The Complete Poems

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The Animal Family

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This is the story of how, one by one, a man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family--and the life that the members of The Animal Familylive together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family itself.

1966 Newbery Honor Book
Best Illustrated Children's Book 1965
Year's Best Juvenile 1965 (NYT)

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"Once upon a time, long, long ago, where the forest runs down to the ocean, a hunter lived all alone in a house made of logs he had chopped for himself and shingles he had split for himself." These words ease the reader into the elegant, dreamlike world of Randall Jarrell's Newbery Honor book The Animal Family. One night, the lonely hunter hears the singing of a mermaid, and because "he himself was as patient as an animal," the mermaid learns to trust him, speaking to him in a voice like the water. In time they teach each other their languages, with many amusing exchanges occurring as the hunter tries to teach his new friend terrestrial words and concepts. The hunter explains, "The house is a big wooden thing ... that you stay inside at night or when it rains." "Why?" she asks. "To keep from getting wet." "To keep from getting wet?" the mermaid says despairingly.

The mermaid and the hunter become a family when the hunter takes a bear cub from its mother to live with them as a son. "The bear's table manners were bad. But so were the mermaid's--especially as she couldn't resist throwing the bear pieces of fish." Having a bear around seems perfectly normal, but not quite a complete family, so eventually the hunter captures a spotted baby lynx. When the lynx brings home not another dead partridge, but a little boy, the delicate, playful family dynamics change again. This book of low-key epiphanies is packed with delightful, illuminating, often unexpected comparisons of the ocean world and the land world most non-mermaids wouldn't have considered. Enhanced by a beautiful design and gorgeous illustrations by Maurice Sendak, this book is perfect for any reader--young or old--ready for a bit of gentle philosophy with a decided twinkle. (All ages) --Karin Snelson

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Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (Phoenix Fiction)

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Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire—and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker’s razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College—mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself. 

 

“A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power. . . . A delight of true understanding.”—Wallace Stevens

 

“I’m greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It’s a remarkable book.”—Robert Penn Warren

 

“Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures . . . is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell’s forte.”—Mary Welp

 

“One of the wittiest books of modern times.”—New York Times

 

“[T]he father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that ‘political correctness’ was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago.”—Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

 

“A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition. . . . Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd.”—Edmund Fuller, Saturday Review

 

“[A] work of fiction, and a dizzying and brilliant work of social and literary criticism. Not only ‘a unique and serious joke-book,’ as Lowell called it, but also a meditation made up of epigrams.”—Michael Wood

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Randall Jarrell's only novel features a Bryn Mawr-like women's college in which whispers and verbal shivs and sycophancy rule. "Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other." The institution's star-struck head is a Clintonesque young man particularly adept at raising money in Hollywood and who "wanted you to like him, he wanted everybody to like him--it was part of being a president; but talking all the time was too." Unfortunately, his new creative-writing hire only likes him the first time they meet. Thenceforth, she not only stirs things up but skewers them as well.

When the book was first published in 1954, most considered Gertrude Johnson to be a none-too-veiled portrait of Mary McCarthy. (The Partisan Review, for instance, failed to run a planned excerpt for fear of litigation.) "As a writer Gertrude had one fault more radical than all the rest: she did not know--or rather, did not believe--what it was like to be a human being. She was one, intermittently, but while she wasn't she did not remember what it had felt like to be one; and her worse self distrusted her better too thoroughly to give it much share, ever, in what she said or wrote." Pictures from an Institution is a superb series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. One reads it less for plot than sharp satire, of which Jarrell is the master.

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Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

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Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin—this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

Contents
RANDALL JARRELL: Introduction
FRANZ KAFKA: A Country Doctor
ANTON CHEKHOV: Gusev
RAINER MARIA RILKE: The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing
ROBERT FROST: The Witch of Coös
GIOVANNI VERGA: La Lupa
NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Nose
ELIZABETH BOWEN: Her Table Spread
LUDWIG TIECK: Fair Eckbert
BERTOLT BRECHT: Concerning the Infanticide, Marie Farrar
LEO TOLSTOY: The Three Hermits
PETER TAYLOR: What You Hear from 'Em?
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Fir Tree
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: He
ANONYMOUS: The Red King and the Witch
ANTON CHEKHOV: Rothschild's Fiddle
THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Cat and Mouse in Partnership
E. M. FORSTER: The Story of the Siren
THE BOOK OF JONAH
FRANZ KAFKA: The Bucket-Rider
SAINT-SIMON: The Death of Monseigneur
ISAAC BABEL: Awakening
CHUANG T'ZU: Five Anecdotes
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL: A Tale of the Cavalry
WILLIAM BLAKE: The Mental Traveller
D. H. LAWRENCE: Samson and Delilah
LEO TOLSTOY: The Porcelain Doll
IVAN TURGENEV: Byezhin Prairie
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: The Ruined Cottage
FRANK O'CONNOR: Peasants
ISAK DINESEN: Sorrow-Acre

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No Other Book: Selected Essays

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Randall Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters. Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books of poetry, he also left behind a sparkling comic novel, four children's books, numerous translations, haunting letters, and four collections of essays. Edited by Brad Leithauser, No Other Bookdraws from these four essay collections, reminding us that Jarell the poet was also, in the words of Robert Lowell, "a critic of genius."

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"Most critics," Randall Jarrell wrote in a 1952 essay, "are so domesticated as to seem institutions--as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe." His complaint was as accurate then as it is now. Yet Jarrell himself had nothing of the literary obstructionist to him. The essays he wrote over the course of three decades--in which he mingled his assessments of poetry and prose with the occasional cri de coeur over the state of American civilization--always escort the reader directly into the inner sanctum of the work at hand. And they do so with such scintillating, comical brilliance that most other criticism seems to pale into testy insignificance. We should be grateful, then, that Brad Leithauser has assembled No Other Book, which returns to print many of Jarrell's imperishable picks and pans.

Jarrell's slash-and-burn style caused a certain discomfort among his fellow poets, particularly those who fell short of his sky-high standards. And indeed, his inspired jabs have lost little of their pungency or amusement: Oscar Williams's poetry, for example, "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." Even Walt Whitman, whose reputation Jarrell single-handedly repaired, gets the occasional spanking.

Only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever, could have cooked up Whitman's worst messes. For instance: what other man in all the history of this planet would have said, "I am a habitant of Vienna"? (One has an immediate vision of him as a sort of French Canadian halfbreed to whom the Viennese are offering, with trepidation, through the bars of a zoological garden, little mounds of whipped cream.)

A master of the sublime putdown, Jarrell was even more masterful when it came to praise: his essays on Whitman, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens permanently changed the way we read these poets. He also functioned as a early-warning system for his own generation and the one to follow--who else was sufficiently prescient to pick out Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich as front-runners? And unlike his New Critical contemporaries, Jarrell never made the mistake of divorcing life from art. His comment on Frost's poetry applies equally to his own productions: "How little they seem performances, no matter how brilliant or magical, how little things made primarily of words (or of ink and paper, either), and how much things made out of lives and the world that lives inhabit." No other poet has ever written about his art with such electricity and intelligence--which makes No Other Book one of the true treasures of this or any other year. --James Marcus

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The Bat-Poet

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There was once a little brown bat who couldn't sleep days-he kept waking up and looking at the world. Before long he began to see things differently from the other bats, who from dawn to sunset never opened their eyes. The Bat-Poet is the story of how he tried to make the other bats see the world his way.

Here in The Bat-Poet are the bat's own poems and the bat's own world: the owl who almost eats him; the mockingbird whose irritable genius almost overpowers him; the chipmunk who loves his poems, and the bats who can't make beads or tails of them; the cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, and sparrows who fly in and out of Randall Jarrell's funny, lovable, truthful fable.

Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT)
Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT)

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Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet is the story of an artist. Although the bat-poet may look like a furry mouse with wings, he swells with an artistic sensibility. One day, he discovers how amazing it is to stay awake during daylight hours, exploring things mostly unseen by standard, nocturnal bats. But when he tries to get his bat friends to stay awake with him, they say, "Day's to sleep in." And so the sensitive bat-poet is left alone to embrace the wonders of the day, including the fascinating activities of the possums, squirrels, chipmunks, and especially the mockingbird. The bat-poet attempts to sing a song like the mockingbird's, "But when he tried, his high notes were all high and the notes in between were all high," so he imitates the mockingbird's words instead, and concocts poetry about how the sun "shines like a million moons" and other daytime marvels. Children will identify with the bat-poet's struggle to be understood, and adults will revel in Jarrell's artful prose and gentle wisdom. Maurice Sendak decorates more than illustrates the book with delicate, endearing pen-and-ink sketches of woodland scenes--the perfect complement to Jarrell's lyrical, philosophical, exquisitely spun fable. School Library Journal writes, "The totality charms by turns the eye, the ear, and the imagination, and as true poetry must, it satisfies the heart." (All ages) --Karin Snelson

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