Jarrell/Salinger

Colin Pink (colin@cpink.demon.co.uk)
Sun, 18 Jul 1999 09:50:54 +0100 

I just noticed this in an article on Randell Jarrell by Adam Gopnik in
the current issue(July 19th) of the New Yorker and thought it might be
of interest to bananafishers.  Gopnik says:

In his sentimentality, as in much else, Jarrell's only contemporary was
Salinger, who was also a humorist by first impulse, and also concerned
primarily with recuperating true feeling through innocent speech.  When
Esme saves the Sergeant or when Zooey saves Franny, it is by speaking
tenderly and precisely about ordinary loves.  That's what Jarrell did
too. Reading Mary Jarrell's rhapsodic, intently detailed memoir of her
dream poet, one is put irresistibly in mind of 'Seymour: An
Introduction' and Salinger's intently detailed memoir of his creation,
where we learn, too, how the perfect modern American poet shaves, walks,
plays tennis, runs to buy Louis Sherry ice cream.  I have often thought,
half seriously, that Jarrell might have been the original of Seymour, or
at any rate one of the forces breathing on his creation.  There is the
same precocity, the same twinkling generosity, the same overearnest
spirituality that never quite coalesces into religion.  Even the
subjects of Seymour's poems as Buddy Glass describes them for us - a
little girl who turns her doll's head toward the poet on an airplane,
the young widower whose hand is bitten by his cat - sound like Jarrell.
Some of this is the shared period, but not all.  (You couldn't say it of
Lowell, for instance.)  Even Buddy's lovely distinction that his
brother's poems were not light- but high-hearted seems made for Jarrell.
        In the end, Seymour couldn't take the world and chose to leave
it.  Did Jarrell?  There is enough ambiguity about the circumstances of
his death to make it an argument . . .
        . . . Jarrell's poetry, like Seymour's, implies ways of going
on, and his inability to carry on himself makes us doubt the faith he
gives us.

End of Quote.

So, what do you think?  Is Jarrell the model for Seymour?  I don't know
much about Jarrell so I'd be interested to know what people think.  One
of the things that one does periodically wonder about is what kind of
poet/poetry Salinger had in mind when he was describing Seymour.

-- 
Colin Pink