Customer Reviews

Pictures from an Institution (Phoenix Fiction Series)

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Randall Jarrell's roman a clef about life in a small college, in that it centers upon a Mary McCarthyesque novelist who is herself embarking upon her own roman a clef (very much like THE GROVES OF ACADEME) about the "little people" who also trundle through the small college campus where she is allowed to stride magnificently like a contemptuous giantess. Thus the reader has the double pleasure of seeing her ironic views of the failings of the people around her contextualized by his or her ironic view of her own grosser moral failings. The giddy mise-en-abyme effect of this is tempered at the end, wherein the novel's narrating consciousness (our guide through this academic Wonderland ) must confront whether there is something to find beautiful--and sincerely--in this most artificial and insincere of playworlds. A wonderful work.

Author Randall Jarrell's brilliantly witty, prophetic novel from the middle of the last century shows in their bud many of the absurd developments which have come to full flower in current American academe. Endless Tolerance, Creativity, and Diversity are already the buzzwords par excellence at fictional Benton College of the 1950's. Accordingly , Jarrell presents us with an art department whose members are so open minded (i.e. reluctant to judge between good and bad) that "if someone dipped a porcupine in chocolate and called it modern, they'd swallow it." Similarly, a creative writing department replete with published authors brought in to teach students more ambitious than talented flourishes at Benton. One such student, Sylvia Moomaw, has written a story of which she's singularly proud. It involves a bug which wakes up in bed to find itself turned into a man. "Influenced by Kafka," she shyly acknowledges, when talking about her "artistry" to the skeptical central character, Sydney. Finally, Benton College is especially self-congratulatory over its efforts at outreach, seeking token representatives for Diversity's purposes, even from an area as remote and unpromising as Tierra del Fuego, lest anyone be excluded. If artists generally see in advance of the rest of us, this novel may be adduced as evidence for the point.

I laughed out loud through the entire thing! People on the street would stop me and ask what was so funny. Randall Jarrell, a poet, and Mary McCarthy were on the Bard College campus at the same time in the '50's, when McCarthy was a writer in residence for a year. Jarrell shadows her cold-hearted fiction-gathering techniques, as she observes the Bard faculty in action(this is during the 1950's) for a book she wrote called The Groves of Academe. My piano teacher thought it was a mean-spirited view of McCarthy, but Jarell was a cose friend of hers; it's somewhat of a loving portrait. PS: Groves of Academe was also very good. Pictures is a "Making Of".

Randall Jarrell's only novel is intelligent, sparkling, tender, entertaining and singularly plotless. It really is what it says on the tin - some pictures from an institution. The institution in question is based on the American ladies' college where he taught for some years - one of the key portraits is apparently that of his one-time colleague Mary McCarthy (author of The Group and other best-sellers) - as Gertrude. Her deliberate social wickednesses are some of the highlights of the book.

You will need a reasonably good background in the arts to get even half the jokes here. I think of myself as well-read but I was aware that many things in the text were going over my head. I would guess that the book was written partly out of a sense of frustration at being surrounded by doe-eyed undergraduates and having no one actually intelligent to talk to. There's a vaguely bitter edge to the constant flights of brilliant humour that makes one sense the author's loneliness and anger at the on-going waste of intellectual potential in the world. This slightly savage tone provides an excellent counterpoint to his poet's eye for detail and his honest regard for beauty. Certain select things and people in the book can be suddenly redeemed from mockery when they become or produce something really worthwhile. This is humbling, to one who has been riding along with Jarrell's high-handed mischievousness - to be brought up short against the man's aesthetic honesty and willingness to admire. He - or his narrator (it is for once a justifiable confusion) - is utterly unafraid to admit it when he has made a mistake. This rescues us just a little from despair. It brings compassion to the spirit of Vile Bodies, and reckless hi-jinks to the reflectiveness of Point Counterpoint. If you liked either of those, you'll probably like this.

Either way, there are delightfully awful characters to hate and plain delightful characters to love. There is keen discussion of music, writing and the contrast between Old Europe and the New World. The depiction of the college president is a work of genius, and the capture of "Gertrude's" verbal cruelties is deft and highly enjoyable. Excellent fun for anyone who has lived in an academic community.

What a strange novel. I knew of it vaguely as about Mary McCarthy's stint at Sarah Lawrence in the postwar idyll when college jobs appeared easy to get and the literate spoke of German poetry in the original and listened to twelve-tone music, but Jarrell's only fiction's certainly exceedingly odd. It meanders, it ruminates, it penetrates, all in an elusive style permeating tone, voices, conversations from a curiously placed, not quite omniscient, narrator sounding a lot like the poet himself.

Moments of mockery, as in the performance of "The Life of Nature" ballet by students, or poignancy, as with Constance's immersion in the Grimm's tale of the Juniper Tree, alternate. Gertrude as the McCarthy stand-in for me seemed less engrossing. Descriptions such as "torn animals were removed at sunset from that smile" make her seem more evilly enjoyable than she really is as a figure to be caricatured. "She's the worst Southerner since Jefferson Davis" is a great line, all the same. I guess you, as was Jarrell, had to be there.

Other characters such as the boyish booster President of Benton College, and his dull wife, and other cowed faculty (few students make much of an impression, tellingly, and few scenes take place in class) float by with similar blends of observation and detachment. The attention given Dr. Rosenbaum appeared enormous given the relatively small role his part added up to in terms of advancing the storyline. The college appears as if remote from the rest of the world, even as it determinedly (this being 1954) imposes its progressive values on generations of women, bohemian or polite, mannered or gawkish. "Living around colleges the way you do, you've just lost your sense of what's probable," Gertrude chides the narrator.

Gertrude's predecessor goes off to another college. "Somehow, after sixty years in it, the world had still not happened to her, and she stood at its edge with a timid smile, her hand extended to its fresh terrors, its fresh joys--a girl attending, a ghost now, the dance to which forty years ago she did not get to go."

There's not much plot, which is the point our narrator makes about Gertrude's own attempts to make out of this bucolic college year a ripping satire. "Her books were a systematic, detailed, and conclusive condemnation of mankind for being stupid and bad; yet if mankind had been clever and good, what would have become of Gertrude?" Such remarks keep you turning the pages, even if it's a slow, skewed, and oddly paced narrative.

I valued this novel for its sudden, unpredictably placed, passages of insight. "Poor moths attracted to the lepidopterist, who trade them their soft wings for the hard conclusion that they are typical specimens of genus A, species B, sub-species C--and who murmur with their last breath that he is a typical lepidopterist!"

"Someone at a travelogue cannot help feeling, even if he knows better: 'Lucky coolies, to be there in the midst of the romance of the East!' But they aren't in it, they are it, so it is no good to them."

"The people of Benton, like the rest of us, were born, fell in love, married and died, lay sleepless all night, saw the first star of evening and wished upon it, won lotteries and wept for joy. But not at Benton."

Saying "I guess," the narrator notes, is a tic of Americans. They cannot match their jaded, harsher, crueler European counterparts. But, I guess that nobody other than a poet could have written this eccentric, eloquent, enigmatic, and enduring, novel. It's an acquired taste that may come and go as you read it, but it should linger, as the passages I cited do, at their own offbeat, barely registered, moments.

Here we have one of the funniest academic satires ever. So what if it doesn't have much of a plot? It is stuffed with satiric set pieces, gorgeously funny one-liners, and characters only slightly exaggerated from reality.

Dated as all get-out, but does that matter when a book is full of zingers? My favorite is "After knowing Flo for a while you started to wonder, like a Greek philosopher having a nervous breakdown, whether it was Right to be Good." I could fill this review with even more insightful bits, but nothing funnier.

Running through everything there is a theme or current regarding art and the making of it. The best and worst characters are writers, musicians, or visual artists. Right in the middle of the set piece on Art NIght everything stops so Jarrell can describe a sculpture of true soaring beauty....and then he moves on to zing its creator, who talks about this thing the same way she talks about her other lumps of metal nodules.

Unlike Kingsley Amis, Jarrell loves some of his characters. The German composer and his wife (who might be a well=veiled portrait of Hannah Arendt or might not) are close to his heart. Constance, the narrator's friend, lets Jarrell describe affection and joy.

I've read this book at least a dozen times, the first before I went to college myself and the last a few weeks ago. I press copies on friends. Grab it before it goes out of print again, and enjoy.

The title tells you right away that this book will be very clever, but it should also alert you that it is a series of satiric set pieces rather than a fully-realised novel. The narrator, self-effacing and elusive, turns his gaze on administrators and faculty at fictional Benton College more or less in turn although a flimsy plot takes us through the term. Some of the characters, notably the music professor, attain full stature as literary creations but the main object of the narrator's attention, the woman novelist, is presented with a cruelty that is difficult to comprehend within the story as we have it. It is clear that we are reading a roman-a-clef and I for one did not have the key. However, the narrator has a wonderful store of witticisms and parts of the book are very funny even if the total effect is uneven.

I was determined to like this book and gave it my best shot, but found I couln't bring myself to finish it. Yes, it's witty, but it's also hopelessly dated. The fifties had come and gone long before I was born, so I confess that many of the cultural references went right over my head. If you are looking for a spoof on academia, you're better off reading David Lodge or Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.