They met at a three-week writers' conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder in July 1951. Though Randall Jarrell was an established critic and poet, Mary von Schrader -- then the author of three unpublished novels she calls "my half-finished cathedrals" -- hadn't heard of him. "I signed up for everybody but Randall," she says. She first saw him across a campus dining-room table, and they introduced themselves an hour later over the piano. "We don't want to stay around for this dopey mixer, do we? Why don't we set out for the great world?" the poet asked suavely. Then, less suavely, he bought her a Coke in the student lounge.
It was true love at first sight, Mary recalls. Before the week was out, she was reviewing a lengthy manuscript -- Seven-League Crutches, his fourth book of verse -- that they took along on off-campus excursions. "Why, he just loaded me down -- it was still in long script," she says. "We sat around in the grass in Denver proofing it." They quickly formed what Randall called their "group of two." A year later they married and then did take on the world together, forging a remarkable intellectual and emotional union until his sudden death after being struck by a car in 1965.
Thirty-five years later, Mary Jarrell, '36, has published Remembering Randall (HarperCollins, 1999; $22), letting the rest of the world in on their life together -- and, almost inadvertently, gaining the recognition she never pursued for herself during their marriage.
In effect, Mary became the amanuensis of Randall's life, a role that brings to mind Vera Nabokov, wife of novelist Vladimir Nabokov, or Nora Joyce, wife of James Joyce. All three women forged close and unusual partnerships with their husbands, becoming their creative companions, sometimes their touchstones, and often their intermediaries with the "real world."
It's not a popular, well-understood, or well-acknowledged role in today's postfeminist world. "To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had, a round-the-clock inseparability," Mary writes. "We took three meals a day together, every day. I went to his classes, and he went on my errands. I watched him play tennis; he picked out my clothes." Randall termed himself and Mary "the Bobbsey twins." Indeed, they were born only four days apart in May 1914.
Mary Jarrell recently told an audience near her Greensboro, N.C., home of her own early aspirations. "In my student days at Stanford as a philosophy major and an English minor -- saturated in Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc., and steeped in Anna Karenina, Look Homeward, Angel and The Magic Mountain -- how I yearned to be a writer."
In fact, Remembering Randall is not her first book. In the years following her husband's death, she published Jerome: The Biography of a Poem (1971) and The Knee-Baby (1973), a children's book, and wrote essays for Harper's and poetry magazines. She also edited Randall Jarrell's Letters (1988). But this new memoir has brought her unprecedented notice from the literary establishment. "More than any other memoir of an artist I know, this one rings with the convincing sound of remembered happiness," wrote Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. The New York Review of Books de- voted six pages to the Jarrells in December.
Of course, Randall Jarrell is an inextricable part of the interest in Mary Jarrell's memoir. And her book has helped renew appreciation of him. It was published simultaneously with a collection of his criticism, No Other Book: Selected Essays, edited by poet Brad Leithauser. "I give her tons of credit for how well she writes," says Leithauser, "but the fact is, she would never have written a book if she hadn't met Randall. She was wonderfully well served by meeting him -- as he was by her," he says, noting that Randall's work improved with Mary by his side.
Randall was a critic whom the New York Times Book Review called "astute, insightful, passionate, sympathetic, and remarkably prophetic." In his lifetime, he published four volumes of critical prose. He was known for his willingness to praise neglected writers, reassess the misunderstood or misappraised poets of the past and dismiss the powerful ones of his time. His famous remark about Oscar Williams, that his verse "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter," got him dropped from Williams' influential anthology. His assessment of Stanford's legendary professor-critic Yvor Winters: "He writes as if the last three hundred years had occurred, but not to him."
Not surprisingly, Randall's barbed criticism made him some enemies. "Oh yes," recalls Mary philosophically. "There were people who would have nothing to do with us. But that's part of it -- you take your lumps." By contrast, in the nine effervescent essays that make up her memoir, Mary portrays a more benign man. "I do feel the more you read you see that he's not a nasty person," says Leithauser. "What's interesting with Jarrell is that with all his talent for invective, he is generous, open-hearted, humble in most ways -- at the service of whatever he's reviewing." There will "always be a shortage" of such critics, says Leithauser.
Leithauser notes that 35 years after his death, Randall, "a powerfully attractive personality," also remains "a bright, propulsive presence" in the world of poetry. One volume of his verse won a National Book Award. He also wrote a children's book series illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Garth Williams and translated Rilke's poetry, Grimm's fairy tales and Goethe's Faust.
Critics and friends have praised the memoir -- and Mary herself -- for her joy. Fred Chappell, poet laureate of North Carolina, cites her "ability to discern hope in even the darkest hour." For there were dark hours: Randall was killed in a 1965 car crash that some have argued was suicide. Mary asserts that it was an accident. In the final year of his life, Randall was battling clinical depression. In her book, Mary presents evidence that he was winning the fight. Then, early one evening, he was sideswiped by a car while walking near the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus.
Mostly, though, his widow remembers the good times. Was the couple always so happy together? Yes, she insists, their lives were indeed amicable and affectionate throughout their 13-year marriage. "We didn't want to have deep unpleasantnesses. We were very congenial, always. He was very easygoing."
Why did Mary wait so long to publish her memoir? Chappell, who met the Jarrells in 1963, points out that despite her apparent gaiety, "she hesitated a long time before writing it because of the pain of remembering these things. Time was very hard for her after his death."
Now, says Leithauser, "she has a new, peripatetic life in her 80s because of this book." She's traveled to conferences, talked on a New York radio show and participated in various celebrations in North Carolina. And her work continues: she is editing a new edition of her husband's letters that will include previously withheld correspondence from novelist Peter Taylor, filling out what she calls the "wonderful, three-way literary friendship" of Jarrell, Taylor and Robert Lowell.
Mary says her relationship with Randall was more a symbiosis than a modern marriage. She found purpose in him, and is continuing to find it in writing about him, three decades after his death. "When I lost him so suddenly, the pattern was all gone. I had nobody else to read new poems with. 'Well,' I thought, 'I'll keep myself in touch with him.' That's what it's done for me -- it's kept me in touch with him."
Cynthia Haven is a California writer and a regular contributor to Stanford.
