‘Pictures from an Institution’: Randall Jarrell flays the Academy

In Poetry and the Age (1953), Randall Jarrell admired “in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity.”  In his short life Jarrell (1914-65) distinguished himself in several fields: poetry, criticism, fiction and children’s stories. His satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), cares little for plot or action, but relies on character, situation, style and wit, and uses the narrator’s waspish intellect and sensibility to unify his scenes.  Jarrell took the hint from W. H. Auden’s remark that “when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.”  Accordingly, he packed his book with aphorisms, epigrams, quotations and references.  Everything reminds the narrator of something else, a damning comparison or an absurd contrast.  This constant flow of allusion fuels his attack on his targets: the mindless avant-garde notions, received ideas and phony liberalism of a progressive eastern women’s college in the mid-1940s.  At the same time, the narrator’s learned references suggest his own ideals, his civilised taste, enthusiasm and intelligence. This scornful novel is the summa of Randall Jarrell’s values and ideas about education, music, art and literature.

The title of the novel echoes Modest Mussorgsky’s musical depiction of ten paintings in Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), and also foreshadows the abstract paintings in the “Art Night” chapter.  In the novel the characters are the pictures, the college the institution.  Benton College may have been ironically named for Thomas Hart Benton, a Midwestern regional artist and antithesis of the avant-garde, who painted sculptural figures of ordinary people.  Jarrell’s Pictures, a series of satiric academic portraits, has no plot.  Like Benton College, “nothing ever happens” in the novel, though the narrator believes that novelists should have a plot to engage their readers.

Benton—smug, pompous and self-righteous—is modelled on Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, fifteen miles north of Manhattan.  Jarrell, just out of the army, taught there in 1946-47, when the college had 247 students and 66 faculty.  Many of the fictional characters are also modeled on real people.  The college president Dwight Robbins (named after President Dwight Eisenhower) is based on Harold Taylor.  He was promiscuous but Jarrell was prudish, and there are no sex scandals to enliven the story.  Gertrude Johnson is modeled on Mary McCarthy, who did not teach at Sarah Lawrence that year.  Johnson’s surname is similar to Johnsrud, the name of McCarthy’s former husband.  Irene Rosenbaum is inspired by Hannah Arendt, close friend of McCarthy and co-dedicatee (with Jarrell’s wife Mary von Schrader Jarrell) of the novel; and Charles Daudier by the anthologist Oscar Williams.

In Benton, which has a quota for abnormally intelligent—but not Jewish or Black—students, even the dissidents are abjectly conformist.  Provincial and dull, it discourages publications by the professors, who advance their careers by spending sycophantic evenings with the deans.  The unnamed Head of the English Department specialises in the minor 18th-century poet William Cowper, pronounced “Cooper” and often confused with Fenimore Cooper for comic effect.  Like many academics, he resembles his subject, who eventually went mad.  Each of the Head’s colleagues “did something that seemed to the world impractical at best, idiotic at worst.”

The nameless first-person narrator and faculty member is witty and dazzling, caustic and cruel, and flays his characters.  A superior misfit and expert hatchet-man, he’s ostentatiously erudite and tells jokes that clever readers can spot.  He uses scientific terms his audience would probably not know: eidetic, tachistoscope, icosahedron and levorotatory; is superior and arrogant; calls colleagues stupid fools and imbeciles; hates atonal music and abstract art.  He’s snobbish and funny about Midwestern state universities that start with the letter “I”.  He despises “quiet backward colleges”, though Jarrell would later spend most of his academic career in the rather backward Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro (known by its alumnae as “the WC”).

Jarrell alludes to his personal interests: cars, cats, tennis and German.  Gottfried Rosenbaum drives a French Simca convertible and recalls a luxurious Mercedes (which Jarrell once owned).  The narrator often mentions the Persian cat, Tanya.  He escapes from academic boredom on the tennis courts, Rosenbaum lumbers toward the courts and calls from them, flowers fall on them, keepers water them, Robbins’ Afghan dog lies on them and chews the tennis balls.  The narrator, also passionate about German, tries to learn the language and translates Rilke.

The narrator has bright awful eyes and describes the characters through the recurrent ocular leitmotif.  Robbins has boy’s eyes, Gertrude has the protruding eyes of a pythoness, her husband Sidney has wide delighting eyes, Rosenbaum’s eyes are bright and understanding.  The narrator also compares the academics to fictional characters.  Dr. Whittaker gives a pseudo-sociological interpretation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, in which the narrator of the novel resembles Alceste, who in the play rails against the vices of society.  President Robbins identifies with Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.  He too comes from humble origins and has created his own public image.  Like Gatsby, “The World and President Robbins were in love with each other.”  The narrator arouses our  interest and then teases us by hinting at a fascinating scene and character.  He notes that Gertrude’s big fight with Robbins scandalized the college, but doesn’t describe it; and mentions that the name of her predecessor, Manny Gumbiner, inspired pure awe.  Even if Nothing Gertrude did could surpass him.  She could have set fire to a teacher in an auto-da-fè, and his old students would still have exclaimed, “You should have been in Manny’s class.”

Dwight Robbins is a satiric portrait of a self-serving college president.  Like Harold Taylor, Robbins is handsome and athletic, has an Oxbridge degree and a huge dog.  In the novel the boy-wonder—“half jeune fille, half faux bonhomme—is undeveloped and immature.  He became president of Benton when he was only 34—and some people wondered if he were really that old.  At home on land and in water, he was an Olympic diver and the name of his sport suggests the handsome Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.  Every day his faithful Afghan followed him into the pool.  He’d been a Rhodes Scholar, and was awarded an honorary degree from an obscure college in Florida that had given a “Doctor of Humor” degree to the television comedian Milton Berle.

Taylor is nevertheless a trimmer and self-promoter. He always “believed what it was expedient for the President of Benton College to believe. . . . He was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.”  Selling himself and making a good impression, smiling and speaking for money, he constantly searches for Excellence, but can neither identify nor find it.  When required, he expresses the appropriate grief, but has not enough time to be human.  As Robert Lowell said of his father, Robbins “hadn’t got a mean bone, an original bone, a funny bone in his body.”

His wife Pamela, an English South African and also not quite human, is awful in a different way.  All the tropical sunlight and cosmic rays had turned her into a mutation: “Her every sentence sang itself to a melody so thin-lipped, so emptily affected, so bloodless, so heartless, so senselessly and conclusively complacent, that it was not merely inhuman but inanimate, not merely lifeless but the negation of life.”  Jarrell’s five repetitions of “so” and two repetitions of “not merely, ” his linking “human” and “inanimate,” “life” and “lifeless,” are stylistically superb.  Harold Taylor later divorced his wife.  In the novel, both husband and wife look the part but behave like wind-up dolls.

Camille Batterson, teacher of creative writing, has never married and one felt that in her virginal dynasty, “neither had her mother, her grandmother, any of the Battersons.”  She thought Katherine Mansfield’s stories were the brilliant consummation of fiction—without realizing that her favourite author had led a wild bisexual life.  Camille, a ripe victim for Gertrude’s fiction, seemed like “a giraffe who’d come to a taxidermist and begged to be stuffed”.  When Camille got a surprising job offer at a big Midwestern university, Robbins didn’t try to keep her and she decided to leave.  Soon after that she suddenly died.  Her demands on life had been too small; and she did not perish, like her beloved Victorian heroines, of brain fever, but of a modern corpuscular deficiency.

Mary McCarthy was a clever and creative rival, and Jarrell—who knew her socially—portrayed her as a colleague.  Referring to the polymath and author Edmund Wilson, he writes that “Gertrude married her first husband for his brains.”  McCarthy’s biographer Frances Kiernan quotes a description of Jarrell’s visit to the Wilsons on Cape Cod in the summer of 1943: “It coincided with a visit from the Nabokovs and had not been a success.  Jarrell, McCarthy later recalled, had trailed after her ‘screeching in a whisper,’ asking why she bothered with ‘these people.’ . . . In their worst moments, she and Jarrell were each capable of the sort of behavior one expects from a willful and precocious child.”  The similarity in their makeup was not lost on their friends.  Comparing Jarrell and McCarthy, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “At times I think of Randall in his off-moods, though Mary is never discourteous.”  Jarrell absurdly felt superior to Nabokov, a brilliant conversationalist and great novelist.  Egoistic and used to being the center of attention, he probably envied Nabokov’s close friendship with Wilson, which excluded him.

In November 1948, right after teaching at the Salzburg Seminars in Austria, Jarrell wrote Lowell, “The final judgment on Mary McCarthy is that she was disappointed in Europe.”  In Pictures he states, “Gertrude thought Europe overrated” and reversed Henry James’ great international theme of innocent American expatriates who are out of their depth with sophisticated Europeans: “She had a wonderful theory that Europeans are mere children to us Americans, who are the oldest of men.”  Jarrell was quite mistaken, however, about McCarthy’s attitude to Europe.  She later married a diplomat, lived for many years in Warsaw and Paris, and wrote The Stones of Florence (1959), which Jarrell praised.

Yet some biographical details are significant.  McCarthy had an Irish background and had been an orphan; Gertrude had an Irish lip and not much of a childhood.  But in this overkill novel, she is “a short slight woman who was from head to foot, except for her pale blue eyes, a pale, pale, almost wholly unsaturated brown.”  Her awful dinner was not fit for a dog.  An enthusiastic student says her teaching is “just out of this world!  I’ve never had a teacher like her,” but doesn’t add specific details to her gush.  Unlike the narrator and the composer Rosenbaum, Gertrude is tone-deaf and dislikes music.  Her name means “strong spear” and she can be fierce.  She has a hard heart and a sharp tongue, and her “bark was her bite.”  Reversing Baruch Spinoza’s “laboring to understand,” she finds people detestable and condemns everyone.  Literary rivals she hated most of all: “She dismissed the world generally, but writers, competitors, people who mattered, particularly—death or a bad book was a joy to her, and the world’s swift forgetfulness best of all.”  Not even the sickness of her devoted husband “could make an ordinary human being out of Gertrude.”  Like Dwight and Pamela Robbins, she did not know “what it was like to be a human being.”

The narrator also severely criticises Gertrude’s fiction.  He thinks she’s very good at delineating external details, but has no understanding of human feelings.  If a child had swallowed furniture polish, she could not describe “how the child felt as it seized and drank the polish, how the mother felt as she caught the child to her breast.”  Though she has a brilliant reputation, the narrator calls her novels mediocre.  She feels every time that her next book will be a great success. McCarthy realised her dreams with the tremendously popular novel The Group, published in 1963 and filmed three years later.  Despite his condemnation, the narrator believes “there is a Gertrude inside everybody.”  Since they are both witty and caustic, he is perversely fond of her.

On April 23, 1981 McCarthy wrote a long, defensive, fascinating and unconvincing letter to me denying that she was the model for Gertrude:

I’m pleased to “disinform” you.  Randall Jarrell didn’t choose me as a satiric victim in Pictures from an Institution.  At any rate I never thought so, and he denied it in a rather charming letter to me, which perhaps I still have somewhere.  The idea that the repellent Gertrude was me has been dear to people who knew neither Jarrell nor me at all well.

I liked him and thought he liked me, though this may have been a mistake on my part.  In any case what he wrote me was that if there was a model for Gertrude it was himself—on the ‘Madame Bovarie, c’est moi’ principle.  Without necessarily taking that too seriously, I could find none of my traits except a satirical turn of mind (not distinctive to me) in Gertrude.  If I remember right, she’s fat, colorless, has unwashed, dank, dark blond hair, eats a great deal of candy, is a terrible cook and housekeeper and, like her awful husband Sidney, has a perpetual cold.  None of these items applies or ever applied to me so I could hardly feel wounded.

Jarrell naturally denied that McCarthy was the model for Gertrude and surely put some of his own negative traits into her character.  To throw critics off the scent and avoid a libel suit, he deliberately included details to distinguish Gertrude from McCarthy, and made the beautiful, stylish gourmet into a homely, dowdy and Barmecide cook.

The narrator contrasts the sympathetic Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum (both first names mean “peace”) and Constance Morgan to Dwight and Pamela Robbins and Gertrude Johnson.  The fair-haired Gottfried was born (like Mozart) in Salzburg and escaped  (like Freud) from the Nazi annexation of Austria, “at the eleventh hour, by the skin of his teeth, without a garment.”  He speaks grammatically correct English with a strong German accent.  Well-travelled from the North Cape of Norway to Sydney, Australia, he is also a musicologist and “had once spent a year and a half recording the songs of the inhabitants of the Gulf of Papua,” New Guinea.  He plays the piano and cello, and is a great teacher.  He sets to music works by Bertolt Brecht, Robert Frost’s “The Witch of Coos” and George Meredith’s poem “Lucifer in Starlight.”

An avant-garde composer, he follows Arnold Schönberg’s atonal music, which the narrator hates and compares to Passages from a Dentist’s Life, and which Thomas Mann had described in his recent novel Doctor Faustus (1948), to Schönberg’s fury. Gottfried is famous and mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and his cosmopolitan life delights the narrator: “The Russian Irene, the Austrian Gottfried, the Bavarian [maid] Else, the Persian Tanya—the cat was named Tanya—these and the Simca, a French car manufactured under Italian patents, often made me think of Europe and America, the Old World and the New.”  Gottfried reveals his humane character by revising (as Auden did) the lines of “September 1, 1939,” from “We must love one another or die” to the more honest “We must love one another and die.”  Unlike Gertrude, Gottfried—expressing a major theme of the novel—felt for all the living and the dead “the undifferentiating sorrow, the elegiac, unforced acceptance, that man feels in the end for all his kind.”

Irene Rosenbaum, “a slight, animated, disquieting woman,” is fifteen years older than Gottfried.  Unlike her husband, she had managed to escape from revolutionary Russia with her wealth: “they had a cook, a summer cottage on Cape Cod, and a new Simca convertible.”  In her youth she had been a well-known singer of opera and lieder. Constance Morgan, named for the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fey, is the charming, dreamy and delightful embodiment of grace and light.  She works in Robbins’ office, and is Gottfried’s pupil, secretary and, Irene says, “all that a daughter would be for us if we had a daughter.”

The first five chapters focus on individual characters, who all come together in chapter 6 “Art Night” and, at the end of the academic year in chapter 7, “They All Go.”  In “Art Night,” when the faculty and students exhibit their work, the narrator moves from satirising his colleagues to mocking their artistic creations.  Seventy years ago Jarrell could get away with making fun of Sona Rasmussen’s mixed ancestry and weird physical appearance.  She’d been a shipyard welder during the war, still wears goggles and mask, and—“like racetrack-drivers about to give a Noh play”—makes welded statues—even after her freshmen have severely burned themselves.  The narrator asks, “It’s ugly, but is it Art?,” and concludes, “you would have had to be an imbecile” to appreciate it.  Gertrude thinks, as Sona tries to explain her work and returns to reality, “More ether, nurse.  This woman is conscious.”

Some students painted imitations of the unnamed Henri Rousseau, with “beasts of prey, in forests and marshes, all looking feral.”  This prompted Gertrude to recite William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright!” and suggest that the artist illustrate Kipling’s Jungle Book.  The more advanced students, imitating the dead-end art of Arshile Gorky, would be astonished if you asked them to draw something and concluded that you knew nothing about art.  (David Hockney has regretted that art schools no longer teach drawing.)  Gertrude then quotes an artist the narrator reveres, “Cézanne was right about painters—le peintre est en general bête” (most painters are stupid).

In the course of the novel the narrator brilliantly mentions 20 other artists who represent an aesthetic standard that opposes abstract art.  He uses four artists to portray his characters.  Gertrude smiles like the damned in the medieval sculpted Last Judgment in Bamberg Cathedral, Germany, and her dreadful dinner looks like a disgusting still life by Chaim Soutine.  Camille Batterson and Constance Morgan have the dreamy dazzled aura of Odilon Redon.  Colleagues use the first name of the formal and formidable Dr. Crowley “about as much as one uses El Greco’s.”

The narrator uses other artists to make incongruous and comic combinations.  The sociologist Dr. Whittaker looks like “a Holbein of the aged Emile,” the child and title-character in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education (1762).  A colossal statue of George Washington “looks as awful as Ingres’ Zeus” in his Jupiter and Thetis (1811).  The first sentence of the novel announces, “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver”, the bumpkin whose head turns into a donkey’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and half by the avant-garde architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.  The lawn is ornamented with a hideous spikey statue by the modern American David Smith.  The frost patterns of the window panes of Benton resemble the cut-outs of Matisse, and one wealthy student claims expertise since her family actually owns a Matisse.

The animals of the Victorian painter Edwin Landseer are absurdly compared to the straight lines and bright colors of Piet Mondrian.  The sympathetic Gottfried owns a real Edouard Vuillard and two real Paul Klees, and has reproductions of three portrayals of music: Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute (1670), and two others of string players: Eugène Delacroix’s Portrait of Paganini (1832) and Edgar Degas’ Father Listening to Pagans (1870).  In the most subtle allusion, Gottfried plays Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, inspired by several paintings of this subject by the unnamed Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.

The low point of “Art Night” is the soporific lecture by the dismal poet and best-selling anthologist Charles Daudier.  He’s based on Oscar Williams, a mediocrity who influenced and degraded poetry in much the way that Taylor influenced education.  Williams (1900-64), born Oscar Kaplan in Ukraine, compiled poetry collections that were widely used in schools and colleges, and sold more than two million copies.  His success filled Jarrell with envy and rage.  In his famous caustic condemnation, Jarrell declared that Williams’ poetry “seemed to be written on a typewriter by a typewriter.”  He also wrote in Poetry and the Age, his major critical work: “A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production . . . the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’ poems than I have seen in any other anthology.  There are nine of his poems—and five of Hardy’s.  It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.”  Williams might have defended himself by saying, “if no one else will publish my verse, I must do it myself.”  Jarrell might have characteristically said, “I fed the hand that bit me,” but Williams took damaging revenge.  Jarrell wrote the poet John Berryman, “I knew that my reviews meant never being put in another Williams’ anthology, but I didn’t know he’d even get to work on the old ones.” Williams deleted Jarrell’s poems from the reprints.

Like the middlebrow Mortimer Adler, Norman Cousins and Clifton Fadiman (all born in 1902), Williams was a parasitic purveyor of literary products.  He was a prominent critic, read manuscripts for publishers, had a newspaper column, directed a book club, spoke on radio programs, lectured in colleges, gave commencement addresses, collected honorary degrees, was connected to the Académie Française, and favoured the public with his one-act plays and chatty essays.  In his sentimental speech Daudier “kept talking about Love, it was always Love, never love, and when he said Love a strange light would come over his face, and make you want to hate your neighbor,” which reverses the biblical injunction.  After enduring his speech, the narrator dismisses Daudier as “a poor stupid old man”.

Loading every rift with ore, Jarrell laces almost every page of Pictures with learned allusions that lend authority to the narrator’s comments, and both challenge, educate, delight and amuse his readers.  It seems as if Jarrell collected more than 140 allusions, many of them from the Bible and Shakespeare, and fit them into the novel like pieces in a mosaic.  Some allusions have no quotation marks and no source, and it’s not clear if they are by Jarrell or a famous author; others are in quotation marks or italics, but not identified; some are deliberately distorted idioms and clichés, a technique which he learned from Joyce’s Ulysses: “every pearl has its oyster”. Like Oscar Wilde, he places many quotations in a paradoxical or ironic context that changes the original meaning and contrasts Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory” to “trailing clouds of mustard”.

Some allusions describe Benton; others suggest the severity of Gertrude, the gentleness of Gottfried and Constance.  Jarrell contrasts Benton to more famous colleges by stating, “The very important are different from us.  Yes, they have more everything.”  This cleverly alludes to Hemingway’s retort in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which also applies to Benton’s well-off students.  Scott Fitzgerald, obsessed by wealth, said, “The very rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The teacher who stopped publishing contrasts the spiritual and practical by alluding to 1 Corinthians 13:11, “when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  Alluding to Lord Byron’s poem “The Destruction of Sennacharib”, the narrator describes Gertrude invading the mild sheep of Benton “like the wolf on the fold”.  An unidentified quotation from John Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” sweetly describes Constance’s filial relation to the Rosenbaums, as she looks at them “like puzzled urchin on an aged crone / Who keepeth closed a wond’rous riddle-book / As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.”

Gottfried, who’d been driven out of Nazi Austria, alludes to Abraham given Canaan in Genesis 15:7 “by asking the Lord what land he had brought him into. . . . And HE said unto him, I am the Lord, that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.”  The narrator twice quotes Satan’s reply to God’s query, “Whence cometh thou?” in Job 1:7: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” to reveal that Gottfried is being tempted and tested by the satanic Gertrude, who hates him.  (In Joseph Conrad’s Victory the evil Mr. Jones quotes this to describe himself.)  Gottfried twice ironically quotes Friedrich Engels’ prediction in Anti-Dühring that men will be free to govern themselves “ven de Shtate hass videredt avay.”  But the Communist State did not wither away; it became immensely powerful and disastrously oppressive.

Irene Rosenbaum observes that the novelist must gather and preserve his fictional material, “if something happens to you, what good is it to have happened, if you do not put it in a book?”  In his last novel, All That Is (2013), James Salter agreed: “Only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”  Jarrell’s book ends weakly as the narrator asks his wife to pick him up on the Benton campus.  His nostalgic Proustian recollection four pages earlier would have been a more effective conclusion: “All the absences that were present there, came together into a kind of elegiac listlessness: everything had for me then too faint and strange a life even to need to perish.”  It’s ironic that Jarrell wrote the kind of academic satire that Gertrude was writing, and that Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) was better than his own book.

Jarrell’s caustic tongue and ostentatious display of learning were defensive.  He didn’t drink, was prudish, disliked vulgar expressions, and said “golly” and “gee”.  He hid behind his beard, his Mercedes, his attraction to professional car racing, and his myth of his own happy marriage as it disintegrated.  In April 1965, six months before Jarrell’s death, Hannah Arendt wrote Mary McCarthy: “Now he is off to a mental hospital.  He seemed quite sick when I saw him, chiefly depressed but with some streak of real insanity in it that frightened me, as though some altogether alien person was looking through him who still was He.”

 

Allusions in Pictures

My article on “Allusions in Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution” in Notes on Contemporary Literature (March 2006) identified 67 of them.  I now add 68 more allusions, and challenge readers to give the exact sources for 5 others.

13- Spartan boy –hid a stolen fox beneath his coat and didn’t flinch when it ate his flesh, Plutarch, Moral Essays (lst century AD).

18- “The very important [the rich] are different from us. Yes, they have more everything [money].” –Hemingway on Scott Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936).

20- “The fathers have eaten Cream of Wheat [a sour grape], and the children’s teeth are set on  edge” –Jeremiah 31:29. Years

21- My friends, there are no friends!” –Attributed to Aristotle in Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship” (1576).

24- “eye of beet” –“eye of newt,” Macbeth (1606).

25- “a man of good character where women are concerned”—G. B. Shaw, Pygmalion (1913).

28- “A Roland! An Oliver!”—heroes of Song of Roland, 11th-century French epic poem.

37- “uneventful pathway to the grave” –Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” (1751).

39- “trailing clouds of mustard [of glory]” –William Wordsworth, “Immortality Ode” (1807).

42- “consummation [devoutly to be wished]  of despair “ –Hamlet (1600).

44- “woe to him by whom it cometh” –Luke 17:1.

51- “Achilles leg [heel]” –The Iliad.

57- “thorn in the flesh” –2 Corinthians 12:7

63- “beyond the dreams of avarice” –James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791).

71- “like the wolf on the fold” –Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815).

73- “eyes fixed before her [feet]” –T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922).

87- “put away such things” –1 Corinthians 13:11.

90- “go thou and do otherwise [likewise]” –Luke 10:37.

90- “killed with unkindness” –Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603).

93- “the poor dew would at last thaw” –Hamlet (1600).

95- “the improbable and the impossible” –Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 BCE).

111- “shining on the just and unjust” –Matthew 5:45.

115- “pillar of righteousness” –Psalms 89:14.

119- “the eye of the mind” –Wordsworth, “My Mind’s Eye” (1827).

124- “hung like a sword above their heads” –Damocles sitting beneath a sword hung by a single thread, in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (45 BCE).

132- “anger [necessity] is the mother of invention” –Proverb.

132- Baruch Spinoza had “labored carefully not to mock, lament, and execrate, but to understand” —Theological-Political Treatise (1670).

135- “the skin of his teeth” –Job 19:20.

138- Sergei “Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead” (1908) –based on Arnold Böcklin’s paintings (1880s).

138- “asking the Lord what land He had brought him into” –Genesis 15:7.

140- “weighed upon her eyelids [scales] and found wanting” –Daniel 5:27.

144- “like puzzled urchin on an aged crone” –John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1820).

144- “Pyrrhic defeat [victory]” –The Greek king Pyrrhus suffered heavy losses when defeating the Romans in 279 BCE.

151- “a change in one’s own self” –Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908).

156- “Lensky’s aria” –Peter Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin (1878).

158- “First I will eat my steer!” –German expression: whether or not you feel like doing something.

158- “Igor Stravinsky wrote a polka for the elephants” –in Walt Disney’s animated Fantasia (1940).

162- Talleyrand, “if you have not lived under the old dispensation you have not tasted the Sweetness of Life” –Memoirs (1891).

165- “Believe, believe my heart!” –Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 (1894).

167- “the commonest thing in the world is kindness” –Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (1919).

174- “It is not the plunder but” –Marianne Moore, “New York” (1921).

176- “world without end” –Shakespeare, Sonnet 57 (1609).

176- “No Kafir has set foot on that mountain since the days of the Prophet!” –Kipling, Kim, (1901).

176- “like the Dauphin in the story” –Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).

188- “the Universe that she accepted” –Margaret Fuller, “I accept the universe,” in her biography by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1898).

189- “human too, all too human” –Friedrich Nietzsche (1878).

190- “in the poem ‘free, free!’ ” –George Herbert, “The Collar” (1633).

196- “Barmecide feast” –in Arabian Nights a prince gives a beggar a feast of empty dishes.

207- “Remember that you too are mortal!” –Memento mori, Roman slave to his master.

213- “Far be it from me to implore your cruel pity” –Christoph Gluck, Alceste (1767).

214- “My destiny is accomplished and I die content” –Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Ambitious Guest” (1835).

219- “turned in all their gold / For the banknotes of the one unwithering State” –Jarrell, “Children Selecting Books in a Library” (1941 version).

220- Goethe, “Man would not be the best thing in this world if he were not too good for this world” –Maxims and Reflections (1833).

221- “It was I, Lord, it was I” –Matthew 26:22.

238- “make you want to hate [love] your neighbor” –Mark 12:31.

238- “Nothing can hurt the good man” –Socrates in Plato, Phaedo (360 BCE).

241- “The greatest of these” –1 Corinthians 13:13.

241- The Firmament of Time –Percy Shelley, “Adonis” (1821).

241- “A Cock for Asclepius” –Socrates’ last words in Plato, Phaedo.

244- “all the dunces are leagued against him” –Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1706).

247- “And O poor hapless Nightingale thought I” –John Milton, Comus (1637).

253- “the weary weight of this intelligible world” –Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (1798).

255- “Here I am!” –Isaiah 6:8.

259- “the world is too much” –Wordsworth, Sonnet (1807).

265- “the tears of things” –lacrimae rerum in Virgil, Aeneid.

266- “Paul and Virginia” –title of novel by Bernardin de St. Pierre (1788).

275- “The arrow in its flight is motionless” –Zeno’s Paradox.

275- “the proto-Mongolians of a German historian’s grotesque theory—J. F. Blumenbach (1752-1840) on the Finns.

Quiz for readers:

116 & 169- Bismarck, “you can do anything with children if you only play with them” –

162- “nostalgia is the permanent condition of man” –

195- “What women eat when they live alone!” –

269- “man is an uncomfortable animal” –

273- “too faint and strange a life even to need to perish” –

 

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist in February 2024.  His Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath will appear on July 3, 2024.  His book, 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway, will be out in July 2025P, all with Louisiana State University Press. 

 

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