Gold-Plated Age

In his first lecture as the newly appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, highbrowed, full-bearded Poet-Critic-Novelist (Pictures from an Institution) Randall Jarrell, 42, last week suggested that this is not a golden, but a "gold-plated," age. "Most of our literature," Jarrell complained, "is Instant Literature, Ready-Mixed Literature . . . easy, familiar, instantly recognizable thoughts . . . already-agreed-upon, instantly acceptable attitudes." When he turned to the visual arts, there was somewhat less jaundice in his eye but just as much cheek in his tongue: "I hardly know whether to borrow my simile from the Bible, and say flourishing like the green bay tree, or to borrow it from Shakespeare, and say growing like a weed."

"We are producing paintings and reproductions of paintings, painters and reproductions of painters, teachers and museum directors and gallerygoers and patrons of the arts, in almost astronomical quantities. Most of the painters are bad or mediocre, of course . . . but the good ones do find shelter in numbers, are bought, employed, looked at, like the rest. Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. The president of a paint factory goes home . . . and stares relishingly at two paintings by Jackson Pollock . . . He feels at home with them; in fact he feels as if he were back at the paint factory."

In too many forms of art, Jarrell finds, too many people are willing to swallow spoon-fed taste: "A great many people are perfectly willing to sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say it is a chair. In fact there is nothing that somebody won't buy and sit in, if you tell him it's a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair."

As for architecture, Jarrell found it flourishing. "Even colleges have stopped rebuilding the cathedrals of Europe on their campuses; and a mansion is what it is, not because a millionaire has dreamed of the Alhambra, but because an architect has dreamed of the marriage of Frank Lloyd Wright and a silo . . . The public that lives in the houses our architects design ... is a broadminded, tolerant, adventurous public, one that has triumphed over inherited prejudice to an astonishing degree. You can put a spherical plastic gas tower on aluminum stilts, divide it into rooms, and quite a few people will be willing to crawl along saying, 'Is this the floor? Is this the wall?,' to make a down payment and call it home."

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