The Rewards of Vice

"It should be the duty of book juries to reward the all-out professional author and not to dig around and rescue a writer from obscurity, said Novelist John O'Hara a few years ago. "I don't believe that there are better writers than Hemingway, Faulkner, Cozzens, and me pining away in Brown County, Indiana, or in an espresso joint on Third Street, or on the faculty of East South Dakota A. & M." Last week, U.S. book publishers took cognizance of O'Hara's benediction for professionalism and tapped three veteran writers for the $1,000 National Book Awards. Honored were Novelist Conrad Richter, 70, for his tenth novel, The Waters of Kronos (TIME, April 18, 1960), an old man's fevered attempt to distill the lessons of his forgotten youth; Journalist William L. Shirer, 57, for his massive (1,245 PP) study of Hitler's Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (TIME, Oct. 17); and Poet Randall Jarrell, 46, for his eighth book, The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

Of the three winners, fiercely bearded Randall Jarrell commanded the most interest, partly because of his views on the poet's role in the world. He delights in being called--by reviewers "whose sleep I have troubled"--a poet "who has never learned how to write poetry." Forsaking deliberate obscurity, he dissects the terrifying emptiness of contemporary life in sharply observant verse that is salted with wit. In his prizewinning volume of 19 poems (there are also twelve translations from the German of Goethe, Rilke and others), he is more chronicler than participant, mainly exploring the grey world of loneliness and near despair through the eyes of women. "You see what I am," cries the anguished heroine of the title poem. "Change me, change me." . . . this print of mine, that has kept its color Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--Only I complain.

Jarrell's women are nature's betrayed, sullen spectators at the passing parade. Only in the fleeting world of fantasy do they find escape.

Safe from all the nightmares One comes awake in the world, she sleeps.

She sleeps in sunlight, surrounded, by many dreams Or dreams of dreams, all good--how can a dream be bad If it keeps one asleep? In the past, Jarrell has often jousted with the U.S. public over its "unusual relationship to the poet. To most of us, verse is so uncongenial, so exhaustingly artificial, that I have often thought that a man could make his fortune by entirely eliminating from our culture verse of any kind. In the end, there would be no more poems, only prose translations." Thus

Early to bed, early to rise

Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. would be changed to

Which sibling is the well-adjusted sibling?

The one that gets its sleep.

At the Book Award ceremony, Jarrell likened the public's inability to understand poetry to its bewilderment at the razzle-dazzle" of professional football. "Take Johnny Unitas, quarterback of the Baltimore Colts," said Jarrell. "Only a few people up in the stands understand what he is doing. Most of them have only seen a few games. If he played it so that everybody could understand it, he wouldn't last long in that league. Same with poets. People have real trouble with poetry in our time because they have so little practice."

To bring the public closer to poetry, Jarrell offered a sly suggestion. "It is customary for poets to recommend poetry to you, and to beg you to read it as much as you ought, instead of as little as you do. But perhaps it is a mistake to keep telling people that poetry-is a good thing after all, one they really ought to like better; tell them about money, even, and they will finally start thinking something is wrong with it. Perhaps instead of recommending poetry as a virtue, poets should warn you against it as a vice. We say that virtue is its own reward, but we all know vice is its own reward, and know it too well ever to need to say so."

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