Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

by Randall Jarrell

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire—and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker’s razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College—mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself. 

 

“A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power. . . . A delight of true understanding.”—Wallace Stevens

 

“I’m greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It’s a remarkable book.”—Robert Penn Warren

 

“Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures . . . is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell’s forte.”—Mary Welp

 

“One of the wittiest books of modern times.”—New York Times

 

“[T]he father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that ‘political correctness’ was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago.”—Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

 

“A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition. . . . Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd.”—Edmund Fuller, Saturday Review

 

“[A] work of fiction, and a dizzying and brilliant work of social and literary criticism. Not only ‘a unique and serious joke-book,’ as Lowell called it, but also a meditation made up of epigrams.”—Michael Wood

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Dark Academia, Academia, Literary Fiction, Novels, American

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Poems, published in collections such as Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), of American poet and critic Randall Jarrell concern war, loneliness, and art.

He wrote eight books of poetry, five anthologies, a novel, Pictures from an Institution . Maurice Sendak illustrated his four books for children, and he translated Faust: Part I and The Three Sisters , which the studio of actors performed on Broadway; he also translated two other works. He received the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, served as poet laureate at the Library of Congress in 1957 and 1958, and taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He joined as a member of the American institute of arts and letters.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

A smug self-involved novel written for the wine-quaffing elite so they might titter around their canapés at the bons mot expressed about a footnote in the revised Oxford edition of The Iliad. The narrator is a pompous New York scenester and the novel reminiscent of all those moments when you’re watching a Woody Allen film and it’s going all right, then suddenly you have this overwhelming urge to kill all the privileged neurotic whining nuisances gobbling up all the caviar before you. Maybe it’s a class thing. I was raised in Compton, Edinburgh where we don’t tolerate books of such a dated self-regarding nature, boyee. A parting warning: be suspicious of all books that subtitle themselves ‘comedies.’ Usually the wish is father to the thought, dear homey.

[Sketchbook · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skittering on life support, this aimless "comedy," narrated by the most toxic whiner in modern lit, grazes academic pretension with nonstop insult / put-down humor associated today with camp TV comics. It seemed funny to many elitists on publication in the early 50s and it amused me years later. On a reread ("Mommy, you have dishpan hands all over") I had to call Nurse Curtis with a Vodka IV.

A nameless professor at a women's school in the northeast burdens us with his smug-bitchy reportage. The college president, a former Olympic diver, croons his speeches. "His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put out your slippers by it." So far, so good. But this goes on and on : "That voice did not sell itself to the highest bidder, it just gave itself away to everybody." There's more : "He was not human. He had not had time to be; besides, his own gift was for seeming human." The president never says anything in the plotless pastiche or is the center of any scene. The narrator just keeps telling us about him like a standup comedian doing a monologue. But a monologue is not a novel.

The president hires as a guest writing teacher a woman novelist named Gertrude and she's supposed to be an ogre. But she never says anything either; we're just told about her by the unseen antagonist. Ex: On seeing the president, we're told, she felt "as if she'd just taken a drink." He's such valuable material for her next book that she "walked around and around him rubbing up and down against his legs, looking into the dish of fresh mackerel he wore instead of a face." The monologue continues. "Gertrude's bark was her bite; and many a bite has lain awake all night longing to be Gertrude's bark." O, there's more: "Gertrude knew the price of every sin and the value of none." But who is she? Does she have any characterization at all, beyond the monologue? Nope.

There's also a faculty wife who looks, we're further told, as if she'd waked up by chance and "her clothes had come together and involved her in an accident. She lived before Original Sin, and could only make mistakes." (Now the narrator sounds like the comic Phyllis Diller doing a monologue). Critics of the day swooned over this kind of stuff, which tells you all about 'em, ehh? Meantime, they ignored the gorgeous comic writing of Dawn Powell...

Inserted like spoons of castor oil so you can choke on fashionable culture of the 50s are names like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Charles-Henri Ford, Janacek, Vivaldi and the revue song, Civilization, from Angel in the Wings ("Bongo, bongo, bongo...I don't wanna leave the Congo..") It's known today because it was introduced by Elaine Stritch (1947) and became part of her retirement-solo act.

A lauded poet, Jarrell displays pleasure with words, but, in his only novel, he reveals his talent is for the monologue -- not the novel.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago. It is still funny, although it has aged a bit. The novel is about a progressive liberal arts college, ca. 1948, called Benton. Jarrell modeled it on Sarah Lawrence, where he taught for a time in the late 1940s. It is a wonderful sendup of the oddities of such a place, told largely through sketches of various faculty members and their families, with oddball students wandering through. Some are said to be modeled on Jarrell's colleagues at the school: the novelist Gertrude Johnson on Mary McCarthy, Irene Rosenbaum on Hannah Arendt.

The book is peppered with literary and biblical allusions and quotations, which are almost never identified. Wordsworth, Keats, Auden, Jarrell's own works, and others pop up. These include one of the more withering adaptations of Shakespeare:

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither age nor custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertude Johnson.

In another place he alludes to Auden's own judgement of "September 1, 1939:"

Flo Whittaker had once gently reproved Dr, Rosenbaum for his attitude towards politics. She had done so by quoting to him, in tones that rather made for righteousness, a line of poetry she had often seen quoted in this connection: "We must love one another or die." Dr. Rosenbaum replied: "We must love one another and die."

Jarrell and Auden moved in the same circles, so he likely had it directly from the author. In any case, Jarrell assumes a high level of education and culture, as he defined them.

Much of the satire is biting, but always tempered by an affection for his victims.

A few more quotes:

Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.

Jeremy Bentham's stuffed body would not have been ill at ease in their house.

He had not evolved to the stage of moral development at which hypocrisy was possible.

Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.

The tone can be almost wistful, somewhat elegiac at times. At the end of the novel the unnamed narrator, a poet and almost certainly intended to be identified with Jarrell himself, is leaving Benton for another school. He cleans out his office and wanders the campus:

As I walked back through Benton to my office, I hardly looked at Benton. I felt that I had misjudged Benton, somehow ... and yet I didn't fell repentant, only confused and willingly confused; and I was willing for Benton in its turn to misjudge me. I signed with it then a separate peace. There was no need for us to judge each other, we said, we knew each other too well; we knew each other by heart. Then we yawned and turned sleepily from each other, and sank back into sleep.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Randall Jarrell’s only novel is a comedy, short on plot and long on characterization, set at a private women’s college. The unnamed narrator is a visiting professor who is a stand-in for Jarrell; Gertrude Johnson, a novelist in residence who is studying the campus denizens in order to novelize them, is based on Mary McCarthy. We also get to know the president of Benton College and his South-African born wife, who Gertrude refers to as “the Black Man’s Burden;” Gottfried Rosenbaum, a composer in residence, and his wife Irene; Sidney Bacon, Gertrude’s attentive, doormattish husband; and some other minor characters.

Gertrude is viciously witty. When holding forth, "she had the contempt for her audience that the real virtuoso so often has." She is someone who “told big lies like Hitler’s.” Nurturing does not come naturally to her; conversations with children are difficult, and domesticity a challenge. At a dinner party she throws,

There was very little of Gertrude’s dinner, but what there was was awful: it was a dinner you would not have invited a dog to. You felt with naïve resentment: “You’d think if she’d wanted to have people to dinner she’d have cooked them more than this”; ah, but she hadn’t wanted to, not really. She felt, somewhere in the depths of her Lucy Stone-ish heart, that cooking is a man’s job, and soon, so did you. After her dinners guests had often wanted to pay Gertrude the simple tribute of a sampler, one bearing in chain-stitch or lock-step the words Kinder, Kirche, Küche.

After the meal, the guests are relieved to consume a bakery cake: “It was good to eat something that had felt a cook’s transfiguring hands.”

Gertrude is the star of the novel, but Jarrell’s comedic talents are sprinkled over the others too. President Dwight Robbins has a public speaking voice that “not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put out your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get into something more comfortable. It was a Compromising voice. President Robbins was, in Shaw’s phrase, “a man of good character where women are concerned,” and he had never touched a Benton girl except in a game of water-polo; yet as you heard him speak something muttered inside you, “To a nunnery, go!”

And speaking of the student body, “Nowadays Benton picked and chose: girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school’s quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.”

At times, though, the witticisms feel too Wildean:

People say that conversation is a lost art: how often I have wished it were!

She had never married; neither had her mother, her grandmother, any of the Battersons – one felt that.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

halfway through, this book abandons itself and spends the rest of its pages just sort of dancing around. the story that was being set up (that of the satirical novelist come to the campus to write a book about it) goes off over the hills and leaves us with 150 more pages of delightful characters and witticisms... it was kind of a disappointment... when i started this book it was one of those HOLY SHIT! moments where you think you are finally finding A Perfect Book... this is oscar wilde / dorothy parker quality wit here, for real, only somehow done with the gentle fluffy funnylovingkindness of p.g. wodehouse... there is another review here on goodreads that says that jarrell treats all of humanity as if they were retarded children... he forgives them everything they do because they don't know what they're doing... and then on top of it there are these crazy metaphors all over the place...

(Gertude the novelist has come to Benton college to write a book about it, and has been asking a lot of questions of the narrator, a professor there.)


I always answered her questions. If I hadn't, someone else would have-- and it was appropriate that she and Benton should meet and, each in its own way, preserve the memory of each other. But sometimes I felt sheepish-- felt like a flock of sheep, that is-- as Gertrude sheared from me (with barber's clippers that pulled a little) my poor coat of facts, worked over it with knitted brows, and then, smiling like Morgan le Fay, cast over my bare limbs her big blanket conclusions."

that's not even really a stand-out section... it's all like that...

[carlageek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many people, I suppose, all I knew of Randall Jarrell before I read Pictures from an Institution was “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner,” a poem of World War II that, like Hobbes’s state of man, is nasty, brutish, and short. Pictures is an entirely different beast; jovial and verbose, it pokes mild fun at academics and, somewhat self-referentially, at novelists who mine them for material. And I like the book very much for what it is. It is absolutely hilarious at times (see my notes and highlights); at other times the references sail over my head—I suspect some of them would be obscure even to the erudite midcentury reader who was Jarrell’s target audience.

But the book is also what it says on the tin: pictures from an institution. There is no story here, no plot; only a series of amusing portraits of the peculiar characters who walk the ivied halls of Benton College—Robbins, the superficial college president, his snake-obsessed son and two Afghan dogs; the ever-so-European music professor Rosenbaum and his wife, a retired Russian opera star; the president’s secretary, Constance, a befuddled young woman adopted by the Rosenbaums; and the main attraction, the novelist and creative writing professor Gertrude Johnson, a cruel and insecure woman who chews up and spits out everyone around her in the name of gathering material for her novels. The narrator, a poetry professor, paints all these individuals (even Gertrude) with a measured but affectionate eye.

As a women’s college alumna myself—one of the type whose alma mater is a significant part of her identity—I thought I would recognize the institution of Benton itself as a familiar caricature, but in fact I did not. The Benton that Jarrell describes, and the few students who wind up in his pages, are rather different from my own collegiate experiences; even more superficial and static and irrelevant, while considerably less intellectual. I recognize more in what’s remembered of Vassar of Mary McCarthy’s The Group than I do in Benton; the next midcentury campus novel on my list is McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, so stay tuned. Gertrude Johnson is supposedly based on McCarthy (and as awful as she is, and as much as I adore McCarthy, I admit I can believe it), and both Benton and the college in The Groves of Academe are said to be inspired by Sarah Lawrence. I’m really looking forward to the compare-and-contrast exercise that book will afford me.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pictures from an Institution is Randall Jarrell's poignant and highly comedic book of a women's college. In his portrait of Gertrude, a haughty writer in residence, we have a masterpiece of characterization. The humor in the book is of a rarefied sort - still I would say this is the funniest book I have ever read. I have read Pictures of an Institution four times to savor over its parody and descriptions and laugh inside at the laser vision of Jarrell. It is not easy to write satire on this level. When I ask people for a truly funny book in literature of the 20th century most say Confederacy of Dunces and then draw a blank. I always recommend this.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a real soft spot for novels set on college campuses. Any time I’ve looked through lists of options, Jarrell’s has been there. Still, it took the 1954 Club blog challenge for me to finally pick up a copy. For about the first half, I was fully engaged with this academic comedy even though it doesn’t have a plot as such. The stage is Benton women’s college; the cast includes various eccentric professors and other staff, from President Robbins on down. Gertrude Johnson, a visiting writer, is writing a novel about Benton. The problem for her – and for us as readers – is two-fold: the characters are almost too eccentric to be believed, and nothing happens here.

The narrator, a poetry professor at Benton, knew Gertrude socially back in New York City. His descriptions of his fellow faculty are often hilarious. For instance, here’s his picture of Flo Whittaker:

Mostly she wore, in the daytime in the winter, a tweed skirt, a sweater-set, and a necklace. The skirt looked as if a horse had left her its second-best blanket; the sweaters looked as if an old buffalo, sitting by a fire of peat, had knitted them for her from its coat of the winter before

The Whittakers’ house is so full of kitschy knick-knacks that “Jeremy Bentham’s stuffed body would not have been ill at ease.” And then there’s the Robbinses’ ill-behaved pair of Afghan hounds, and Dr. Rosenbaum the music professor, whose German accent is rendered over-the-top.

Funny as parts of the novel can be, the humour can feel dated and sometimes relies on niche cultural references. The very first line, for example: “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe”. However, elsewhere Jarrell mocks the pretentiousness of modern art and of the Benton set, who also seem woke avant la lettre:

Most of the people of Benton would have swallowed a porcupine, if you had dyed its quills and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren’t prejudiced towards moon men; and they were so liberal and selfless, politically

Amusing pen portraits and witty lines made this pleasant to spend time with, but not a read that will stick with me.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had flashes of clever writing, but much more that was obscure and pointless. Perhaps prose by a poet tends toward taking risks of metaphor and expression that work in the more spare poetic medium, but fail in a prose narrative. There was an underlying snarky tone, in which nearly every character is faulted as pathetic, or mindlessly selfish and provincial, that made it further unsatisfying.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Witty, cruel and ultimately soulless. I know it's supposed to be about Mary McCarthy, but to me it reads very meta.

[Kay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't you hate it when a book is recommended as hilarious and it turns out so unengaging, so lacking in sparkle that you sigh and put it down after 50 pages? I do.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pictures from an Institution was poet Randall Jarrell's only novel. Published in 1954, it's a satire portraying the intellectual swaggering and pomposity prevalent in an enlightened women's institution called Benton College. Meant to be funny--it's subtitled A Comedy--it is. Jarrell must have had fun ridiculing what he saw as the foibles and pretensions of the academic life he himself was part of. It's said to be modeled on Sarah Lawrence College in New York where Jarrell taught, though he says Benton is more of a type rather than a specific school. You'll laugh out loud at the preening and the eccentricity, the confusion and backbiting. The latter, particularly, is the metier of Gertrude Johnson, the creative writing professor meant as a caricature of Mary McCarthy, who was once also a faculty member of Sarah Lawrence. His portrait of her in an ensemble of characters whose mannerisms Jarrell sees in high satire is savage. Such scenes as a cocktail party, an assembly, the president's struggles with the self-inflated novelist teaching the school's writing program, will make you smile if not laugh out loud.

The main problem is that it's hard to relate to the characters and the academic backdrop of a novel removed 60 years from us. Like so many novels published decades ago, the lush and practiced quality of the narrator's voice helps to date it. The blurbs themselves accompanying my edition strike the same tone as the material; most are by contemporaries of Jarrell. Of the two more contemporary to us, Noel Malcolm may be correct in considering it the forerunner of our campus novels of today, but Michael Wood's claim of the novel as meditation isn't believable. The one bright spot is Gertrude Johnson, only because she's a send-up of the iconic Mary McCarthy, who we know enough about to understand as Jarrell pictures her, and is therefore familiar. The rest is too clouded by the tyranny of time to claim relevance in our world far-removed from Benton. The small town, small campus feel of Benton and the almost closeted academia of its faculty seem provincial. It reads like our own 1950s except the biting spirit of Jarrell's prose prevents us from holding it close nostalgically.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let’s see if I have this straight. Mary McCarthy spent a year teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1940s. In 1952, she published The Groves of Academe, which some credit as being the first faculty novel. In the years since, the shelf devoted to that inbred genre stretches into the next valley. Ms. McCarthy has a lot to answer for.
It happens that the poet Randall Jarrell taught at Sarah Lawrence that same year. Two years after McCarthy’s book appeared, Jarrell published this satire about a novelist of repute who spends a year teaching at a progressive women’s college and uses that year to gather material for a savage novel.
I haven’t read Groves, but I’m sure Jarrell’s book is funnier. I haven’t guffawed while reading so often since the last Mark Twain I read. I don’t know if McCarthy ever spoke to Jarrell again. In addition to being a good writer, she seems to have been a top-notch feuder.
Jarrell’s telling jabs at the foibles of institutions of higher learning balance between merciless and affectionate. Many are the observations of his own alter ego, the narrator, but the most telling blows are landed by the novelist, Gertrude. In singing the praises of Benton College to the Committee on Aims, she declaims: “Beautiful spot! So young, so lovely! So unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!” (p. 211).
In one of my favorite scenes, Gertrude dissects a visiting lecturer at the reception in the home of the college’s president. The lecturer, Daudier (pronounced Dod-yer), seems to be an amalgam of Clifton Fadiman and Mortimer Adler. This scene comes near the end of the book, just as I was beginning to wonder whether Jarrell’s love of paradox didn’t border on the perverse (“you had to hear it not to believe it” - p. 25). The book is witty and insightful from beginning to end.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was all enjoying this book and laughing out loud on a very cheerless B train, and enjoying how it positively revels in its artifices (short, punchy disquisitions on how impossible it is to make a "real" person seem like a "real" character, and vice versa), when Karl, who read it a few months ago (and gave it a very good review, so read his if you're interested in hearing more about the book itself), pointed out that the character of Gertrude was a lot like me. In fact, he said, "That's what being married to you is like." At first, I was all, "Hey! Whoa!" But then I kept reading, and Gertrude kept behaving more and more awfully, and I finally had to admit the justice of the charge. So, any of you who've been wondering what it's like to be married to me, read it.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of many re-reads - Picture from an Institution is just so much one of those books that I pick up to check a quote or whether I recall a passge correctly and then I just get sucked in once more.

Still haven't found the particular passage I was looking for, but did find a line that I had previously hunted for fruitlessly, because I thought it must come much later along than page 2.

And I'm not actually reading the vintage Penguin edition, but that makes a nice picture!

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

My brain turned to cardboard every three pages. Either the air in the buses is stagnant, or this was frightfully dull, or I'm just not the kind of satire fan who appreciates this. I do like Richard Russo's [i]Straight Man[/i] and Kingsley Amis' [i]Lucky Jim[/i], so who knows where the problem lies.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know how mental retards seem really good and decent and innocent even when they misbehave, because we realize they're too retarded to know any better? The narrator of this novel thinks that way about people in general.

[Imlac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Labored, dated, not really worth the effort, particularly when putting in the effort sometimes still leaves you baffled as to what he's getting at. I've tried this book several times, and have finally put it aside with a good conscience.

[Andrew Pilet]

this novel has a deeply weird configuration that it doesn't pull off very well but is still absolutely fascinating by the fact of it being present.

the narrator is seemingly Randall Jarrell himself, at least according to the back matter, and his narrative deals with his relationship to a fictitious writer, Gertrude Johnson. the premise of the novel deals with Gertrude's time as a writer-in-residence at the equally-fictitious Benton College, as she's writing a novel regarding and featuring the people she meets at Benton.

so, in a lovely Kierkegaard-type manner, there are multiple layers of fictional reality at play: there is the real-real Randall Jarrell, who is writing from the perspective of a fictionalized Randall Jarrell at a fictional college about a fully fictional writer named Gertrude, who herself is writing (presumably from the perspective of a fictional-fictional Gertrude) a fictionalized account of that school. it's several confusing layers of irreality pressed against each other, questioning whether our 'real-real' Randall Jarrell can actually be believed as fully real author. or, rather, injecting the possibility that the writer on the cover of the book is a fake too. i love this -- the total collapse of perceived realness, such that fiction and reality are really arbitrary modes of belief and perspective existing in that exact same span and space.

Randall Jarrell spends that concept on a series of expositional diatribes on the oh-so-kooky-lovable figures of a campus (which is a nice trope/concept to have in mind), which is slightly depressing. but at the same time, Gertrude, repeatedly, sets down these exact characters which fictional-Jarrell-narrator -- who, keep in mind, judges Getrude's very act of fictionalizing -- has established, as 'types'. so presumably Jarrell has in mind/certainty that at hand, in this kind of narrative, is the underhanded perpetual intrusion of a reality of 'typeness'.the unfortunate thing about that possibility is the idea that he felt he needed over 150 pages of that expositional work in order to justify the maybe 50-75 pages that even hint at a scrutinizing of author, the fictional work, and the narrative sameness of the campus.

something repeated in this novel is that the college, Benton, does not change, is not a space for change, it exists internally/separately from the real world, the Benton-insider always looks with skepticism at the outsider. a student/product of Benton will always enter a non-Benton obscured world after the Benton-experience. the college is reified as both the place of intellectual progressiveness and of social suspension, where all movement is both backward and forward at the same time. when narrator Randall Jarrell at the end discusses leaving the college, he says "I was willing for Benton in its turn to misjudge me. I signed with it then a separate peace." Perhaps that was just a popular phrase at this point, but considering John Knowles' novel had just released, portraying the campus as 'a separate peace' from war and the external forces of reality, there's something telling about Jarrell's usage of it. 'a separate peace,' for him, is the act of actually separating from the college/campus. peace is moved outward, located in the escape to the outside, rather than in the protection from it.

unrelated, slightly. i think Jarrell encapsulates the exact purpose of fiction, or of fictionalizing. he writes of Gertrude: "she talked, as always, about the difference between life and art, and the necessity of giving life form -- form, in this case, was her plot, and you could see that having been given that plot was the best thing that had ever happened to Benton. And the fact that nothing much ever happened at Benton made her even more impatient with Benton: it was not simply raw, but dead unresisting, material."

[Bill FromPA · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dr. Rosenbaum's saying about Benton was not unjust. It went: The Patagonians have two poets, the better named Gomez; the Patagonians call Shakespeare the English Gomez.

A pretty bland affair. How did this get to be the locus classicus of the academic novel?

The novel is set at Benton, a progressive women’s college and narrated by an unnamed poet / professor. I suppose some, such as George Will read the book as a satire on progressive education, but one has to bring a pretty strong prejudice of one’s own to the book to see Jarrell’s occasional mild jabs as savage satire.

Jarrell tends to write in aphorisms, but seems not to realize that stringing a bunch of these together does not build a novel. He does seem fascinated with novel writing as is shown by making Gertrude Johnson, novelist and visiting professor, his main character. He seems under the mistaken impression that, having decided to make colleagues characters in her novel, the novelist must necessarily invite them into her home for a kind of formal sitting, which provides one of the book’s odder scenes. The narrator expresses shock when he discovers that Gertrude has come up with a plot for her novel about Benton; nothing ever happens at Benton so a plot would necessarily be a misrepresentation. This may be meant to explain or excuse the complete lack of plot in Pictures from an Institution .

Gertrude is cynical, critical, ambitious, outspoken, and generally feared by the faculty. The other main character, Austrian refugee and Benton’s dodecaphonic composer-in-residence is Gottfried Rosenbaum, seems intended as a foil for Gertrude, laid back, accepting of his own artistic obscurity, willing to take people uncritically on their own terms. But, true to the un-novel like nature of the book, a confrontation never comes, they go along on their separate courses, coming together on “Art Night” in the penultimate chapter, producing just about no chemical reaction. Gertrude charms her companions, including Rosenbaum, by wisecracking her way through a student production of The Spook Sonata, a Strindberg adaptation. Typical of Jarrell’s “tell, don’t show” style, we are told how witty Gertrude is in this instance, but are never told even one of her witticisms.

Gertrude and Rosenbaum dominate the book, the other less prominent characters are Benton’s president, professors and spouses and, in a few cases, the children of these. We meet one student by name and are told briefly about a Kafkaesque story she has written – this is far too thin a reed to bear any interpretation that sees in it a general condemnation of Benton’s educational practices.

One thing I found appealing in the text was the depiction of the home where Rosenbaum lived with his wife, long-retired Russian soprano Irene. The house serves as a kind of magic cave of mitteleuropäische Kultur set down in the less civilized wilds of the US. Jarrell does not do a lot with this concept, but it allows him to introduce a number of artistic references, particularly to music, including a number of allusions to Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs.

Many allusions in the text which I at first thought Jarrell had made up turned out to be real people or works of art. Friedrich Gerstäcker is a real German writer, not a Karl May stand-in as I first thought. The Witch of Coös, the text for Gottfried Rosenbaum's first American composition is by Robert Frost. On page 216, I finally found an apparently fictional allusion: Czech author Jiří Vlček-Krkonáček.

[Wherefore Art Thou · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads more like a set of character sketches with only a passing resemblance to a novel (so far, I was only willing to progress to 50 pages, ~20%).

I don’t mind that, in theory, I just didn’t find the characters that vibrant, interesting or unique, any of the three would do, or the writing very clever, or funny. It’s not poorly written, it’s just quite boring.

I think a contemporary who was able to catch more of the cultural references might have enjoyed it more — but after just reading Lucky Jim, a much more vivid academic skewering, Pictures from an Institution just doesn’t quite hold up, for me. I still would be interested in reading his poetry or short stories.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

As campus comedies go, it’s as if Animal House took place at the Jewish fraternity.

[Harveysykes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amusing but not much meat on the bones

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell is a comic book of fiction that isn't really a novel, although it doesn't have to be--it's exactly what it calls itself, an interconnected series of portraits painted on the canvas of a small women's liberal arts college in the 50s (presumably Sarah Lawrence).

Going nowhere while loosely following the academic year, Pictures (let's call it that) is brilliantly written and draws on Jarrell's exceptional erudition, notably referencing German literature and music and the Greek myths. Jarrell must have written it the way Nabokov is said to have written--notecard by notecard, pasting each in place when he had finished anatomizing one of his targets: the college president, the college president's secretary, the visiting writer-in-residence, the permanent composer-in-residence, and so forth.

Small women's colleges aren't completely thing of the past, but they don't have quite the resonance they had in Jarrell's day, and I don't know that they quite make sense as objects of satire anymore, but that's not the book's weakest point, which is the way it loses track of itself from time to time, taking something on and dropping it and then taking it on again.

This can be a technique that works. The closest thing to Pictures, in my mind, is work by Henry Green, which doesn't go anywhere, either. Fussing about can be amusing, but sometimes it's distracting, as in: what the hell is going on now?

When summer arrives, the students and faculty scatter and the book is over. No more pictures. And yet the emptiness of a campus in summertime can be poignant, just as, in my opinion, Christmas break on a campus is the best time of year of all, a time when ghostly fugitives from their families and students from abroad who can't afford to go home are free to think their own thoughts, no longer syllabus-bound, and take long walks in the snow.

Ultimately, Jarrell was a poet. Ergo, this book needs to be read slowly. There's no plot. Nowhere to get to. Hurrying through it--though one is tempted to at times--is a mistake.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm someone who is constitutionally inclined to agree with Jarrell on questions of politics and culture, which can make getting through a book of his essays a little hard and make some of the poems feel like old news. But this novel, about a visiting novelist reaching writing at a small women's college works for me in spite of its closeness to my own experience.

Part of it is that it's never entirely clear what Jarrell is doing here; coming out of a mid-century tradition that says, do something new with the novel, Jarrell leaves out a plot, and instead gives us chapter long explorations of certain characters together: so, what is the composer of atonal music like around the newly hired administrator? What characterizes the relationship between the novelist and her husband, the novelist and the U president? These really are more like the pictures at an exhibition alluded to by the title than some coherent narrative, and it makes for a bracing read, one where, I think, most of the emphasis is thrown on the language and syntax, especially, which is taut and funny and very dense. This might be a problem for some readers: without a story to drag you along, there's reason to worry you might lose your place, or feel like you're not getting anywhere, and quit. It doesn't even really build to a big finish, though there is room for a couple notes of melancholy at the end.

Instead what you have are lots of observations, nearly all of which are crystallized insights and almost as many are painfully funny. It's no mistake that I also teach at a small women's college, and the cultures, for all their differences, feel very similar; a lot of what is said about the college in this book applies just as well to my own, in ways that sadly flatter neither. But it was funny, and these asides provided those moments of recognition that kept me reading, and which make this a book to really cherish and admire, even if I wonder who else would find in it those things I so enjoyed.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look: Jarrell was renowned as a poet and a critic, not a novelist, and this novel-like object doesn't really cohere. It begins at the end, jumps to the beginning, sketches each of its characters and ends abruptly. What it is, is a means for Jarrell to construct lavish, ornate angel-hair paragraphs: riffing on Shakespeare and the Bible, warping speech cliches, then leaping suddenly into startling lyric beauty. The author's voice is wry, desultory - finding much to make fun of in his progressive college environment, but overall seeming at peace with it. This mocking isn't the excoriation from the outside of, say, William Buckley's God and Man at Yale; it's the witty banter heard at the Progressives' cocktail party, from one of the elder backbenchers.

It's fundamentally an unserious book, full of scholarly showmanship, so it's understandable that some might find it tiresome or show-offish. Certainly you can't lose attention, since the descriptions are sometimes almost so opaque as to defy comprehension (even after some sedulous Googling). But I've a taste for archaic literary takedowns (the main antagonist is supposedly a sketch of Mary McCarthy), so for me it was worth the effort. Your mileage may vary.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by an admired friend, who happens to be an English professor, as "the ultimate academic novel." I'm not so sure. Randall Jarrell is best known as a poet and writes brilliantly, but his book is almost entirely characterization. Very little happens . . . perhaps precisely because very little EVER happens at Benton College, the imagined liberal arts college he skewers here. Moreover, creating humorous stereotypes of university professors and administrators, for any of us who have worked on a campus very long, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel: it's just a little too easy. Still there are some very funny scenes in this comedy, and anyone who has known the typical university president, who is more an institution than a person, the want-to-be novelist whose every social engagement is simply collecting fodder for her fiction, or the eccentric professor of music, who so often speaks with a German accent and imagines himself a great composer of twelve-tone music will find some very familiar characters on these pages.

[Jonathan Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, though not a novel

The form of a novel is a mere excuse for Jarrell's wit. Characters and chapters are taken up here and there, but the main point is to make beautiful fun of a certain kind of mid-century women's college (Jarrell taught at such a place) and the state of American learning. Jarrell was feared for his aperçus, and many of them make happy appearance here. Against the novelist Gertrude Bacon's corrosive cynicism, Jarrell puts the exotic European music faculty, the Rosenbaums, whose life experience and wisdom, tempered by nostalgia, point to a better kind of education.

Jarrell perhaps overmystifies the Rosenbaums, putting into their mouths all of his outsider's awe at prewar European culture. But as eccentric as they are, Jarrell makes them the moral center of his book

Some of his wit has not aged well, especially concerning race. But many of his references open up an entire world. I have come back to this book repeatedly, and though Benton College never existed, its human types live on.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t finish this book; I just couldn’t bring myself to read any more of it after about 20-25% in. Basically the narrator is always and seemingly only interested in making catty comments. Some of these are genuinely funny and witty, but it quickly gets very tiresome; salt makes food taste better, but when too much is used the dish becomes inedible. As this book did for me. I was hoping it would be a good followup to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. If you’re looking for an academic satire from the mid50s with wit and, yes, some wickedly good cattiness, stick with Lucky Jim.

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is a chain of first-rate insult and top-shelf wit. The chain does have some weak links in it though. Somewhere near the middle it begins to sag a bit. Or maybe I just grew tired of quip counting. It tightens up toward the end, for whatever that's worth. It's a mean novel that means nothing (as far as I can tell) to anyone but Randall Jarrell and roman-a-clefists. Brilliant, too. I wish he'd've written more of them.