Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy by Randall Jarrell

Author:Randall Jarrell [Jarrell, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1952-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

V.

Gertrude AND Sidney

1.

THOUGH GERTRUDE’S grammar, syntax, and punctuation were perfectly orthodox, though her style made everything sound as if it had been dictated to her by the Spirit of Geometry, she was admired by the most experimental of writers, men who, since high school, had never so much as used a comma, except perhaps to put one after every word of a book of poems. But she was (and they felt this, even if they couldn’t say it) as excessive as they: her excess was moral, spiritual, and cut far deeper into life than anything they had managed themselves. Grammar and capital letters are conventions, the last twigs on the tree of life; it was the roots that Gertrude sawed patiently away at. So even the farthest-flung picket of Experimentalism (poor verlorne Feldwacht!) loved Gertrude’s work, and forgave it its hysterical blindness toward him and his for the sake of its vision of the rest of reality. With them and Gertrude it was a case not of deep calling to deep but of chaos calling to chaos: they were all members of the Sons and Daughters of Old Night, a lodge as strange, in its way, as Florian Slappey’s Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise, another lodge of which one used to read.

Gertrude pointed at the world and said, her voice clear and loud: “You see! you see!” But as you looked along that stretched shaking finger you didn’t see, you saw through. Her vision was too penetrating. She showed that anything, anything at all, is not what it seems; and if anything is not anything, it is nothing. How Gertrude did like Swift! His work, that is: in his life, she felt, he was always fooling around with his friends, gossiping, trying to help the Irish, making up proverbs and jokes and riddles, writing letters in baby-talk to that silly woman. In his work only one thing puzzled her: why had Swift liked the Houyhnhnms? Whenever she thought of Gulliver’s Travels she felt a faint impulse to sweep the last piece off the board, to write an article exposing the Houyhnhnms.

Gertrude could have taken the Houyhnhnms for granted; to anything except a bust of Cato, they expose themselves. But Gertrude hated for anything to be latent or tacit or implicit: if there was an inexpressible secret to the world—or one unexpressed because taken for granted by everybody—she would express it or die. So her books analyzed (besides the sun, the moon, the starry heavens, and the moral order) the dew on the cobweb and the iridescence of Titania’s wings; and they did not murder to dissect, but dissected to murder. The blush on the cheek of Innocence is really—one learned this from Gertrude—a monomolecular film of giant levorotatory protein molecules, and the bonds that join them are the bonds of self-interest. She said to the Universe that she accepted it, for analysis.

Of any thousand pigs, or cats, or white rats, there are some who eat their litters and some, a good many more, who do not.

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