Stranger from Abroad by Daniel Maier-Katkin

Author:Daniel Maier-Katkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

In 1946, Arendt was approached by Randall Jarrell, a poet who had taken up the position of book review editor for The Nation for a year while Margaret Marshall was on leave. Jarrell had been impressed by Arendt’s essay “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’,” which appeared in the Winter 1945 edition of Partisan Review, and asked her to submit book reviews. Over the next few years the two became close friends, and by 1951, when he had an appointment at Princeton (which he found so stuffy that he described it as “much more Princetonian than—than Princeton even”),2 Jarrell was a regular visitor to the Blücher household in New York. He wrote to his wife, Mary, that Hannah and Heinrich were “a scream together,” that sometimes they had “little cheerful mock quarrels,” that they shared household duties such as washing dishes, and that “she kids him a little more than he kids her. They seem a very happily married couple.” It was he who characterized the relationship between Hannah and Heinrich as a “dual monarchy.”3

Language was part of the bond between Arendt and Jarrell.4 Arendt, who loved poetry, was by the time she met Jarrell already familiar with a great deal of English-language poetry, the meaning of which she grasped better than the sound. Her own spoken English was heavily accented, and when she read English poetry, she did not have the sense for what she called “the specific gravity of English words, whose relative weight, as in all languages, is ultimately determined by poetic usage and standards.” There was a bilingual collaboration between Arendt and Jarrell. He loved German poetry, and published quite a few translations (especially of Rilke), with which Arendt helped; and she benefited from his service as one of her “Englishers” (Alfred Kazin was another at the time) who transformed her long, complicated, awkward Teutonic sentences into long, complicated, beautiful English sentences. After Jarrell’s death Arendt wrote that “whatever I know of English poetry, and perhaps of the genius of the language, I owe to him.”

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jarrell would come to visit Hannah and Heinrich from wherever he happened to be teaching for what they all referred to as “American Poetry Weekends.” He would read to her for hours, sometimes following her into the kitchen when she prepared something for them to eat, sometimes staying in the living room to argue with Heinrich about such questions as whether Rilke or Yeats was the better poet. Blücher preferred Yeats, and Jarrell, Rilke. For Jarrell, the pleasure of visiting with Hannah and Heinrich involved being in the presence of such great erudition, and joy at the opportunity to hear German spoken. German, he wrote (not Germany), was the country he liked best.5

Jarrell’s arguments with Heinrich about poetry often devolved into shouting matches as both men had tendencies to zealous enthusiasm. After one of their weekends Jarrell wrote to Hannah that he found Heinrich awe-inspiring because encountering a person even more enthusiastic than himself was like “the second fattest man in the world meeting the fattest.

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