Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (Phoenix Fiction) - Softcover

Jarrell, Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226393755 ISBN 13: 9780226393759

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the author of six volumes of poetry and the recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry in 1961. Pictures from an Institution is his only novel.

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Pictures from an Institution

A Comedy

By Randall Jarrell

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1954 Randall Jarrell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-39375-9

Contents

1. The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins, 
2. The Whittakers and Gertrude, 
3. Miss Batterson and Benton, 
4. Constance and the Rosenbaums, 
5. Gertrude and Sidney, 
6. Art Night, 
7. They All Go, 

CHAPTER 1

The President, Mrs., AND Derek Robbins

1.

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. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President's waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one's sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.

In this office Constance Morgan had been, for a year, the assistant to the secretary of the President; this was her last day.

Her job was like most jobs, except for its surroundings: either she did what she did not want to do, or wished that she had it left to do. By four o'clock there was nothing left. She sat in uneasy content, in easy discontent—she could not tell, for a moment; then she remembered and laughed at herself. She picked an envelope from the top of one pile, put it on the top of another, and took a last last look through the drawers of the desk. Dr. Rosenbaum's old St. Bernard's voice came to her from the tennis courts, and she felt once more the pleasure she always felt at any reminder that he existed; she saved for him St. Augustine's best sentence: I want you to be. Two voices from the President's office—the President's, Gertrude Johnson's—she heard with different feelings; she could not have said exactly what they were.

2.

GERTRUDE JOHNSON was, of course, the novelist; she had come to Benton six and a half months ago, late in the fall, to replace a new teacher of creative writing who had proved unexpectedly unsatisfactory. Gertrude had, as her enemies put it, a hard heart and a sharp tongue, but her heart was softened a little, and her tongue dulled, at her first interview with the President of Benton, Dwight Robbins. He was a nice-looking and informal and unassuming man, a very human one, as he sat there on the edge of his desk, in the winter sunlight of his office; she felt—people could not help feeling as soon as they met President Robbins—as if she had just taken a drink. Everything was blurred a little with attractiveness, and she almost believed, as she did not ordinarily, in Friendship at First Sight. President Robbins wore a simple, grey flannel, undergraduate's suit; his fair hair kept flopping in his face; in spite of once having been a diver in the Olympics, he gave an impression of slightness. He had what novelists used to call "an engaging grin," but it was engaging; one liked the way the skin crinkled around his eyes. Gertrude tried to think of a word for him, and did: the word was boyish.

The President, for his part, saw a short slight woman who was from head to foot, except for her pale blue eyes, a pale, pale, almost wholly unsaturated brown. Her lips were painted a purplish maroon; she had put on no other make-up. She wore her hair more or less as our mothers wore it; her features, as far as one could distinguish them, were undistinguished. Then one noticed that she had an obstinate Irish—or, perhaps, an obstinate apish—upper lip. Her face seemed a ground on which anything could figure: one felt that when she wore new earrings her husband, the children in the street, and the blind beggar on the corner would congratulate her on them. This is what you saw. Yet when you knew her how different it all looked; Gertrude's spirit shone through her body as though the body were an old pane of glass, and you thought, "My God, how could I have been so blind!"

They talked a little (Gertrude in her anomalous Southern speech, President Robbins in Standard American) about the job he was offering her. The salary was not what either would have wished it, but he explained why it couldn't be in a way that was new to her: his married alumnae either died before their husbands, who left money to their own colleges, or else on their husband's deaths left money to the husbands' colleges as memorials; and his unmarried alumnae left their money to cats and dogs and causes. Gertrude and the President laughed. Gertrude had not met a great many college presidents, but she knew from fiction, conversation, and Reason what all of them are like; President Robbins was different.

The job seemed unusually undemanding: one taught classes only twice a week, and did the rest of one's work in individual talks or "conferences" with the students. Gertrude smiled and said, "There's nothing I'd rather do than talk." It was true.

President Robbins laughed—he admired frankness—and said heartily: "Good! Then Benton is certainly the place for you." They both sounded a little too hearty, but they knew that one necessarily sounds that way in such circumstances: who comments on the weather with all the lack of interest that he really feels?

Gertrude was, as novelists say, "between novels"; she had taught writing once at an old-fashioned, high-schoolish college in Missouri, and knew that after it Benton would be a breeze. The President seemed to feel—several sentences implied it—that she would be a great acquisition to Benton; this was so, of course, but she was pleased that he both knew it and showed that he knew it. They arranged everything: President Robbins took her back to the station in one of the school's cars, and they had a drink on the way; late that week Gertrude and her husband found an apartment in Mount Pleasant, the little city that Benton lay at the edge of, and on Monday of the next week—a snowy Monday—Gertrude taught her first class at Benton.

Now she had taught her last class there, thank God! Suffused in summer, blind with bliss, she sat saying goodbye to President Robbins; and President Robbins, blind with bliss, sat saying goodbye to Gertrude Johnson. Constance, in the office outside, could not help hearing every word of their somewhat self-conscious, wholly delighting voices; they both sounded a little hearty, but they knew that one necessarily sounds that way in such circumstances.

3.

GERTRUDE and the President's Friendship at First Sight had lasted only until they took a second look at each other. After this look Gertrude no longer felt as if she had just taken a drink, but felt as if she had a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226393755
• ISBN 13: 9780226393759
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar