Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell

First published: 1954

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Benton College, a fictional school somewhere in the Northeastern United States

Principal Characters:

• The unnamed narrator, a professor and poet
• The narrator’s wife, also unnamed
• Dwight Robbins, the president of Benton College
• Pamela Robbins, the president’s South African wife, who pretends to be British
• Gertrude Johnson, a novelist and teacher of creative writing at Benton
• Sidney Bacon, Gertrude Johnson’s husband
• Flo Whittaker, a liberal, public-spirited Benton wife
• Jerrold Whittaker, Flo’s husband, a sociologist
• Gottfried Rosenbaum, a composer who teaches at Benton
• Irene Rosenbaum, Gottfried’s wife, a former opera singer
• Constance Morgan, assistant to the secretary of President Robbins

The Novel

Pictures from an Institution is divided into seven chapters, each of which is, in turn, divided into several numbered scenes. Randall Jarrell was enormously knowledgeable about music, and the novel has been likened to a musical composition in which the chapters are like movements and the scenes like themes, recurring point and counterpoint. The narrative begins at the end of a spring term at Benton, an exclusive college for women located somewhere within an easy distance of Harvard and Princeton Universities. The unnamed narrator eventually reveals himself as a teacher at Benton and a poet.

In the first scene of chapter 1, Constance Morgan is serving her last day as assistant to the secretary of Benton’s president. From his office, Constance hears the voice of President Robbins bidding farewell to Gertrude Johnson and the voice of Gertrude Johnson bidding farewell to President Robbins. Both seem delighted to be parting.

By the third scene, the narrative flashes back to late in the fall, when Gertrude comes to Benton to replace a new teacher of creative writing, Manny Gumbiner, who proved in his own mind too “advanced” for Benton and, to Benton, simply “unexpectedly unsatisfactory.” Gumbiner had succeeded Camille Turner Batterson, a genteel Virginian who had taught creative writing at Benton. Offered a chair at a Midwestern university, she had, to everyone’s astonishment, accepted. When Batterson died the following March, a good many people felt that leaving Benton was the true cause of her death. Gertrude, a southerner of quite a different sort from Miss Batterson, cannot abide Benton, but she renders her life there tolerable by using the school and its inhabitants as material for her next novel.

The narrator reports that the friendship at first sight between Gertrude and the president did not survive their second look at each other. She is brilliant but insensitive, fiercely witty, and feels that no human being who is not a writer is worthy of her consideration. Her husband, Sidney Bacon, lives in the reflected light of her persona. He listens to her ideas with rapt attention, reads her manuscripts with expressions of awe, and constantly assures her that she is an extraordinary human being. He seems totally happy in this role. The narrator and his wife are old friends of the Bacons from the days when they all lived on Bleeker Street in New York City. Gertrude is always comparing Bleeker Street to Benton, much to the disadvantage of the latter.

The novel has little plot in the traditional sense. It covers six and a half months of an academic year. The setting for the first few pages of the novel is Benton at the close of school for the year. The rest of the novel is a flashback, beginning with Gertrude’s arrival on campus and eventually returning, in chapter 7, “They All Go,” to the nearly empty campus as summer begins. The narrator strings together scenes from academic life: dinner parties hosted by the president and Mrs. Robbins and various members of the faculty (including one particularly ghastly dinner hosted by Gertrude Johnson), student performances on Art Night, a pompous guest lecturer who speaks “for some years” one evening. In the final chapter, all the characters leave Benton, some for the summer, some forever—providing a firm conclusion, if not a resolution, to the narrative.

The novel contains almost no physical action. Its characters, however, are drawn with depth and precision. Initially, the vignettes that make up each chapter seem only obliquely related. Yet as a minor actor in one scene becomes a major actor in the next and vice versa, the mosaic of tiny pieces becomes gradually recognizable as a story. The chief unifying factor in the work is the tone of the narration. The narrator’s observations and remarks are consistently elegant and witty. They are often ironic and not infrequently bitingly, even cruelly, satiric. On the other hand, the narrator clearly reveals feelings of affection mixed with his disdain for the prevailing ethos of this college for females. He provides the coda for the novel when, in the last chapter, he is preparing to leave Benton himself for another job elsewhere.

The Characters

The novel is, to some degree, a roman à clef. The author filled a part-time teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, during the 1946-1947 academic year. He worked sporadically on Pictures from an Institution from that time until 1954, when it was published in its final form. Appearing in the novel under fictional guises are Henry Taylor, then-president of Sarah Lawrence, and his wife; Jarrell’s New York friends Jean Stafford, Hannah Arendt, and her husband, Heinrich Bleucher; Sara Starr, the daughter of longtime Jarrell friends from Nashville, Tennessee, the place of Jarrell’s birth; and the author himself. Which real person’s behaviors and personality traits have been given to which fictional character is, however, problematic. For example, in Pictures from an Institution, Gertrude Johnson uses her six and a half months at Benton to gather material for a withering novel she will write about the place. The narrator looks somewhat askance at this behavior. In real life, though, it was Jarrell himself who used his year at Sarah Lawrence as Gertrude uses hers at Benton.

Characters are presented in the round, but since the novel is a satire, it is their foibles that are emphasized. President Robbins is a former Olympic diver, a Rhodes Scholar, and the recipient of an LL.D. from a college in Florida that also awarded a “doctor of humor” degree to Milton Berle. Mrs. Robbins affects British superiority, but she is a faux Englishwoman. She is liked by no one. The Robbinses have a little boy named Derek with a passion for snakes, and they also have Afghans named Yang and Yin that are described as “very pretty and very bad.”

Other Benton couples prominently featured are Flo and Jerrold Whittaker and Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum. Flo is the complete liberal-progressive activist. She subscribes to every left-wing shibboleth and belongs to every organization that idealizes the proletariat. She refuses to read any novel more than fifty years old because of the status of women depicted therein. She loves humanity and will love individual human beings if humanity is unavailable. She is as widely liked as Pamela Robbins is disliked. Her husband, Jerrold, is a sociology professor. For him, there are no discrete experiences in life. He deals with everything he encounters by generalizing it into part of some abstract theory, about which he then drones on endlessly. The Whittakers have two children: John, described by the narrator as a “good and agreeable, if inhuman, boy,” and Fern, a “proto-Fascist.”

Gottfried Rosenbaum is a professor of music and a composer of twelve-tone pieces. Gertrude comes to dislike him (as she comes to dislike almost everyone) and would like to refer to him as a “Nazi.” Unfortunately for her purposes, he is an Austrian Jew, thus rendering that particular epithet unusable. His wife, the former Irene Letscheskinskaya, was a Russian opera singer. The narrator suggests that the Rosenbaums do not really live in Benton, for they have brought Europe with them to America. Constance Morgan is a young woman who comes to work at Benton after finishing college elsewhere. Although she is almost like family to the narrator and his wife, once she discovers the Rosenbaums and they her, she virtually becomes their adopted daughter.

Critical Context

Pictures from an Institution is Jarrell’s only novel. He was known primarily as a poet and a literary critic who turned his wicked wit upon any work he deemed inferior. He was prolific—in addition to his poetry, he published four translations (three from German and one from Russian), edited six anthologies (five of fiction and one of modern poetry), and in the last years of his life wrote four children’s books. Pictures from an Institution is very much a novel written by a poet. It is filled with striking metaphors and similes, and dazzling wordplay occurs throughout. The dialogue sparkles with wit; sometimes that wit stings, as when Gertrude, in a belligerent mood, decides to “smoke heads.”

There are several indications, though none is definitive, that writing fiction proved harder for Jarrell than writing poetry. First, he published only one novel in a writing life of approximately thirty years. Second, Jarrell began work on Pictures from an Institution shortly after his year of teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and, despite the fact that the novel is of only moderate length, he required six years to complete it. Third, Jarrell’s fictional technique may fail him at times. The novel is a first-person narrative, and the narrator’s personality is well developed. However, he sometimes describes in great detail scenes at which he was not present and recounts conversations that he could not have overheard. These may represent lapses, or they may simply signify that Jarrell did not feel bound by the strictures of the naturalistic, or even the conventionally realistic, novel.

For a satire written in the 1950’s by a left-leaning author (Jarrell was a Freudian and a Marxist in his thinking and the literary editor of the journal Nation), Pictures from an Institution is remarkably apolitical. It is replete with allusions to literary works, musical compositions, and paintings, but it contains few references to politics, even campus politics. The portrait of Flo Whittaker is that of an ideologue, a study of how the ideologue thinks and responds rather than a study of the ideology itself. Jarrell approaches his work not as a propagandist but as an artist.

Bibliography

Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. The title of this evaluation of Jarrell’s work is a play on the title of his 1965 collection of poems The Lost World.

Jarrell, Mary, ed., assisted by Stuart Wright. Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Jarrell alludes to Pictures from an Institution some forty-four times in his correspondence.

Pritchard, William H. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Eighteen pages are dedicated to a discussion of Pictures from an Institution.

Quinn, Sister Bernetta, O.S.F. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne, 1981. An entry in the Twayne’s United States Authors series. Chapter 6, “Critic, Novelist, Translator,” discusses Pictures from an Institution.

Rosenthal, M. L. Randall Jarrell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Number 103 in the Pamphlets on American Writers series. Makes reference to Jarrell’s “very witty novel” and “lively criticism” but concentrates upon his poetry.