Indulgent, or candid, or uncommon reader--I've some: a wife, a nun, a ghost or two--If I write for anyone, I wrote for you; So whisper when I die, We was too few; Write over me (if you can write; I hardly knew)

That I--that I--but anything will do, I'm satisfied...And yet--and yet, you were too few; Should I perhaps have written for your brothers,

Those artful, common, indulgent others?

Randall Jarrell wrote this bitter-sweet little obituary for himself more than ten years before he was struck by a car one night as he walked along a country road near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His wife and the nun have returned to whisper his praises in a volume of appreciations published this fall. Mrs. Jarrell recalls her husband's enthusiasms for sports cars, Mahler, and a giant cat named Kitten; Sister M. Bernetta Quinn plods patiently through an exposition of "Metamorphoses in Randall Jarrell."

But how about "the ghost or two"--the handful of fragile souls that Jarrell forsesaw clustering about his grave? Instead we have nothing less than the United States Cultural All-Star Team. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Robert Fitzgerald, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Leslie A. Fiedler, Hannah Arendt, all take the podium.

Jarrell was one of the elite, and one can read this book for titilating glimpses into the insider's world of working poets. In places Lowell is called "Cal" and William Carlos Williams "Bill," and the coziness is compulsively fascinating to an outsider. But the real question is what brought this great and loving fraternity of American poets together? And the answer--God-like Randall--is fascinating too.

Mrs. Jarrell may be suspected of instigating the movement to canonize her husband. She has been touring the country reading his poems since shortly after his death. And she was the star performer at an immensely emotional memorial service at Yale in February, 1966, in which many of the contributors to this book spoke in his honor.

The mythology that is growing around Jarrell started with his death. He died, "an apparent suicide" the papers and newsweeklies reported. But Mrs. Jarrell wrote letters to Time and Newsweek, explaining that her husband was wearing dark clothes and "a favorite pair of brown gloves, that the road was narrow and badly lighted, and that the car brushed past him at approximately 45 m.p.h. bruising his shoulder and glancing the side of his head at windshield height, causing instant death." Like Jay in Agee's A Death in the Family, there wasn't a mark on him, but suddenly he was dead.

At times his life seemed to belong as much to the picturesque world of fiction as did the manner of his death. We get only glimpses of Jarrell in the book of memorials. None of the writers attempt a miniature biography, but the anecdotes all add to the same picture of paradoxical man, warm to those he respected, yet always distant enough to be awe-inspiring.

He was a terror as a reviewer--and treated mediocre work from his friends as a personal reproach. But merciless as his criticism was, the poets treasured it. "I wrote to the mind of Randall Jarrell," Adrienne Rich writes and many of the contributors like her recognize Jarrell's capacity for understanding just what they were trying to do in their poetry, telling them when and how they failed, and encouraging them to keep going. "Twice or thrice, I think he must have thrown me a lifeline," Lowell says.

A Figure from Fairyland

Arendt calls him "a figure from fairyland," and none who knew him can resist commenting on the sparkling, playful eyes lodged in his deep and at times overpoweringly sad face. Elizabeth Bishop remembers him looking "small and rather delicate but bright and dazzling, too" on the crest of a Cape Cod sand dune, writing in a notebook. Robert Fitzgerald finds his face "old-fashioned and rural and honorable and a little toothy." His wife says that he grew the immense beard to look like Chekhov, but to another observer it hides "the naked vulnerability of his countenance."

The book is loaded with stories of Jarrell the gamesman. He and Lowell used to sit in an empty classroom playing "Who's First?", a game in which they would downgrade fellow-poets until they were the only two left at the top. From his youth, he loved tennis and he lavishly admired professional football, spending countless Sunday afternoons in front of his TV and eventually making Johnny Unitas a figure for the poet's craft. Once, while a house guest, he lost a croquet game to some children, and his hostess detected him at 5 a.m. the next morning on the front lawn, rearranging the wickets.

"If you can write; I hardly knew"

This viciously competitive streak poured over into what he wrote. His writing had the same sparkle as his talk, and the contributors are as much in awe of the man's power with words as they were with the man. Most of them are conscious of the irony of writing a volume of eulogitic criticism on Jarrell, for he was the most violent and the most effective of professional critics.