In April 1951 Randall Jarrell sent a short poem titled “A War” to his friend Robert Lowell:
There set out, slowly, for a Different World,
At four, on winter mornings, different legs…
You can’t break eggs without making an omelette
—That’s what they tell the eggs.
The poem is unnervingly odd, with its disjointed second line that evokes, for me, Bruegel’s ominous Hunters in the Snow, who bring no good tidings to the village they’re approaching. Jarrell’s only accompanying comment urged Lowell to read Hannah Arendt’s just-published book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Jarrell was inviting an interpretation: in a totalitarian state, whether fascist or communist, foot soldiers who’ve been promised a better world follow their leaders to disaster blindy (with their legs, not their heads). “The fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror,” Arendt wrote, “adds to ruthlessness an efficiency which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings.”
Ruthless efficiency was the theme of Arendt’s essay “The Eggs Speak Up,” written around 1951 with Jarrell’s “A War” as epigraph.1 It seems likely that Jarrell wrote the poem for Arendt, with whom he was close at the time, and that its cruel joke about eggs arose in their conversations together. Arendt was wary of any blueprint to build a better world, in which human beings were inevitably treated as the raw material for construction. The Stalinist apparatus of secret police, concentration camps, and summary executions didn’t lead to the promised “withering away of the state” but to a mushrooming system of permanent terror. Stalin’s signal achievement, according to Arendt, was to reverse the familiar saying “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” into Jarrell’s nightmare version, in which party loyalists learn that they themselves were to “do all the breaking.” Arendt narrowly avoided becoming one of totalitarianism’s broken eggs herself. Arrested in 1933 by the Gestapo in Berlin and interrogated for eight days regarding her work documenting antisemitism, Arendt fled to France, where she was arrested again in 1940 and held as an “enemy alien” in the internment camp at Gurs before making her way, with the assistance of Varian Fry’s network, to a refugee ship in Lisbon.
The omelet line is often attributed to Stalin from his genocidal 1932–1933 artificial famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, which killed an estimated four million people. But Stalin never said it. Among those who did was Robert Louis Stevenson, in his 1897 novel St. Ives, about a French officer imprisoned by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.“My dear Miss Flora,” the hero says, “you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs…and it is no bagatelle to escape from Edinburgh Castle.” It was presumably from Stevenson that the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty borrowed the phrase, specifically to defend Stalin’s famine policy, in his notorious pro-Soviet reports from Moscow, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Under pressure from Ukrainian activists, the Pulitzer Board considered rescinding the prize in 2003. But as Askold Krushelnycky reported in TheGuardian, the board determined that “the prize was given for a story unconnected with the famine.”
Horror and humor mingled in Jarrell and Arendt’s interactions, as in their grimly playful variations on broken eggs. Beginning in 1945, when he was thirty-one and she was thirty-nine, they often met in Arendt’s cramped rooming house on West 95th Street. Jarrell, who came to be known for his lacerating poetry reviews (dismissing much of one Auden volume as “non-Euclidean needlepoint”), was serving as interim literary editor at The Nation. Arendt admired his World War II poems—based on his experiences as a flight instructor for the Army Air Force—with their focus on the deaths of young soldiers, most famously the decimated gunner washed out of the turret with a hose (“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”) or the young recruits of “Losses”:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out.
Their visits were reciprocal language lessons. Jarrell helped with Arendt’s reviews and essays—“translated [them] into English,” Arendt, whose English was spotty, remarked. He read Dickinson, Auden, and Wordsworth to her “for hours,” she wrote in her poignant remembrance of him in Men in Dark Times (1968).2 “He opened up for me a whole new world of sound and meter, and he taught me the specific gravity of English words, whose relative weight, as in all languages, is ultimately determined by poetic usage and standards.” That feel for the English language entered her prose. The sheer literariness of Origins, not just of its references (Conrad, Kipling, Proust) but of its style, appealed to Jarrell, who told Arendt that her book was “a sort of crushing unbearable poem.”
In return Arendt helped Jarrell—whom she had enlisted to translate some German poems for the publisher Schocken Books—with the language he barely knew. “It is by Trust, and Love, and reading Rilke/Without ein Wörterbuch, that Man learns German,” he wrote. Arendt (who had earlier collaborated on an essay about Rilke’s Duino Elegies) was Jarrell’s dictionary as he became the foremost Rilke translator of his time. “I often thought,” Arendt wrote, “that the country the German language represented to him was actually where he came from, for he was, down to the details of his physical appearance, like a figure from fairyland.”
I own Jarrell’s two-volume German edition of Rilke, a gift from his widow, Mary. During the mid-1970s, when I was living in Greensboro, North Carolina, I used to wander over to the gracious ranch house in the woods off New Garden Road that she had shared with Randall during his years of teaching at Woman’s College of North Carolina (now UNC-G). I felt that I was somehow channeling the poet during those visits, and the well-thumbed Rilke volumes brought him even closer.
On some of the poems he had penciled interlinear translations exactly as they later appeared in print. “The Olive Garden”—on a theme dear to Arendt, the withdrawal of God in the modern world—adopts the pedantically correct translation of the informal “du” as “thou,” a likely contribution of Arendt’s: “And why is it Thy will that I must say/Thou art, when I myself no more can find thee.” When I told Mary, a couple of years later, that I was writing my doctoral thesis on Emily Dickinson, she lent me Jarrell’s proofs of the 1955 edition of Dickinson’s poems. She told me something that even now is not widely known, that Jarrell was working on an essay on Dickinson, titled “Empress of Calvary,” when he walked into the path of a car on a dark night in Chapel Hill in 1965.3
While Arendt was finishing The Origins of Totalitarianism (recently reissued by the Library of America in an expanded edition), Jarrell was drafting his very funny novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954). Dedicated to Arendt and drawing on their friendship, the book is partly a spoof on progressive education, but an affectionate one. The main character is a novelist named Gertrude Johnson who is writing a bitchy novel about Benton, a progressive women’s college. Jarrell’s narrator, a teacher there, prefers the more tolerant company of the Rosenbaums, a Viennese twelve-tone composer and his opera diva wife, modeled on Arendt and her husband, the philosopher Heinrich Blücher. The narrator visits the Rosenbaums for gossipy chat, grating music on the gramophone (including a piece that “might have been called Pages from a Dentist’s Life”), and “for help with the Rilke I was translating.” “He would not like German half so well if he should learn it,” Gottfried Rosenbaum remarks.
By the time I finished graduate school and was working as one of Robert Silvers’s assistants at The New York Review, I had decided I wanted to write a Jarrell biography, but I made a strategic error. My first piece for the Review, in the May 9, 1985, issue, was about Jarrell’s letters, edited by Mary. “The recipient is probably not the best editor of love letters,” I tactlessly observed. I was also convinced (as was Arendt, who visited Jarrell not long before his death and found “the laughter was almost gone”) that Jarrell had killed himself, which Mary, despite his earlier suicide attempt, adamantly refused to believe. When I told her about my book plans, she tartly replied that she’d be working with another biographer. Unsure what to do next, I felt like the poet in a Ross Macdonald novel who says, “You can’t make a Hamlet without breaking egos.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism has uncanny warnings for our own dark times. “Totalitarianism in power,” Arendt writes, “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Arendt didn’t just worry about totalitarianism, though; she thought there were dangers in treating democracy too zealously as well. “The democratic way of life,” she wrote in “The Eggs Speak Up,” “can be threatened only by people who see everything as a means to an end.”
Even in democracies, she argued, the ease of private life, as in the McCarthy years, could be suffocated by rigid self-policing: “All grace and all good faith in social gatherings are lost if analysis of ulterior motives or the search for possible sinister consequences is permitted to terrorize the free, and therefore sometimes playful and even irresponsible, minds of free men.” Arendt’s vision of the good life required not only resistance to the dystopian schemes of tyrants but also the safeguarding of smaller freedoms in our daily lives. If democracy consists in part, as Arendt suggests, in how we talk with one another, I’m guessing she was thinking of the sorts of conversations, “playful and even irresponsible,” that she had treasured with Jarrell and other intimate friends on winter afternoons in her cramped New York apartment—“warm, casual, and throwaway,” as Lowell described such visits with Arendt, “a parenthesis in the unjust blur of ordinary life.”
For Arendt, the poets were particularly welcome. “The storehouse of memory is kept and watched over by the poets,” she wrote in On Revolution, “whose business it is to find and make the words we live by.” More specifically she evoked the French Resistance leader René Char and his 1946 book of fragmentary reflections from the war years, Feuillets d’Hypnos, with their stress on “the joys of appearing in word and deed without equivocation and without self-reflection.” During a 1972 visit in Provence, the philosopher Stanley Cavell was inspired by Char’s Feuillets to try his own hand at aphorisms. An enigmatic example from his memoir Little Did I Know: “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. No, nor by breaking eggs.”