Pictures from an Institution was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. It is Jarrell’s only novel — a campus comedy of extraordinary wit that has been compared to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (McCarthy was, transparently, the model for the novel’s villain-protagonist, Gertrude Johnson).
Benton College is a progressive women’s institution somewhere in the American Northeast (Sarah Lawrence, where Jarrell taught from 1946 to 1947, is the obvious model). The novel’s year follows the visit of Gertrude Johnson, a famous novelist whose sharp intelligence and sharper tongue terrorize the faculty. Gertrude observes everything, sympathizes with nothing, and transforms her observations into fiction — using the college as raw material in ways that are brilliant, cruel, and (Jarrell implies) artistically limited: Gertrude can dissect but cannot love.
The novel’s narrator (unnamed, a poet on the faculty — obviously Jarrell himself) is kinder than Gertrude: he too observes the absurdities of academic life (the composer who writes music no one can bear to hear, the sociologist who believes in everything, the president who means well and accomplishes nothing) but with affection rather than contempt. His portraits are no less precise than Gertrude’s but more generous: he finds the faculty ridiculous and lovable simultaneously.
The novel is plotless in the conventional sense — it is a series of scenes, observations, set-pieces, and devastating epigrams strung together by the academic calendar rather than by narrative momentum. Its pleasure is entirely in the prose: sentence by sentence, Jarrell is one of the funniest writers in American literature, and his comedy never sacrifices intelligence for laughs.
Collecting Pictures from an Institution
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1954): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $10–$20
The best American academic novel alongside McCarthy’s Groves of Academe and Nabokov’s Pnin. Jarrell’s reputation as a critic and poet keeps it in demand.