The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts 9781474405294

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The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts

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The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts

Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0528 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0529 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0530 0 (epub) The right of Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot

vii ix

Preface Ronald Schuchard

xi

Editors’ Note Part I: Eliot and the Visual Arts Introduction 1 Eliot in the Asian Wing “Mandarins” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Frances Dickey Eliot’s Tour of Asian and African Art in the Museums of Paris and London, 1910–11 Nancy D. Hargrove “Afternoon” at the British Museum Michael Coyle

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3 9 9

25 36

2 The Modern Bacchanal: Eliot and Matisse John D. Morgenstern

51

3 Eliot and Italian Painting Anne Stillman

69

4 Eliot, Architecture, and Historic Preservation Joshua Mabie

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Part II: Eliot and the Performance Arts Introduction 5 The Musical World of Eliot’s Inventions Frances Dickey

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95 103

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contents

6 Wagner in The Waste Land

121

“Try, If Possible, to Hear Something”: Mediating Wagners Adrian Paterson

121

“So All the Women Are One Woman”: Eliot’s Kundry Katherine Hobbs

134

7 Hearing History: Eliot’s Rite of Spring T. Austin Graham

146

8 Beauty Is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison Steven Tracy

161

9 The Music of Four Quartets

171

Into our First World: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Music of the Will in Four Quartets Aakanksha Virkar-Yates “A Musical Pattern of Sound”: Absolute Music and Four Quartets Michelle Witen 10 Eliot and the Music-Hall Comedian Barry J. Faulk 11 Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London Theatre Anthony Cuda 12 Eliot and Dance Susan Jones Part III: Eliot and Media Introduction

171 179 189

202 225

245

13 Eliot and the Idea of “Media” David Trotter

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14 Eliot and the Art of the Phonograph Malobika Sarkar

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15 Eliot’s Radio Times; or, Listen with Possum Edward Allen

275

Notes on Contributors Index

287 290

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Acknowledgments

M

any people have contributed to this volume beyond its authors, and we wish to thank those who have given their time and expertise: first, our editors at Edinburgh University Press, especially Jackie Jones and Adela Rauchova, who sought out, supported, and encouraged this project; James Dale, Rebecca Mackenzie and Camilla Rockwood, whose contributions throughout the production process were invaluable; members of the T. S. Eliot Society who provided valuable feedback about many of these chapters in earlier versions, including David Chinitz, Ronald Schuchard, Anthony Cuda, Timothy Materer, Michael Coyle, Nancy D. Hargrove, Anita Patterson, Jayme Stayer, Julia Daniel, and especially Vincent Sherry, for his generous reading and advice; Jim McCue for his advice; Christopher Ricks, for the inspiration of his example and encouragement; Ronald Bush for his advice; Rémi Labrusse for his expertise and assistance; Iman Javadi, whose attentive reading and editorial suggestions were invaluable; Anne Nishimura Morse, curator of Asian Art at the MFA in Boston; staff at Ellis Library and the Missouri State Historical Society at the University of Missouri for the use of their collections and help with digitizing historic photographs; the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh; Catherine Piganiol at the Bibliothèque byzantine at the Collège de France; staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum archives; and Camille Cooper and Kathy Edwards, librarians extraordinaires at Clemson University. Finally, and most importantly, we thank our families, especially Stew, Matthew, Thomas, Charles, and Barbara, without whose support and patience the volume certainly would not have reached completion.

Illustration Credits Figure 1.3

Bronze, 96 x 80 x 23 cm. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Figure 1.4 Fang mask, Gabon. 19th Century. Wood, kaolin, brass nails; h. 66 cm. Inv: 71.1965.104. Photo: Musée du Quai Branly / Scala / Art Resource, NY. Figure 12.1 By kind permission of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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acknowledgments

Figure 12.2 Photographer Unknown. By kind permission of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Figure 12.3 Photographer Taber. By kind permission of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Plate 1 Panel; ink, color, gold, and silver on silk (119.1 x 68.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Special Chinese and Japanese Fund, 05.202. Plate 2 Metal, lacquered iron and silk brocade (overall 152 x 87 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Weld Bequest, 11.12547. Plate 3 Oil on wood panel (61.4 x 48.8 cm). Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1892.23. Plate 4 Japanese cyprus with gold; joined woodblock construction. (Height: 140.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Denman Waldo Ross Collection, 09.73. Plate 5 Head of Buddha. 3/4 to right. Pink granite, 50 x 30 x 38 cm. inv.: MA 5029. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Plate 7 Oil on canvas, 10 5/8 x 153 1/4 in. (260 x 389 cm.). Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin. Plate 8 Oil on canvas, 10 5/8 x 153 1/4 in. (260 x 389 cm.). Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin. Plate 12 “I Wish There Was a Wireless to Heaven,” Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

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Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot

Complete Prose 1 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1905–1918, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber and Faber, 2014) Complete Prose 2 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber and Faber, 2014) Complete Prose 3 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3: 1927–1929, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber and Faber 2015) Complete Prose 4 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: 1930–1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber and Faber 2015) CPP The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969) IMH Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) L1 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922, revised edition, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) L2 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) L3 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3: 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012) L4 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: 1928–1929, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013) L5 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2014) OPP On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) SE Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951)

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x TCC UPUC WLF

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abbreviations of works To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber 1964) The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971)

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Preface Ronald Schuchard

T

he essays in this timely collection represent a significant new turn to the arts in the work of T. S. Eliot, facilitated by the ongoing appearance of long-awaited editions of his poems, prose, letters, and plays commissioned by the late Valerie Eliot. The lifting of restrictions on these several genres now provides scholarly access to Eliot’s lifetime engagement with the arts in both popular and high culture, showing him to be far removed from tired allegations of cultural elitism, continuously educating himself not only in literary but in visual and performance traditions, seeking friendships in artistic circles, and vigorously defending the arts from censorship as critic and editor. The authors of these new studies in the several arts have begun to mine the wealth of previously uncollected and unpublished archives, building upon David Chinitz’s T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) and expanding the range and depth of the Asian, Renaissance, Victorian, and modern art forms with which Eliot enriches the cultural texture of his oeuvre. As a Harvard student, Eliot educated himself in the arts both informally as a voracious reader and concertgoer, and formally in the classroom, including Fine Arts 20b: Italian Renaissance Artists, which he took during the 1909–10 academic year. In this course, taught by Edward Forbes, Director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, Eliot took copious notes on the paintings, frescoes, and altarpieces of Uccello, Castagno, Veneziano, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Donatello, and Michelangelo, among others, with frequent visits to the Fogg. He continued his exploration of the arts and architecture during the 1910–11 academic year at the Sorbonne in Paris, which included a journey to Italy for visits to museums and cathedrals, as chronicled by Nancy D. Hargrove in Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009), in her separate study of Eliot’s Italian notebook,1 and here in her delineation of Eliot’s encounters with Asian and African art in Paris and London. Frances Dickey’s first essay in this volume shows the importance to Eliot and his early poem “Mandarins” of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1909, a time when the enterprising student was beginning to seek the friendship of leaders and patrons in the arts, including Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a supporter of the Museum of Fine Arts and the builder of her own magnificent collection under the guidance of Bernard Berenson, a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. Fenway Court, as she called her museum when it opened in 1903, contained 2,500 paintings and more than 3,000 books on art, architecture, and music; in the Music Room she hosted concerts and recitals by prominent musicians. Though Eliot’s signature does

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not appear in her guest book before two recorded visits in the autumn of 1912, he was surely visiting Fenway Court earlier as an undergraduate, probably in 1909–10 while taking Forbes’s course on early Italian painters (Mrs. Gardner held the Virgin and Child by Botticelli and The Death and Assumption of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, whom Eliot studied closely). One of Forbes’s exam questions required students to describe paintings seen in four art galleries.2 Eliot may have been taken to Fenway Court and introduced to Mrs. Gardner by her longtime friend George Santayana, whose advanced course on “Ideals of Society, Religion, Art, and Science in their Historical Development” Eliot was taking at the same time. Perhaps before he left New England, or subsequently in Paris, Eliot was introduced to a member of her circle, her close friend since 1904 Okakura Kakuzō, Curator of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, a former student of Ernest Fenollosa, and one of Japan’s foremost art critics and connoisseurs. Eliot later misremembered that Okakura introduced him to Matisse in 1910, for as John Morgenstern shows in his fascinating study of Eliot and Matisse, they were introduced by Matthew Prichard, colleague of Okakura and former assistant director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, in Matisse’s Paris studio in 1911. Okakura was also away in Europe in 1911 and looking for an opportunity to meet Matisse himself; in Eliot’s memory, Okakura was probably present at that meeting. In the event, Mrs. Gardner already owned a Matisse, the first in an American museum, Nude Seated on the Ground, which she loaned to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the first American exhibition of his works in 1911. In the following year a friend gifted her Matisse’s The Terrace, Saint-Tropez, thereby moving her collection (Eliot would have applauded) toward the cutting edge of modernist art.3 In the Early Italian Room, the Dutch Room, the Gothic Room, and in rooms named after Titian, Veronese, and Raphael, Eliot would also have encountered such paintings as Titian’s Europa, Piero della Francesca’s Hercules, Mantegna’s Sacra Conversazione, Van Dyck’s A Woman with a Rose, Reubens’s Portrait of the Earl of Arundel, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Vermeer’s Le Concert, and Michelangelo’s Pietà (a black chalk study presented to Vittoria Colonna, c. 1540), to name but a few that would have stopped him on his visits. “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo”: when Eliot began to write “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1910–11, the gallery rooms that he brought into the poem may well have been those of Fenway Court, just as memories of Okakura and the Titian Room may have inspired the presence of “Hakagawa among the Titians” in “Gerontion.” By the summer of 1914 Eliot was primed to return to his European adventure in philosophy and the arts with a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to Marburg University in Germany. As his friendship with Mrs. Gardner developed, Eliot maintained a correspondence with her about his discoveries abroad. When in August 1914 the outbreak of World War I diverted him from Marburg to Merton College, Oxford, he met in London during the Christmas vacation Ezra Pound, who showed him some of Wyndham Lewis’s drawings and the first number of BLAST, which commingled manifestos, poems, and striking designs by their Vorticist friends. Eliot soon befriended Lewis and visited his rooms when he was “at home” to the artists in his circle: “I remember Bomberg, Etchells, Roberts, Wadsworth, Miss Saunders and Miss Dismorr as being present,” he recalled.4 “I wonder if you would care for a brief word from London,” he wrote to Mrs. Gardner in April 1915 after his continental museum experience and friendships with London artists had expanded. Informing her of his recent travels in

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Ostende, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, and conscious of her collections of Rubens and Van Dyck, he wanted her to know that he was “extraordinarily impressed by Flemish art, especially van Eyck.”5 Telling her of meeting an American friend of hers who attracted him “by mentioning Mr. Okakura” (who had died suddenly in 1913), he went on to tell her that he had “been seeing a good deal of some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared”: One of the most interesting of the radicals—Gaudier-Brzeska—do you know of him?—is in the trenches, (as is the interesting T. E. Hulme); cubism is still represented by Wyndham Lewis, by Jacob Epstein, and a man whose work I like exceedingly, Edward Wadsworth. There has been an exhibition . . . at the Goupil gallery. . . . I do not know whether you have heard of a certain infamous soi-disant quarterly called Blast. . . . I am thinking of sending you a copy . . . incidentally because it promises to contain a few things of my own.6 Eliot evidently sent her the second and final issue of BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex (July 1915), containing his first poems published abroad, “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” set among numerous Vorticist and Cubist prints and a photograph of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpted “Head of Ezra Pound” in a periodical devoted to avant-garde arts. He also sent her a copy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry (July 1915), to which she subscribed.7 Eliot would remain a lifelong friend of Lewis and Epstein, both of whom made him the subject of their separate arts. His last extant letter to Mrs. Gardner of December 7, 1918 is on display with paintings in the Gothic Room at Fenway Court, near the striking portrait of her by John Singer Sargent from 1888. Eliot soon made his way into the company of another hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Eliot was introduced to her by his mentor (and her sometime lover) Bertrand Russell at a Soho restaurant in March 1916, followed by a gathering the next day in her Bedford Square salon, where he met the painters Dorothy Brett, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, and Bloomsburyites Dora Sanger and Molly MacCarthy.8 In early April he was invited to Garsington, where he became acquainted then and afterward with the Bloomsbury writers Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, the Woolfs, and with the artists, art critics, and interart editors, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell (Vanessa would design the cover for Eliot’s Homage to John Dryden), and Mrs. Gardner’s friend Roger Fry, who welcomed Eliot to meetings of the Omega Club, an offshoot of his Omega Workshops. It was Clive Bell who took copies of Prufrock and Other Observations to a Garsington Easter Party and distributed them to guests, including Middleton Murry, who would eventually coax Eliot, recently appointed assistant editor of The Egoist, into becoming a major contributor of The Athenaeum: A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Murry’s journal and Sidney Schiff’s Art and Letters provided Eliot the opportunity to write his first reviews of Elizabethan drama (“Hamlet and His Problems”), his first of performances in London theaters (“ ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama”), and his first notice of the Phoenix Society, its history and importance to Eliot recovered here in Anthony Cuda’s essay. These were important steps leading to his invitation from Bruce Richmond to review for the Times Literary Supplement in 1920 and to his support from Lady Rothermere to establish The Criterion in October 1922, its first issue announcing in The Waste Land a multicultural vision of the arts in a

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polylingual, polyphonic poem infused with lowbrow and highbrow allusions to a music-hall song, Wagnerian operas, a bawdy wartime ballad, Renaissance plays and paintings, Asian religious texts and voices, and a nursery rhyme. Behind the new editor, who would use his journal in part as a bully pulpit for promoting the arts and protesting censorship against them, stood the circles of his necessary mentors: Forbes at Harvard, Gardner in Boston, Lewis in London, Morrell at Garsington. Eliot’s eight “London Letters” that he wrote for The Dial in 1921–22 became the basis for his regular “Commentary” editorial in The Criterion. The “London Letters” informed his American audience of productions by noncommercial theater companies, such as the Everyman Theatre and the Phoenix Society; the comedians of the music hall and revue; the new exhibition of Wyndham Lewis and his restoration of English caricature in painting; piano recitals by Arthur Rubenstein; the proposed demolition of City churches; and orchestral performances of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, directed by Eugene Goosens in Stravinsky’s presence and danced by Lydia Sokolova: “To me the music seemed very remarkable—but at all events struck me as possessing a quality of modernity which I missed from the ballet which accompanied it. The effect was like Ulysses with illustrations by the best contemporary illustrator.”9 Eliot would continue to promote the arts in his Criterion “Commentaries,” informing the London public that it would soon have “the inestimable privilege” of a twomonth season of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and hoping that the Coliseum would again present ballet performances by Léonide Massine and Lydia Lopokova. In proudly announcing the Diaghilev Ballet, however, Eliot did not hesitate to reveal his impatience, even exasperation at having to induce our London audiences to sit through the performance of the greatest mimetic dancer in the world—Massine—to the music of one of the greatest musicians—Stravinski. The writer of these lines recalls his efforts, several years ago, to restrain (with the point of an umbrella) the mirth of his neighbours in a “family house” which seemed united to deride [Lydia] Sokalova at her best in the Sacre de Printemps. May we at least tolerate a part of what Paris has appreciated!10 The diminishing character of the City of London under the grand schemes of financiers and the dubious tastes of their architects is a recurring theme of the Commentaries as Eliot is moved to ask, “why are the City men pulling down good bank buildings, all sorts of buildings, and erecting grander banks, grander insurance buildings” at the cost of architecturally attractive shops and vanishing courts and passages? “Those who can remember the City as long ago as 1920 must feel very sad. . . . Even the policemen . . . have no City lore and no City curiosity. And what has become of the City barmaid who knew good whisky from bad?”11 But no subject raised Eliot’s editorial ire as much as the censorship of books and paintings. Eliot had his first taste of censorship as assistant editor of The Egoist, when he learned that the October 1917 issue of Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, containing Wyndham Lewis’s story “Cantelman’s Spring Mate,” was suppressed on grounds of obscenity by the US Post Office and upheld by the US District Court of New York in relation to the definition of obscenity in the US Criminal Code, that it has “a tendency to excite lust.” “The case is closed,” reported a dismayed Eliot to English readers. “In America the small number of people who are sensitive to good literature are now forbidden to read one of the finest pieces of prose in the language. And America is not so far away that we need feel no concern in the matter.”12 Awaiting Eliot’s editorial

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concern in the 1920s were the provisions of the English Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and its determined upholder, Conservative Home Secretary William JoynsonHicks, known as “Jix,” who, inspired by the Sunday Express, brought obscenity charges against Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) and subsequently Nora James’s Sleeveless Errand (1929) under the provision that a work may be banned if it has “a tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” But Eliot had other than the Obscene Publications Act to indict in his vigorous defense of these works: “what we should like to be able to gauge, is the extent to which public action is hustled by a certain section of the daily press. We have lately seen the daily press . . . direct its readers to ‘obscene’ books and ‘obscene’ picture shows, and then exult in their condemnation.” He further attacked the “tyranny” behind religious charges of immorality in censorship cases in Ireland and Boston: The tyranny of religion is bad; if religion should prosper, it should not prosper by such means. But the tyranny of “morality” with some wholly vague religious backing, or wholly divorced from any exact religion is still worse. . . . Censorship has made impossible a critical estimate of Joyce’s Ulysses for at least a generation; by setting up a false relationship between art and morals it has obstructed the efforts of all those who recognize the true relationship between art and morals.13 Eliot was equally on the attack against English magistrates who unjustly and inconsistently brought charges of obscenity against painters. After the opening of an exhibition of twenty-five paintings and watercolors by D. H. Lawrence at the Dorothy Warren Gallery on June 15, 1929, the Daily Express reported “shock” at the “intimate nudes” that would “compel most spectators to recoil with horror,” leading to thirteen paintings being seized by a detective inspector of Scotland Yard. “Mr. Read the magistrate,” wrote an incensed Eliot, “has meanwhile exhibited the British sense of fair play, by ordaining that Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s paintings shall no longer be exhibited, but need not be destroyed. Some reproductions of these paintings are to be destroyed, but not the paintings themselves. Here again, we are not interested to decide whether Mr. Lawrence’s paintings are masterpieces or daubs. We learn that features of these paintings were ‘unnecessarily developed.’ ” When the inspector who seized the pictures was asked by the defense attorney whether the legal proceedings were started by a private individual or the authorities, the magistrate ruled that “he need not answer that.” Eliot insisted that the public had a right to know the answer: Because the same news-sheet which first informed us that there was an exhibition of shocking paintings by Mr. Lawrence had previously informed us of another shocking exhibition by a famous foreign painter [Spanish painter Federico BeltránMassés] of whom we had never heard, so shocking that the Ambassador of the country to which that painter belonged . . . did not visit the show until the more shocking of these passionate canvasses had been removed. Yet neither Mr. Mead nor [the inspector] was called upon to judge these paintings. We have not seen either these or Mr. Lawrence’s. Mr. Lawrence is a British subject, one of half a dozen writers whose work commands respect in foreign countries. In concluding the report in disgust, Eliot quoted Matthew Arnold: “Occasionally, the uncritical spirit of our race determines to perform a great public act of self-humiliation. Such an act it has recently accomplished.”14

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It must be admitted that Eliot, while vehemently opposed to literary censorship, was not wholly opposed to some censorship of plays and films, having written in his “Commentary” of September 1928: “The general question of censorship is, we think, a question of expediency rather than principle, when it is not the censorship of a Church. The censorship of the theatre, so far as we know, seems to work pretty well; the censorship of films might be better indeed if it were more severe.” This statement brought a letter of rebuke from Alan Boase, lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, stating that one may agree that there is too much vulgarity and suggestiveness which deserves the film-censor’s blue pencil . . . but heaven forbid that you should encourage [the censors] in their activities until their personnel has been greatly changed, or at least, until they have been “re-educated.” The more intelligent film-going public would probably be shortly robbed of what little good foreign stuff they can at present see, if you stimulated these gentlemen’s “moral sense.” Replying that he had expressed himself badly, “not being very much interested in the cinema,” Eliot asked and received Boase’s permission to print his letter in the correspondence section: I am quite ready to admit that probably the good films are suppressed (censorship has always much more to do with politics, moral prejudice and fear, than with religion); but I should have been glad if several I have seen, and others I have heard about, had been suppressed too. . . . What I should have said, perhaps, is that the film censorship always prohibits the wrong things, and lets by the things which ought to be prohibited. Anyway, I am sure that the stricter the literary censorship, the greater will be the sale of really salacious books.15 After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, and in the midst of censorship controversies, Eliot was moving toward a communal vision of the arts in the Church, a vision born of multinational cathedrals and museums visited, musical and theatrical performances attended, as far back as his visit to Toulouse during the Christmas break at the Sorbonne in 1910. In a previously unrecorded essay titled “If I Were a Dean,” commissioned in February 1931 by Bishop George Bell for the Chichester Diocesan Gazette, Eliot described how he as dean would use the arts to transform his cathedral for the modern religious community. Having visited old and beautiful churches where parishioners seemed afraid to alter in any way the style in which they were built, Eliot declared that he preferred “a church which shows the loving attempts of generation after generation, each according to its own notions of beauty, to leave visible testimony of its devotion. I should like to be able to encourage the best contemporary artists in stone, metal, paint and wood, to apply themselves to the decoration of my cathedral; and the best musicians to make music for its offices.”16 Stating his “one heretical notion” that the organ is not an indispensable instrument, he declared that at least he would want to supplement it with a small orchestra, of strings and woodwind, assembled from local talent (and I am sure that there is plenty of musical talent in rural England). . . . Anyone who has heard instrumental music in certain continental churches knows that the organ is by no means the only medium for church music. And everything that engages more individuals in the responsibility and pride of beautifying the church service, is an encouragement to communal life.

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He would have the interior richly decorated with modern religious paintings, “with tapestries (as, for example, they hang around the bases of columns in the cathedral of Toulouse)”; he would pay particular attention to the performance of religious drama: not only to the revival of mediaeval miracle plays and interludes, but to religious plays by contemporary authors. “Should not the resources of art be devoted to God,” he asked, “instead of merely to the palaces of the rich and finally to museums? I hold also the theory, that it is chiefly in the life of such a centre as a cathedral that art can vitally affect us.” Prophetic of Eliot’s vision, Bishop Bell had in December 1930 commissioned him to write a religious pageant, The Rock (1934), “Written for Performance on Behalf of the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London,” and a religious drama: “And for such activities as religious drama,” Eliot wrote, “I should want to have them performed, as far as possible within the cathedral itself.” On Bishop Bell’s provision for the Canterbury Festival, that is exactly what happened. The first production of Murder in the Cathedral took place in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral in May 1935, with the voices of Eliot’s first experiment in the choral arts resounding—all of his previous life in the arts seemingly flowing into that symbolic performance, all afterward flowing out of it.

Notes 1. Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Italian Trip, Summer 1911: Museums, Cathedrals, Palaces, and Landscapes,” South Atlantic Review, 76.3 (summer 1911), 7–32. 2. Edward Forbes, Fine arts 20 b Final exam (1910), Harvard University Archives, HUG FP 139.62 box 1. 3. By the spring of 1914 Eliot was incorporating modern art into his philosophical papers for Josiah Royce’s graduate seminar. In an essay titled “Suggestions toward a Theory of Objects” (May 1914), Eliot alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) in stating that with certain objects, “the point of view of knowing and of being constantly shift before our attention like the staircase in the illusion” (Complete Prose 1, 130–35; here 131). The painting was extensively covered by the press when it was exhibited as part of the Armory Show in New York (February–March 1913): the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the first large exhibition of modern art in America, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Mrs. Gardner, a member of the organizing committee, attended the exhibition in New York before it was moved to the Copley Society of Art, Copley Hall, in Boston from April 28 to May 19. Eliot doubtless attended, though there is as yet no direct evidence beyond the allusion to Duchamp that he did. 4. “Wyndham Lewis,” The Hudson Review, X.2 (summer 1957), 167: painters David Bomberg, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, and Jessica Dismorr. 5. L1, 103. 6. The French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; T. E. Hulme, poet, philosopher, and art critic; Jacob Epstein, American sculptor, naturalized British citizen. Several Vorticists were represented in the Second London Group Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, London, in March 1915. The Vorticists then held their one and only exhibition at the Doré Gallery from June 10 to mid-July 1915, featuring Gaudier-Brzeska, Etchells, Dismorr, Lewis, Saunders, and Wadsworth. Five days before the opening, Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in France. On May 19, 1918, after attending the private showing of Gaudier-Brzeska’s pictures, Aldous Huxley wrote to Morrell to say that the “glorious company” of poets and painters present included Robert Graves, W. H. Davies, and Eliot, “not to speak of . . . Gertler . . . and so forth.” Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 209.

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7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

ronald schuchard The publication of the first issue of BLAST (July 1914) was celebrated in a painting by William Roberts, showing most of the contributors in The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915. Eliot further informed Mrs. Gardner that the second issue would contain, in addition to the painters’ designs, “some poems by a girl named Jessie Dismorr, which I think might interest you” (L1, 100–3). Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 265. Eliot certainly knew of Morrell much earlier from Russell, who was planning their introduction, evident in a letter to him of October 11, 1915: “I am planning to see you at Garsington, when I come to Oxford, or better on a separate expedition, as I shall probably try not to stay the night at Oxford” (L1, 131). Eliot, “‘London Letter’: September, 1921,” The Dial 71 (October 1921); 452–55; in Complete Prose 2, 369. Eliot, “A Commentary” (October 1924), Complete Prose 2, 545. Eliot had become a serious student of ballet in relation to ritual, evident in his review of The Dance: An Historical Survey of Dancing in Europe in the Criterion of April 1925 (Complete Prose 2, 581–4): “anyone who would contribute to our imagination of what the ballet may perform in the future—should begin by a close study of dancing amongst primitive peoples—vide the Australian ceremonies described by Spencer and Gillen and Hewett; of dancing amongst developed peoples, such as the Tibetans and the Javanese. . . . He should have studied the evolution of Christian and other liturgy. (For is not the High Mass—as performed, for instance, at the Madeleine in Paris—one of the highest developments of dancing?). And, finally, he should track down the secrets of rhythm in the (still undeveloped) science of neurology” (581–82). Eliot, “A Commentary” (December 1928), Complete Prose 3, 537. Eliot, “Literature and the American Courts,” The Egoist 5 (March 1918): 39; in Complete Prose 1, 677. Complete Prose 3, 535–36. Eliot, “A Commentary” (October 1929), Complete Prose 3, 748. Eliot would later give a legal deposition for the defense in the 1961 obscenity trial against Penguin for their unexpurgated edition (1960) of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) from charges of obscenity under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Though Eliot was not called to testify, he wrote in “To Criticize the Critic” (1961): “I felt then, as I feel now, that the prosecution of such a book—a book of most serious and highly moral intention—was a deplorable blunder, the consequences of which would be most unfortunate whatever the verdict, and give the book a kind of vogue which would have been abhorrent to the author. . . . It was noticeable in the Chatterley case, that some witnesses for the defence defended the book for the moral intentions of the author rather than on the ground of its being important as a work of literature.” To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 24–25. L4, 371–73. Complete Prose 4, 296–99.

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Editors’ Note “Curtain Raiser” There is scarcely a single art form that Eliot did not engage in his poetry or influential critical prose. “Convictions: Curtain Raiser,” the first poem that he copied into his notebook now published as Inventions of the March Hare, ingeniously announces his entrée into poetry by way of the stage. His poetry continued to unfold in the theater; in the museum; and in the cabaret, dance, and music halls of St. Louis, Boston, Paris, and London. Eliot developed a remarkable sensibility to music as a boy, studied art history as a Harvard undergraduate, took museum and cathedral tours throughout Europe, and immersed himself in the London art scene when he settled there in 1915—all of which provided a wellspring of creativity reflected in his life’s work. This book explores Eliot’s many-sided engagements with the visual arts; the performance arts including music, theater, and dance; and, finally, the emerging media of recorded sound, film, and radio. Each chapter demonstrates Eliot’s response to a particular art. Taken together, these chapters provide a model for a comprehensive critical conversation about the intersection of the arts. This book is divided into three parts, each of which is preceded by a survey of existing interarts scholarship on Eliot: Part I focuses on visual arts, Part II on performance arts, and Part III on the new media of the early twentieth century. Three clusters of essays focus on topics of particular interest and importance to interart studies: the museums Eliot visited as a young man, where he encountered art and artifacts from around the world; his engagement with Wagner in The Waste Land; and the musical dimension of Four Quartets. The book’s international team of contributors has taken a variety of approaches to their subject matter, but the general method is historical. They place Eliot in relation to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts, from writings about the arts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur Symons, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Huneker, and Irving Babbitt to experiences in the Boston concert scene circa 1909–10, in Matisse’s studio during his Parisian year (1910–11), and in the London theaters where the Phoenix Society staged dramatic revivals in the 1920s. As these specific contexts suggest, we do not aspire to offer an overview of Eliot’s work, but rather new ways of understanding the significant interart dimension of a foremost exemplar of modernism.

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Part I Eliot and the Visual Arts

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Eliot and the Visual Arts

Introduction

E

liot’s early poetry features a surprising number of references to the visual arts. In some instances, a poem responds to a specific work of art, real or imagined: “On a Portrait” (1908) is an ekphrastic sonnet after Édouard Manet’s Jeune Dame en 1866,1 Jean-Antoine Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour l’Ile de Cythère provided a backdrop for the second in a sequence of poems collectively titled “Goldfish” (1910),2 “La Figlia che Piange” (1911) refers to an Italian statue described to Eliot,3 “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” (1914) draws inspiration from a composite of Renaissance paintings,4 and City churches anchor the phantasmagoria of The Waste Land (1922) in the reality of modern London. Elsewhere, references to visual art and artists enter into Eliot’s poetry to register a cultural attitude or aesthetic sensibility, earnestly or with ironic effect: the women in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1911) talk of Michelangelo; a couple seeks out Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in “Lune de Miel” (1917); Hakagawa bows among the Titians in “Gerontion” (1919); and Gauguin maids make a cameo in Sweeney Agonistes (1927). At least until the 1920s, Eliot’s poetry draws inspiration from, runs parallel to, and enters into debate with the visual arts. Eliot’s references and allusions to visual art and artists rested on his firm grounding in the history of art and architecture and his keen awareness of developments in modern art. As a Harvard undergraduate, he took a course on ancient art from Mesopotamia to Rome (1907–8), “Fine Arts 3: History of Ancient Art,” in which he studied “architecture, sculpture, and painting in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, with some account of the lesser arts.”5 In 1908–9, he took a course on Italian Renaissance painting and made detailed lecture notes.6 Visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as his museum and cathedral tour of Europe in 1910–11 brought him face to face with Eastern and Western art and exposed him to contemporary art movements. Eliot’s letters and early journalistic writings testify to his interest in “the people one is interested in, from Matisse to the last show at the Mansard Gallery,” yet these early commissions only rarely mention the visual arts.7 For instance, he remarked in his March 1921 “London Letter” in The Dial that an exhibition of Picasso’s work was the “most interesting event in London,” despite that it lay “outside of [his] provenance” as the magazine’s literary correspondent.8 In light of this somewhat obscured but no less striking history, much valuable scholarship has broadly contextualized Eliot’s engagement with the visual arts, paving the way for more focused studies situating his work in relation to individual movements and artists.9

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introduction to part i

Painting Although the standard narrative of Eliot’s early poetic formation indicates that in late 1908 Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Poetry (1899) introduced him to French Symbolism and to his vocation as a poet, he first encountered fundamental preoccupations of his life’s work through the medium of painting. In the years leading up to his momentous discovery of French Symbolism, Eliot was absorbed in the highly decorative, flattened aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist painting. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Manet showed Eliot how to foreground the act of beholding or observing as a means to explore psychological depth, or the lack thereof. Eliot first took the characteristic pose of an observer in two picture sonnets responding to protomodernist paintings, “Circe’s Palace” and “On a Portrait.”10 It is no wonder, then, that Symons’s association of Symbolism in literature with Impressionism in painting piqued Eliot’s interest: “The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self denying as that which permitted Degas to dispense with recognizable beauty in his figures.”11 Eager to see first-hand the metropolis that he had encountered through poetry and glimpsed in painting, Eliot spent the 1910–11 academic year in Paris, where his “opinions on art, as well as other subjects, [were] modified radically.”12 From as early as his first publications, Eliot’s poetry invited comparison with the modern art movements that he first encountered in Paris and subsequently in London, including Fauvism,13 German Expressionism,14 Futurism,15 Vorticism,16 and most prominently Cubism. Reviewing Pound’s 1915 Catholic Anthology, for instance, Arthur Waugh asserted, pejoratively, that Eliot’s “Prufrock” “holds the same relation to the art of poetry as the work of the Cubist school holds to the art of painting and design.”17 Eliot’s own brother made a similar correlation, opining in a letter that the “short earlier poems are certainly partly inspired by Picasso (et al.).”18 In more recent decades, scholars have focused on the fragmentary aesthetic and simultaneity of trans-historical allusions in The Waste Land, drawing parallels with Picasso and Braque’s collage practice and with Cubism’s fracturing of pictorial space into geometric planes to represent multiple perspectives at once.19 Despite Eliot’s recollection that in Paris “a discussion of [Henri] Bergson was apt to be involved in a discussion of Matisse and Picasso,” critical discourse on Cubism has largely occluded Matisse’s prominence in Eliot’s imagination.20 John D. Morgenstern’s chapter reconstructs the circumstances surrounding Eliot’s little-known visit to Matisse’s studio in March 1911, under the auspices of a mutual friend, Matthew Stewart Prichard. In collaboration with Matisse, Prichard was then working on a theory of aesthetics that conceived of time as space, an idea derived from Bergson’s metaphysics. Reflecting his collaboration with Prichard, Matisse’s large-scale decorative panels Dance (1910) and Music (1910) synchronized painting with the temporal arts of dance and music. Finding himself in the crosscurrents of this debate at a time of artistic ferment in Paris, Eliot interrogated the ideas of Prichard and Matisse in two poems featuring modern bacchanals, “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks” and “Bacchus and Ariadne: 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul.” Morgenstern then shows how the same aesthetic concerns enter into the opening sequence of The Waste Land’s “A Game of Chess,” demonstrating Prichard’s and Matisse’s formative role in shaping Eliot’s interarts practice. In the chapter that follows, Anne Stillman turns to Eliot’s engagement with Renaissance painting in “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” and in Poems (1920).

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Stillman observes that Eliot’s many allusions to Renaissance artists and works throughout the mid to late 1910s register an awareness of his own mimesis in “reproducing” these paintings in poetry.

Museums Eliot was an avid museumgoer, particularly as a student in Boston and Paris, but extending into his early years in London. As an undergraduate, he visited Harvard’s own Fogg Museum as well as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where he encountered both European and Asian art and artifacts.21 He may also have accompanied his friend William George Tinckom-Fernandez on one of his many weekends in New York, where together they could have encountered the inspiration behind “On a Portrait,” Manet’s Jeune Dame en 1866, at the Metropolitan.22 In the Trocadéro and Louvre palaces, in the Luxembourg exhibition hall, and in countless Left Bank galleries including BernheimJeune’s, Eliot kept a watchful eye on the arts scene during his student year in Paris.23 During his Easter holidays in 1911, he traveled to London and visited the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the Wallace Collection.24 While on a traveling fellowship in Marburg, Germany in the summer of 1914, he went to Flanders and marveled in the museums of Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels at “treasures” by Hans Memling, Jan van Eyck, Pieter Breughel, Peter Paul Rubens, and Antonello de Messina.25 When he settled in London he registered for a reader’s card at the British Museum and worked alongside a veritable treasure trove of ancient and modern art from around the globe. The opening cluster of essays in this book examines Eliot’s early engagement with Asian and other non-European art galleries and exhibits in Boston, Paris, and London. While Eliot’s relation to Asia has primarily been understood through his reading and academic study, these three chapters focus on his visual encounters with art in museum contexts and explore how his poetry reflects the aesthetic and social dimensions of these visits.26 Eliot’s response to museums connects his work with broader discourses surrounding the institution in early twentieth-century cultural politics. Scholars over the last decades have conceived of museums as representations of the cultures that build them, and as liminal spaces where the private experience of contemplation and wonder takes place within a public sphere. Although Eliot is conspicuously absent from this scholarship, his poetry registers one of its central concerns: museum visitors put themselves on display alongside art objects and artifacts.27 In the first chapter in the cluster, Frances Dickey places Eliot’s 1910 sequence “Mandarins” against the background of the new Asian galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Beyond the mere juxtaposition of objects in a museum, Eliot’s “shifting scenes” imagine a deeper integration of humans and artifacts, where appreciation is united with use. Nancy D. Hargrove explores the museums and galleries of Paris and London circa 1910–11 to behold the treasures of Asian and African art on display during Eliot’s year abroad. Hargrove’s detailed research into what Eliot saw and could have seen builds a new context for his interest in Asian religion and the global reach of his cultural references. The final chapter in the cluster examines “Afternoon” (1914), a draft poem that unfolds in the “the hall of the British Museum,” constituting Eliot’s most explicit engagement with modern museum culture. “Afternoon” registers the aesthetic and social meanings that cluster around a single moment of observation in the museum: the poet watches a group of “ladies who are interested in Assyrian art” preparing to tour the galleries. They disappear at the end of the poem into a museological sublime,

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introduction to part i

a state of wonder that Michael Coyle explains with reference to a detailed history of the British Museum and to its prominence in poetic imagination from the nineteenth century onward. As in “Mandarins,” the rituals of museumgoing rather than displayed artifacts become the focus of his attention. Taken more broadly, this cluster places Eliot in the discourses of museum studies and sets the stage for re-examining the place of Asian decorative and religious art in the development of literary modernism.28

Architecture Eliot’s travels abroad also brought him to the architectural gems of Europe. During the Christmas holidays in 1910, he toured the cathedral towns of southwestern France, making stops in Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, and Moissac.29 While in London, he visited St. Helens, St. Stephens, St. Bartholomew the Great, St. Sepulchre, and St. Etheldreda.30 Throughout the spring, he made excursions to cities proximate to Paris, many of whose skylines were already famous for their spires.31 While touring through Italy in July 1911, he kept a travelogue in which he made architectural sketches of Verona’s Zeno Maggiore and demonstrated his detailed knowledge of specialized architectural terminology. In the concluding chapter to our coverage of the visual arts, Joshua Mabie ventures into the virtually unexplored field of Eliot and architecture to chart the evolution of the poet’s ideas on the historic preservation of buildings.32 Mabie follows the development of Eliot’s views from his 1921 “London Letter” written in support of the preservation of the City churches to his 1951 address “The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England To-Day.” Eliot’s sentiments on the value of architecture shifted from a view of church buildings as artifacts that held the potential to maintain a direct link to a less corrupt, irrecoverable past, to a sense that church architecture is valuable insofar as it continues to inspire work in the contemporary moment. Mabie shows that this shift in Eliot’s thought is due, at least in part, to his witnessing of the destruction or dramatic transformation of what he thought were stable architectural landmarks in the London that he inhabited in the first decades of the twentieth century. In reconstructing the history of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr at the moment when their façades were being overwhelmed by commercial development, Mabie demonstrates how the evocation of London’s built environment contributes to the poem’s critique of modernity.

Notes 1. A letter from Eliot’s Harvard friend William Tinckom-Fernandez to the son of Harford Powel, a fellow member of the Advocate editorial board, identifies Manet’s painting as the visual source of “On a Portrait.” Harold Powel, Jr. first made this connection in his unpublished 1954 Brown University Master’s thesis, “Notes on the Life of T. S. Eliot, 1888–1910.” Frances Dickey solidified the connection between poem and painting, further exploring the implications of Manet’s painterly aesthetic for Eliot’s burgeoning style; see Chapter 3 of Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 2. Christopher Ricks, IMH, 151. 3. Derek Roper, “T. S. Eliot’s ‘La Figlia che Piange’: A Picture without a Frame,” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 52.3 (2002): 222–34.

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4. L1, 49. See also Harvey Gross, “The Figure of St. Sebastian,” in T. S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review, ed. James Olney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 103–14. 5. Announcement of the Courses of Instruction Provided by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the Academic Year 1906 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1906), 59, located in the Pusey Archives, Harvard University. 6. Eliot’s notes on Italian painting are held in the Hayward Bequest at King’s College, Cambridge. 7. Unsigned review of Clive Bell’s Pot-Boilers, The Egoist 5 (June–July 1918): 87. Complete Prose 1, 724. 8. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: March 1921,” The Dial 70 (April 1921): 448–53; in Complete Prose 2, 337. 9. General studies have helped to situate Eliot in the context of the visual arts since the 1970s. In chronological order, see: Gertrude Patterson, T. S. Eliot: Poems in the Making (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971); John Dixon Hunt, “ ‘Broken images’: T. S. Eliot and Modern Painting,” in The Waste Land in Different Voices, ed. A. D. Moody (Guildford: Billing, 1974), 163–84; Jacob Korg, “The Waste Land and Contemporary Art,” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: Modern Languages Association, 1988), 121–26; Erik Svarny, “The Men of 1914”: T. S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988); Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), especially 28–33; Marjorie Perloff, “The Avant-Garde,” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 252–61; Charles Altieri, “Visual Art,” in Harding, T. S. Eliot in Context, 105–13. 10. Chapter 3 of Dickey, Modern Portrait Poem. 11. Eliot marked this passage in his copy, now held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. 12. L1, 19–20. 13. Nancy D. Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 132–33. 14. Jewel Spears Brooker associates Eliot’s music and imagery with the color and line of Edvard Munch. See Brooker, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004), xv. More recently, Joyce Wexler reads “Prufrock” in relation to German Expressionism in “T. S. Eliot’s Expressionist Angst,” in Jayme Stayer, ed., T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), 214–30. 15. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). 16. Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1980). Giovanni Cianci, “Reading T. S. Eliot Visually: Tradition in the Context of Modernist Art,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 119–30. 17. Arthur Waugh, “The New Poetry,” Quarterly Review (October 1916); reproduced in Brooker, Contemporary Reviews, 3. 18. H. W. Eliot to Henry B. Harvey, September 16, 1944; the manuscript is held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; quoted in Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 233. 19. David Tomlinson, “T. S. Eliot and the Cubists,” Twentieth-Century Literature 26 (spring 1980): 64–81. Nancy D. Hargrove has characterized the Cubist aesthetic as “the distortion or fragmentation of the figure, still-life, or landscape into geometric planes or cubes,” and subsequently as the “de-composing [of] objects” (134–35). “Structurally,” she asserts, looking ahead to Picasso and Georges Braque’s 1912 experimentation with papiers-collés, The

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20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

introduction to part i Waste Land “is a literary collage of urban, desert, and ocean scenes which seem to be disconnected and without order or meaning” (137). See Chapter 4 of Hargrove, Parisian Year. More recently, Young Suck Rhee has continued to explore this fertile terrain in “A Reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from the Perspective of Cubist Painting,” Foreign Literature Studies 37 (2015): 51–59. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13 (April 1934), 451–52. Dickey, Modern Portrait Poem, 93–96. Robert Crawford suggests that Eliot had Tinckom-Fernandez in mind when he later recalled a Harvard classmate who routinely spent four-day weekends in New York (TCC, 80). See Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 84–85. For the Palais du Trocadéro and the Luxembourg, see L1, 19–20. In a letter of July 25, 1914, Eliot told Conrad Aiken that he had seen Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, the 1480s version of which was on display in the Louvre during his stay in France; see L1, 48–49. For Bernheim’s gallery, see L1, 35. Hargrove discusses works of art available to Eliot in the museums of Paris and London in Chapter 4 of Parisian Year. L1, 18. Eliot indicates that he “made notes!!” in the Wallace Collection, though these appear not to have survived. Ibid., 46. Building on Tatsushi Narita’s discovery of Eliot’s ticket to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Roderick Overra has argued that Eliot first encountered Asian art and artifacts in this context. The museum context provided yet another frame of reference that Eliot explored in his poetry notebook. See Narita, “Eliot and the World’s Fair of St. Louis— His ‘Stockholder’s Coupon Ticket,’ ” Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities 26 (March 1982): 1–24; Overra’s article, “ ‘The Lotus Rose, Quietly’: Eliot, Asia, and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis,” is part of a special cluster of essays on Eliot and Asia in The South Atlantic Review (79.3–4 (June 2016)). In chronological order, see: Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3 (1980): 449; Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivam Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D. C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42–56; Catherine E. Paul, Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), especially 1–26. This re-evaluation is already under way, though without substantive engagement with Eliot, in Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). L1, 20. Ibid., 18. Ibid. The subject of Eliot and architecture is a burgeoning field, with several articles and essays devoted to it, in whole or in part. See, in chronological order: Jesse T. Airaudi, “Finding the Stairs Lit: Contemporary Architecture’s Return to Tradition and the Relevance of The Waste Land at the Fin de Millénaire,” Yeats-Eliot Review 16.2 (1999): 2–17; Giovanni Cianci, “Tradition, Architecture, and Rappel à l’Ordre: Ruskin and Eliot (1917–21),” in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 133–54; Matthew Bradley, “Sinful Cities and Ecclesiastical Excuses: The ‘Churches for Art’s Sake’ Movement from the Century Guild to Eliot,” The Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 193–208; Hazel Atkins, “Ways of Viewing Churches in The Waste Land and ‘Little Gidding,’ ” Religion and Literature 44.1 (2012): 167–73; Atkins, “T. S. Eliot, W. R. Lethaby, and Sacred Architecture,” in Benjamin G. Lockerd, T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014).

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1 Eliot in the Asian Wing “Mandarins” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Frances Dickey

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n recent studies of the influence of China and Japan on modernist literature, T. S. Eliot has played a conspicuously minor role.1 Far from being indifferent to Asia, of course, Eliot openly avowed his fascination with Indic thought, an interest that has received its critical due over the years. His graduate study of Sanskrit, Hindu philosophy, and Buddhism enlarged his thinking, enriched his imagination, and shaped some of his greatest poems. Even before his philosophical turn, however, Eliot encountered Chinese and Japanese art in the museums of Boston, London, and Paris, an aesthetic and intellectual experience documented and explored in the first two chapters of this cluster. The clearest evidence of his encounter with Asian art is the four-poem sequence “Mandarins” that he inscribed in his notebook in August 1910, after he graduated from college and before his year abroad in Paris.2 This sequence seems to register scenes in a museum gallery, most likely the newly opened Fenway building of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The museological context of “Mandarins” and how the poem comments on the display of Asian art are the subject of the present chapter. Following chapters by Nancy D. Hargrove and Michael Coyle concern Eliot’s further museum explorations in Paris and London from 1910 to 1914. While Eliot’s relation to Asia has primarily been understood through his reading and academic study, these three chapters focus on his visual encounters with art in museum contexts. Here we attempt to recover his experiences in the Asian galleries of Boston, Paris, and London and understand how his poetry reflects the aesthetic and social dimensions of these momentous visits.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Living in the United States at the turn of the last century, Eliot could hardly have avoided exposure to East Asian, and specifically Japanese, art. Since the 1850s (when Commodore Perry forcibly established diplomatic and trade relations with Japan), a “Japan craze” had gripped the United States, especially in Boston and nearby Salem. Vast collections of ceramics, bronze, jade, and artworks were amassed by those with access to Japanese imports, including Edward S. Morse, William Sturgis Bigelow, and Ernest F. Fenollosa, “the apostles of Japanese culture in Boston.”3 The artifacts they bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum of Salem established collections that remain the most extensive in the world outside of Japan.

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Japanese art commanded higher prices at the turn of the century than at any time before or since.4 Curiosity about and admiration for Japanese art resulted in hundreds of books and articles on the Far East; “so many,” writes one historian, “that few with any interest in culture could have remained totally oblivious to the seduction of Japanese civilization.”5 Japonisme was not limited to collectors and the cultural elite. Americans hungrily consumed domestically produced Japanese-style ceramics, textiles, lacquer-ware, wall hangings, screens, wood- and metal-work, paper lanterns, paper umbrellas, and other decorations.6 Easy to make and transport, Japanese-style fans could be found in nearly every American home in the 1880s and 1890s.7 Japanese-inspired fabrics were made into curtains, upholstery, table covers, piano scarves, kimonos, and smoking jackets. American design incorporated Japanese decorative motifs such as cranes and storks, flowering fruit trees, leaping carp, and insects.8 Of particular interest for readers of Eliot’s “Mandarins,” which refers to “screens” several times, the Japanesestyle decorated screen, described by Edward Morse as “beyond all question, the richest object of household use . . . ever devised,” became a most coveted item for middleclass American homes.9 While the appeal of the rare and exotic might have originally fueled the Japan craze, it took on a life of its own as an interior decorating fad, becoming a virtually ubiquitous feature of middle-class visual culture, especially in New England, by the time it peaked around 1890. How Japanese-style decorations were used to effect is shown in many scenes by Boston society painter Edmund Tarbell, such as the screen in The Breakfast Room (1903) or the kimono in Girl Mending (1910). A bronze Japanese vase even appears in photographs of the Eliot family at home in St. Louis.10 This historical background clarifies two important features of Eliot’s undergraduate context: first, that Japanese-style decorations had acquired a familiarity approaching cliché by the first decade of the twentieth century; and second, that Victorian-American Japonisme primarily consisted of a vogue for “industrial arts” rather than paintings and prints. The colored print, or ukiyo-e, which played such a major role in James McNeill Whistler’s development and in French Impressionism, did not become available in the United States until the 1890s. Consequently, figural representation, “far more prominent in ukiyo-e prints than in the crafts,” played little role in the nineteenth-century Japan craze; rather, “Japanesque qualities of posture, facial expression, and dress” became influential only at the turn of the century, when print-collecting came into vogue.11 In Eliot’s college years, ukiyo-e prints still had cultural cachet; he much later wrote that his undergraduate discoveries included “Manet and Monet, Japanese prints, the plays of Maeterlinck, the music of Debussy and above all the combination of Maeterlinck and Debussy in Pelleas et Mélisande.”12 In this nostalgic recollection, Japanese prints belong to that fin-de-siècle world of French Symbolism that so charmed Eliot and indelibly marked his aesthetic sensibility. By contrast, the bric-a-brac of American Japonisme would have been an all-too-familiar piece of the genteel New England culture to which his family belonged. The distinction between prints and crafts, or between the fine and industrial arts, with their different cultural resonances and social functions, is important to the history of the Museum of Fine Arts, which opened the doors of its new building in November 1909. Founded in 1876, the MFA originally occupied a neo-Gothic palace in Copley Place modeled on the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and

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Albert) in London. Extensive glass cases of artifacts organized by craft or material (metal, ceramics, wood) were designed to educate the public on the development of the industrial arts. As with the South Kensington, its ultimate purpose was to enhance domestic production of such arts—and the Japan craze provides a perfect example of how museums successfully carried out their mission by enlarging (and whetting) Americans’ taste. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century a conception of the fine arts rather than the industrial arts as the proper object of aesthetic contemplation caused museum trustees to rethink the organization of their displays. The acquisition of the Morse, Bigelow, and Fenollosa-Weld collections, consisting of more than five thousand ceramics, fifteen thousand works of art, and some forty thousand prints, had strained storage and exhibition space at Copley Square, which was also vulnerable to fire.13 Such a wealth of artifacts also raised questions about how and why they should be displayed. “THE PUBLIC DOES NOT LOOK AT GREEK VASES. THE PUBLIC DOES NOT LOOK AT JAPANESE POTTERY. THE PUBLIC DOES NOT LOOK AT ANY LONG SERIES OF SMALL OBJECTS, save in the most perfunctory manner at all,” fulminated Matthew Prichard.14 (The charismatic Prichard, Assistant to the Director of the MFA and friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner, was acquainted by 1911 with the young Eliot, who later described his influence as “hypnotic” and his sensibility to art “greater than that of anyone I have ever met.”)15 Instead, Prichard argued, the central galleries should feature well-spaced “masterpieces” in sympathetic surroundings, flanked by rotating displays of secondary works in the smaller galleries. Okakura Kakuzō, Curator of the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art (also acquainted with Eliot)16 had written in his popular Book of Tea (1906), “We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums.”17 With progressive ambitions for their new museum, MFA directors rejected the South Kensington model for one that emphasized the fine in “fine arts”; in a 1907 analysis of the plans for the new building, Frederick Coburn wrote in the art journal International Studio that “persons desirous of the inspiration that comes from seeing noble works of art so displayed as to show their quality” had “received first consideration” in the new museum’s design.18 Rather than promoting industrial arts, the new museum sought to encourage the spiritual and cultural elevation that art could provide, starting with the invitation to worship extended by its neoclassical templelike façade. No longer organized by craft type, exhibits were ordered by region or culture, and within those categories, by chronology. As Coburn explained, this principle of exhibition came from German museums, where “the attempt has been made to develop backgrounds harmonious with the period of specific collections displayed.”19 Rather than confronting visitors with rows of glass cases of materially similar but culturally and temporally unrelated objects, the museum would arrange artifacts so that they provided coherent historical context for each other. Nowhere in the museum was this principle more faithfully carried out than in the Japanese galleries. As the museum Bulletin stated, in these galleries “simple forms of woodwork are introduced in order to secure an appropriate and natural setting” for the collection that, more than any other, constituted the raison d’être of the museum.20 Distinguished Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram, who was also a scholar of Japanese art and architecture, probably collaborated on the design of

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the galleries.21 In his unpublished writings, he advocated treating all artifacts as, in essence, fine arts: The word ‘Art’ does not mean alone the major arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and music, but equally all the more popular and universal expressions of man’s quest for ideals and love of beauty . . . wood carving, pottery, stained glass, tapestries, embroidery, illumination, all are fine arts. . . . Every work of art, from a Greek earthenware cup to a Venetian altar-piece, is an evidence of its creator’s joy in life and work.22 Just as the new MFA aimed to provide “the inspiration that comes from seeing noble works of art,” Cram envisioned galleries where visitors could experience the artists’ own feeling of inspiration through their works. The galleries were to be, in other words, more human-centered. The aim of the museum was “To bring all the arts together, in human scale and after the fashion for which they were intended,” whether in rooms evocative of domestic settings, or in the case of religious art, in “a room or rooms in chapel-form.”23

Figure 1.1 Buddhist temple room in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; photograph from Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, December 1909.

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Figure 1.2 Japanese court in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; photograph from Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, December 1909.

One of the architectural highlights of the new museum was, in fact, a temple-like interior constructed out of wood and plaster with low lighting, designed to house several of the MFA’s most famous Buddhas in a “setting suggestive of the early temple architecture of Japan” (Figure 1.1).24 On the floor below was a “temple forecourt, with neatly raked sand, carefully chosen rocks, stone lanterns and fu-dogs that guarded the approach to a recess where gilded Buddhas sat” (Figure 1.2).25 This design promoted an aesthetic principle as well as a social agenda of bringing two cultures closer to each other. “The Japanese and the American, thinking in terms of Nippon and of the United States, stare, uncomprehensive and mutually repellent [sic], but when either is able to cast aside the convention race has wrought, understanding is possible, or if not understanding then at least implicit acceptance,” Cram wrote.26 By showing something of the “foundations of Japanese character” in the national “[r]everence for ancestors, worship of all the dead, [and] recognition of the perfect unimportance of the individual and of the supreme moment of the family, the commune, and the State,” Cram hoped both to enhance museumgoers’ appreciation for the works of art on display, and to encourage a more sympathetic understanding of the Japanese people.27 All of these museological innovations emphasized the presence and sensibility of the human being: the creator of artifacts, whose beliefs, practices, and personal inspiration the exhibit aimed to make visible, and the viewer, whom the museum sought to inspire, enlighten, and lead to greater cultural understanding.

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“Mandarins” In his 1909 essay for the Harvard Advocate, “Gentlemen and Seamen,” Eliot refers to the hoard of “shawls, the ginger-jars, the carved ivory which the captains brought back from the Orient, the gifts which their descendants are proud to display.”28 The display of oriental treasures in New England homes was a sight to which Eliot was accustomed, while the new MFA proposed a more historical and culture-centered way of seeing the same objects. Whether by direct experience or through the poet’s remarkable ability to absorb the zeitgeist, “Mandarins” investigates how context gives meaning to artifacts, particularly those he might have seen in the Chinese and Japanese galleries of the MFA. The sequence places well-known kinds of Asian artifacts (fans, swords, teacups) into settings where humans use them, either as museum pieces or as domestic accessories—and sometimes as both. These human dramas do more than respond to a “prompt” provided by the museum, however; the museum ultimately comes to seem like a bare accommodation in contrast to the world in which the poet imagines its treasures. Little is known for certain about Eliot’s doings in college, as no correspondence survives from this time, and so any biographical connections with “Mandarins” must be speculative. However, a number of facts support the likelihood that Eliot did visit the new building at some point between November 1909, when it opened, and June 1910, when he completed his Master’s of Arts. In spring 1910, Eliot took Edward Waldo Forbes’s “Fine Arts 20B” course on Florentine painting. The final exam for this 1910 course, serendipitously saved in Harvard’s archives, refers to “the four galleries the class has examined.”29 Given the small size of the Fogg collection at the time (which Forbes, as its recently appointed director, would soon vastly enlarge), Forbes’s position as a member of the board of trustees of the MFA, and the excitement that surrounded the reopening of the Boston museum, the MFA presumably numbered among these four galleries visited by Eliot’s class. While the European rooms would have been the focus of any class trip, Forbes also had a strong interest in Asian art, and may have conveyed this to his students.30 Even apart from this specific connection to the MFA, there were many avenues that could have led Eliot to see it for himself. His membership in Harvard’s Signet and Stylus societies, as well as his own roots in the Boston aristocracy, put him on a social footing with the literati and art connoisseurs of Boston, such as Isabella Gardner, who supported and guided the creation of the new museum.31 The press greeted its opening with enthusiastic fanfare: “Boston’s New Museum a Temple of Fine Arts. Priceless Collections Are Magnificently Housed. Many New Treasures Now to Be Given a Proper Setting. Problems of Effective Display Solved by Patient Study by Experts,” read the Boston Globe headline of November 9, 1909,32 the day before an inaugural reception at the museum welcomed five thousand “prominent Bostonians and New Englanders.”33 Finally, the Peabody Museum in Salem rivaled the MFA for the splendor of its collection, and it is possible that Eliot also went there in the summer of 1910 while staying with his family in Gloucester, perhaps during one of his sailing trips with Harvard friend Harold Peters.34 The fact that Ricks has dated the poem to August 1910 may mean that the setting of the poem combines features of both museums. The particular scenes and arrangements of artifacts described in the sequence suggest MFA displays in the new museum building; more generally, the sequence registers

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the complex social and aesthetic questions of museum design and function that were actively being debated at the time. “Mandarins” comprises four lyrics thematically linked by references to recognizably “oriental” artifacts such as a “sword and fan,” “thin translucent porcelain,” “screen and cranes,” and gowns decorated with “goldwire dragons.” (In what follows, I use the term “oriental” to indicate a set of ideas and clichés associated with the Far East in the minds of Eliot’s contemporaries.) The sections also share a preoccupation with sight: the poet / speaker observes men and women who are also engaged in looking. Indeed, the predominant features of the sequence are people looking at things, and people looking like things. While these situations could happen anywhere, they are especially pertinent to museums, where the question “what am I looking at?” often arises. One might see a given artifact as the embodiment of a person (the artist, or an individual portrayed) and yet also as a thing (made from a certain material at a certain date). In an encounter with a cultural Other, when the represented figure seems human yet substantially unlike the viewer, such questions are especially relevant. The two themes are thus closely interrelated, with the poet investigating how context shapes our perceptions of such artifacts—a dynamic that is at the heart of museum studies. The first section of “Mandarins” describes the public viewing of a male figure who “Stands there, complete, / Stiffly addressed with sword and fan. . . . Indifferent to all these baits / Of popular benignity / He merely stands and waits / Upon his own intrepid dignity.”35 With “fixed regardless eyes— / Looking neither out nor in,” the figure could as well be an artifact (set on a “stand”?) as a person. The figure’s solidity and immobility contrast with the movement of “crowds that ran / Pushed, stared, and huddled at his feet, / Keen to appropriate the man”; their homage makes him the “hero” of the moment. The poet, rather than rushing in himself, watches the crowd’s interaction with the male figure. If they have come to the museum to see the foreignlooking “mandarin” with his “sword and fan,” he has come to view their strange “formalities.” The likelihood that this poem describes a scene of museumgoing is supported by Eliot’s previous experimentation with ekphrasis in “On a Portrait.” Printed in the Harvard Advocate the year before, this picture sonnet describes Édouard Manet’s Jeune Dame en 1866 in terms not unlike those he uses for the Mandarin.36 “On a Portrait” begins, “Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown / To us of restless brain and weary feet . . . She stands at evening in the room alone.”37 “Mandarins” employs the same language of a singular figure who “stands” before a “crowd,” which is exactly the relation that an artwork has to its spectators. Again like “On a Portrait,” the status of the central figure is ambiguous: at first we assume that he (or she) is a living person, but gradually it dawns that we are looking at an inanimate artwork. A further similarity with the earlier ekphrastic sonnet is the way Eliot pairs the figure with accessories: a parrot on a stand in the sonnet, and the sword and fan in “Mandarins.” Similar to the iconography of a visual portrait, these accessories convey important information about the person represented (in this case, the sword and fan are talismans of the Orient). At the same time, they raise the disturbing question of whether the person represented is fundamentally different from the objects that signify his character. Eliot’s “Mandarin” with “sword and fan” could well refer to a particular artwork, although the generic quality of the description makes it difficult to ascertain which. Nevertheless, some notable artifacts held at the MFA in 1910 suggest themselves as

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sources, such as Bishamonten, Guardian of the North, with His Retinue, an impressive painting on silk over wood panel from the late twelfth century, depicting a swordwielding deity who stares unnervingly at the viewer and is supported by “goddesses and demons of his magic power” clustering around his feet (Plate 1).38 This large panel was acquired by Okakura in 1905 and may well have been one of the “early Buddhist paintings” on display in the “tokonoma” (alcove) when the museum opened.39 In her exhaustive 1910 description of the MFA collections, Julia de Wolfe Addison judged this work “the finest representation of Bishamon existing.”40 The arrangement of the composition is not unlike the situation described in the first section of “Mandarins,” featuring a central figure surrounded by a crowd. The warlike Bishamonten lacks a fan, however, and might be too energetic to be said merely to stand and wait. Another candidate for the mandarin is one of the MFA’s suits of Japanese armor, which would certainly have stood “stiffly addressed,” most likely with a sword and possibly with a fan (which was also carried in battle for signaling purposes) (Plate 2).41 In human form with a terrifying mask, but lacking humanity, the “complete” suit of armor definitely looks neither out nor in. The December 1909 Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin reports that the room next to the Buddhist Temple displayed lacquers from the Bigelow and Weld Collections, especially “suits of armor and three swords of special excellence.”42 If indeed the “hero” described in “Mandarins 1” refers to a suit of Japanese medieval armor, this figure takes his place alongside the marionettes and “stuffed men” in Eliot’s gallery of automatons. Ultimately, Eliot is vague about whether the speaker sees a human being or an artwork, and this is an important compositional choice. Like the poet, we do not know precisely how to understand this central figure, accompanied on the one hand by a sword and fan, and on the other by gawking spectators.43 The MFA’s new method of display encouraged viewers to think of culturally related artifacts together, as interrelated aspects of life in a particular time and place. The sword and fan in Eliot’s poem become an occasion for thinking about how accessories confer identity. (In her discussion of the MFA’s sword collection, Addison explains the relationship of these two objects: “When a Japanese child is presented at the temple he receives two little fans. These are symbolical of the swords which he will one day wear.”)44 Does the possession of the sword and fan (the one warlike, the other feminine, both embodying Western stereotypes of the Oriental man) make the figure inscrutable, by virtue of making viewers see him as Oriental? Especially the fan, that most ubiquitous of the Japan-craze knockoffs, seems to confer both orientality and thingness on the male figure. In addition, quite aside from the cultural prejudice that (as Cram wrote) makes the “Japanese and the American . . . stare, uncomprehensive and mutually repellant” at one another, simply juxtaposing fine and industrial arts might have the effect of likening a stylized human figure to a patterned decoration. To an audience accustomed to viewing artifacts as examples of industrial arts (alongside other bronzes, porcelain, textiles, etc.), the addition of the sword and fan emphasizes the figure’s own materiality and mere woodenness. Or, perhaps, does encircling him with admirers make him seem more human? The mandarin is, after all, described in terms more appropriate to a person than a thing: he “waits,” he has “dignity,” he is a “hero.” Moreover, the poet introduces a note of cultural relativism by placing the mandarin at the “center of formalities.” Just as the many decorated sword guards (separated from their original blades) on display at the

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MFA remind viewers of the sword’s ceremonial significance, the poet also observes a Bostonian ritual of rushing to see rare artifacts housed in the new museum. While the sword and fan place the male figure as part of a display of curiosities, the crowds remind us of the equally curious behavior of our fellow humans. These observations are consistent with Eliot’s interest in human interaction as performance, a theme that permeates the March Hare notebook, from “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” to “Portrait of a Lady,” which begins, “You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do.” The sword and fan pull the mandarin one way in the poet’s perception; the crowds another. In taking the museum context as his subject, rather than focusing more narrowly on an artwork, Eliot expands the scope of ekphrasis from art objects to the human comedy of their display. Perhaps for this reason, the first section ends with the line, “The rest is merely shifting scenes.” “Scene” may refer to a visual composition or to the unit of a stage production. The “scene” of the mandarin hovers between the artwork that the museumgoers have come to see, and the “shifting scenes” of human drama as subsequent crowds push in toward it. Indeed, Eliot raises a question that postmodern artists have exhaustively (some might say repetitively) explored: how much does context define the meaning of an artifact? Specifically, does looking at something in an aesthetic way make it an artwork? This question underlies the ambiguity of the scenes in “Mandarins,” which might represent artworks, or else live vignettes of art appreciation and consumption. The second section of “Mandarins” moves from the museum gallery to a domestic setting where “two ladies of uncertain age” “sit by a window drinking tea” and “Regard / A distant prospect of the sea.” The ladies are observers, cultivated connoisseurs of beauty. At the end of the poem, “one lifts her hand to pour” while the other “raise[s] / A thin translucent porcelain” and “Murmurs a word of praise.” This is a scene of art appreciation and consumption, two acts deftly assimilated in the raising of the cup at once to take tea and to receive the light from the window so as better to admire its fine porcelain. Eliot’s poem takes the porcelain out of the display case, so to speak, and places it in a domestic context where we can see it being used. The ladies might easily be Boston Brahmins of the sort so often exposed to Eliot’s wit. Yet the context could also be Japanese, as depicted in a ukiyo-e print; we are not exactly in the scene so much as viewing it from afar: “By attitude / It would seem that they approve / The abstract sunset (rich, not crude).” We are not privy to their thoughts, or even their speech (just the sound of “murmuring”). Their own appearance, in fact, pushes the ladies in the direction of being aesthetic objects themselves: “The outlines delicate and hard / Of gowns that fall from neck and knee; / Grey and yellow patterns move / From the shoulder to the floor.” Their profiles, “delicate and hard,” resemble the china cups from which they drink tea. This equivalence between the ladies and their teacups might comment on the decorative function of women, but it also renders the entire scene less “live” and more still, closer to the condition of visual art. Similar scenes can be found in Japanese prints and the Western paintings they inspired. Whistler’s Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony (1864–79), influenced in part by the art of Katsushika Hokusai, combines Japonistic composition and accessories (azaleas, kimonos, sake cups, a long-necked banjo or shamisen) with a London background (Plate 3). It is tempting and indeed plausible to read the last line of “Mandarins”—“And so I say / How life goes well in pink and green”—as a

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reference to this painting. Closer to the MFA context that “Mandarins” evokes, however, the scene might also describe an ukiyo-e print representing courtesans drinking tea or sake; gowns that fall from the neck suggest the looser-flowing kimono rather than a tightly-laced Edwardian dress. Their “tranquility” may be less a state of mind than a cultural stereotype or, perhaps, simply a description of art’s stillness. This episode of “Mandarins” places a display-worthy artifact, a porcelain cup, in a human “scene” of its use and appreciation, just as the museum designers intended. In that sense, it perfectly enacts their intentions; yet we are not sure whether the scene is in Tokyo or Boston. In addition, the poet could be watching real ladies appreciate a porcelain cup, or he could be gazing at a Japanese print. Something about the poem resists our desire to place its action precisely in a time and geographic location. Like the first part of “Mandarins,” this second part is rooted in the observation of an object (whether cup or print), but in departing from the museum setting, Eliot takes the idea of “context” to a different level. In the domestic scene he evokes, appreciation and use are united in one gesture, a gesture that moreover is imagined to be universal. The flight of Eliot’s imagination from museum to life is both in keeping with the spirit of the new MFA and also, paradoxically, in sympathy with the MFA’s most ardent critic, Matthew Prichard, who had left his post in 1907 as his frustration mounted. Prichard later wrote (in an unpublished manuscript), “The same spirit puts objects into museums and men into prisons . . . the ancient object of art . . . derives its being and value from those who pay attention to it. Apart from them it would sink at once to the level of the rubbish of the ages from which the self conscious efforts of its admirers have rescued it. . . . A museum is like the smell of cooking when you are not hungry.”45 (In contrast, the scene of tea-drinking in this section of “Mandarins” exemplifies the integration of appetite and aesthetic appreciation.) It is possible to see how the new Japanese galleries at the MFA evolved out of Prichard’s criticism, yet were still open to it, insofar as no museum can literally reproduce the living context of its artifacts, only point to their original setting in a way that stimulates the public’s imagination. The imagination, in other words, will always outstrip the museum immediately, if the museum is properly constituted to enable flights of fancy. From a porcelain cup in section two, we move back to the figure of another mandarin, this time seated, in section three. At the new MFA, the “Porcelain Corridor” on the main floor led directly to one of the museum’s prize possessions, “a large Japanese carved wooden figure of Amida Dai Butsu” (Plate 4).46 This statue, described by Addison as “full of majesty and dignity” with “true religious repose,”47 resembles “The eldest of the mandarins / A stoic in obese repose,” who, “With intellectual double chins, / Regards the corner of his nose” (“Mandarins” 3). Other possible models for the eldest mandarin are the wooden Buddhas “enshrined in dignity” in the Buddhist Temple Room (Figure 1.1), or those below on the ground floor looking out into the court.48 Like the first mandarin, this figure seems almost too inert to be alive, yet possesses human characteristics: though motionless, he seems thoughtful. Evoking the language of European philosophy to call him a “stoic” and an “indifferent idealist,” the poet places him indeterminately between East and West, with a cultural relativism similar to that employed in the first two sections. While the mandarin regards his nose, “cranes that fly across a screen / Pert, alert, / Observe him with a frivolous mien—” The screen Eliot refers to here is presumably the decorated kind that Morse praised as “the richest object of household use . . . ever devised.” Photos

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of the original Japanese court show screens lining the sides of the garden, with three wooden Buddhas seated at the end of the court (Figure 1.2). This arrangement demonstrates how birds on a screen could be imagined to be flying toward or looking at a seated figure in their vicinity. This act of gazing is different from those of the first two sections, where people look at artifacts; here, one artifact looks at another. If the first section of “Mandarins” zooms out to observe the museum context of display, this section zooms in on a self-contained world of art. The screen is the mandarin’s context, and vice versa; this situation literalizes the conditions of the new MFA, where the arrangement of artifacts was supposed to generate a sense of the culture and period to which these works belonged. The statue and screen may belong together culturally, but there is something absurd about the scene as Eliot describes it: the displayed artifacts still lack a context of living humans to make use of these objects in the ways for which they were intended. Instead, the alert cranes look forever at the stoical mandarin. They are “frivolous” because removed from a setting where they can serve the function for which they were designed. Nonetheless, this self-contained world of art offers aesthetic ideas that are of value to the poet. Japanese screens played an important role in the development of Impressionist and modern painting, particularly for Whistler, who placed a decorated screen in counterpoint with painting itself in works such as The Golden Screen and La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (both 1864). In these works, a Japanese-style screen behind the figure effectively cuts off the background and pushes into the foreground, flattening the picture plane and emphasizing the continuity of painting and screen. The scattering of ukiyo-e prints in The Golden Screen further insists on the essential flatness of the four media present: painted screen, textiles, prints, and the painted canvas itself. This compositional device led Whistler to the more thoroughgoing flatness of Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony, begun in the same year, where not only the costumes of the women but also the design of the whole composition and the lack of shadow show the influence of Japanese prints (Plate 3).49 Édouard Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola of 1868, showing the author flanked by a Japanese screen and an ukiyo-e print (alongside a reproduction of Manet’s own controversial Olympia), similarly gestures to the influence of Japanese art on the painter’s development. The combination of Olympia’s impassivity and the pasty, depthless look of her skin upon white sheets had made Manet notorious a few years before. Eliot’s “On a Portrait” registers Manet’s aesthetic flattening in Jeune Dame en 1866, whom the poet finds inscrutable and stony.50 “Mandarins” continues this train of thought by linking the aesthetic flatness of a decorated screen with an impression of indifference and stoicism in the central figure. Apart from the psychological ramifications of flatness, the idea of a screen contributes to or at least harmonizes with a purely formal aspect of “Mandarins.” This sequence, like others in Eliot’s notebook, experiments with a non-narrative structure of composition, juxtaposing four related scenes without linking them by plot or character development. The multi-paneled screen is not the only model for such organization; “Preludes” and “Caprices,” for example, evoke musical sequences as their inspiration. However, “Mandarins” gives many cues of its specific compositional model by end-ofline references to “scenes,” “planes,” and (twice) a “screen.” As mentioned above, the decorated screen was a prized possession in many turn-of-the-century American homes, and the MFA’s Fenollosa-Weld collection boasted many fine examples—in particular

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the wave-screen of Korin, which Addison called “its most precious possession” and which is still today frequently featured on the museum’s website and its products. In a letter to Scofield Thayer of 1916, Eliot refers to “a screen by Korin” as an appropriate furnishing for the interior where he hopes Thayer will “enshrine” his new wife.51 Numerous screens from the Fenollosa-Weld collection represent birds, including Birds in Trees and Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons.52 Such a screen not only stands behind the “screen and cranes” in section three, but also informs the multiplicity of views throughout the composition, and in particular the principle of “scenes” hailed in the last line of the first section (“the rest is merely shifting scenes”) and “planes” in the last line of section three (“how life goes on different planes”). In a folding screen, the arrangement of the panels is not limited to temporal or narrative sequence, and indeed, right-to-left reading is not conventional in Japanese and Chinese. Instead the screen encourages a “shifting” mode of looking— moving back and forth among panels. Elements in each panel lead the eye to other panels, yet each can also be studied individually. Similarly, each part of “Mandarins” issues from the first Mandarin, the “centre of formalities,” and is thematically but not narratively linked to the others. Throughout his career, Eliot experimented with nonnarrative structures, and his longer poems all work on the basic principle of numbered sections that do not necessarily proceed chronologically, as in “Mandarins.” This early sequence, like his “Preludes,” “Caprices,” and “Suite Clownesque,” is important as a testing-ground for his lifelong compositional technique. A sense of lightness and movement is also important to “Mandarins” in a way that suggests the aesthetic of the decorated screen. An important compositional device of Japanese art is the juxtaposition of an object at rest (tree, rock, shore) with one in movement (bird, wave, butterfly, fish).53 Each section offers this contrast: between the standing mandarin and the crowds that rush to see him; the seated lady and the cup she raises; the seated mandarin and flying cranes. Movement is especially significant in section four, where “demoiselles and gentlemen / Walk out beneath the cherry trees, / the goldwire dragons on their gowns / Expanded by the breeze.” The movement of “walking out” is picked up by the textiles, which in a brilliant stroke are transported by a breeze from the display case to a natural setting. The idea of a breeze that “expands” or contracts the poem unexpectedly also applies at the level of form, where Eliot’s lineation and the length of each section gently disrupt our expectations, conveying movement without disjuncture. His lines vary between trimeter and tetrameter, with a few two-syllable lines thrown in at unpredictable intervals (“How much,” “Regard”); rhyme comes and goes; and section lengths vary from twelve to seventeen lines. Without dimeter lines, three of the four sections are fourteen lines long, but Eliot’s refusal to make the poems into sonnets seems conscious, since ultimately each falls short of or overshoots that magical number. Eliot’s formal choices, or rather his informalities, avoid any sense of fixed regularity and generate a sense of movement. It is appropriate that the sequence should end with a scene of walking, for this gesture underlies the whole composition: with the poet, we stroll through connected rooms of the museum, observing the art and those who have come to see it; allowing artworks to inspire imaginative reveries of their use in other times and places; and absorbing the aesthetic principles represented in these galleries. Formally, we move from one scene to another; visually we shift between artworks and their museum context, seeing first the mandarin, then the crowds who press about him. Where is the

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ritual: in his sword and fan, or in their gawking? Then, seeing a porcelain cup, our imagination evokes ladies (decorated not unlike the cup itself) drinking from it, perhaps in Boston, perhaps in Tokyo. A richly threaded textile evokes a vision of couples walking decorously through a cherry orchard. The mind shifts between the world represented by artworks (paintings, religious statues, ceremonial swords, ceramics, textiles, prints) and the spectacle of our appreciation and consumption of these works. It seems likely that the Asian galleries of the MFA provided the catalyst for “Mandarins”; even if this connection cannot be demonstrated with certainty, the sequence clearly considers the kind of questions raised by museumgoing. Each section revolves around one or two artifacts that the poet places in a social setting, extracting the object from the stand or case where it might have appeared and bringing it to life in a human drama. The idea of context extends farther than the MFA directors might have envisioned, for at least in the first two sections, the artifact becomes the subject of Bostonian rituals of appreciation, even as these blend with a vague suggestion of Oriental ceremonies. In the third section, Eliot exposes the poverty of the bare museum context, in contrast to the domestic surroundings that one might imagine for these artifacts. Finally he turns to “one more thought for pen and ink”—reminding us, in fact, that at least two of the poems represent imaginative acts rather than actual experiences—in a scene of couples in “conversation dignified / Nor intellectual nor mean, / And graceful, not too gay.” This ending “expands” beyond the artifact (whether a garment or ukiyo-e print), drifting into a pleasing, if idealized, realm of courtly socializing remote from the gallery setting of the first mandarin. Whereas people take on the qualities of objects in the opening sections, here the gowns with goldwire dragons become merely a detail in a pastoral scene of leisurely conversation beneath the trees. “Pen and ink” carry the day here, in the sense that we leave the museum context of crowded galleries and Boston connoisseurs for a truly “natural” setting (as the MFA Bulletin called its Japanese galleries). Eliot becomes, perhaps despite himself, the visitor envisioned by the museum’s designers, a person “desirous of the inspiration that comes from seeing noble works of art.”

Notes 1. Zhaoming Qian pioneered this approach with two studies of American poetry: Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); more recently, British Modernism and Chinoiserie, ed. Anne Witchard (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), explores representations of China and things Chinese by Bloomsbury writers. These studies document the importance of a resurgent Chinoiserie in the shaping of modernism. Anita Patterson has examined Eliot’s reception of Buddhism and Confucianism in a New England context; see “T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism,” American Literary History, 27.4 (winter 2015): 665–84. Eliot’s exposure to East Asian culture has also been the subject of papers presented at the T. S. Eliot Society’s Annual Meeting by Patterson (2013), Roderick Overaa (2014), and Joon-Soo Bong (2015). 2. As dated by Ricks in the “Chronology of T. S. Eliot’s Poems” in IMH, xxxix. 3. Julia Meech and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Japonisme Comes to America: The Japanese Impact on the Graphic Arts, 1876–1925 (New York: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum / Harr N. Abrams Inc., 1990), 45.

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4. Ibid., 43. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. For a thorough discussion of this episode, see William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1990). 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Ibid., 50–51. 9. Ibid., 76. 10. Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 17. 11. Hosley, The Japan Idea, 52. 12. Eliot, “Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,” Drama New Series 36 (spring 1955): 16. In “The Borderline of Prose” (The New Statesman 9 (May 19, 1917)), Eliot also refers to the 1890s as “the days . . . when knowing amateurs began to talk of Outamaro and Toyakuni,” two famous Japanese printmakers. Complete Prose 1, 537. 13. Morse sold his collection to the MFA and held the title of “Keeper of Japanese Pottery” there from 1892 to his death; see Meech and Weisberg, Japonisme Comes to America, 45. Bigelow deposited his collection in 1889, making the donation official in 1911 (thus many items bear the year 1911 as part of their acquisition number, although they would have been on display for many years before that); see Meech and Weisberg, 52. 14. Matthew Prichard, “Current Theories of the Arrangement of Museums of Art and their Application to the Museum of Fine Arts,” Communications to the Trustees Regarding the New Building: Papers by Officers of the Museum (Boston: privately printed, 1904), 16. 15. L3, 132. See Morgenstern in Chapter 2, this volume, for further discussion of Eliot and Prichard. 16. At what point they became known to each other is uncertain. Okakura, like Prichard, was friends with Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose house Eliot might have visited as early as 1909, when he became a member of Harvard’s Signet Society, to which she had social ties. See Crawford, Young Eliot, 114. In a 1915 letter to Mrs. Gardner, Eliot refers to Okakura, and a note (probably contributed by Valerie Eliot) states that “in 1910, [Okakura Kakuzō] had taken TSE to meet Matisse” (L1, 101). Okakura was traveling in Asia during much of Eliot’s undergraduate period at Harvard, including 1909–10. He did lecture at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, but it is not known whether Eliot, who attended the fair, was aware of him at this time. In her 1910 book on the MFA, Julia de Wolfe Addison writes, “The name of Okakura Kakuzo is well known both in literature and art to anyone who has ever felt the least intelligent interest in the subject” (Julia de Wolfe Addison, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1910), 323). 17. Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), 118. 18. Frederick W. Coburn, “The New Art Museum at Boston,” International Studio 33 (1907–8): lvii. 19. Ibid., lviii. 20. Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 7, no. 41–42 (December 1909): 44. 21. In “First Impressions of the Rediscovery of Two New England Galleries by Ralph Adams Cram,” Douglass Shand-Tucci finds compelling evidence of Cram’s role in the design of the galleries (in the form of architectural plans from 1909 bearing his handwriting and initials) (The Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin (fall 1979): 2–16). Anne Nishimura Morse, curator of Japanese Art at the MFA, however, cautions that no record of his participation has been found at the museum archives. Most likely Cram worked with Assistant Curator Francis Gardner Curtis and Okakura Kakuzō, who would have required the services of a trained architect. 22. Ralph Adams Cram, from an unpublished pamphlet reproduced in Shand-Tucci, “First Impressions,” 12.

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23. Ibid 12. 24. MFA Bulletin 7, 58. 25. Walter Muir Whitehill, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), I. 241. 26. Ralph Adams Cram, Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts (London: John Lane, 1906), 19. 27. Ibid., 20. Constance J. S. Chen has written about the ideological motivations behind the foundation of the Chinese and Japanese collections at the MFA, arguing that collectors such as Fenollosa and Bigelow saw cultural parallels between Japan and New England, both rapidly modernizing and casting aside traditional ways. See Chen, “Collecting Asia: Cultural Politics and the Creation of the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” in Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community, ed. Monica Chiu (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 91–123. 28. Eliot, “Gentlemen and Seamen,” The Harvard Advocate 87 (May 25, 1909), in Complete Prose 1, 21. 29. Edward Forbes, Fine arts 20 b Final exam (1910), Harvard University Archives, HUG FP 139.62 box 1. 30. For example, a piece of 1911 correspondence from P. K. Hisada, a Boston dealer of Japanese and Chinese art objects, reminds Forbes to pick up a pair of decorated doors that were being held for him and offers “a few other things, recently imported, which we presume might interest you” (Harvard University Archives, HUG FP 139.62 box 1). And, as Nancy D. Hargrove also points out (see Hargrove in Chapter 1, this volume), Forbes later asked Eliot to send him a copy of the catalogue of the Trocadero museum in Paris, home of the Musée d’éthnographie and the Musée cambodgien (see Eliot’s letter to Edward Forbes, May 22, 1911, L1, 19). 31. Crawford, Young Eliot, 114. 32. Boston Globe, November 9, 1909, 11. 33. “Opening Reception Is Attended by Distinguished Throng,” Boston Globe, November 10, 1909, 6. 34. Crawford, Young Eliot, 141. 35. IMH, 19. All subsequent references to this poem taken from IMH, 19–22. 36. For a discussion of “On a Portrait” and “Circe’s Palace” as ekphrases, see Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 77–92. I also discuss “Mandarins” there, with a different focus (93–96). 37. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967), 21. 38. MFA accession number 05.202; description from Addison, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 342. Her book provides an important resource for knowing what might have been on display in 1910, although unfortunately her discussion of Asian art is organized by medium rather than by room of the museum. 39. MFA Bulletin 7, 58. 40. Addison added, “It is essentially Japanese in character, although a casual observer may think that it savours of the art of China and India,” and this ambiguity could explain why Eliot calls his figure a “mandarin” when most of the artworks on display at the MFA were Japanese. It is unlikely that as a college junior he would have been alert to the cultural distinctions between Japan and China that connoisseurs of his day recognized. (See Addison, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 342). 41. Suggestion from Anne Nishimura Morse, MFA. An example from the collection would be the suit of armor in the Weld Bequest, 11.12547. 42. MFA Bulletin 7, 58. Addison describes the sword collection and dwells on Samurai customs in Chapter XIII of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, though she doesn’t mention any armor.

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43. Anita Patterson argues in the context of the New England reception of Buddhism that Eliot portrays the mandarin as “an Emersonian hero-bureaucrat situated at the ‘centre of formalities’ in Tokugawa-era Neo-Confucian Japan” (Patterson, “T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism,” 674). 44. Addison, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 374–75. 45. At the time of Prichard’s death in 1936, Harry Rowan Walker arranged Prichard’s sundry notes thematically for publication under the collective title Matthew Stewart Prichard. Walker’s manuscript (henceforth Notes) is held at the Bibliothèque Byzantine at the Collège de France in Paris. This quotation appears in a thematic section titled “Museums.” Prichard, Notes, 5. 46. MFA Bulletin 7, 56. The MFA accession number of this statue is 09.73. 47. Addison, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 324. 48. Ibid., 332. 49. See Robin Spencer, “Whistler, Swinburne, and Art for Art’s Sake,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 64. 50. For a more extensive exploration of Eliot and aesthetic flatness in the context of late nineteenth-century painting, see Dickey, Modern Portrait Poem, Chapter 3. 51. L1, 151. In this letter, Eliot treats the screen of Korin as a feature of fin-de-siècle decor along with “dim light drifting through curtains,” “a volume of Faust bound in green and powdered with gold,” and “a drawing by Watteau,” but his ironic tone, no doubt shaped by his own disillusion with “a wife who is not wifely,” acknowledges the aesthetic significance that such an artifact had for him in a time gone by. 52. MFA accession numbers 11.4140, 11.4430, and 11.4431. 53. Hosley, The Japan Idea, 51.

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Eliot’s Tour of Asian and African Art in the Museums of Paris and London, 1910–11 Nancy D. Hargrove

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hen Eliot traveled to Paris in October 1910, he had already developed an appreciation of Asian art that is less well known than his subsequent interest in Indic language and philosophy.1 The museums of Paris and London fed his interests in the arts of Asia as well as exposing him to those of Africa, laying the groundwork for his immersion in anthropology and Indic studies upon his return to Harvard in the fall of 1911.2 Eliot’s religious and philosophical views and ultimately his creative work reflected this many-sided education in non-Western culture. During the academic year 1910–11, Eliot visited many museums, both in Paris and, during the Easter holidays, in London. Japanese and Chinese art were wildly popular in both capitals at the time, while Europeans were beginning to appreciate African artifacts as art, rather than only seeing them as ethnographic curiosities. This chapter gathers for the first time information about the Asian and African art on display in London and Paris at the time of Eliot’s sojourn. Owing to the limited number of documents from this time of his life, for the most part we cannot know with certainty what he saw in Paris. However, from his Baedeker guidebook to London (held in King’s College library, Cambridge), and from a letter to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley about his London trip, we do know which London museums he visited and what he saw or wanted to see, thus confirming some of his artistic inclinations.3 Eliot’s interest in Asia began in childhood when he read Sir Edwin Arnold’s “The Light of Asia,” a poem about Buddha for which he retained great affection for the rest of his life.4 Furthermore, Anita Patterson has shown that as a youngster he was aware of the Orient by way of his own family. She notes that his great-grandfather was a New Bedford shipowner and that his uncle supervised a Unitarian mission in Japan in 1903.5 Building on the work of Tatsushi Narita, who discovered Eliot’s admission ticket to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and contextualized his short story “The Man Who Was King” (1905) in light of the Philippines exhibition, Roderick Overaa has established a compelling case that Eliot also attended exhibitions from Japan, China, British India, Ceylon, and Siam. The enormous Japanese exhibition, for example, showcased its art and seems to have contributed to the craze for Japonisme in the United States and Europe in the early twentieth century. Overaa argues that Eliot’s interest in Eastern art and culture as well as his concern with primitive civilizations was doubtless stirred by what he saw there.6 Eliot’s essay “Gentlemen and Seamen,” published in the Harvard Advocate in May 1909, indicates his knowledge of the commercial aspects of Asia for American merchants and also the Asian art and cultural objects that trade introduced to the West.7 He wrote about the men of the Merchant Marine “who carried American commerce to the Levant, to India, to China” and described “the shawls, the gingerjars, the carved ivory which the captains brought back from the Orient, the gifts

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which their descendants are proud to display.”8 “Gentlemen and Seamen” contains a germ of Eliot’s mature recognition in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) that “[e]ven the humblest material artifact, which is the product and the symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes.”9 Yet in its emphasis on the display of material artifacts, the earlier essay understands these Eastern art objects as curios destined to be looked at, inflecting the transmission of culture in the direction of the museum. At Harvard, Eliot had opportunities to see Oriental art in various locations, such as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where “small exhibits from various parts of Asia and Japan” were kept in a case described in the Guide to the Peabody Museum published in 1898.10 As Frances Dickey discusses (see Dickey in Chapter 1, this volume), Eliot likely saw Oriental works both in Boston homes, where they were popular decorative items, and in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which housed one of the finest and most extensive collections of Asian art in the Western world and may be the setting for his 1910 poem “Mandarins.” At this time, or possibly in Paris, he also became acquainted with Okakura Kakuzō, the curator of Chinese and Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts.11 Eliot also testified to his own early interest in Asian art, remarking in a late essay on Gordon Craig that he had discovered Japanese prints in college.12 Eliot’s previous exposure to Asian art prepared him to take in the riches gathered in the museums of Paris from more than two centuries of cultural exchange and imperial looting. In 1910, European museumgoers could experience a historically unprecedented display of non-Western cultural artifacts. The most impressive of the Parisian museums housing Asian art was the Musée Guimet (now the Musée national des arts asiatiques–Guimet), named for the Lyons industrialist Émile Guimet (1836–1918), who acquired hundreds of paintings, statues, and other art objects on a trip in 1876 that included stops in Egypt, Greece, Japan, China, and India. After displaying them at the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris, in 1879 he built a museum in Lyons to house them. Ten years later he transferred the collection to the Guimet Museum, which was built by the French government in Paris so that a wider audience could view it.13 At this time, items from French expeditions to Afghanistan were added to his personal collection. In Baedeker’s 1907 guidebook Paris et ses environs, it is described as a “museum for religions of the Far East” illustrated by works of art from India, Japan, China, Indochina, Siam, Cambodia, Korea, and Egypt.14 The museum contains several Buddha sculptures from India, Vietnam, China, and Korea, including a large head from northern India from 430–35 bc (Plate 5), as well as the compassionate figure of the bodhisattva, a future Buddha who remains on earth to help others attain Nirvana; among the most striking are the gold bodhisattva and the Maitryea bodhisattva. Also in the museum is a stunning nineteenth-century gold sculpture of the birth of Siddhārtha (the future Buddha) from the right side of his mother, Queen Māyā Devī from Nepal. In a summary of Buddhism that appears in the 1914 Lectures on the Harvard Classics, Professor C. R. Lanman, whose courses Eliot took upon his return to Harvard, alludes to “the later tradition that Buddha was born from his mother’s right side, a trait that appears . . . in many of the sculptured representations of the scene.”15 As is well known, fragments of Buddhist thought and texts permeate Eliot’s writing. The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, and Four Quartets in particular reflect the Buddha’s

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renunciation of desire and attachment to the physical world. In Ash-Wednesday, for example, the speaker conveys both the difficulty and the value of renunciation of the material world using the natural beauty of the New England seacoast. Part III of The Waste Land more overtly refers to Buddha’s Fire Sermon, in which he urges the priests to abandon the burning desires of the flesh,16 while the commands of the thunder and the thrice-used “Shantih” at the end come from the Sanskrit sacred text the Upanishads. During this time, according to Stephen Spender, Eliot said that he was thinking of becoming a Buddhist.17 The Guimet also contains a collection of figures representing the Hindu deities Vishnu (preserver of the universe) and Shiva (the creative force). Eliot developed a lifelong interest in these figures and in Hinduism’s sacred text, the Bhagavad Gīta (The Song of the Lord, from the Mahabarahta), seen most obviously in section III of The Dry Salvages, where he quotes the statement of Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu) to Arjuna: “ ‘on whatever sphere of being / The mind of man may be intent / At the time of death’—that is the one action” that will be fruitful in other lives.18 In both Buddhist and Hindu sacred objects, the divinities are often depicted sitting on an open lotus blossom, holding a lotus, or with lotus flowers as decorative items behind or above them. Further, ritual vessels such as bowls and cups were often decorated with lotus petals.19 The lotus was a sacred symbol of purity, perfection, and transcendence; in the Bhagavad Gīta, for example, one who has achieved detachment from the physical world and is unaffected by sin is compared to a lotus that rises from muddy water but is then untouched by it, and is thus pure.20 Eliot is drawing on this complex symbolism of the lotus in the opening section of “Burnt Norton” in his description of the ecstatic timeless moment, where the lotus rises from “the pool . . . filled with water out of sunlight.”21 Paris’s Musée Cernuschi (also called Musée des arts de l’Asie) displayed too a collection of Chinese statues, bronzes, and ceramics dating largely from 8000 bc through the thirteenth century, and a small number of Japanese works. Henri Cernuschi, an Italian by birth who had settled in France in 1850 following the 1848 Revolution in Italy, took a trip around the world from September 1871 to January 1873 with the art critic Théodore Duret, purchasing nearly five thousand works of art in China and Japan. In order to house his magnificent collection he commissioned the architect William Bouwens der Boijen to build a mansion on Avenue Velasquez next to the Parc Monceau, with mosaics of Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle, and above those, four lifesized statues in what appear to be Greek robes on its façade. When he died in 1896, he bequeathed both the mansion and his collection of Asian art to the city of Paris, and it opened as a free public museum in 1898.22 According to Baedeker, the Cernuschi’s collection of Chinese and Japanese works of art was inferior to that of the Guimet, but was interesting for its “wooden gallery decorated with dragons” and its “magnificent bronzes,” the most impressive of which was the Japanese Buddha, the largest in Western Europe; indeed, the mansion was designed around it.23 The enormous room two stories high contained the Amitābha from the Banryūji Temple of Meguro in Tōkyō, dating from the eighteenth century.24 Eliot most likely also visited the Musée d’éthnographie and the Musée cambodgien (also called the Musée indochinois)25—both then located in the Palais du Trocadéro, though they were subsequently closed and their holdings transferred to other museums.26 He had been asked by Edward Forbes, whose course in Fine Arts he had taken

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Figure 1.3 Shiva Nataraja (King of Dance). Chola period, Dravidian style. 11th century. From Vellalagaram, Southern India. Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. at Harvard just prior to his sojourn in Paris, to secure for him a catalogue titled Le Musée de sculpture comparée du Trocadéro, written by its director Camille Enlart and published in January 1911. In a letter of May 22, 1911 to Forbes, Eliot explained that he had “arranged with [the publishing house] Alphonse-Picard that they should send you a copy of the Trocadéro catalogue.”27 Founded in 1878 as Paris’s first anthropological museum, the Musée d’éthnographie displayed primitive works of art from Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and Europe. One of its most impressive works was the large eleventh-century bronze figure of the Hindu god Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance (Figure 1.3), from South India, which was carried through the streets during religious celebrations. The drum in his upper right hand symbolizes creation, while the flame in his upper left hand symbolizes destruction. Beneath his foot he crushes the dwarf of ignorance, Apasmara, while maintaining his dance pose in the center of a whirling circle of flames, the very image of stillness in the midst of chaos.28 Perhaps this image of the Hindu god may be discerned in Eliot’s later evocation of the stillness of dance in “Burnt Norton.”

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Other stunning works in the Musée d’éthnographie that might have caught Eliot’s eye were the relic Korwas (brought back from Indonesia by the 1824 Expédition Duperrey) and an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century ancestral figure from Papua New Guinea, currently in the section “Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas” in the Louvre. The latter was part of the collection of Georges de Miré, Louis Carrée, and Pablo Picasso.29 The African section of the Musée d’éthnographie contained, according to Baedeker, “a very important collection of diverse objects.”30 Although items such as weapons and animal horns had been brought back from Africa to Europe in the 1870s and even earlier, they were seen as curiosities or souvenirs that testified to colonial conquest and exploration but were not valued as works of art and had little monetary value, being often found in flea markets and pawnshops. Thus they were typically displayed in ethnographic museums or in private collections.31 Indeed, during his undergraduate years, Eliot may well have seen the collection of African artifacts donated to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology by H. K. and W. E. Faulkner, including such items as wooden masks, wooden figurines, weapons, jewelry, baskets, pottery, and pipes.32

Figure 1.4 Fang mask, Gabon. 19th century. Photo: Musée du Quai Branly / Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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However, in the early 1900s, avant-garde artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso began to see such artifacts as works of art that led beyond European naturalistic representation. Matisse in the fall of 1906 showed Picasso a small African sculpture (a Vili figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo) that he had purchased at a curio shop, and both were impressed by its highly stylized portrayal of the human figure, the flatness of the face, and its lack of emotion.33 Picasso was even more influenced upon seeing the African masks displayed at the Musée d’éthnographie in June 1907 (Figure 1.4), although he complained that “the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat.”34 They showed him, he said, “what painting was all about,” explaining that they represented “a kind of mediation between [human beings] and the unknown hostile forces that [surround] us.”35 While he at first denied it, he later admitted that the masks influenced his 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, often singled out as one of the origins of Cubism.36 These examples of African art contributed to the use of flatness, fragmented figures, geometrical shapes, and abstraction in Cubism and other forms of early modernism. Indeed, in a 1934 Criterion “Commentary” Eliot recalled Matisse and Picasso as central figures in the art world during his student year in France (“discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso”),37 at the time of the sensational public debut of Cubist works at the Salon des indépendants, which took place from April 30 to June 13, 1911 and featured paintings by Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Delaunay, and Léger (Picasso and Braque did not participate). The Musée d’éthnographie housed the African works that inspired their experiments, including a statue dedicated to Gou, the divinity of war and iron, created before 1858 and given to the museum in 1894 (currently in the Louvre), as well as numerous masks such as that of the genie Kaki-Guie, brought back from the Côte d’Ivoire by Maurice Delafosse in 1900. Another statue of Gou, also called the organizer of the world, was a gift of Charles Étournaud in 1895 (currently in the Musée du quai Branly). Eliot may have tracked down these works to see what inspired the modern artists who caused such a sensation in Paris in the spring of 1911. The techniques of fragmentation and multiple perspective used in The Waste Land have been linked with Cubism,38 while the African artifacts themselves may have influenced his constant theme of the savagery of the primitive world present in modern-day civilization, as in the Choruses from The Rock, which insist that the desert is “not remote in southern tropics,” but is present on the Tube.39 The Musée cambodgien was established in 1882 with the collection of explorer Louis Delaporte, the museum’s first director. According to Baedeker, its Khmer art objects included original sculptures, representations of Brahma and Buddha, and reconstitutions of Khmer monuments decorated with ornate motifs such as elephants, lions, and a colossal hydra with seven heads, perhaps Eliot’s introduction to this ancient civilization, where Buddhism and Hinduism coexisted.40 Among the outstanding pieces at the Musée cambodgien were the large and impressive Chaussé des géants (Giant’s Causeway) from the Hindu Temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia, constructed in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century; Vajimukha, a seventh-century statue with a horse’s head and a human body representing either Hayagriva or Kalki, avatars of Vishnu who destroy evil; and a seventh-century representation of the Hindu deity Harihara, which combines Vishnu (Hari) and Shiva (Hara), and a lintel from a temple, both brought from Cambodia by Étienne Aymonier in the 1870s. In

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1927, this collection was transferred to the Guimet prior to the demolition of the Palais du Trocadéro. The Louvre also displayed art from Japan, China, India, Syria, Cypress, and Phoenicia, though the Baedeker guide notes that, with the exception of the rich collection of Japanese and Chinese porcelains in the Louvre’s Grandidier Collection (also called the Musée de l’Extrême-Orient), the holdings of the Musée Guimet and the Musée d’éthnographie were vastly superior.41 The Louvre’s collections of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, Baedeker described as among the richest in Europe.42 After Bergson’s lecture on April 8, 1911, the Easter holidays began and lasted until April 28, when the philosopher’s courses resumed.43 Eliot took advantage of this break to travel to London, marking in his copy of Baedeker’s London and its Environs (1908) the Eastern Religions Room, the Asiatic Saloon, the Chinese and Japanese Porcelain Collection, and the Indian Section in the British Museum, as well as the Turkish, Persian, Chinese, and Saracenic Collections in the South Kensington Museum (the original name of the Victoria and Albert Museum).44 Writing to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley on April 26, 1911, the day after his return to Paris, he tells her that he had not wasted his time in London and lists the places he had visited, including the “Brit[ish] Mus[eum]” and “S. Kensington (in large part),” where he presumably sought out the collections he had marked.45 In the British Museum, according to Baedeker, the Room of Eastern Religions such as Brahmanism and Jainism contained numerous sacred items, the most spectacular of which was “a model of a sacred car for Vishnu (?)” from southern India; this strikingly ornate piece was made of wood with tiny figures, two gold horses, and a red octagonal roof.46 In the next room, titled “Buddhism,” were displayed Japanese, Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese, and Indian sculptures and other works; most intriguing was a “machine used by the Shingon sect in Japan to exorcise the 108 demons that tempt the human heart to sin,”47 thus perhaps reinforcing for the young Eliot in a stunning manner the human proclivity for sin, a theme which haunts his works from beginning to end. In the Asiatic Saloon Eliot saw Japanese and Chinese pottery, porcelain, brass, and bronze items.48 The Ethnographical Collections may have been an attraction to Eliot given the interest of modern artists in Asian and African art at this time, and he may have consulted the British Museum’s 1910 publication Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections along with his Baedeker here. These collections offered Asiatic, African, Oceanic, and American sections, “each containing a great variety of objects illustrating the habits, dress, warfare, handicrafts, etc., of the less civilized inhabitants of the different quarters of the globe,” according to his Baedeker; the name of the collection and this description underline the Western view at the time that the items displayed were not art but examples of the lifestyle of “primitive” civilizations.49 The museum’s African collection dates from 1818 to the end of the nineteenth century following imperial expeditions to what are now Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana; the most important artifacts consisted of a thousand brass plaques from the Benin expedition of 1897.50 Other important collections that would have been displayed at the British Museum at this time were the Asante material collected by Thomas Bowdich in 1818; East African collections from the end of the nineteenth century by A. C. Hollis and others; additions to the Nigerian artifacts by the Temples in 1904 and by P. Amaury Talbot in 1905; and collections from the Congo expedition of Émile Torday in the first decade

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of the twentieth century. Indeed, there was a wealth of material that Eliot could have seen there, including weapons, musical instruments, ceramics, and basketry.51 The Indian Section at the South Kensington Museum is marked with checks in Eliot’s Baedeker. Here were displayed Hindu architecture, carpets, costumes, jewelry, arms and armor, musical instruments, and figures of Buddhist divinities.52 One of the most striking items was a life-sized mechanical tiger devouring a British officer, which Baedeker termed “barbaric”53 and which is still prominently displayed today. Eliot would also have seen two bronze statues of the Shiva Nataraja from India (acquired in 1873 and 1879).54 The Cross Gallery, also marked in his guide, contained Saracenic, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, and Japanese art collections, “all of which will richly repay inspection,” according to Baedeker.55 This gallery held pottery, porcelain, ornaments, tiles, carvings, and screens along with other artifacts, the most impressive of which were a model of a Chinese building sent by the Emperor of China to Josephine, the wife of Bonaparte, but captured by the British; a Japanese equestrian statue; an eagle with outstretched wings of hammered metal; and a colossal bronze figure of a bodhisattva, not unlike the gigantic Buddha in the Cernuschi museum in Paris.56 The African collection at the time contained mainly pieces of jewelry such as bangles, arm and leg rings, earrings, and beaded necklaces, many of which were acquired in the 1870s, in 1901, and in 1904. Asian and African works were on display in several other locations in London as well. In the Wallace Collection, which Eliot visited, were busts of an African king and queen,57 while in the ethnographic collection in the Lady Brassey Museum, constructed in Indian style, were, according to Baedeker, “savage ornaments from South Africa” as well as a doorway from a Buddhist monastery in Tibet and jewelry from India.58 The influence of the Asian and African art that Eliot saw in Paris and London at a very impressionable age and in impressive circumstances may not be as obvious as other influences of this miraculous year, but what he saw dominated his mind and his imagination, both immediately and throughout his life. As I suggested at the outset, the works of Asian art he saw that year may well have inspired him to take graduate courses in Eastern religions, philosophy, and philology upon his return to Harvard. As previously mentioned, in the fall of 1911, he took Sanskrit under Professor C. R. Lanman. The following year, he continued with Lanman’s course in Pali as well as with Professor James H. Woods’s course in Philosophical Sanskrit, in which he studied the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, 196 aphorisms that constitute one of the six main schools of Indian Hinduism. Lanman was the premier American academic in the field of Sanskrit and Pali and an authority on Buddhism, while Woods was a specialist in Indian philosophy.59 In 1913–14, the Japanese scholar Masaharu Anesaki—the first to hold the recently endowed visiting chair in East Asian thought—offered two courses: “Religious and Moral Developments of the Japanese, with reference to Philosophy, Art, and Literature” and “Schools of the Religious and Philosophical Thought of Japan, as compared with those of India and China,”60 which traced the development of Buddhism in those countries. Eliot took extensive notes for the second course.61 Eliot’s religious and philosophical views, his interest in Asian and African art, and his literary works, especially The Waste Land and Four Quartets, bear the marks of this aspect of his 1910–11 year abroad. It permeated other elements of his life, both professional and personal, as well. In his early years as a reviewer he wrote regularly about Asian topics, such as his 1915 essay-review of ten books on India titled “What

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India Is Thinking About To-day”; a 1917 review of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s book “Noh” or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan; two 1918 reviews, of Brahmadarsanam, or Intuition of the Absolute: Being and Introduction to the Study of Hindu Philosophy by Śrî Ānanda Āchārya and Outlines of Jainism by Jagmanderlal Jaini; and a 1925 review of Mudrās: The Ritual Hand-Poses of the Buddha Priests and Shiva Priests by Tyra De Kleen. In addition, his “lifelong engagement” with the works of Rudyard Kipling is seen in his 1909 paper titled “The Defects of Kipling,” written for English 12 at Harvard, his 1919 review of Kipling’s The Years Between, several commentaries in The Criterion, and his introduction to the 1941 A Choice of Kipling’s Verse.62 Furthermore, Daljit Nagra remarks in a BBC broadcast on Eliot’s India that Eliot’s voice as he reads his poetry on recordings often sounds like an Indian chant, and he notes that, as director of Faber and Faber, Eliot published translations of many Indian texts in the 1930s.63 Indeed, his appreciation of non-European art extended beyond his own life and work; he saw it as a crucial component of the culture of the twentieth century in general. In a letter to Mary Hutchinson (tentatively dated July 11, 1919), Eliot gives a short list of what “comprises modern culture” and includes, along with such items as Russian ballet, Flaubert, Mozart, and Bach, “Polynesian, African, Hebridean, Chinese, etc. etc. say savage and Oriental art in general,” noting that he likes most of these items on a personal level but is annoyed by those who like them simply because they are in vogue.64

Notes 1. See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck’s essay, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot’s Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West: A Quarterly of Asian and Comparative Thought 35, no. 2 (April 1985): 115–31; and Cleo Kearns McNelly’s book T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 2. I am grateful to Louise and Guy Serratrice, who introduced me to the Musée Guimet, and Philippe Martial, who advised me to visit the Musée Cernuschi. I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Willis and James Hamill of the British Museum, Gill Saunders and Emma Rogers of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dominique Réninger and Hélène Bayou of the Musée Guimet, Charlotte Lanciot of the Musée Cernuschi, Susan Haskell of the Peabody Museum, and Michael Slade and Kay Menick of Art Resource for aid in securing information and / or illustrations. Readers wishing to see the Asian and / or African holdings at museums mentioned in this essay should go to their online collections. 3. L1, 16–19. 4. Eliot, “What is Minor Poetry?” Welsh Review 3.4 (December 1944) [256]–67, 258; McNelly, Eliot and Indic Traditions, 21. 5. Anita Patterson, “Eliot and Japonism,” a paper delivered at the T. S. Eliot Society conference, September 28, 2013. 6. Roderick Overaa, “ ‘The Lotus Rose, Quietly’: Eliot, Asia, and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis” (paper, T. S. Eliot Society conference, St. Louis, Missouri, September 19, 2014). 7. Complete Prose 1, 21–23; Patterson, “Eliot and Japonism.” 8. Complete Prose 1, 21–22. In replying to Donald Hall’s request in 1950 to reprint Eliot’s prose pieces in The Harvard Advocate Anthology, he replied that “Gentlemen and Seamen” is “not without interest,” but refused permission to include two others (Complete Prose 1, 23, note 4). 9. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 92.

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10. Guide to the Peabody Museum of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1898), 24. 11. Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 93. 12. Eliot, “Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,” Drama New Series 36 (spring 1955): 16. 13. Hélène Prigent, Guimet: National Museum of Asian Arts (Paris: Artlys, 2004), 6. 14. Karl Baedeker, Paris et ses environs, 16th ed. (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1907), 234–37. After Guimet’s death in 1914, the museum’s emphasis shifted to the arts of Asia and, in the ensuing years, collections from other museums were transferred there. 15. C. R. Lanman, “Buddhism,” in Lectures on the Harvard Classics, ed. William Allan Neilson (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1914), 470. 16. CPP, 70. 17. Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot (New York: Penguin, 1976), 20. 18. CPP, 188. 19. Numerous examples of this use of the lotus were displayed in many of the museums that Eliot visited. 20. Chapter 5, verse 10 of The Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Bantam, 1986), 60. 21. CPP, 172. 22. Gilles Béguin, Cernuschi Museum Guide (Paris: Éditions des musées de la Ville de Paris, 2005), 7. 23. Baedeker, Paris et ses environs, 228. 24. Béguin, Cernuschi Museum Guide, 27. 25. Indochina included Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Singapore, and Siam (now Thailand). 26. These museums were closed prior to the demolition of the Palais du Trocadéro in 1935 to make way for a new building. 27. L1, 19. 28. This figure was transferred to the Guimet in 1928 upon the closure of the Musée d’éthnographie. Similar representations of this Hindu god appear in London museums. 29. Ancient art objects were owned not only by these three but also by Max Ernst, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, according to information in this section of the Louvre. Picasso himself had an extensive collection of African art by 1908 (Denise Murrell, “African Influences in Modern Art,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aima/hd_aima.htm (April 2008), 2). Ultimately, he owned 110 objects, including ninety-six from Africa, twelve from Melanesia and Polynesia, and two from Indonesia (Peter Stepan, Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis, trans. Paul Aston and Karin Skawran (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2006), 11). 30. Baedeker, Paris et ses environs, 239. 31. Murrell, “African Influences in Modern Art,” 1–2. She also notes that the earliest art exhibitions in the United States that included African artifacts as works of art were in 1914 at the small gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and in 1923 at the Whitney Studio Club. 32. See Guide to the Peabody Museum, 24, and the online collection. I am grateful to Susan Haskell of the Peabody Museum for providing me with information on the collections prior to 1910 and for alerting me to the 1898 Guide to the Peabody Museum. 33. Murrell, “African Influences in Modern Art,” 2. 34. Quoted in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1989), 266. 35. Quoted in ibid., 266. 36. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881–1906 (New York: Random House, 1991), 475; see also, for example, Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 51, and Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic, 2001), 92. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13 (April 1934): 452. See my discussion of these influences in The Waste Land in T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 136–40. CPP, 149. Baedeker, Paris et ses environs, 238–39. Ibid., 104–6 and 172–73. Ibid., 102. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 846. Eliot’s London Baedeker is now in the Hayward Bequest at King’s College, Cambridge. While the change to the museum’s name occurred in 1899, it was still referred to by its former name for some time. L1, 18. Karl Baedeker, London and its Environs: A Handbook for Travellers (London: Dulau, 1908), 312. Ibid. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 319. “History of the Collection and Department,” Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/departments/ africa,_oceania,_americas/history_of_the_collection.aspx. I am grateful to James Hamill of the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the British Museum for this information. Baedeker, London and its Environs, 163–64. Ibid., 364. I am grateful to Emma Rogers, Assistant Curator of the South and South East Asia department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, for this information as well as that on the golden throne. Baedeker, London and its Environs, 364. Ibid., 364–65. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 335–37. The collections were moved to the Hastings Museum in 1919. See Lanman’s summary of the major tenets of Buddhism in “Buddhism,” 469–74. “History of the Collection and Department,” British Museum. See Perl and Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage,” 116–17, and McNelly, Eliot and Indic Traditions, 11, 22. Complete Prose 1, 11, notes 1 and 2. In “The Defects of Kipling,” Eliot referred to Kipling’s “own special province of literature, the Anglo-Indian Orient” (Complete Prose 1, 8). Daljit Nagra, “T. S. Eliot’s India: Many Gods, Many Voices,” BBC Radio 4 Broadcast, August 10, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037s8mw. L1, 378.

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“Afternoon” at the British Museum Michael Coyle

U

nfolding in “the hall of the British Museum” (Plate 6), Eliot’s manuscript poem “Afternoon” constitutes his most explicit engagement with modern museum culture. With “Mandarins” (1910), “Afternoon” brackets the period of Eliot’s youthful museum-flâneurie, a period that began with his first visit to the British Museum on his European tour of 1910 and closed after he acquired a card of admission to the Reading Room in December 1914. Tentatively dated to this year, “Afternoon” thus was written before Eliot received his reading ticket (Figure 1.5).1 It registers the aesthetic and social meanings that cluster around a single moment of observation in the museum: the poet watches a group of “ladies who are interested in Assyrian art” preparing to tour the galleries. At this point himself a “mere” gallerygoer, not yet having established the Reading Room as his place of study, Eliot was probably not as well versed in its treasures as the intellectual “ladies,” “bluestockings”—women whose education would typically include the kind of museum visits recorded in “Afternoon,” whom he takes as his subject.2 The combination of scorn and envy that shapes the poem’s tone

Figure 1.5 Eliot’s 1914 reader’s card for the Reading Room of the British Museum.

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may reflect the poet’s own position as a neophyte at the doors of a great institution where he had yet to establish an identity. Eliot’s reader’s card, of course, did just that.3 But “Afternoon” reflects an earlier moment. As the ladies’ disappearance at the end of the poem suggests, “Afternoon” records an encounter with the museological sublime. Eliot’s title foregrounds a particular time, although it refers less to the time of day itself than, metonymically, to a practiced, social passing of time in particular places and in socially sanctioned ways. The opening stanza of “Afternoon” might seem to suggest there is something silly about these ladies, that Assyrian art is perhaps but another fashionable detail no more and no less important than their “tailor suits”: “The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art / Gather in the hall of the British Museum. / The faint perfume of last year’s tailor suits / And the steam from drying rubber overshoes / And the green and purple feathers on their hats / Vanish in the sombre Sunday afternoon.”4 That their suits are of last year’s fashion suggests that these ladies are a bit frumpy, apparently lacking the energy to be fashion-forward. We see no individuals, just the group. But one detail here destabilizes the others: the perfume we notice is not from the ladies themselves—it is from “last year’s tailor suits.”5 In other words, the poem opens with attention to the ways that material culture summons history. Read in the context of Eliot’s early poetry, this move might suggest Laforguean satire, where attention to bourgeois materiality serves—in Arthur Symons’s phrase— as a means of squeezing sentiment “out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it.”6 Indeed, the few critics who have commented on “Afternoon” have primarily noted Eliot’s debts to Laforgue. Ronald Schuchard identifies “Afternoon” as a “Laforguean” poem, characteristically ironic in its mention of the “absolute.”7 Similarly, in his Times Literary Supplement review of Christopher Ricks’s edition of Inventions of the March Hare, Steven Romer calls it “dandified social observation . . . a decidedly Laforguean vignette.”8 But “Afternoon” is more than a snicker at bourgeois self-seriousness and folly. The speaker might initially seem blasé, and the setting might be the kind of Sunday afternoon that is the subject of Laforgue’s posthumous Dimanches (Sundays), but “Afternoon” pushes off from, and indeed pushes beyond, the smugness that characterizes Laforgue’s apostrophes to “Sundays, banished from sight / Of the infinite.”9 Laforguean features endure in “Afternoon,” but their functionality changes. In “Afternoon,” as in “Prufrock” or in “Portrait of a Lady,” the joke turns on the speaker, and on us. The extent of this development might quickly be gauged by contrasting “Afternoon” with “Spleen,” a poem Eliot published in the Harvard Advocate in January 1910. “Spleen” opens with a flâneur-like observation: “Sunday: this satisfied procession / Of definite Sunday faces; / Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces / In repetition that displaces / Your mental self-possession / By this unwarranted digression.”10 The “procession”—and the speaker’s attention to the attire of the women passing by— anticipates the opening of “Afternoon.” But “Afternoon” is unconstrained by the speaker’s concern with his own “mental self-possession.” Neither does it self-dismissively apologize for its existence (“this unwarranted digression”). Where Laforgue’s poetry treats Sunday as ironically displacing “the ideal” (the very mention of which ordinarily produces a hyper-sophisticated yawn from the poet), and “Spleen” derides the “satisfied” procession of definite, sanctimonious “Sunday faces,” “Afternoon” is set in the veritable temple, as we shall see, of bourgeois civilization: not in church, but in the British Museum.

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“Afternoon” resonates broadly with early modernist concerns about the relation of poetry to history, tradition, and culture. Although Eliot never published the poem, he did copy it into a letter to his Harvard friend and fellow poet, Conrad Aiken.11 At around the same time, Ezra Pound wrote that “when words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”12 Pound, as Michael Levenson notes, refused to put his trust in the ineffable and preferred things to words.13 History is not just the material of the Cantos; the poem builds around what Pound characterized in Guide to Kulchur as “whole slabs of the record.”14 For Pound, poetic language calls attention to its own materiality, and the Cantos strain tirelessly, perhaps even heroically, to unpack history itself from the language in which it is written: the total history preserved in the materiality of language, a sign that always exceeds the signified. But Eliot’s poetry treats things in a very different, sometimes opposite, way— as portals to the metaphysical—and no other Eliot poem thematizes this impulse more than does “Afternoon,” which closes with the “ladies” moving beyond where the poet can follow, “towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute.” Where Pound would celebrate, say, the fifteenth-century Tempio Malatestiano for the ways in which it physically incorporated elements from earlier historical eras, Eliot sees the modern temple of the muses—the museum—as there to inspire wonder. It is not the temple itself that matters; it is not even the things gathered inside the temple: Eliot’s museum is a liminal space where the profane and the sacred interact intimately, even promiscuously. For Eliot, women play a special role in this interaction precisely to the extent that he typically sees them for better and for worse as embodying culture (consider by way of examples Cousin Nancy, the addressee of “Portrait of a Lady,” or the typist in “The Fire Sermon”). But that the “ladies” of “Afternoon” are interested in Assyrian art is no random detail. In the decades before the Great War, Assyrian art would have carried its own perfume, redolent of a long Victorian vogue that inspired a thousand Church of England sermons using Nineveh as a warning for the prideful British Empire, as well as a steady stream of poetic responses from some of the most celebrated poets of the era.15 As an anonymous reviewer reflected in 1830, Assyria “has lately become a singular favorite among poets. . . . Philosophize as we may on the causes, Sardanapalus and Nineveh now are, and ever will be, subjects for poetry.”16 By 1909, when Pound published his “And Thus in Nineveh,” any social interest in Assyrian art would itself have been already a bit fusty, rather like “last year’s tailor suits”—not exactly déclassé but no longer smart. Fashionableness is not, of course, what Eliot’s bluestockings are seeking. In the short and syntactically incomplete second stanza (as they move across the hall, what?), the women execute a vanishing act, fading “beyond the Roman statuary.” If the prospect of these “ladies” engaging with the hyper-masculine, invariably martial art of ancient Assyria initially seems risible, this vanishing creates an aestheticizing distance. For all that their feathered hats and drying galoshes might seem signs of folly, they demonstrate signs of vitality and life on an otherwise “sombre Sunday afternoon” that threatens to swallow up them and the speaker alike.17 And yet, as they cross the entry hall of the museum, as if strolling across a lawn, we last see them on their way to “the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute”—on their way to powerful, sublime, even spiritual forces infinitely greater than themselves.

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The ladies of “Afternoon” invite comparison with their more famous sisters who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Sarah Lyall noted this relation in a review of March Hare for the New York Times, calling “The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art / Gather in the hall of the British Museum,” a less successful version of Prufrock’s lines.18 Lyall’s dismissal calls to mind a familiar argument about Eliot’s treatment of women talking about culture. In 1950, Dame Helen Gardner infamously scoffed that “the absurdity of [women] discussing [Michelangelo’s] giant art, in high-pitched feminine voices, drifting through the drawing-room, adds merely extra irony to the underlying sense of the lines.”19 As Ricks has noted, John Crowe Ransom, Grover Smith, and Hugh Kenner all echoed Gardner’s “contempt.”20 This way of reading Prufrock as the too-sensitive soul surrounded by prattling culture vultures remained something like critical orthodoxy for half a century and more. But the problem in “The Love Song” is not the women’s—it is Prufrock’s: Prufrock, who freezes at the every prospect of living exchange; Prufrock, who seems afraid of women, petrified by sexuality and incapacitated by the duality of human nature. “In short,” he acknowledges to himself, “I was afraid.” Those women who “come and go” possess a kind of courage that Prufrock himself seems unable to muster. He fears intimacy as much as he might the superficiality of social gatherings where a waiter “lifts and drops a question on your plate.” This dismissive way of understanding Eliot’s women drawn to the arts persists even in more recent feminist scholarship. Writing of “Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock,” Rachel Potter notes that “women are depicted as being outside a cultural language they use and abuse.”21 Women, in this context, are strangers to a culture that pointedly does not include them. Any discoursing by them about art must inevitably remain inauthentic. The historical reception of “Prufrock” thus demonstrates an unmistakable and self-reproducing pattern. But where does the pattern really leave us? Does the poem entitle readers to distinguish themselves from the discoursing women, and should readers be so quick to do so? In fact, because of its perceived parallel with “Prufrock,” “Afternoon” offers an opportunity to rethink the poetic function of these society ladies. The women in “Prufrock” are doing nothing necessarily inappropriate, but they do, nevertheless, serve as a sign for ordinary behavior within the usual constraints of polite society. Whether their talk of Michelangelo leads them to deeper experience is not a question the poem answers, or even asks: they appear primarily as an index of J. Alfred’s dysfunction. The “ladies” of “Afternoon” represent something more. The poem concludes with a vision of transformation that implicitly affects the speaker as much as it does the bluestockings to whom he initially condescends. In Eliot’s notebook, “Afternoon” follows the poem “Paysage Triste,” another flâneur poem that contemplates the relation of women to culture, but with a significant difference. In “Paysage Triste,” a self-ironizing dramatic monologue defines women by their social status, the first stanza obsessing about a working-class “girl” the speaker saw on the bus. The speaker may be confessing to his more socially appropriate female friend (a woman who knows “how to sit and what to wear”), whom he seems to address in the second and third stanzas, or voicing desires only to himself. In the speaker’s different praises for these women separated by class lies a deeper complaint about the constrictions of polite society. He fantasizes about the red-haired girl he saw on the bus and who

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noticed his gaze (the speaker tells himself that she approved), subsequently imagining her moving about in her “chamber” with “loosened hair” and “naked feet.” The speaker’s attraction to the unknown woman on the bus and his belief that she approves his attention have a precedent in Baudelaire’s “À une passante” (1857): Lightning . . . then darkness! Lovely fugitive whose glance has brought me back to life! But where is life—not this side of eternity? Elsewhere! Too far, too late, or never at all! Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you—you Whom I might have loved and who knew that too!22 Baudelaire’s speaker knows nothing of this passing stranger except that she excites his sense of beauty and so his love. She strikes him as being ennobled (as well as made available) by her mourning. He passes her closely enough that when she glances at him he sees her eyes are “ashen.” Her glance, he affirms, “has brought me back to life,” and the sonnet closes with the flâneur-speaker imagining this passing stranger reciprocated his desire. This anonymous encounter gives rise to a moment of transcendence, fusing aesthetic and erotic excitement. “Paysage Triste” develops and accelerates only one side of Baudelaire’s fusion. Encountering the girl not as a pedestrian but as another rider on an omnibus, the speaker experiences a sexual arousal that is pointedly unrefined by any aesthetic or spiritual elevation. In fact, the girl’s attractiveness owes almost everything to her class status. As in “À une passante,” the speaker is physically close enough to her to see the color of her eyes (blue), but socially they remain worlds apart, so that he closes his eyes to see her as he wants her to be. He thinks of her still, later, while in the opera box with his more socially appropriate companion. While the girl on the bus controls her power to see by lowering her eyes, the speaker has his polite companion’s glasses in his keeping; her prodding was meant to get him to hand over her glasses, but the poem does not say that he did so. The girl on the bus is a physical body, a primitive; the lady in the box embodies culture. In “Paysage Triste,” seeing and imagining collide even more violently than they do in “Afternoon.” The French title, “Paysage Triste,” or “dreary landscape,” excites anticipations that the poem raises without satisfying. As in Baudelaire, the scenery here is urban, more cityscape than landscape, and not only an imagined one but also private—more mindscape than cityscape. That the speaker’s opera-box companion cannot share this view is suggested by the fact that he holds her opera-glasses—and her prodding him to hand them over only sends him deeper still into his internal reverie. Here the material object of the opera-glasses summons neither the relationship between this couple nor the public world of opera performance so much as the private world of both sexual fantasy and poetic fantasia. The poem ends with a self-portrait that is all irony: a “smiling stripling” with a “pink soaped face” whose apparent propriety is a mask for restless and destabilizing desire. Of course, the irony does not stop there: the face of the girl on the bus functions as little more than a screen on which the speaker projects his desire: both his desire for her and his desire for a life more fulfilling than the social passing of time in socially sanctioned ways. There are, thus, several ways in which the “paysage” is “triste.” Like “Afternoon,” “Paysage Triste” imagines

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a female figure at a vanishing point. Both poems develop potentially arresting concerns with vision. Both poems treat women as embodying, not Baudelairean spiritual ideals, but culture. The “ladies” of “Afternoon” are of the right class (which is to say the speaker’s class) even if their sense of “what to wear” is imperfect, but they attempt something that the speaker’s opera-box companion in “Paysage Triste” does not. For her, so much at ease in the darkened auditorium, attending the opera seems primarily a social occasion. Opera figures in “Paysage Triste” not as high art or intense aesthetic experience but simply as the kind of leisure activity reserved for those of the young man’s class. The speaker of “Paysage Triste” strains against such reservations without showing the kind of energy breaking them would require. The “ladies who are interested in Assyrian art” may lack energy for fashion, but in aesthetic pursuit they prove to be cut from different cloth. Indifferent to punctilio but genuinely enthusiastic for the art that brings them to a social space, these women are “amateurs” in the sense that they love, and “comedians” because they pursue that love so unabashedly, so unselfconsciously. Despite their very different social station, they are kindred to the sailors of the canceled draft of “Death by Water”: “The sailor, attentive to the charts and to the sheets, / A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide, / Retains, even ashore, in public bars or streets / Something inhuman, clean, and dignified.”23 The “something inhuman” that the sailors retain, even while making fools of themselves ashore, is a humbling sense of the infinite; the dignity of these sailors comes from having learned their own insignificance amidst the vastness of the sea. Eliot’s sailors are in familiar ways primitives far removed from the proprieties and niceties of modern life. By contrast, the women of “Afternoon,” like the women Prufrock imagines meeting at some soirée, are moderns who must go out of their way to encounter the absolute. Their attire—and, here, their gender—exemplify Eliot’s use of “objective correlatives,” signifying that civilized life. They must go to where Eliot had in 1914 been spending long hours working—they must go to the British museum.24 For all that they must go to an appointed place at appointed times to escape the limits of the ordinary, once in the museum they can potentially meet the absolute. The British Museum was not the first museum in the modern sense, but it arguably was the first to realize the function of the modern museum—that “house of the muses.” A museum is a temple to those gods sacred to modernity: culture and science, history and the state. Modern museums by design confound the distinctions between the sacred and the profane, between art and politics, between the historically contingent and the absolute. They can be places in which society gathers and in which it can be important to be seen, but they can also serve as shelters from the merely quotidian. The development of the British Museum marked a profound paradigm shift in how we view both history and the objects it bequeaths to us. More than the Wunderkabinette of the Renaissance, the universal survey that was from the start the mission of the British Museum (and of modern museums in general) occasioned new ways of seeing and established new relations to historical artifacts. The museum emerged from Enlightenment ideals, collecting and classifying both the natural and cultural worlds, rationalizing the development of civilization and trying to uncover its uniform laws. To this ambition the British Museum joined another: to be a national schoolroom and to instill superior standards of taste as means of improving civic life. In such a context, art objects came to be taken as artifacts, as signs in a new syntax that was history itself.

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At the same time, the universal survey functioned by reminding visitors of their own historical situatedness; history was not just collected and organized in the museum, but emanated from it. The standpoint of the viewer became itself productive. The British Museum took shape around the extraordinary collection of wonders (80,000 objects) gathered by Sir Hans Sloane, who, on his death in 1753, offered his collection to the nation.25 An act of Parliament moved the collection to Montagu House, and the museum began admitting visitors on January 15, 1759. The museum as we know it today, however, is arguably as much a product of empire and war as it is of Sloane’s collection. It was formed in particular by two great shocks to its classical artifacts and orientation. First, in 1801, following Britain’s defeat of the Napoleonic army at the Battle of the Nile, came an enormous collection of Egyptian antiquities. As Stephanie Moser explains, “When the French forces landed in Egypt in 1798 to conquer the Ottoman leaders who were ruling the country, a team of 167 scientists and technicians accompanied them with the aim of recording the monuments and natural history of Egypt. . . . This scholarly expedition was a fundamental part of the military campaign itself, the rationale being that the information collected would enable the French to better conquer Egypt.”26 Despite the fact that the British Museum was not initially interested in these artifacts—their association with French Imperial ambitions seems actually to have counted against them—the weight of public interest eventually led to action.27 These sometimes colossal antiquities soon enough required the creation of additional and more structurally robust spaces, and a new Egyptian gallery was “designed to highlight the artistic attainments of the classical world.”28 In other words, the display of Egyptian artifacts at first aimed to demonstrate their inferiority to Greco-Roman classical tradition. This aim would change, both as a result of the artistry of the objects themselves and also of a second shock to Eurocentric convictions. In 1825, Claudius James Rich, English Resident of the East India Company at Baghdad, shipped to the British Museum “two small fragments of carved stone” from the Mesopotamian mound of Kalah Sharkat; these represent the first Assyrian artifacts acquired by the British Museum.29 The artifacts may have been small, but they were enough to excite another Franco-British competition. That competition was won by Austin Henry Layard, who was in 1845 commissioned by the British Ambassador in Constantinople to begin excavations into the mound of Nimrud.30 Those excavations led to the rediscovery of lost Assyria, and ultimately to a re-evaluation of biblical history as well as of the very purpose of the museum itself. Ian Jenkins, Curator of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, has written the history of this re-evaluation. Between the Romantic and Modernist periods, aesthetes and archeologists debated the museum’s principles of collection and display. The aesthetic ideas that originally guided principles of collection and display, whereby the treasures of human history were to be gathered to inspire and guide the nation, gave way over the course of the nineteenth century to more archaeological— more scientific—principles. Jenkins sees the relation between these two curatorial principles as a matter of transition. For Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, however, the relationship is less about historical development than it is a matter of dialectical opposition. On the one hand is resonance: “the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken

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by a viewer to stand”; on the other hand, wonder is “the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.”31 Wonder, Greenblatt explains, works to textualize history while resonance attempts the historicization of the text or object. If, as Jenkins suggests, the debate between beauty and history has never conclusively been resolved, for Greenblatt this is a fortunate thing. There is, nonetheless, no mistaking that universal survey museums have come to be organized on historical rather than aesthetic principles. The modern museum is a temple to culture—but culture primarily in its anthropological sense—and Clio, the muse of history, is the goddess who presides over the temple. Jenkins is right that there has been a historical shift, apparent in the many poems written about objects in the British Museum since the mid eighteenth century, and Greenblatt is right about the enduring value of wonder. Wonder endures as a curatorial principle, but its functionality has changed. When Layard’s Assyrian treasures reached the British Museum in 1849 they “were greeted with intense curiosity and interest, and Assyrian civilization had a considerable impact on the art and literature of the nineteenth century.”32 By 1850 there was already a long tradition of English poets treating the fall of Nineveh as moral exemplum and using it as a warning to the British Imperium—scripture-inspired poems like Sir John Sinclair’s “An Antidote against Revolutions: The Land of Nineveh. A Fragment” (1790), Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815), or Edwin Atherstone’s “The Fall of Nineveh” (1828, but sufficiently popular as to be revised and reprinted as late as 1868).33 Although biblical verses continued to inform post-Layard poems that took Nineveh as topic and theme—as in Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional” (1897), Robert Crawford’s “In Nineveh” (1909), or Marianne Moore’s “Is Your Town Nineveh?” (1916)—after Layard, material history begins to dominate scripture as the basis for Nineveh-themed poetry. The shift is obvious in a poem like Charles Christopher Bowen’s “Stat Nominis Umbra: Lines Suggested by Layard’s Discovery of the Ruins of Nineveh” (1861), but it was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh” (1856) that opened the field and that lies most immediately behind Eliot’s “Afternoon.” In our Museum galleries To-day I lingered o’er the prize Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes,— Her Art for ever in fresh wise From hour to hour rejoicing me. Sighing I turned at last to win Once more the London dirt and din; And as I made the swing-door spin And issued, they were hoisting in A wingèd beast from Nineveh.34 Rossetti’s poem opens with his own “afternoon”: he had gone searching for the soul of John Keats by way of what the British Museum used to call the Elgin Gallery, his purpose being to commune with and draw inspiration from the elevated beauty of the Parthenon friezes. The art of Greece is forever fresh, the poet tells us, and the gallery functions as a source of spiritual renewal after the “dirt and din” of modern London. Once having received his spiritual nourishment, he made his way out of the gallery

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and through the entry hall—only to be blocked at the exit by something monstrous, something inhuman, clean, and dignified: A human face the creature wore, And hoofs behind and hoofs before, And flanks with dark runes fretted o’er. ’Twas bull, ’twas mitred Minotaur, A dead disbowelled mystery: The mummy of a buried faith Stark from the charnel without scathe, Its wings stood for the light to bathe,— Such fossil cerements as might swathe The very corpse of Nineveh. In fact, what Rossetti encounters here is not just an Asiatic sublime to counter classical beauty—what he encounters is a new faith born of an ancient one long-forgotten. Rossetti’s poem emphasizes that this wingèd beast too came from deep in the earth, and has in this sense a certain unlooked-for kinship with the “dirt and din” of modern London. For Rossetti, the museum is no place of escape from the world so much as it represents the apotheosis of ordinary life, and in this way among others it establishes a vision still taking new shape sixty years later in Eliot’s “Afternoon.” The “Burden” of Rossetti’s title functions in multiple intersecting and meta-poetic ways. “Burden” signifies the failures for which Nineveh is being called to account; it signifies the responsibilities that Nineveh has passed to Britain, one world power to another; and—in the same sense that Yeats would play with in “Three Songs to the One Burden” (1939)—it signifies the “song” that Rossetti is moved to make.35 It is in the last of these senses that Rossetti’s “Burden” most crucially prepares the ground for Eliot’s poem. Rossetti was interested in neither the romance of ruins nor the irony of triumphal architecture from a vanquished and vanished culture. He did not, like Shelley, write about an object he had never seen (“Ozymandias”); he did not, like Keats, rhapsodize about a museum object (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”) without recognizing his experience as being of the museum. Rossetti understood the museum’s function as a temple not only to culture but also to the state. More than any poet before him—and most after—Rossetti understood that the power of a museum to enshrine and aestheticize objects owes greatly to its ability to cathect material objects with historical resonance. The opening to “Burden” has it that the poem arose from chance experience: “as I made the swing-door spin / And issued, they were hoisting in / A wingèd beast from Nineveh.” Two details make it unlikely that he was in the museum the day that Layard’s wingèd bulls were installed. First, it is highly unlikely that the museum would have attempted the installation of a twenty-ton object at a time when visitors were underfoot. Second, Rossetti’s signature does not appear in the British Museum Reading Room sign-in books (preserved in the museum archives) for that day. Rossetti did, however, sign in a week later, presumably after seeing the famous image in The Illustrated London News (Figure 1.6).36 Rossetti’s visit is, in other words, itself a trope. Rossetti’s locating himself in the museum that day serves to invoke Keatsian notions of the beautiful and contrast them with Blakean notions of the sublime: “A human face

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Figure 1.6 A winged lion from the palace of Sargon II in Khorsabad, delivered to the museum in 1856; not the guardian spirit about which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote, but the image that informs the opening of “Burden of Nineveh.” Illustrated London News (February 28, 1852), 184. the creature wore, / And hoofs behind and hoofs before, / And flanks with dark runes fretted o’er.” But aesthetic sublimity is not the point: what most excites Rossetti is the way in which this object summons the world that made it: as “mummy of a buried faith” and “the very corpse of Nineveh,” the beast stands not for itself and not even for the artist who made it: it is there as synecdoche for a vanished civilization—or at least a civilization vanished until the recovery of this artifact. Ever mindful that the beast has been removed from “charnel” to church—to the museum—the poem concludes with the striking thought that archaeologists another two thousand years hence might one day dig up London, recognize the museum as a temple, and regard the beast as the god of the English: “O Nineveh, was this thy God,— / Thine also, mighty Nineveh?” Like Eliot’s “Afternoon,” Rossetti’s “Burden” displays ambivalence about the kinds of visitors who will now come to see the beast: Now, thou poor god, within this hall Where the blank windows blind the wall From pedestal to pedestal, The kind of light shall on thee fall Which London takes the day to be: While school-foundations in the act Of holiday, three files compact, Shall learn to view thee as a fact Connected with that zealous tract: “ROME,— Babylon and Nineveh.”

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The poem’s uneasy distinction between the poet’s experience as visitor and the schoolchildren in “three files compact” turns on a concern about modes of perception. Schools will present this “poor god” as a beast; children will study the sculpture “as a fact” of history. The succession (actually, in classical-historical terms, a regression) of ancient capitals, “Rome,—Babylon, Nineveh,” exemplifies the ways in which preachers had been invoking Nineveh as a righteous warning to the excesses of empire, even as the dash after “Rome” suggests a still older lesson newly present. Rossetti’s poem offers an implicit alternative; it focuses on an experience rather than on a thing, and treats that experience as dynamic, unsettling, and inspiring. The artifact may be historical and may lead to sustained mediation, but if viewed imaginatively, viewed poetically, it can all the same inspire wonder. Hinged on the modern sense of the museum as sacred space, this emphasis on modes of perception carries over sixty years later into Eliot’s “Afternoon.” Eliot’s poem represents several different transformations. First, the ladies who make their way to the Assyrian exhibit become, under the speaker’s gaze, themselves the exhibit. But whereas the “ladies of uncertain age” of “Mandarins” sit tranquilly sipping their tea and the poem emphasizes their gentility, the ladies of “Afternoon” are active and perhaps not quite so refined. Although the poem does not name them as such, their identification as “ladies,” their hapless fashion sense, and their very interest in Assyrian art identifies them as bluestockings. The template for such group tours had been set by British classicist Jane Harrison, who between 1880 and 1922 pioneered the giving of “perambulatory” lectures in the British Museum. As Harrison remembered, “I was studying at the British Museum when Sir Charles Newton, the then Keeper of Antiquities, asked me one day if I would not take some parties of ladies round. He could not ask me officially but he thought I might explain some things to the ladies.”37 Age-old obstacles barring most women from higher education (or even from being asked “officially” to lecture in the national museum) brought cultural significance to courses such as Harrison’s, but because Harrison was not merely an example of such projects, her own attitude toward Assyrian art demands notice. “Why,” she asked, “when Egypt and Assyria and Phoenicia are dead, is Greece alone untouched by time, vital forever?”38 Her premise here (Greek art is forever fresh) could have been Rossetti’s, but her conclusion most decidedly was not: she found in Greek art a “largeness and universality which outlives the individual race and persists for all time.”39 Harrison was focused on the rituals of ancient Greece. Eliot’s “Afternoon,” with its flâneur-like transformation of museumgoers, observes the rituals in and of the British Museum. For Harrison, aesthetic pleasure resides in the ability to think away the foreground and to contemplate instead the motionless distance. For Eliot, the contextualizing power of the museum is a positive and transformative force. When Eliot wrote in 1919 that “Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum,”40 he was not immediately considering material culture—what he meant in this instance was the British Reading Room, now removed from the Museum and housed since 1997 in its new purpose-built facility at St. Pancras as the British Library. But his point in urging the importance of imagination is all the same pertinent. What Shakespeare was unable physically to view, he made up for with vision. How we look at something can be more important than what it is we see. Nevertheless, Eliot continues, “what is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past.”41

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For Eliot, the museum is one such place where “the consciousness of the past” can be cultivated, but the larger question remains: what is it to be cultivated for? The dynamically unstable conclusion of “Afternoon” suggests, modestly, one answer. The poem does not attempt to represent the ladies’ experience of transport—although in the final line the poet possibly sees them at last as fellow travelers. “Afternoon” attempts neither Keatsian rhapsody nor the studied and carefully framed epiphany of Rossetti, but instead gives form to the moment immediately before that kind of release. The poet is in the museum too, but he watches these lovers of Assyrian art at a safe remove, aestheticizing not so much their excursion as his own experience of it. As the ladies fade from his view they look “like amateur comedians across a lawn”: the purposeful gracelessness of physical comedy here expands—the ladies are like amateur comedians not fully in control of their movement. The simile whereby the entry hall of the museum is figured as a lawn is another sign of the museum’s function in society life—a life in which these bluestockings are not particularly interested, and in which they seem rather out of place. But the point is not that they head toward the Assyrian galleries as though across a lawn but rather that the speaker views them as if from across a lawn: across an aestheticizing distance. A lawn represents a manicured, ornamental space, a sign of social status; the museum can be taken as such a space, but if it is, then these ladies will inevitably seem comic, and the final line of the poem undercuts such a reading. Eliot’s simile here functions a bit like the simile in the opening line of “A Game of Chess”: “The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.” There, the simile functions to underscore that the woman’s overwrought chair is no throne at all; in “Afternoon,” the simile functions to distinguish these ladies from any interest in mere social status. The second stanza of “Afternoon” enacts a second transformation, a Baudelairean one, finding beauty in comic gracelessness and form in quotidian life. The speaker is that kind of “painter of modern life,”42 but he operates at one further remove from Baudelaire’s flâneur: he not only is not “of” the crowd, he is not even in it. Observed from the near distance, the ladies “vanish” and “fade” from view precisely as they approach the Assyrian gallery and leave ordinary experience behind. This fading is a historical journey as much as it is a physical one, in this way becoming metaphysical. Strikingly, the movement past Rome to deeper antiquity parallels Rossetti’s “Rome,— Babylon, Nineveh”: part of Nineveh’s power comes from this sense of it somehow being over the horizon line of familiar history. Assyria retained its biblical resonance well into the twentieth century, even as archaeology worked to bring it into history. As the ladies move beyond the speaker’s view they leave social space and enter the sacred space of the museum. In the social space they move beyond they shamble “like amateur comedians across a lawn.” But as they vanish from our view—as they leave the world of socially sanctioned appointments—they move “towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute.” We do not know if they reach these things. We have no access to their inner lives and have no way of knowing if they themselves understand what the speaker affirms so certainly. Whether the speaker makes that approach with them is as uncertain as whether we ourselves, as readers, do. As recent museum theorists like Fiona McLean have established, the business of a museum is not simply to display treasures—it is to shape and structure the experience of visitors: “Museums control and subordinate history and nature to contemporary definitions of social reality. They embody the past for ‘the

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tourist gaze.’ ”43 Like poems, museums give form to experience: “Afternoon” is finally less important as an account of the speaker’s experience than it is as a form of experience for its readers. For this reason above all, it matters that the speaker’s aestheticization of these ladies seems to promise their transfiguration. In formal terms, the poem develops a series of evaporating contexts: the ladies are on their way to experience Assyrian artifacts beyond the vision of the poem; the speaker’s experience observing the ladies leads him to a vision beyond that afternoon in the museum; and the poem leaves its readers with what is perhaps the most strikingly Keatsian moment in Eliot’s oeuvre—an ending that is not just open, but epiphanic. There is finally no other way for this poem that sees its figures approaching “the ineffable” to end, approaching as it does the limits of material history and of language itself. The poem is called “Afternoon” but, in the end, the afternoon does not matter. Pound’s “Canto VIII” (1923) opens with a nod to Eliot and a catfight between the muses of history and epic poetry: These fragments you have shelved (shored). “Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope Slanging each other sous les lauriers Eliot was very much on Pound’s mind at this point, it having been only a year since Pound had performed his editorial ministrations on the typescripts and manuscripts of The Waste Land. Clio (here figured as “Truth”) represents those “whole slabs of the record” Pound wrote about in Guide to Kulchur—language treated as material history. Calliope represents the transformative power of poetry—its ability to inspire wonder. Neither goddess would prevail in the Cantos: Pound would spend the next half-century trying to find ways to make archival material sing. But for Eliot it was never much of a question, and “Afternoon” would, with the possible exception of “Gerontion” six years later—where “signs are taken for wonders” and we see “Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians,”44—remain the last poem he preserved that relates our capacity for wonder to material history.

Notes 1. This tentative date is offered in Christopher Ricks in IMH, xl. 2. Of course, almost from its origins in the eighteenth century, the term often carried negative connotations. As Kathryn Hughes has observed in the context of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, “As Miss Bingley emphasizes, it was important for a well-educated girl to soften her erudition with a graceful and feminine manner. No-one wanted to be called a ‘blue-stocking,’ the name given to women who had devoted themselves too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits. Blue-stockings were considered unfeminine and off-putting in the way that they attempted to usurp men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority.” See Kathryn Hughes, “Gender Roles in the 19th Century,” http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-rolesin-the-19th-century. 3. Like Pound, H. D., and Richard Aldington, Eliot found that he could turn the museum into his office—a nice trick to help allay some of the insecurities presented by such a monument to power, history, and culture. 4. IMH, 53. 5. This detail also invites comparison with Prufrock’s wondering if it is “perfume from a dress / that makes me so digress?” Here, too, we find a displacement—a mediation—whereby the perfume is associated with some material object rather than with the women themselves.

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6. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, rev. ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 60. Eliot’s own copy of this book was the 1908 edition. 7. Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 231. 8. Stephen Romer, “The Hand of Laforgue’s Shadow: Roots and Readings of Eliot’s Unpublished Early Verse,” Times Literary Suplement 3 (April 1998): 20. 9. The Poems of Jules Laforgue, trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil Press, 1986); this particular line is from Dimanches XI: “Ô Dimanches bannis / De l’Infini” (274). 10. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967), 26. 11. See Eliot’s letter to Conrad Aiken of February 25, 1915, in L1, 95–96. 12. Ezra Pound, “Affirmations: Analysis of This Decade,” published in the New Age 11 (February 1915); reprinted in A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1974), 114. 13. Michael Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 111. 14. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1938; rpt. 1970), 30. 15. Among more celebrated contemporaneous examples, see Lord Byron’s “Sardanapalus” (1821), Henry Burgess’s 1853 translation of the fourth-century St. Syrus Ephraem’s “The Repentance of Nineveh: A Metrical Homily,” Edwin Atherstone’s The Fall of Nineveh: A Poem in 30 Books (1828; repub. 1868), or Edward George Kent’s “Nineveh” (1859). The year 1851 alone saw the publication of three poems (two of them prize poems) called “Nineveh”: by Edward Henry Bickersteth, Alfred William Hunt, and T. H. Jex-Blake. 16. Anonymous review of Edwin Atherstone’s The Fall of Nineveh: A Poem in The Dublin Literary Gazette 12 (March 20, 1830): 181–83. 17. As Beci Dobbin has observed, Eliot’s knowledge of women’s apparel can be surprising. Typically his descriptions of women’s clothing function as objective correlatives for their inner life. See Beci Dobbin, interview by Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine, July 20, 2012, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/ts-eliots-untrendy-underwear/. 18. Sarah Lyall, “40 Poems that Eliot Wanted to Hide, Including Some on the Bawdy Side,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 23, 1996. Similar commentary can be found in Janine Catalano’s undergraduate thesis for the University of Pennsylvania’s Humanities Forum: “Envisioning Cultural Visions: Visual Arts in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot” (2006). 19. Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 84. 20. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 12–13. 21. Rachel Potter, “T. S. Eliot, Women, and Democracy,” in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, ed. Cassandra Laity and Nancy Gish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222. 22. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), 97–98. Baudelaire’s original: “Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!—Fugitive beauté / Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, / Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? // Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! / Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, / Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!” (275–76). 23. WLF, 55. 24. See Eliot’s letter to Conrad Aiken of February 25, 1915, in L1, 95–96. 25. Marjorie Caygill and Christopher Date, Building the British Museum (London: The British Museum Press, 1999), 11–12. 26. Stephanie Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 66. 27. Ibid., 72–73.

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28. Ibid., 76. 29. Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Gardens of the British Museum 1800–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 153. 30. Ibid., 155. 31. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 4 (January 1990): 11–34. 32. J. E. Curtis, in Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum, ed. Curtis and J. E. Reade (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 211. 33. Jonah 1–3; Nahum 1:1; Matthew 12:41. 34. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 55. 35. In this sense, Rossetti was anticipated by Charles Bowen, who wrote that “The haughty and the strong / Give but a burden for the shepherd’s song.” Bowen, “Stat Nominis Umbra: Lines Suggested by Layard’s Discovery of the Ruins of Nineveh,” in Poems (Christchurch, New Zealand: Union Office, 1861), 112–14. 36. The image Rossetti saw was in The Illustrated London News, February 28, 1852, 184. 37. Jane Harrison, Pall Mall Gazette, November 4, 1891, 1; quoted in Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55. 38. Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, 89. 39. Ibid. 40. SE, 6. 41. Ibid. 42. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 1–40; see especially 5–13. 43. Fiona McLean, Marketing the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19. 44. Consider the third stanza of “Gerontion,” where the speaker turns from cultivated flowering trees to Limoges porcelain to the paintings of Titians: “History has many cunning passages.”

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2 The Modern Bacchanal: Eliot and Matisse John D. Morgenstern

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he poems that Eliot recorded in the notebook now published as Inventions of the March Hare indicate his early sensitivity to the conventions that both limit and define art forms. Eliot’s introduction to these aesthetic rules came during his teenage years, when his mother gave him a copy of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).1 Pater’s study provided Eliot and his generation with a touchstone in the field of aesthetics, surveying centuries of philosophical discourse concerned with the relationship between art forms. While allowing that poetry or painting “may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art,” Pater concludes that each distinct art has “its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm” and its own limitations determined by its “responsibilities to its material.”2 Eliot’s predilection to thread his own texts with inspiration drawn from other art forms prompted him to confront these limitations in a draft poem copied into his notebook under the title “Second Caprice in North Cambridge” (1909). Borrowing the language of Pater, Eliot’s roving narrator finds “unexpected charm” in the conventionally unpoetic “débris of a city” in the first stanza, giving pause in the second to measure this seeming transgression of “our definitions / And our aesthetic laws.” From this moment of contemplation onward, Eliot’s poetry repeatedly enters into the discourse of aesthetics, at once registering and redefining the limits of his art. Within a few years, Eliot was to encounter many of the aesthetic concerns that shaped his interarts practice throughout his career. The composition of “Second Caprice in North Cambridge” coincided with his introduction to Irving Babbitt, the period’s staunchest advocate for distinct boundaries between aesthetic media. Babbitt instilled in Eliot a distinction between art forms that occupy space (painting, sculpture, architecture) and those that occur in time (poetry, music, dance, drama), and he brought him to the frontiers of his own art form, a borderland that he explored in his poetry notebook. Eliot later recalled that Babbitt’s ideas had remained with him permanently as a model both to follow and to refute, and added that Babbitt was one of the forces that had sent him to Paris in the fall of 1910.3 Eliot’s aesthetic education took a new turn in Paris when he met Matthew Stewart Prichard, a figure whose place in art history is already a subject of debate.4 Prichard was then in the process of formulating a theory of aesthetics that understood Henri Matisse’s liberation of color from form in terms of the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Prichard argued that Matisse’s pictorial space epitomized Bergson’s synthesis of time and space as duration (durée), particularly in his efforts to represent other art forms on canvas. At its center,

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this chapter argues that Prichard focused Eliot’s internal debate about “aesthetic laws” on the relationship between modern painting and poetry and complicated any ostensible distinction between temporally progressive and spatial media. Eliot featured the circular bacchanal dance in two poems, “Bacchus and Ariadne: 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul” and “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks,” which recall aspects of Prichard’s response to Matisse’s Dance (1910), and perhaps respond directly to the painting. I argue, finally, that Prichard’s aesthetics prompted Eliot to satirize the conventions of ekphrasis in The Waste Land’s “A Game of Chess.”

The Mélange de Genres Babbitt’s The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910) attempted to update, at the start of the twentieth century, a text that Pater acknowledged as seminal to his own aesthetic criticism: Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön: The Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Babbitt was entering a long conversation that started with eighteenth-century art critic Johann Winckelmann, who contrasted two versions of the story of Laocoön, the Trojan priest strangled in the coils of a great serpent: Virgil’s telling of this event in the Aeneid and an ancient sculpture depicting the same event. Whereas Virgil’s Laocoön raises the heavens with barbarous cries (“clamores horrendos ad sidera tollit”), every muscle and sinew of the sculpted Laocoön conveys the pathos of suffering with beauty. Lessing attributed the discrepancy between poem and sculpture to the conventions of verbal and visual expression as circumscribed by the limits of their respective media: poetry depicts an action piecemeal as it unfolds word after word in a sequence of time; the visual arts depict a single moment in its entirety by way of an arrangement of forms in space. As an illustration, Lessing emphasizes the technique Homer deployed in his ekphrastic rendering of Achilles’s shield: rather than attempting to “paint” the shield in its complete form, Homer instead depicts the process of its creation, foregrounding the master craftsman’s actions as he forges the shield’s ornamentation. In another example, Lessing recalls the odes of the ancient poet Anacreon, who, sensing the limits of his art, imagines himself describing his paramour to a painter feature by feature (“Paint me the hair this way, he says, and the forehead this way, and the eyes . . .”).5 Unlike the poet, the painter has it within his means to harmonize these features in juxtaposition, to depict her physical beauty. Virgil abided by the same limitation: “His Dido, too,” Lessing is eager to point out, “is never anything more to him than Pulcherrima Dido [most beautiful Dido],” a simple telling without showing.6 With only recourse to language, Virgil can only insinuate her beauty circumstantially, by adorning her in rich jewelry and gilded attire. Lessing finds the sculpture, and the spatial arts in general, superior to the temporal arts, which must rely on building a climax or crescendo rather than simply aspiring to beauty. Nearly a century and a half after Lessing’s Laocoön, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s efforts “to put the eye in the place of the ear and the ear in the place of the eye”7 had resulted in what Babbitt refers to as “a mélange de genres,” a synesthetic confusion between literature, painting, and music. “The nineteenth century witnessed,” Babbitt rails, “the greatest debauch of descriptive writing the world has ever known. It witnessed moreover a general confusion of the arts, as well as the different genres within the confines of each art. To take examples almost at random,” he enumerates, in an effort to illustrate the imperative for medial distinctions: “we have Gautier’s transpositions

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d’art, Rossetti’s attempts to paint his sonnets and write his pictures, Mallarmé’s ambition to compose symphonies with words.”8 Under the pressure of Romanticism, the arts were fused in a new synthesis, where they “melt together and interpenetrate in emotion.”9 All art forms were vulnerable. In Wagner’s formulation of opera as musicdrama, for instance, pure poetry, pure music, and pure drama “become effective only when they are rid of an unprofitable restraint and self-limitation and melt together in a mystical erotic embrace.”10 Rodin applied to sculpture the principles of Impressionism in painting, “violating its special form and symmetry” and failing to capture life “with a sufficient suggestion of repose.”11 “Even the art of dancing [had] caught the contagion, and,” according to Babbitt, “is not content to count simply as dancing but must needs be a symbol and suggestion of something else, of a Greek vase for example, or a Beethoven symphony.”12 In literature, Baudelaire and the Symbolists had once again incited the poet to paint and to sing. Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” which Babbitt reproduces in full, occasioned the coordination of artistic media in a “tenebrous and profound unity,” in which “perfumes and colors and sounds correspond to one another.” Verlaine’s dictum, “Music first and foremost” (“De la musique avant toute chose”) privileged sound over sense, reducing poetry to the “mere buzzing of the romantic chimera in the void.”13 In Babbitt’s time, Henri Bergson’s élan vital was the driving force behind the continued extension of generic and interarts confusion.14 Bergson’s interior realm of intuition had replaced the Symbolist “region of revery,” in which the arts were suffused in emotion and reduced to suggestion. Babbitt quotes from Bergson’s doctoral thesis, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), in which he subordinates art to a metaphysical state: “Art aims to lull to sleep the active powers of our personality and bring us to a state of perfect docility in which we realize the idea that is suggested to us, in which we sympathize with the sentiment expressed.”15 Bergson compares the artist’s methods to those of the hypnotist, luring his audience into a world of pure sensation where, Babbitt suggests, “the proper boundaries of the arts” lack definition. Eliot took a course with Babbitt during his Master’s year at Harvard (1909–10), which likely introduced him to the central concerns of The New Laokoon before he acquired a copy for his personal library.16 Eliot’s reception of Babbitt’s position was surely qualified: he had by that time already composed ekphrastic portraiture in the image of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in “Circe’s Palace” (1908), an ekphrasis of Édouard Manet’s Jeune Dame en 1866 titled “On a Portrait” (1908), and harmonized with the music of the Symbolists.17 Nevertheless, Babbitt’s protest against interarts analogy seems to have occasioned an immediate test and measurement for Eliot’s own practice. In “Opera” (1909), a poem drafted the same month as “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” Babbitt’s invective sounds behind the narrator’s critique of emotional effusion in the love duet of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. A strategy of deferred action in the first verse paragraph not only mirrors the listening experience of Tristan and Isolde’s protracted second act, but also operates as a formal analysis of the limits of poetry. As “contorted” as the “paroxysms” of the love duet, the ungrammatical opening lines of Eliot’s vignette foreground description over action: the first verse paragraph lacks a central, coordinating verb and follows a syntax encumbered by modifiers (“fatalistic” / “passionate” / “ominous”). A pattern of hypotaxis layers enjambment upon enjambment (“And . . . / And . . . / And . . .”), literally extending the first verse paragraph spatially as it approaches the “last / Limits of self-expression.”

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Eliot’s poetry, like the music to which it responds, progresses without narrative advancement and thus collides (“Flinging itself”) with the conventions of temporally progressive art forms. Eliot’s poetry notebook not only registers the distinction that Lessing had made and that Babbitt reasserted between temporally progressive and spatial arts but also Bergson’s contemporary challenge to these conventions. Whereas “Opera” analyzes the formal limitations of art forms, the third of a four-part sequence collectively titled “Mandarins” (1910) signals a means of reconceiving them.18 As cranes fly across a Japanese screen, a mandarin sculpture “in repose” perceives his relative fixity through the eyes of an “idealist” and in a manuscript variant as an “intuitionist.” Eliot composed this sequence while making preparations to spend the following academic year in Paris, where he would attend Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France and discuss their relevance to the latest developments in modern art with Matthew Prichard.

“Geniuses of Integration” Educated at Oxford at the apex of Pater’s authority in the late 1880s, English-born Prichard developed an early taste for classical Greek and Renaissance art (Figure 2.1). Over the following decades, however, his exposure to Eastern art prompted him to abandon the Greek ideal and the artistic conventions associated with it. During a

Figure 2.1 Henri Matisse, Portrait of Matthew Stewart Prichard, 1914. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2016. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

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nine-year tenure at Lewes House in Sussex in the employ of the American expatriate Edward Perry Warren, Prichard visited Cairo and Constantinople in search of Eastern antiquities. In the course of his travels, he developed what Lewes House Secretary Frank Gearing recalled as “a fad for Orientalism.” “In the streets of Lewes,” Gearing remembered, Prichard “wore a Turkish fez . . . salaamed on entering a room, used Turkish or Arabic phrases on greeting and departure, and gave the impression that he had a private working-arrangement with Allah.”19 In 1901, Prichard moved to Boston, where he served as the assistant to the director of the Museum of Fine Arts. In collaboration with Okakura Kakuzō, the museum’s curator of Oriental art, Prichard devised a plan for museum display that one historian refers to as “a blueprint for the planning of the new building and a foretaste of principles that were to become general in museums elsewhere some years or decades in the future.”20 In protest against the museum’s display of replicas, Prichard left the museum world of Boston in 1907 and returned indefinitely to Europe.21 While traveling through Italy in 1908, Prichard discovered his ideal artistic paradigm in the treasures of Byzantium, the geographical and historical point of overlap between East and West. With dual affiliations to early Christianity and to the Islamic decorative tradition, Byzantine carpets, pottery, vases, and architectural ornament remained integral to quotidian life, functional, and authentic. By contrast, in his view, the aspiration to an idealized beauty had relegated Greek sculpture to the pedestal and confined all Western painting since the fall of Byzantium within the frame. In a lecture drafted during the First World War titled “Greek and Byzantine Art,” Prichard declared unequivocally that the “basis of art is not beauty.”22 The idealized beauty of Greek sculpture, he remarked, derived from the sculptor’s formulaic application of spatial ratios and geometric proportions.23 Prichard singled out for particular scrutiny the authority of Winckelmann and Lessing, who, he claimed, had labored under the false assumption that beauty was “the final category of value”24 and had thus enforced the aesthetic law distinguishing spatial and temporal arts: Classical and academic works of paintings and sculpture, in as far as they claim to correspond truly with visual experience, may therefore fairly be judged by the success with which they render the spatial atmosphere of their representations; all the more so as we learn by looking at the paintings of the last six centuries in Europe that the major preoccupation of the painter executants has been to re-convey the impression of space to the beholders of their works. However, observation establishes that these works, like arid verbal concepts are deficient in this respect: the pictures are flat projections, the sculpture is abstract.25 Whereas Byzantine art privileged authenticity of experience, Winckelmann and Lessing’s emphasis on spatial harmony in the visual arts had placed a premium on mimesis, which had in turn unduly extended the influence of Renaissance perspectival painting by centuries. In late 1908, Prichard settled in Paris, at the very period when Bergson’s philosophy was in the crossfire of debate about developments in modern painting. For instance, in prefacing an interview of December 1910 in the daily Paris-Journal, Bergson’s interlocutor situated Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907) in the context of their “subtle and strong attachments to the sphere of modern art.” Bergson responded, in language redolent of Babbitt’s in The New

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Laokoon but advancing the opposite view: “Philosophy is a genre of which the different arts are the species.”26 Such rapprochements between Bergson and the arts no doubt originated with the frequent appeals to artistic analogy in his published works. As opposed to the fixity imposed by academic perspectival painting, Bergson held that all life is in constant flux, in a continuous process of becoming, which he refers to as “duration” (durée). The analytical approach to painting invites the viewer to isolate for analysis a single scene within a frame; however, this tableau is incomplete and fragmentary because it is impossible to isolate a single action from the continuous flow of experience. By way of illustrating the fluidity of life in Time and Free Will, Bergson summons the analogy of listening to music, where individual notes only have resonance in relation to the melody as a whole, an amalgam of past, present, and future with the notes “melting, so to speak, into one another.”27 Rather than flowing one from the other in a succession, musical notes interpenetrate, each “tingeing” those of the whole “with its own colour.”28 In Matter and Memory, furthering his case for continuous, interpenetrating time, Bergson argues that space also partakes of duration. No place can be experienced apart from the flow of life; places as well as moments interpenetrate in duration. Whereas the intellect conceives in linear clock time and geometric space (complete perception), the intuition ascertains rhythmic duration (pure perception). Between September and December 1910, Prichard worked out the implications of duration for the visual arts in a series of personal notebooks now held in the archives at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. “A picture comes to us in terms of pure perception: its colors according to scale.” However, the process of analysis forces us to “recognize its colors one by one.”29 In a classical picture showing the arrangement of forms in spatial harmony, Prichard noted, “the flow of the durée is arrested, its nature analysed, the results recomposed.”30 Representation supplants reality in Renaissance masterpieces, which the beholder perceives as geometric space, or space severed from duration: “Titian, El Greco in their most rhythmic moments are forced by their method to affect as spatially a call on our memories to complete the perception.” Advancing Bergson’s theory to validate his preference for Byzantine decorative arts, Prichard asserted that in decoration, by contrast, “we perceive in scale, but not in the scale the artist has chosen, but in the scale of the whole. We don’t feel color, but tensions, vibrations & rhythms just as we don’t hear notes but movements.”31 Whereas Bergson made frequent appeals to the arts on the level of analogy to illustrate his re-conception of time and space as duration, Prichard fully transposed the concept into a foundational principle in the field of aesthetics. Prichard quickly surpassed his point of departure in Bergson, concluding that duration not only meant that life was a constant flux, but also a process that united artist and spectator in a joint state of consciousness. In the formulation of Prichard’s greatest disciple, the art historian Georges Duthuit, Bergson conceived of duration as a “fabulous magnet,” that “draws us from the past, opens the gates of the present, and makes our life itself a source of invention, a flow of creation.” However, Duthuit continued, “Contrary to Bergson, who saw life as an impulsion, [Prichard] wished to make it a force of attraction, a continuous time, without the possibility of a break.”32 According to Prichard, the true artist appeals to the intuition and “creates within us a frame of mind. Within the frame there must be some action.”33 Attuned to the durational rhythm of the artist, the beholder shares his state of consciousness; Prichard refers to this connection between artist and audience as “some action.”

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With its synthesis of multiple art forms, Byzantine High Mass was the most frequent illustration of collective consciousness in Prichard’s repertoire. In the sacred space of a Byzantine church, the architecture, mosaics, textiles, frescoes, reliquary, music, and the drama of liturgical rites all subordinated themselves to the communal action of worship. In the lexicon of Prichard’s aesthetics, the term “Byzantine” thus assumed a greater significance, designating this dynamic synthesis of spatial and temporal art forms exemplified by High Mass. “ ‘Byzantine art,’ ” Prichard mused, “is an unhappy term. It embraces expression of every kind, painting, sculpture, ceremony, music, architecture, practiced by geniuses of integration.”34 “Byzantine” expression signified for Prichard the harmonization of multiple art forms to effect a state of shared consciousness, including but not limited to the religious sentiment of liturgical rites. Of all modern “geniuses of integration,” Henri Matisse most closely approximated Prichard’s Byzantine ideal. In January 1909, Prichard visited Michael and Sarah Stein’s “At Home” salon at 58 rue Madame, where he first set eyes on Matisse’s compositions in color.35 Prichard was stung with recognition at the sight of early studies for Matisse’s large-scale decorative panels Dance and Music, remarking afterward that they represented a modern way of painting corresponding to the Byzantine expression. Music (Plate 7) showcases five vermilion figures in a prairie uniformly green and under a cobalt sky; an upright figure plays miniature violin accompanied by another on horn while the remaining three take in the music. Dance (Plate 8) represents five other red figures in a fluid, circular dance on the same prairie and under the same azure. With their eschewal of three-dimensional perspective together with their emphasis on contrast of color and tone over recognizable figures of beauty, Matisse’s planes of color and arabesque demarcations lent themselves to interpretation through the lens of Prichard’s evolving aesthetic theory: Now that painting has run the whole gamut, it has with the movement of Matisse come round again to the point from which it started, that of action, I mean where the observer is invited to start on a course of feeling in a particular spirit of attention, instead of being made to sit down and accept and judge facts.36 Prichard contrasted what he called the “Byzantine-Matisse attitude” with the “Greek-Renaissance-Academic position” in his notebooks, at the Steins’ salons, and in Matisse’s Issy studio approximately seven kilometers southwest of central Paris.37 Over the next eighteen months, Prichard and his young acolytes, Duthuit and the philosopher Camille Schuwer, witnessed first-hand the artistic process of vision and revision as Dance and Music took shape out of previous forms, a procedure referred to by Catherine Bock-Weiss as “new paintings generating themselves, as it were, from the previous version.” Standing before Matisse as he moved from one side of the studio to the next, continually reworking these 8½-foot by 12¾-foot panels, Prichard “observed Matisse’s grounding of these paintings in things seen, experienced, and then transformed and exalted in colored rhythms of planes and patterns. A Bergsonian durée was applicable here.”38 In fact, Prichard had intuited the rhythms of these decorative panels as early as Easter 1909, when he saw an early photograph of Dance: “I have seen a photograph of [Matisse’s] latest composition,” he wrote, “a ring of dancing women, or a ring expressing the rhythm of women dancing, for their existence is only suggested by light female symbols against a blue and darker background.”39

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Matisse’s Dance and Music not only challenged the supreme value of beauty in the visual arts, but also suggested the possibility of spatially conveying art forms understood by Lessing and Winckelmann to occur in time. Prichard intuited in Matisse’s decorative panels the rhythm of dance and music conveyed not in time or in space but in duration. Intuited in duration, Matisse’s five vermilion dancers embody movement as they flow in circular formation against blue and emerald planes; they emanate vibrations that extend beyond whatever frame that seeks to limit them in space. In synthesizing the rhythms of dance, music, and painting, Matisse’s panels resist distinction between temporal and spatial arts. While admired by Prichard in Matisse’s studio, Dance and Music were surrounded in controversy from the moment that they were unwrapped for installation at the 1910 Salon d’automne under the generic title Panneaux décoratifs. Alastair Wright’s comprehensive reconstruction of Dance and Music’s reception during and after the exhibition shows the full spectrum of interpretations prompted by their rejection of beauty as a category of value and their affiliation with decoration. C. Lewis Hind, author of the first English-language study of post-impressionist painting, for instance, recognized the visual kinship of Matisse’s panels with the rock drawings of primitive draughtsman. For Hind, “those two paleolithic panels by Matisse” were the “kind of pictures a cave-man might have painted had he found a rock large and smooth enough upon which to smear his ochreous colours.”40 Despite “their incongruity, their so-called ugliness, their disregard of all the canons of the best European art,” however, Hind perceived a rhythm in the paintings that felt like “drumming in [his] inner consciousness.” Arguing the same point visually on the front page of Paris-Journal, a humorist refigured one of the females from Dance in the image of a Neanderthal above the caption: “This year, at the salon d’automne, woman triumphs in all her beauty” (Figure 2.2). Henri Pellier argued in the same vein that Matisse’s decoration was “so far removed from all that we have considered for centuries as the beauty of lines and the harmony of colors” that it betrayed a lack of “knowledge of color and charm of composition.”41 Pellier contrasted the “ferocious blue,” “no less violent green,” and the “red beings moving about agitatedly” on Matisse’s canvas with the harmony of bacchanal paintings in the manner of Titian or Poussin: Dance “seems like a bacchanal of the flayed or of sinister puppets.”42 In a letter to Prichard, Schuwer more favorably conceived of Matisse’s Dance as a modern bacchanal. “For the canvas La Musique,” he noted, “the decorative arrangement whose design we had admired in the studio of Matisse is realized perfectly.” He added that the figures “suggest immediately and without effort” “the loftiness and purity of musical sounds” before noting that he too had discerned a kind of vibration similar to what Hind called “drumming”: “one feels [in Dance] the rhythm of the earth, pagan, Dionysian.”43 Prichard made Eliot’s acquaintance in the fall of 1910, in the midst of the debate centered on Matisse’s new aesthetic, and guided him through the Parisian art world. Eliot likely had conversations with Prichard in mind when he later recalled that during his Parisian year, “a discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved in a discussion of Matisse and Picasso.”44 Prichard and his aesthetics feature prominently in the letters that Jean Verdenal, a mutual friend in Paris, dispatched to Eliot in the year following his repatriation to Massachusetts. In one such letter, dated February 5, 1912, Verdenal told Eliot that the “worthy Prichard’s conversation [was] more or less the same,” dominated by a fervor for “life and action.”45 Recalling years later his time in Paris, Eliot remarked in

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Figure 2.2 Gir, Paris-Journal, October 1, 1910. A caption to the cartoon read: “This year, at the salon d’automne, woman triumphs in all her beauty.” a letter to the art historian Herbert Read that he “knew Matthew Prichard many years ago and am in many ways deeply indebted to him. . . . [H]is sensibility to art is greater than that of anyone I have ever met.” While acknowledging Bergson as Prichard’s philosophical point of departure, Eliot opined, “my belief is that [Prichard’s] own aesthetics, based as they are on experiences of a very remarkable sensibility, have an independent value, and that Bergson provided him much more with a valuable emotional stimulant than with an intellectual structure.”46 Perhaps recalling Babbitt’s emphasis on Bergson’s discussion of hypnotism as well as conversations with Prichard about how art ought to place a beholder in a particular frame of mind, Eliot cautioned Read that “Prichard’s personality is so strong, and his conviction (I might say his fanaticism) so intense, that his conversation has an almost hypnotic influence. You will need all your intellect to resist it.”47 During his Parisian year, Eliot attended Bergson’s lectures alongside Prichard, and in mid-March 1911 Prichard invited Eliot and Verdenal to Matisse’s Issy studio. “If it will not bother,” Prichard wrote to Matisse in a letter dated March 12, “I propose visiting you next Tuesday in the afternoon. I will bring to you my friend Mr. Eliot and the young Frenchman, M. Verdinal [sic], whom I presented to you last Sunday.”48 Inside and out of Matisse’s studio, Prichard’s “remarkable sensibility” to art informed Eliot’s, who declared in the spring of 1911 that during the preceding months his “opinions on art, as well as other subjects, [had] modified radically.”49

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Perhaps inspired by conversations with Prichard about Matisse’s decorative panels, and by their critical reception, a striking convergence of bacchanal imagery suffused with the concerns of Bergson’s metaphysics appeared in Eliot’s poetry notebook in February 1911. In the first of these, “Bacchus and Ariadne: 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul,” the act of visualizing these gods prompts a meditation on the relationship between clock time and the eternal. Robert Crawford takes “Bacchus and Ariadne” as a precursor to “Sweeney Erect” (1919), where the imperatives of the first two quatrains (“Paint me . . . / Paint me . . . / Display me . . .”) suggest that the figure of Ariadne came to Eliot through the medium of painting. With none of the beauty evoked by Anacreon’s instructions to the painter in his ode, but appropriating his technique, Eliot’s directives summon the image of Ariadne aboard a ship in the Aegean Sea (“Display me Aeolus above / Reviewing the insurgent gales / Which tangle Ariadne’s hair”). Associating Eliot’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” with the bacchanal tradition in painting, Crawford proffers a model in Titian, whose Bacchus and Ariadne (1523) Eliot saw in London’s National Gallery in April 1911.50 Not only because Eliot copied this draft fragment into his poetry notebook two months before his first visit to England, but also because of its dialogue with Bergson’s philosophy, Eliot’s poem bears a closer resemblance to the reception of Matisse’s modern bacchanal than it does to Titian’s Renaissance painting. On one level, “Bacchus and Ariadne” stages a Cartesian debate between material and immaterial life (body and soul) and on another it enacts an analysis of opposing aesthetic discourses concerned with the affect of visual art. The poem eschews all description of the image of Bacchus and Ariadne, taking instead as its subject the spectator’s experience of viewing it. As if standing before a painting, the unidentified speaker visualizes (“I saw”) the lives of Bacchus and Ariadne “curl upward like a wave” in the first verse paragraph. The wave appears to crest and break in the enjambment of the second line (“And break”); the second, unfinished sentence on the same line (“And after all it had not broken—”), however, swiftly reverses this conclusion in favor of uninterrupted flux and flow. The metaphor places the speaker’s perception of the lives of Bacchus and Ariadne within the conceptual framework of Bergson’s duration, the continuous flow of life. In line with Prichard’s aesthetics, the beholder in Eliot’s poem then intuits a distinct rhythm emanating from Bacchus and Ariadne: “The drums of life were beating on their skulls, / The floods of life were swaying in their brains.” The second verse paragraph puts Prichard’s aesthetic of absorption in contact with Pater’s “thick wall of personality,” which he claims rings around the spectator, secluding “the individual in his isolation.”51 Recalling “the circle of our thought” that isolates the speaker of Eliot’s ekphrastic sonnet, “On a Portrait,” a “ring of silence” “closes around” the protagonist of “Bacchus and Ariadne” “and annuls / These sudden insights.” A textual variant of “insights” as “intuitions” further evidences a momentary absorption in the bacchanal image comparable to Prichard’s experience in first setting eyes on Matisse’s Dance. Once torn from the flow of duration, “the world of contact [springs] up like a blow” and the winds (or “life” in a textual alternative) from beyond the world dissipate without a trace. Connecting the third verse paragraph with the first, the phrase “I saw” returns to observe that the conception of “Time” exercised throughout the poem has begun to chip away at previous resolve: “I saw that Time began again its slow / Attrition on a hard resistant face.” Mirroring

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accounts by early beholders of Matisse’s Dance, the persona of Eliot’s vignette hears rhythms emanating from a painting and fleetingly shares in Bacchus and Ariadne’s state of consciousness before returning to the material world to debate the spiritual implications of the encounter. In the same month as “Bacchus and Ariadne,” Eliot drafted an untitled lyric featuring dancers in a ring accompanied by piano, flute, and violin music against a dense backdrop of blue cigar smoke. The first verse paragraph foregrounds stasis in a strictly material world, with “torpid smoke of rich cigars” and “torpid after-dinner drinks” dulling the senses (“hardly a sensation stirs”) and stifling life (“Existence just about to die”). The first four lines begin with definite articles, privileging description of the material scene without narrative advancement, and the lack of any pronoun suggests the absence of a living protagonist, which complements the deadening of sensation. By contrast, the second verse paragraph springs to life in a call to “action” that draws on Bergson’s and Prichard’s vocabulary: “What, you want action? / Some attraction?” the protagonist inquires, as a female as indiscriminately delineated as on Matisse’s canvas (“A lady of almost any age / But chiefly breasts and rings”) sings lines borrowed from a popular ragtime: “Throw your arms around me—Aint you glad you found me.” While “action” recalls Bergson’s philosophy, “attraction” summons the communal absorption in the arts at the center of Prichard’s aesthetics, as the rhythms of poetry, music, and dance bring the crowd together in unified action. Eliot’s use of the second person (“your . . . you . . . you”) achieves this mutual engagement in poetry by inviting readers to partake in a shared course of action (“Throw your arms around me”), a device he would reuse in the invitation to action that begins “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“Let us go then, you and I”). An unpublished travelogue that Eliot kept while on tour through northern Italy in the summer of 1911 likewise shows him viewing art through the interpretive lens of Prichard’s aesthetics. Along with descriptions of piazze and sketches of duomos, the travelogue records Eliot’s commentary on paintings, mosaics, sculpture, and architecture, often in the technical language of his art historical training at Harvard. Of the ceiling ornamentation in the San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, for instance, Eliot notes the “shallow coffers, or rather a grating.”52 However, Eliot’s criterion for assessing the value of art on his Italian tour—the degree of their religious expression—was all Prichard. Eliot admired, for instance, the interior of the domes of St. Mark’s in Venice for their fine mosaics, but judged them to be more narrative than religious. Standing before the Byzantine mosaic of Mary on the golden apse inside the cathedral of Santi Maria e Donato in Murano, Eliot remarked: “The Interceding Virgin is the finest mosaic I have seen; the finest Virgin, and one of the finest religious expressions I have anywhere seen. Note effect of curve in apse,” he added, “which bends the Virgin forward over you, enhancing the evocation of divinity.”53 On the other hand, Carracci’s and Guercino’s frescoes on the ceiling of Bologna’s Palazzo Sampieri, he noted, were devoid of religious feeling.54 Entering the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, he remarked that it was cold and barren—a vacuum of religious sentiment. Continuing on to the frescoes of the Arena Chapel, he regretted that each of the pictures demands analysis one by one instead of contributing to a cumulative effect. In short, he concluded in line with Prichard, the frescos fail to decorate because they invite intellectual examination.55

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Eliot’s remarks on Renaissance art and architecture throughout the travelogue also indicate Prichard’s guidance on the cathedral tour. The monastery at Certosa di Pavia was, Eliot opined in words that could have been Prichard’s own, one of “the most repellent buildings in Renaissance art. The production of a rotten art.”56 In Milan, Eliot disparaged Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance mural, The Last Supper (1499), as being of little interest; in Venice, he similarly noted that Titian’s paintings had charm but that they were unequivocally of no interest to him.57 However, one Renaissance painting impressed him: Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian (1490), on display in the Ca’ d’Oro on Venice’s Grand Canal (Plate 9), then still the private residence of Baron Giorgio Franchetti. It was likely by way of a letter of introduction from Prichard that Eliot gained entrance into the palace; Prichard was acquainted with the Franchetti family and approved of Giorgio’s decision to build a chapel around the painting, “where” Prichard observed, “it could still act as the artist intended it to function as an altar piece.”58 Mantegna adorned the Ca’ d’Oro Sebastian with a painted frame outside of which the bludgeoned saint appears to step, in the direction of the beholder, in a move reminiscent of Mary’s posturing in the mural in the apse of Santi Maria e Donato in Murano. Spiraling around a candle in the foreground, a banderole reveals the inscription “Nothing is stable if not divine; the rest is smoke” (“nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus”). Integrated into the chapel’s decor, resisting the confines of its frame, and foregrounding its expression of divinity, Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian was an exception of its time in the minds of both Prichard and Eliot. Eliot’s aesthetics in “Bacchus and Ariadne,” “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks,” and his travelogue suggest a thorough absorption of Prichard’s ideas about the integration of art into daily life, the power of art to condition our psychological state, and the possibility of synthesizing aspects of temporally progressive and spatial art forms. Eliot did not cease to engage with Prichard’s aesthetics after he returned to Massachusetts in the fall of 1911. “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” (1914), for instance, captures the detail of Mantegna’s saint departing from his frame, prompting the poem’s speaker to join with Sebastian on a course of action (“To follow where you lead, / To follow where your feet are white”).59 Nor did Eliot lose interest in the visual arts after “St. Sebastian”: references to the Byzantine architecture of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Ravenna and to da Vinci’s The Last Supper appear in “Lune de Miel” (1917–18); a Renaissance painting hangs in the church where “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (1917–18) takes place; the epigraph to “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1918–19) returns again to Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, and Hakagawa bows among the Titians in “Gerontion.” Nevertheless, visual art enters these poems as references and moments rather than their theme or occasion. Eliot returned to painting and to the aesthetic debate between Babbitt, Bergson, and Prichard for one more significant engagement. On the evidence of the travelogue, Crawford comments that Eliot’s “architectural exactness would benefit his poetry,” and he points to the “coffered ceiling,” “carvèd dolphin,” and “antique mantel” in “A Game of Chess.”60 This passage of The Waste Land (1922), which looks backward in both nostalgia and irony, returns to the questions of whether and how the poet can and should respond to painting in words.

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“In Pigment, But So Lively” The first thirty-four lines of “A Game of Chess” embed multiple layers of ekphrasis within a fabric of literary allusions concerned with the translation of expression across art forms. The sequence opens with a portrait of a lady brushing her hair in a gaudy dressing room in baroque style. A mirror intensifies the amber glow of seven-branched candelabra, which in turn refract through the lady’s jewels, scattering prismatic light across a tabletop, the marble floors, golden cupidons, and other art objects decorating the room. Open vials of synthetic perfumes saturate the air in odors that rise and stir the pattern of candle smoke on the coffered ceiling. The portrait then shifts focus to record the lady’s experience in beholding a painting on her chamber wall. Eliot’s text forms a pattern of multiple recursions that returns to his early apprenticeship in aesthetics, satirizing the idolatry of physical beauty and problematizing conventional distinctions between temporally progressive and spatial arts. Eliot’s portrait, clearly in dialogue with the visual arts, may be notionally ekphrastic or refer to a specific painting. Observing affinities between Eliot’s portrait and the visual arts, Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley suggest its resemblance to a painting by the Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, presumably The Swing (1767).61 While the putti and luminous palette of Fragonard’s painting recall the cupidons and amber glow of Eliot’s portrait, the open-air setting typical of a Fragonard masterwork conflicts with the enclosed, even claustrophobic, atmosphere of the poem’s highly decorated mise-en-scène. Frances Dickey establishes a more convincing visual reference point in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Aesthetic portrait of Lady Lilith (1868). The painting features Adam’s first companion in Eden brushing her long, fiery red hair before a hand-glass, surrounded by many of the very objects cluttering Eliot’s portrait: a chair, a candelabrum, a jewelry case, perfume vials, and a window onto paradise. Beyond these striking parallels, Dickey identifies a stylistic affinity between Lady Lilith and the opening of “A Game of Chess” in their common emphasis on decorative surface at the expense of their subject’s interiority. “Rather than giving us access ‘through’ the painting to the sitter, [Lady Lilith] offers itself as an autotelic, self-sufficient object of beauty.”62 Eliot’s verbal portrait similarly omits both interior monologue and direct discourse in favor of adornment, giving the impression throughout the first twenty lines of extended description that she is more shell than substance. That Eliot’s portrait responds to Rossetti’s painting seems all the more probable in light of “Body’s Beauty,” the sonnet that Rossetti composed to accompany Lady Lilith. In the poem, Rossetti’s femme fatale works her golden locks like a spider at her web, weaving a golden tapestry of unfading beauty: “her enchanted hair was the first gold. / And still she sits, young while the earth is old.” Rossetti’s seemingly casual “still” functions as both adverb and adjective, at once reinforcing the permanence of Lilith’s beauty in biblical legend and her status as a fixed image on canvas. The opening scene of “A Game of Chess” similarly turns on the word “still” as it shifts attention from the paintings hanging on the dressing-room wall (“And still she cried, and still the world pursues”) to the poet’s awareness of his own media (“her hair . . . / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still”). Beyond this grammatical signal that the poem is in dialogue with painting, “Body’s Beauty” provides an indication of why Eliot returned to his early interest in aesthetics to test once more the boundary

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between poetry and painting. Whereas Rossetti’s painting follows the conventions of visual art insofar as it foregrounds beauty, his corresponding sonnet reveals Lilith’s more unattractive side. Narrated from a perspective of age and experience, “Body’s Beauty” reflects on the trappings of beauty for youth: “Lo! As that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went / Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent /And round his heart one strangling golden hair.” Caught up in the image of Lady Lilith, the adoring man loses himself. The portrait that begins “A Game of Chess” similarly satirizes Eliot’s youthful idolization of female beauty and poignantly initiates a theme of alienation and adulterated love that plays out in the two scenes that follow. These scenes dramatize the elusiveness of intimacy, first in a one-way conversation between paramours (“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak” // “Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?”) and then in a pub scene where a woman subjects another to ridicule for having lost her beauty (“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique”). While Rossetti’s Lady Lilith is frozen in time and flattened into a decorative pattern, Eliot’s female figure comes to life out of a background of sumptuous adornment, but only at the moment when she connects with the psychological state of Philomel in the mantel painting. The first two sentences of the section merely evoke her surroundings, conveying a sense of absence comparable to the first verse paragraph of “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks”; the heavy perfumes that fill her dressing room recall the “torpid smoke of rich cigars” from the earlier poem, overwhelming the senses and obscuring the portrait’s subject. The exquisite decoration lifted from Virgil (Dido’s “laquearia”) and Shakespeare (Cleopatra’s “burnished throne”) stands in for any direct description of the lady’s actual person. “The Chair she sat in” is the first of several inanimate objects that serve as syntactical placeholders for the lady in a grammar of substitution underscored by the conspicuous majuscule (“Chair”). Past-tense construction even grammatically displaces the lady from her chair: she was in the chair at some indefinite point, but she may have vacated it. The only other reference to the lady’s person comparably obfuscates: “under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points.” Perhaps to leave room for the poet-painter’s hand on the brush, the lady’s never appears; at least grammatically, the hair brushes itself.63 It is the chair that glows, the glitter of the jewels that rises to meet the candelabra light, and the perfumes that stir the pattern of smoke on the coffered ceiling. Eliot satirizes the conventional use of decoration for the purpose of evoking beauty in language: his portrait only reveals the absence of beauty. Rather than simply evoking the lady’s appearance, Eliot’s profusion of decorative verbiage problematizes aesthetic boundaries between poetry and painting. Time and space are at odds throughout the sequence as the poet works to evade the inherent temporality of language in favor of visualization. The first sentence is breathlessly long at nine lines and follows a syntax that renders the subject of the verb “doubled” ambiguous (the syntactical possibilities include the “Chair,” “the marble,” “the glass,” and “the standards wrought”).64 Modifiers encumber the second sentence and grammatically subordinate active verbs. Preceded by a string of adjectives (“Unguent, powdered, or liquid—”) in a strictly linear reading, the verbs “troubled, confused” function first as participial adjectives before the introduction of “And drowned the sense in odors” on the following line alters their part of speech.65 The atmosphere of “A Game of Chess” embodies the synesthetic confusion that Babbitt ascribed to the

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“mélange de genres”: perfumes confuse and drown the sense in odors and the only sound is an “inviolable voice” “heard” through the medium of painting. The poem’s turn to the painting of Philomel marks a change in Eliot’s mode of description and in our perception of the lady who has remained obscured by her surroundings. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomel weaves a tapestry to recount her brutal rape after Tereus, her assailant, severs her tongue to prevent her from speaking of the crime. After weaving her story, Philomel murders Tereus’s son, and the Furies transform her into a nightingale as punishment. Where Philomel enters Eliot’s poem, she appears both in an ekphrasis of the painting above the fireplace in the lady’s dressing room and as an “inviolable voice” that sounds from the painting as birdsong (“ ‘Jug Jug’ ”). While the painting on display within “A Game of Chess” is probably a notional ekphrasis, it bears resemblance to Philomela and her Tapestry (1864), a watercolor by Rossetti’s fellow Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones modeled his painting after the Philomel of Chaucer’s The Legends of Good Women (1380s), which recounts in verse the predicaments of many of history’s misused women, including Cleopatra and Dido. In Burne-Jones’s rendering, Philomel directly confronts the spectator both with her tapestry and with her penetrating gaze. Her left index finger points to her closed mouth, indicating that the partially unfurled tapestry in her hands must “speak” for her in the absence of verbal expression. Similarly, Eliot recounts Philomel’s narrative out of sequence, as though multiple scenes were encapsulated within the single frame: “The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice.” Presumably “the change of Philomel” refers to her transformation into a nightingale, which occurs at the end of her story; the painting displays this “change” before, or perhaps concurrent with, the moment that Tereus forces himself upon her. The nightingale’s voice also seems to appear spatially, alongside both of these scenes on the canvas (“there”). The order of Philomel’s story suggests that the mantel painting in Eliot’s poem bears an inset reproduction of the tapestry comparable with Burne-Jones’s watercolor. The multiple layers of ekphrasis in the mantel painting within Eliot’s portrait have a hypnotic effect on the lady in the dressing room, who hears rhythms emanating from the mise en abîme (“ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears”). It is at this moment that we first connect with her on a human level rather than as a concatenation of adornments: she responds to Philomel’s story of violated innocence and wordless agony. The experience of Eliot’s lady enacts Prichard’s aesthetics of absorption: she intuits the cadence of nightingale song, which transports her into the painting’s frame of mind. Presumably glimpsed through the curvature of an antique mirror, the figures in the painting appear to lean out from the walls (“staring forms / Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed”) like the interceding Virgin in the apse of Santi Maria e Donato and Mantegna’s St. Sebastian stepping out of his frame. The “staring forms” might recall the gaze of Burne-Jones’s Philomel, but their incline toward the beholder suggests an invitation to enter into the world of life and action that Prichard associated with interarts expression. The description of some of the wall paintings as “withered stumps of time . . . told upon the walls” likewise recalls Prichard’s rejection of perspectival painting as “arid verbal concepts” spatialized (in this case as “stumps”) once severed from the flow of duration. By contrast, an excised line from the manuscript of The Waste Land describes the painting of Philomel as singularly dynamic (“In pigment, but so lively”).

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This particular painting harmonizes with the many art objects that move, pulsate, and animate the dressing room.66 A cupidon sculpture peeps out from behind the fruited vines while another hides its eyes behind its wing, the pattern on the coffered ceiling forms and reforms like a kaleidoscope, and a “carvèd dolphin” swims on the colored stone of a fireplace bathed in green and orange light. As Allyson Booth observes without attribution to the theory that Prichard developed in response to Matisse’s decoration, the entire “material world [of the portrait] throbs, flows, and rearranges itself.”67 All of these artworks conspire to draw the lady of Eliot’s portrait into a shared state of consciousness with Philomel, a mutual engagement interrupted when the sound of footsteps shuffling outside her chamber door draws her back into her own portrait. Eliot shifts focus to the portrait’s actual medium in the final three lines of the sequence: “Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.” Lilith’s brush doubles semantically to refer to the poet-painter’s brush under which fiery red pigments transform into words as they appear on the page. This self-reference brings closure to the portrait and acknowledges the word-painting that has just occurred. The recursive painting in “A Game of Chess” exercises Prichard’s aesthetics as part of an extended analysis of the techniques conventionally available to poets attempting to paint in words. But it also registers the perspective of a mature poet who has come to the realization that surface beauty has little substance. Eliot dispenses in “A Game of Chess” with the conventions that aspire to beauty in favor of Prichard’s aesthetic, which promises deeper, psychological connection. The lady’s response to the mantel painting becomes the catalyzing moment of the scene as well as a rare instance of human connection in The Waste Land: she emerges from her decorative background to assume an identity, or at least a psychic state, in relation to Philomel and even in relation to us. A “genius of integration” in his own right, Eliot allows us to hear along with the lady in his portrait the birdsong of Philomel as it resounds through history, through the mantel painting, and ultimately through the rhythms of poetry.

Notes 1. See John J. Soldo, The Tempering of T. S. Eliot (Epping: Bowker, 1983), 32. 2. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Mineola and New York: Dover, 2005), 89 and 92. 3. “XIII, by T. S. Eliot,” in Irving Babbitt, Man and Teacher, ed. Frederick Manchester and Odell Shepart (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 104. 4. Catherine Bock-Weiss traces Prichard’s “astonishing” influence on a century of Matisse scholarship in Chapter 6 of Henri Matisse: Modernist against the Grain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962), 109. 6. Ibid., 108. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009), 325. 8. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), viii–ix. 9. Ibid., 124. 10. Ibid., 106.

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eliot and matisse 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

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Ibid., 232–33. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 129. Eliot’s autographed copy of The New Laokoon (dated 1910) is held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. See Chapter 3 of Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012). For a more comprehensive analysis of “Mandarins,” see Dickey in Chapter 1, this volume. Osburt Burdett and E. H. Goddard, Edward Perry Warren: The Biography of a Connoisseur (London: Christopher, 1941), 140–41. Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts Boston: A Centennial History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), 188. See ibid., 172–205. Matthew Stewart Prichard, “Greek and Byzantine Art,” (London: Bonner & Co., 1921), 2. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 8. At the time of Prichard’s death in 1936, Harry Rowan Walker arranged Prichard’s sundry notes thematically for publication under the collective title Matthew Stewart Prichard. Walker’s manuscript (henceforth Notes) is held at the Bibliothèque byzantine at the Collège de France in Paris. Prichard, Notes, 18. “Une heure chez Henri Bergson,” Paris-Journal, December 11, 1910. My translation. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910), 100. Ibid., 8. Matthew Prichard, Notebook 1, 11. Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 12. George Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1950), 9. Matthew Prichard, Notebook 2, 5. Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Harry Rowan Walker also compiled Prichard’s writings on Byzantine art in a manuscript essay titled “Art and Byzantine Art” now held at the Bibliothèque byzantine at the Collège de France in Paris. Prichard, “Art and Byzantine Art,” 26. Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1995), 70–71. Prichard, Notes, 11. David Lewis, “Matisse and Byzantium, or, Mechanization Takes Command,” Modernism / Modernity 16, no. 1 (January 2009): 52. Bock-Weiss, Henri Matisse, 163. Matthew Prichard to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Easter Sunday 1909. Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. C. Lewis Hind, The Post Impressionists (London: Methuen, 1911), 50–52. Henri Pellier, “Le Salon d’automne,” La Petite République, September 30, 1910; quoted in Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 140. This is Wright’s translation. Henri Pellier, “Salon d’automne”; quoted in Wright, 137. Camille Schuwer to Matthew Prichard, October 13, 1910. Archives Henri Matisse, Issy-lesMoulineaux; reproduced in Wright, Matisse, 154. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13 (April 1934), 451–52.

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68 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

john d. morgenstern Jean Verdenal to Eliot, February 5, 1912, in L1, 32. Valerie Eliot’s translation. Eliot to Herbert Read, April 9, 1926, in L3, 132–33. Ibid., 133. Matthew Prichard to Henri Matisse, March 12, 1911. Archives Henri Matisse, Issy-lesMoulineaux. Eliot to Edward Forbes, May 22, 1911, in L1, 19–20. Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 108. Eliot’s annotated copy of Baedeker’s London and its Environs is held in King’s College Library. Pater, Studies,153; see Dickey, Modern Portrait Poem, 87–89. Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 163. Reproduced in Crawford, Young Eliot, 164. Eliot’s travelogue is held at Harvard’s Houghton Library (MS Am 1691 (131)). Eliot, “Notes on Italy,” 35. Eliot, “Notes on Italy,” 21–23. Reproduced in Crawford, Young Eliot, 164. Eliot, “Notes on Italy,” 45 and 17. Matthew Prichard to Isabella Stewart Gardner, February 17, 1910. Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. See Christopher Ricks’s annotations in IMH, 268–69. Crawford, Young Eliot, 163. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 101. Dickey, Modern Portrait Poem, 30. Allyson Booth, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 81. Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 273. Ibid., 273. WLF, 11. Booth, Reading, 81.

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3 Eliot and Italian Painting Anne Stillman

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. S. Eliot’s lines can conjure worlds. Sometime these seem like painted worlds, and the worlds in which we find ourselves when we move among paintings. Take this line from “Gerontion”: “By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians.”1 A quintessence of Eliot’s poetic craft is distilled here, “fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”2 An uncertainty flickers across the cadences in the cross-contact of the names “Hakagawa” and “Titians”: a relation is floated by the elusive verb “bowing,” enigmatically carried through the artfully loose gesture of the preposition “among,” as one “Hakagawa” is cast among however many Titians, as we could never be “among Shakespeares.”3 Eliot’s line evokes an attitude adopted “among” paintings, and invites us to imagine the beholder as well as the objects possibly beheld; the line becomes tantalizingly obscure, as we slip into imagining something we know we are only being seduced into imagining. The line is quintessentially Eliot’s in its intense powers of evocation, or, more boldly, in its power to rivet both attention and prejudice by juxtapositions: here a cocktail of a named artist together with an artistically imagined name, fantasy and memory mixed with the desire to apprehend the elusive gesture, “bowing.” In Eliot’s early verse, allusions can induce such double-takes: the line seems to apprehend an awareness of its own powers of mimesis, while registering a flicker of anxiety, slightly flinching, perhaps, at its own means of representation. What follows dwells on such elusive double-takes, by way of allusions to painting, specifically to Italian painting, in Eliot’s early verse. Eliot studied a course on Italian painting at Harvard; he took detailed notes on Italian art and architecture while travelling in Italy in 1911; his early poems make reference to Italian paintings. My purpose here is not to give an exhaustive account of what Eliot studied and saw, but rather to try and imagine some of the peculiar ways that this experience finds its way into the texture of some of his poems. The notes on Italian painting Eliot made at Harvard show a preoccupation with the corner-of-the-eye vision that would come to preoccupy his later fascination with dramatic form: a hand, a foot, “someone indistinct” on the fringes of the scene. In his early critical prose Eliot frequently mentions “rooms,” “scenes,” “atmosphere,” and “situations,” and draws attention to the “cross-contact” that makes up a situation or a scene. For instance, Edgar Lee Masters “sometimes fails in a situation [. . .] because he does not fix before you the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room.”4 The notes on painting seem to be, for the most part, a dutiful recording of a lecture course, but they also show an acute attention to just such scenic form, “the contact and crosscontact of souls.” In Fra Filippo Lippi’s painting of Madonna and Child, for example, Eliot notices the elfish boy in the corner as especially curious and representative of

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part of the work’s “soul” always “intermingled” with the element represented by the Madonna. In these notes, the single most intense phrase that leaps out—as Eliot imagined intense phrases leaping out of Shakespeare’s plays—is “the audacious reality of flesh.” This carries the piercing ring of Eliot’s imagination, a sting felt in the arrows in “The Death of St. Narcissus,” “Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows.” We might begin to imagine how the sudden vista of a painting can emerge through Eliot’s poems by way of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” In the third quatrain, a designed landscape enfolds pellucid detail. Caught in some interlude between set pieces, the singular: “But through the water pale and thin / Still shine the unoffending feet.” Surrounded by the frame of what “A painter of the Umbrian school / Designed” and, subsequently, what “the painter set” “there above,” these lines leap out from the surrounding quatrains with a curious, luminous quality. “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” opens with an epigraph from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: “Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars”—wingless creatures that seem to worm their way into the beginning of the poem on a centipidal proliferation of dense feet: “Polyphiloprogenitive / The sapient sutlers of the Lord.” In this poem, the quatrains are partly a means of dramatizing the worn-out, the foot-sore. The sudden turn, then, to a world painted elsewhere, “But through the water pale and thin . . .” invites us to imagine the recognition of other possible experiences implicit in the expression of these experiences.5 So much depends, here, on “But.” For if the lines were, “And through the water pale and thin / Still shine the unoffending feet,” these numinous feet would appear as a consequence or auxiliary to the actions of design and the description of setting in the previous quatrain, where the painter’s preparation of “gesso” is deftly contrasted with the auricular nimbus; the secrets of technique with the mysteries of theology artfully if predictably held in counterpoise—from this, an “and” would usher in the baptismal water as fittingly quenching “the wilderness is cracked and browned.” The “But” scuppers any tidy movement of equivalence. “But through the water pale and thin / Still shine the unoffending feet” presents this experience as an exception to the scene-setting rather than its consequence. As if, in spite of the knowledge on display of painterly technique and topos, this portion of the work of art and the moment in time it represents together have the power to be a unique part of a “whole of feeling” strangely distant from these very materials acting as its frame.6 The feet are still unoffending—they have not had nails driven through them yet—but the line also prompts us to remember how a ritual marking a beginning can seem to comprehend its own ending, as rippling across the line is a signature tune in Eliot’s repertoire: “still . . . un . . . ending.” Buried in plain sight, the experience of a work of art is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.7 The buttoned-up quatrains come undone for a moment: the feet possess a sudden vulnerable nudity. In paint, Eliot sometimes found “the audacious reality of flesh.”8 What painting do we imagine at this point in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”? Eliot’s “A painter of the Umbrian school / Designed . . .” may be directing us to a very specific work (a “gesso ground” seems knowledgeable about specific material facts of its making) and yet, at the same time, it is precisely this specificity that suggests other possibilities by showing how another context can fail to appear.9 As part of one work is invited into another whole, its original surrounding is both called into being and rendered palpably absent. Notes and guides to Eliot’s poems suggest that this line may refer to Piero della Francesco’s Baptism, which Eliot marked in his London

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Baedeker, and where Christ’s feet stand on watery stone. B. C. Southam tells us: “Eliot is describing a real or imaginary painting of the baptism of Christ. . . . (The picture could well be Piero della Francesco’s “Baptism” which has been on view in London’s National Gallery since 1861).”10 Yet the feet in Eliot’s poem could equally, and even more plausibly perhaps, conjure a detail in Fra Angelico’s Baptism in the San Marco, where Christ’s feet shine through the water, pale and thin, and seem to half-float, perhaps signaling an ethereal kinship with the imaginative pull Eliot felt for the “submarine and profound.”11 But Fra Angelico is not “A painter of the Umbrian school.” Perhaps we should think of the lines not as “describing a real or imaginary painting” (my emphasis), but as creating for us an experience that is both real and imaginary. “La Figlia che Piange” is said to refer to a real work of art Eliot may have seen, one which has never been located.12 But it is Eliot’s allusiveness that sharply conjures the feeling of recognition, even when there may be nothing to recognize, or not exactly recognize. Recognition, or the hallucination of recognition, then opens to a series of penumbral possibilities: the “good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”13 The variety of actions implicit in the two metaphors of tearing and of welding show how the practice of allusion prompts curiosity about the nature of the relations between contexts, and raises questions about whether similarities are being suggested, or whether differences are to be imagined, or both; allusions urge comparison and provoke thoughtfulness about the act of comparing. Of Joyce, Eliot writes, “[he] uses allusions suddenly and with great speed, part of the effect being the extent of the vista opened to the imagination by the very lightest touch.”14 The extent of that vista, as these lines from “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” show, is difficult to determine. A seemingly specific referent is a casement opening to “a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and never completely focus; of feeling of which we are only aware in a kind of temporary detachment from action.”15 In Eliot’s Harvard notes on Italian painting, occasional flashes of wit and irreverence resound: he notes a “Madonna Adoring” by Fra Filippo Lippi in the Uffizzi, Florence, and writes that the Madonna is not “adoring;” she has “ugly hands.” Eliot’s quip sounds like the kind of joke a weary tourist might scrawl in the margins of her guidebook to Florence, but it also purposefully brushes one attitude up against another, as the decorum of the merely received is given a jolt by the lively awkwardness of a singular point of view, a miniature act of subterfuge foreshadowing the desires of Eeldrop and Appleplex in their endeavour to escape “the too well pigeonholed.” A variation on this gear shift is a minor signature tune in Inventions of the March Hare, where conventional locutions adhering to works of art are nudged off-kilter, or shown in the act of being upstaged. This flicker of irreverence may dismantle the pose of merely adoring the unadorable yet “famous,” but irreverence, too, strikes a pose. As in Eliot’s early letter to Conrad Aiken, “Come, let us desert our wives and fly to a land where there are no Medici prints, nothing but concubinage and conversation. That is my objection to Italian Art: the originals are all right, but I don’t care for the reproductions.”16 Reproductions once adorned the walls of the typist’s flat in early drafts of “The Fire Sermon” (“A touch of art is given by the false / Japanese print, purchased in Oxford Street”), where the verse wags a finger at “false”; in the letter to Aiken, the disdain for reproductions of Italian art occurs in an invective against other forms of reproduction: “as you know, I hate university towns and university people,

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who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the walls.”17 The pictures may be hideous as perhaps they seem to represent a mere stand-in for some lack of taste, but their hideousness here also seems intimate with their mechanical reproduction, as if, like “university people,” they are “the same everywhere.” Is it that, without the audacious reality of paint, there could be no audacious reality of flesh? Eliot is ever-attentive to the little fissures of self-delusion in genteel habit, as well as—or because of—becoming a consummate performer of genteel habit; this early letter to Aiken seems to be a gauche, younger version of the searing insight with which he understood Blake to be a “wild pet for the supercultivated.”18 It may be “hideous,” or inspire feelings of hideousness, to see a reproduction of a painting you love in surroundings that are hideous to you; the disappointment of reproduced color, the faded, poor souvenir of the audacious reality of paint, might affix the attachment to a painting into a fierce, singular love. Eliot’s early fascination with paintings of St. Sebastian is bound up with both the “audacious reality of flesh” and “hideousness”: “I have studied Saint Sebastians— Why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and stick him full of pins (or arrows) unless he felt a little like the hero of my verse?” Eliot refers to “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” a poem he chose not to publish. The poem seems to reiterate, in words that belong to the street piano in “Portrait of a Lady,” a tune that is “mechanical and tired”: “some worn-out common song,” “Recalling things that other people have desired.” In “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” the out-worn is tirelessly explored— loved, even. Being lovingly “mangled,” is, after all, its subject matter. The poem emphatically resists a direct correlation to any of the painted renditions of St. Sebastian Eliot said he contemplated, but rather like a postcard shop in Venice, on the fringes of where Mantegna’s St. Sebastian lives, the poem conjures a kind of souvenir replica, while also prompting a hankering for some unfathomable original. In this respect, it is like other forms of longing for true love. The poem is a strangely gorgeous, hideous homage to the endless originality of human loss. As a variety of reproduction, Eliot’s own practice of allusion doesn’t sit blithely aloof from the risks at stake in reproducibility. Eliot’s allusions make self-conscious use of an acute sense of the rechauffée, the déjà-vu, so that, with the “lightest of touches,” the very fact of a recurrence being well-worn acquires, or even conditions, a variety of shimmering beauty: those unoffending feet belong to many paintings. Eliot is a great satirist of tourism as well as being an assiduous tourist, elements that meet in “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” where the lines are so saturated with reproductions of Venetian art that the poem, like Venice, appears to be sinking. Words from the inscription on Mantegna’s martyrdom of St. Sebastian, “nihil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus” (“only the divine endures; the rest is smoke”), written on a small scroll around a candle near the feet of the saint, drift into the atmosphere of the poem in the epigraph, a kind of antechamber for the slippery events that will unfold: “Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus—the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pink!” The cry of the gondolier, a snatch of a tune from Gautier’s “Sur les lagunes,” is snuffed out in sudden darkness, the airy lyric extinguished, only to emerge again, as if stepping out of a dark church into radiant light, transfigured into a Jamesian visitor to Venice. Gautier’s Venice in Variations sur le Carnaval de Venise self-consciously delights in a historically thin surface, while “Burbank” has

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its tentacles in the ooze: “A lustreless protrusive eye / Stares from the protozoic slime / At a perspective of Canaletto. / The smoky candle end of time.” How can such an eye stare at such a painting? Protozoa are unicellular, with no nerves or brains; Canaletto paints elaborate cityscapes in a learned, conventional style. A “stare” may or may not be comprehending, like a tourist’s eye perhaps. But the lines are not a mere jibe at gawking incomprehension. Rather, the quatrains comprehend temporality through the neat octosyllables being seemingly at odds with the sprawling time they measure, so that the poem is showing how incommensurable tracts of time can rhyme. Suddenly the limpid blue of Canaletto’s Grand Canal is paint: an alchemy of water, stone, memory, a kind of liquid thought comprehending both “slime” and “perspective.” Epochs of prehistory and history are brought into close proximity by the gesture of the artist, the brushstroke, the cadence, while the inscription from Mantegna’s painting flickers portentously in the corner of the frame, “the smoky candle end of time.” As “Burbank” shows, Eliot’s painterly allusions conjure up for us the paradoxes of the medium of paint itself. Take the opening of “Sweeney Erect”: “Paint me a cavernous waste shore / Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, / Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks.” “Sweeney Erect”’s epigraph is from act II, scene 2, of The Maid’s Tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher. Aspatia, who is brokenhearted, is watching her attendants, Antiphilia and Olimpias, work on a tapestry that tells the story of Ariadne. Like Aspatia, Ariadne has been abandoned by her lover. Aspatia thinks her own desolation is greater than the story of the legend; she criticizes her attendants’ work, and demands that she is taken as a model for their tapestry instead. The direction given by Aspatia is that the attendants should weave a landscape that reflects how she personally feels; “Sweeney Erect” condenses Aspatia’s demands into the first two quatrains of the poem, and turns a tapestry into paint. Fancifully perhaps, the writing feels like the quick jabs of brushstrokes. Cyclades are floating islands, “unstilled,” but to “cast” is to freeze something, to make it still; as in “Burbank,” the density of movement being described seems to come up against the syllabic regularity of the quatrain, to be locked in end-rhymes, and internal rhymes (“anfractuous” echoes “cavernous”; “perjured” recalls “insurgent”). The verbs at the beginning of the lines in the first stanza open to this contradictory motion: the certainty of direction in the imperatives “paint” and “cast” contrasts with the uncertain movement of what they direct, “cavernous,” “yelping.” The “yelp” of the seas, for instance, is an older, original meaning, like the “sea yelp” in The Dry Salvages, but it is also a cry, either animal or human, and here, next to “snarl” and “faced,” both meanings are drawn out. The mixed diction seems to possess the qualities of paint: muddy oils magically becoming a translucent window opening to a vista, while also being material comprised of stuff. In The Maid’s Tragedy, Aspatia demands that her tumultuous personal desolation be rendered in the external stillness of the tapestry, “Doe it by me, / Doe it againe by me.” Her commands are recalled in Eliot’s “Paint me” and “Display me,” which carries the sense of “depict it for me,” but also “depict it as me,” and seems to possess some of the double-minded strangeness of portraiture itself, its own preoccupations with the mechanics of subjectivity. As T. J. Clark writes, “portraiture in particular can operate happily in two frames of mind: it can be monstrously confident about the alchemy of paint as ‘presence’ and ‘character’ and yet flaunt its knowledge of the weirdness—the deep obscurity—of the conventions at play.”19

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Eliot’s relationship with Italian painting is necessarily opaque, bound up as it is with his allusive practice. It registers a fascination with scenic form, peripheral vision, detail, recursiveness, portraiture, and paint itself. It also must be bound up with his love of Dante. Here, then, that enigmatic moment from Eliot’s lecture notes on Italian painting asks to be contemplated again: he imagines the elfish boy in a corner as a representative element of the work’s soul, intermingled always with the element represented by the Madonna.20 This little moment has long shadows winding through Eliot’s work. To understand the elfin, the carnivalesque as intermingling with the serene, the meditative, is to comprehend how the grotesque and the sublime might play off each other. It is a thought that speaks to Dante’s style, as Eric Griffiths writes: [W]riting like Dante’s arises out of pausing for thought between stylistic possibilities and not from espousing one known approved manner. Dante’s terms are all “terms of comparison” as suits the habits of cultural transposition he acquired when scanning between Old and New Testaments, or turning his gaze from a sculpted mermaid to her contrasting Virgin Mary.21 “Intermingling” comes to matter deeply for Eliot—in his acute hearing for Shakespearean leaps of register, a pausing for thought between sordidness and magnificence. This gaze that turns from a sculpted mermaid to her contrasting Virgin Mary speaks to Eliot’s poem of turning, Ash-Wednesday. Ash-Wednesday circles and turns around color and light: “the Lady is withdrawn / In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown”; “white light folded, sheathed about her, folded”; “The silent sister veiled in white and blue”; “Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour”; “In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour.” The attention paid in this poem to light and cloth has a painterly quality, as if the verse is dressing its wounds, tending its deeply riven heart, with color. Ash-Wednesday is singing the blues. But merely saying the poem is “painterly” may not be saying much at all. It is rather that works of art like Eliot’s cradle within themselves a responsiveness to other works of art—works that may be distant in both time and medium. You can read Ash-Wednesday and then look, really look, at, say, Piero della Francesco’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi in the hills above Arezzo. The poem and painting intermingle in their shared attention to “blue of Mary’s colour,” in folds of light and cloth, in the meditation they depict and prompt both for and of “the blessèd face”: “Lady of silences / Calm and distressed / Torn and most whole.”22 Suddenly, together, the works of art inspire shared wonder. It seems as if “there is now, assuredly, no telling / how spirit readied the hand to engineer a perceptible radiance.”23 And the wonder is that the experience really is the experience of a moment and of a lifetime—“very much like our intenser experience of other human beings.”24

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

CPP, 37. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), 122. I owe this observation to Ricks, Eliot and Prejudice, 122. Eliot, “Mr. Lee Masters” (a review of Songs and Satires), Manchester Guardian 906 (October 9, 1916); Complete Prose 1, 488. 5. See Eliot’s account of “wit” in “Andrew Marvell,” originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (March 13, 1921); Complete Prose 2, 309–10.

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6. “Whole of feeling” is a phrase that occurs throughout Eliot’s criticism, describing poetic texture; see for instance “Philip Massinger” (1920) Complete Prose 2, 245. Variations on this phrase occur in the notes he kept while traveling through Italy in July 1911, where “great feeling” is a term of praise. Eliot’s travelogue is held at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “Notes on Italy” (MS Am 1691 (131)). 7. I am thinking of Eliot’s own words in the essay Dante (1929): “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings.” Complete Prose 3, 711. 8. Eliot’s Harvard lecture notes on Italian painters are held in the Hayward Bequest at King’s College, Cambridge. (Henceforth, “Notes on Italian Painting.”) 9. In “Notes on Italian Painting,” Eliot describes the means of preparing “gesso.” 10. See for instance B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 117. Eliot’s marked copy of Baedeker’s London and Its Environs is held in the archive at King’s College, Cambridge. 11. There is an extended study of the Fra Angelico frescoes at the San Marco in Eliot’s “Notes on Italian Painting.” “Submarine and profound,” comes from “Mr. Apollinax,” CPP, 31. 12. Derek Roper, “T. S. Eliot’s ‘La Figlia che Piange’: A Picture without a Frame.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 52.3 (2002): 222–34. 13. Complete Prose 2, 245. 14. Eliot, “A Note on Ezra Pound,” To-day 4 (September 1918), 6; Complete Prose 1, 751. 15. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” 1951; OPP, 86. 16. L1, 81. 17. WLF, 45; L1, 81. 18. Eliot, “William Blake” (originally “The Naked Man”), The Athenaeum (February 13, 1920); Complete Prose 1, 187. 19. T. J. Clark, “It stamps its pretty feet,” London Review of Books (November 19, 2015): 11. 20. Eliot, “Notes on Italian Painting.” Eliot is writing about Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child. 21. Eric Griffiths, introduction to Dante in English, ed. Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), lxxvi. 22. CPP, 91. 23. Geoffrey Hill, “To John Constable: In Absentia,” in Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996), 53. 24. Complete Prose 3, 711.

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4 Eliot, Architecture, and Historic Preservation Joshua Mabie

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he years following the Second World War were difficult for many of England’s cathedrals and historic churches. Many of the buildings had been damaged in the war, and the severe austerity of the period put pressure on churches’ finances when demands for maintenance and repair were greater than ever. England’s cathedrals rose out of the destruction of the war as symbols of English virtue and tradition, but wartime population shifts and declining attendance left some churches empty and derelict. In June 1951, in the midst of this challenging time, the Friends of Chichester Cathedral invited T. S. Eliot to give a lecture on “The Value and Use of Cathedrals To-Day.” Much recommended him as an appropriate lecturer for the Friends’ annual address: Eliot came to Chichester as a Nobel laureate, as the most prominent Anglo-Catholic of his generation, as a speaker who could fill a basketball arena, and as a personal friend of the Bishop of Chichester.1 Less well known to present-day critics, Eliot also came to Chichester as a writer who, in the 1920s, turned his amateur interest in church architecture into a modest body of poetic comment on, and prose advocacy for, London’s City churches and historic English architecture. Together The Waste Land and Eliot’s 1920s Dial and Criterion commentaries portray historic English churches as stable artifacts that maintain a link to a less corrupt, more beautiful past. If the Friends of Chichester Cathedral had expected a vigorous defense of ecclesiastical architecture similar to the arguments that Eliot had made earlier in his career, however, they would have been surprised by Eliot’s comments in the cathedral. Eliot’s remarks at Chichester did not completely abandon the historical and aesthetic arguments for architectural preservation that he had articulated as a younger man, but they did mark a substantial revision of his earlier views on church buildings and their value. Namely, in the Chichester address Eliot recognized that church buildings change over time and that their value comes primarily from continuing to do good work in the present moment. Eliot is all too often associated with a staid conservatism, but this characterization is directly at odds with his remarkably progressive thoughts on architectural preservation. Indeed, his 1951 comments anticipate a similar shift in the field of historic preservation from early advocates’ taxidermy of individual buildings to contemporary efforts to conserve whole cultural landscapes by preserving buildings in their social and economic contexts.

Eliot’s Early View of Architecture and Its Preservation Eliot had been interested in architecture since at least his time at Harvard, where he studied art history under the direction of Edward Forbes during the 1909–10 academic year.2 Spurred on by his experiences in Forbes’s class, Eliot made architectural

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investigation a significant part of his excursions during his year in Paris (1910–11). At Christmas, Eliot toured the cathedral towns of southwestern France, including stops in Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, and Moissac. During his Easter holiday from Paris to London in April 1911, Eliot made the City churches a centerpiece of his tour. After the trip (his first to London), Eliot proudly reported to his cousin Eleanor Hinckley that he had skipped the Tower, Madame Tussaud’s, and Westminster Abbey to visit instead “St Helens, St Stephens, St Bartholomew the Great, St Sepulchre, [and] St Ethelreda [sic],” four City churches and one medieval Roman Catholic church in Holborn, just outside the limits of the City.3 Eliot’s annotations in London and its Environs, the Baedeker volume that guided him through the City, further testify to his youthful interest in church architecture. In addition to the churches he mentioned to his cousin, Eliot marked fourteen other City churches in his guidebook, including the two churches he would later reference in The Waste Land, St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr.4 The notebook that Eliot kept while visiting Italy in the summer of 1911 is the greatest record of his extensive architectural understanding from the period, with detailed notes and drawings of not just major landmarks like Venice’s St. Mark’s Basilica but also minor, out-of-the-way churches like Verona’s San Fermo and Padua’s Chiesa degli Eremitani.5 Ten years after his first touristic encounter with London, Eliot returned to the City churches periodically while working as a banker at Lloyd’s, and his first published comments on these churches present them as beautiful and historic bulwarks against an altered and degraded City context. For instance, his June 1921 “London Letter” in The Dial rails against news that the Bishop of London had recommended razing nineteen of the City churches.6 Under the plan, seven of the nineteen churches’ towers would be preserved as architectural and historical monuments after the lots were sold for redevelopment.7 In his argument against the plan, Eliot concedes that the City churches were seldom visited as either houses of worship or as tourist sites. Despite the churches’ “desuetude,” Eliot considered them worthy of preservation because they are beautiful relics: “[T]hey give to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced. . . . [T]he least precious redeems some vulgar street, like the plain little church of All Hallows at the end of London Wall. Some, like St Michael Paternoster Royal, are of great beauty.” In addition to pointing to the churches’ aesthetic value, Eliot highlights their pedigree: “some are by Christopher Wren himself, others by his school.” Eliot’s third appeal is personal. He concludes the letter by sharing his own experience of the churches: “To one who, like the present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand’io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto) the loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and unforgotten.”8 Eliot’s “London Letter” appeal to save the City churches reflects the two primary justifications for architectural preservation espoused by the early English preservation movement: protection of outstanding aesthetic monuments, and protection of buildings made significant by association with a major historical figure or event. Eliot’s argument for saving relatively disused churches exactly as they are, as artifacts of a lost past, is also consistent with the preservation philosophy of John Ruskin and William Morris, the fathers of the English preservation movement. Ruskin and Morris resisted all changes to historic buildings, not merely threats of demolition, but also changes wrought by restoration. Specifically, they resisted Victorian restorers like Sir George

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Gilbert Scott, William Butterfield and Ewan Christian who sought to purify England’s medieval buildings stylistically by removing later periods’ ornamentation and by adding (mainly gothic) elements that they considered to be improvements on the buildings’ design. These restorers drew inspiration from the French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s contention, “To restore a building is not only to preserve it, to repair it, or to rebuild it, but to bring it back to a state of completion such as may never have existed at any given moment.”9 Ruskin and Morris rejected Viollet-le-Duc’s philosophy and were appalled by Scott’s dramatic changes to England’s cathedrals, churches, and chapels. To Ruskin, restoration was “the most total destruction which a building can suffer . . . a destruction accompanied by a false description of the thing destroyed.”10 Ruskin granted the necessity of maintenance to prevent buildings’ decay, but he argued, “We have no right whatever to touch [the buildings of past times]. They are not ours.”11 William Morris similarly condemned restoration of historic buildings. In the “Manifesto” that became the founding document of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), Morris called upon those who were responsible for historic buildings to “put Protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care . . . to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands.” To Morris, even a building that has “become inconvenient for its present use,” is not a candidate for razing, alteration, or enlargement; instead, Morris suggests the construction of a new building on a different site to house the functions that the historic building could no longer conveniently accommodate.12 Many twenty-first-century preservationists acknowledge the importance of Ruskin’s and Morris’s efforts to bring an end to overzealous restoration, but are critical of their attempts to “freeze [buildings] at a point in time” and to preserve architectural works as museum pieces. English Heritage, the nation’s primary preservation organization, now recognizes that sensitive remodeling and adaptive reuse are often the best ways to keep buildings occupied and therefore well maintained. In a departure from early preservation orthodoxy, English Heritage now offers to “help congregations accommodate changes . . . in ways that will enhance the special qualities of their buildings.”13 Like Ruskin’s and Morris’s over-simplified and dogmatic views, Eliot’s 1921 “London Letter” argument regards the City churches within a dichotomy of preservation or destruction that does not take into account inevitable and necessary incremental changes to buildings and the uses to which they are put. Eliot’s critical and poetic descriptions of the durability of the City churches and his insistence upon their preservation as artifacts overlook the complicated history of the churches’ transformations. By the mid-1920s, Eliot had already begun to shift away from the principles of Ruskin-Morris preservation he staked out in the 1921 “London Letter” toward the position of his 1951 Chichester address, which anticipated the more progressive view held today by English Heritage. In an October 1926 Criterion “Commentary,” Eliot explicitly rejects the logic of his earlier defense of the City churches, writing, “We renounce any attempt to appeal to our Shepherds on the argument for Art, or for the beauty of London.”14 Following this rejection of his earlier aesthetic argument, he also disavows historical association as a justification for preservation by declaring, “we shall cease to appeal in the name of Christopher Wren and his school, and appeal instead in the name of

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Laud and the beauty of holiness.” Despite these seemingly unambiguous renunciations, Eliot’s rejection of aesthetic and historical appeals for preservation was neither final nor complete. His January 1927 “Commentary” quibbles with the criteria proposed by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) for deciding which old buildings are worth preserving.15 Founded in 1877 by William Morris, the SPAB has hewn to its founder’s directive to preserve “artistic, picturesque, historical, antique or substantial” buildings.16 In his “Commentary,” Eliot sifts through these criteria skeptically, writing, “[a]rtistic and historical, certainly; picturesque, doubtful . . . antique, meaningless; substantial, some of the concrete work at Wembley is substantial.”17 Eliot’s 1927 re-engagement with aesthetic and historical arguments is not necessarily incompatible with his earlier renunciation, because this 1927 “Commentary” makes claims about preservation broadly rather than preservation of churches specifically. When he does return to church preservation in the “Commentary,” Eliot observes that the SPAB report “makes no special mention of the City Churches” and laments, “perhaps there is nothing more to say about them until they are destroyed.” As with his comments the previous October, Eliot here states, “besides the powerful and concurrent reasons for preserving them as ancient buildings, there are other powerful reasons for preserving them as churches.” One year later, in the January 1928 “Commentary” subtitled “The Stones of London,” Eliot returned again to preservation, this time to oppose a proposed extension and alteration of Westminster Abbey.18 Eliot grants that the Abbey is “an historical monument of great symbolic value and of aesthetic interest,” but as with his January 1927 “Commentary,” he quickly pivots to the argument that the Abbey is significant because of the “public ceremonies for which the Abbey is the traditional and appropriate scene.” Eliot was disturbed by plans to enlarge and remodel Westminster because it “was not originally designed as a Pantheon, but as a Church.” He is, therefore, eager to see it preserved not as a monument to great men, but as a secure resting place for people whose “religious faith (or superstition if you like) made them very anxious to be left in peace.” Running throughout these three contributions to The Criterion is Eliot’s clear commitment to the preservation of churches as working buildings that exert influence on the life of the City, not merely as monumental towers or as museum pieces.19 Over the course of the 1920s, Eliot’s interest shifted from preserving buildings’ specific aesthetic features or historical associations to protecting the institutions that buildings house. As Hazel Atkins observes, Eliot’s revision of his church preservation principles tracks with his conversion to the Church of England, which culminated in his baptism on Easter 1927.20 Eliot’s perspectival shift from outside observer to communicant, parishioner, and church warden certainly influenced his views on the value and uses of historic church buildings, yet Eliot’s revision of his views also coincides with the dramatic interwar transformations of some of the City churches. These relatively overlooked architectural changes—along with Eliot’s spiritual journey—help to explain the development of Eliot’s views and exert critical pressure on his poems. Eliot’s direct experiences in the 1920s with the changes wrought on St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr, the two churches he mentions in The Waste Land, helped to shift his architectural preservation sentiments away from church buildings as museum pieces toward churches as working and ever-evolving centers of religious and community life.

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St. Mary Woolnoth: Threatened and Undermined As with his early prose argument for preservation, Eliot’s poetic use of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr in The Waste Land suggests that he considered the City churches to be stable but threatened monuments worthy of preservation. In the poem, St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr appear as relics of a City that had been overbuilt by banks, trading houses, and office buildings; like the snatches of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Webster, these churches are “fragments” that the speaker has “shored against [his or her] ruins.” The poem shows that the contexts of these churches have changed: in the twentieth-century London of the poem, throbbing taxis have replaced the clatter of horse hooves and carriages, the Thames is slicked with oil and tar, and demobbed soldiers wander the streets. Strangely, then, given all the signs of twentieth-century London that surround the churches, the poem does not explicitly acknowledge that the church buildings themselves have been altered. St. Mary Woolnoth rings its bell at nine o’clock as it has for centuries, and St. Magnus Martyr’s geode-like walls encase the timeless and untarnishable “inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.” Eliot discovered, however, that the City churches were not the durable and immutable bulwarks against the “vulgarity” of the City that he may have first observed as a young man on holiday or intimated as a banker seeking a lunchtime refuge. St. Mary Woolnoth, especially, had undergone significant transformations over the course of its eight-hundred-year history. The pamphlet that Eliot cites in his notes to The Waste Land, The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches, dates St. Mary Woolnoth’s existence to 1191.21 The medieval building was not destroyed in the Great Fire, but it was heavily damaged. Christopher Wren conducted the initial repairs, but this renovation was evidently unsuccessful or unsatisfactory, because the entire medieval structure was razed in 1716. Wren’s protégé Nicholas Hawksmoor was commissioned to build the new church that same year. Hawksmoor’s building, the present structure, was completed in 1727. Hawksmoor’s design for the church acknowledged the history of its site and the memories of its parishioners, but its new architectural style was nevertheless of its time. The church’s heavily rusticated façade and columns, its unique turreted tower, and its monumental interior (lit primarily by clerestory windows to insulate the sanctuary from Lombard Street traffic noise) led Pevsner and Bradley to describe it as “the most original church exterior in the City of London.”22 The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches also recognizes Hawksmoor’s innovation, writing that St. Mary Woolnoth is “a church of quite unusual distinction, both externally and internally . . . one of the best of Hawksmoor’s efforts.”23 Despite the historical and aesthetic significance of St. Mary Woolnoth, the City and South London Railway planned to demolish the church in 1897 to make way for a booking hall and access point to what is now Bank Station. Because of public outcry, however, the project’s engineers spared the church and instead built the booking station on the wedge-shaped site between the church’s south wall and King William Street.24 In the updated plan, the railway company provided access to Bank Station from the street level via an elevator shaft that engineers dug through the church’s crypt and foundation. Because this shaft descended directly through the crypt, which had for centuries been used as a burial ground, all of the bodies that had been laid to rest under the nave were exhumed and reburied outside of London.25 When the project

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was completed, Underground patrons accessed the elevators from King William Street through a doorway that formerly led to St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt. They then waited in the crypt for an elevator that would take them down to their trains. The construction of the passage to Bank Station under St. Mary Woolnoth required the installation of steel girders beneath the floor and inside the walls of the church to shore up its suddenly shaky foundation.26 Whatever symbolic effect this literal undermining may have had, the project of exhumation and reburial came as a practical relief to St. Mary Woolnoth’s parishioners, despite the inconvenience and dislocation caused by the closing of the church during the months of construction. The railroad’s removal of the bodies provided a permanent solution to what had been for many years a persistent, if intermittent, problem—the interruption of services by noises and stench wafting up into the sanctuary from the crypt. In an 1889 letter to the editor of The Times, St. Mary Woolnoth’s rector J. M. S. Brooke noted that he had “often, while conducting service in the church above, heard the coffins tumbling about in the vaults below.”27 Two years later, Brooke again wrote to the editor of The Times about the condition of St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt, this time to address the controversy over the reduction of scheduled services at his church. “Some few years ago,” he explained, “the smell from the vaults, which contain, as I compute, the remains of 7,000 or 8,000 bodies, became so foul and offensive that we were obliged to discontinue the services. It was then determined by the vestry to seal and concrete the superficial area contained within the walls.” Brooke notes that the crypt was imperfectly sealed, however, because “during the past summer, the church began to smell again, some of the congregation became ill, and I, after two and sometimes three services on Sunday, became affected with a sore throat. This smell at times was intolerable, coming up from below in whiffs and gusts.” Just before his final plea to preserve the church by “reverently” removing its vault’s contents, Brooke notes again the terribly close proximity of the bodies beneath his parishioners’ feet: The mass of corrupted humanity contained within the four walls gives off an effluvium which must find a vent through the smallest of apertures, should such exist in the concrete. The fact that there are thousands of bodies within a foot or two of the floor of the church constitutes standing evidence of an insanitary condition. These bodies, from my own personal knowledge and sight, consist, roughly, of those which are dry and those which are wet. I should think that more than half are harmless, shrunken and withered, but the remainder are marvelously preserved flesh and bones, the stomachs nests of corruption, and here and there little pools of treacle reduced to such by catalytic process.28 It goes without saying that St. Mary Woolnoth’s services began to suffer from lack of attendance during this period.29 The engineers’ mechanical and olfactory triumphs notwithstanding, the descent into Bank Station through St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt was likely an uncomfortable experience to an Underground patron of Eliot’s sensitivity. For at least nine hundred years, the act of descending into St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt had been weighted with tremendous significance. Karsten Harries reminds us that We should not forget the . . . meaning of descent: going down into a cellar, into the underworld, descending into hell. In many medieval churches we often find beneath the light-filled choir a crypt: narrow steps wind down into its musty darkness. If the

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joshua mabie altar above is given to light and eternal life, beneath is the realm of darkness and death. The crypt is the cellar of the church. Here human pride is shattered.30

The engineers’ design for the Tube stop rejects the meaning that Harries identifies and disregards the long history of the place. In direct contrast to Hawksmoor’s attempts to incorporate the history of the site into a new design for the church, the engineers disregarded the previous functions of the church’s architectural features and reduced them to mere ornament shorn of meaning. The appearance of St. Mary Woolnoth in the first section of The Waste Land shows that Eliot was troubled by the church’s fading existence as a vital spiritual community in the City. The actual emptying of St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt and its reconfiguration as a waiting room for Tube commuters provides an exact historical context, and perhaps correlative, to the Dantean crowd that “flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. . . . Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Eliot may have regarded the tall façade, the solid walls, and the nave floor as a stable enough relic of the former City, but the exhumation of its former congregants blends into the flow of dead souls / commuters in limbo over London Bridge. This exhumation also informs the speaker’s address to Stetson that follows: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? . . . / O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” These lines capture the horror of digging up buried bodies, even while recognizing that such an act may be done by a “friend” with the best intentions. More generally, St. Mary Woolnoth’s empty crypt supports Eliot’s broader Waste Land critique of his world’s failure to reckon fully with death. With each man’s eyes “fixed before his feet,” Eliot and his fellow commuters avoid sight, thought, and apparently the smell of the dead in the City churches, thereby evading consciousness of the process of life, death, and resurrection that the churches’ naves, dark crypts, and light-filled choirs were designed to represent. Thus, the dead sound that St. Mary Woolnoth’s bell makes is not the heavy peal of Donne’s bell that forces his pre-modern auditors to reckon with their own mortality, but a sound that is “without resonance, dull, muffled” because it is “destitute of spiritual life or energy.”31

St. Magnus Martyr: Overshadowed and Overlaid Like St. Mary Woolnoth, St. Magnus Martyr appears in The Waste Land as a relic of a richer and more beautiful past. Two sections after Eliot’s mention of St. Mary Woolnoth, he describes St. Magnus Martyr at the end of a similar amble through the City, observing that its walls “hold / Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.” St. Magnus Martyr’s beauty is “inexplicable” perhaps because its relatively unremarkable exterior suggests nothing of its splendid interior design. Standing at the place where London Bridge crosses into the City, the Dantean crowd that flows across the Thames in the first section of the poem walks past St. Magnus Martyr on its way up the hill to King William Street. The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches notes that a church of St. Magnus Martyr has stood near the Thames since the Conquest.32 St. Magnus’s medieval building was completely destroyed

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by the Great Fire, and the parish hired Wren to rebuild the church. Wren’s design embraced the church’s prominent location at the head of London Bridge with a tall, richly ornamented tower that stood as something of a gatepost to the City for people crossing over from Southwark. Wren segmented the church’s interior plan into three aisles and nine bays with the slender ionic columns that Eliot made famous in The Waste Land. Though Wren’s design for the church was undoubtedly beautiful, the “inexplicable splendor” that Eliot encountered inside St. Magnus Martyr was not the interior that Wren designed; neither was it the sumptuous interior that visitors see today. A catastrophic 1760 fire consumed much of the church and caused the first major changes to Wren’s St. Magnus Martyr. According to the Proposed Demolition pamphlet that Eliot cites in his notes, the fire resulted in changes to the interior that “[exhibit] faults of design . . . and [that are] disappointing.”33 Eliot either overlooked this eighteenthcentury remodeling or chose to ignore it. Instead of factoring this more complex history of St. Magnus Martyr into the poem, Eliot glossed the lines with the note, “The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors,” even though significant remodeling projects separated him from what Wren had built. Overlooking or ignoring this more complex history allows Eliot to use the church in The Waste Land as a durable link to a nostalgic past. St. Magnus Martyr anchors a small nostalgic district in The Waste Land where “the pleasant whining of a mandolin” contrasts with the automatic scratching of the gramophone, where idle public-house chatter contrasts with anxious, hurried bar talk, and where noon-lounging “fishmen” contrast with foot-fixed-gaze commuters. Soon after the publication of the poem, Eliot was confronted with dramatic changes to St. Magnus Martyr that undercut its symbolism in The Waste Land and caused him to rethink his former views about what of historic church buildings can and cannot be preserved. Just as the St. Magnus Martyr that Eliot encountered in 1921 was very different from the church that Wren designed, it has undergone many changes since the writing of The Waste Land. Unlike the transformation of St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt, which was completed a decade before Eliot first encountered the church, he witnessed firsthand St. Magnus Martyr’s second wholesale remodeling. Since the eleventh century, St. Magnus Martyr welcomed the pedestrians who crossed over London Bridge to the City; even after the construction of New London Bridge in 1831, the church stood prominently in the City skyline (Figure 4.1) and maintained its association with the City’s “fishmen” beside the Thames. In 1921, however, engineers began excavating the foundation for Adelaide House, a faux-Egyptian warehouse and office building modeled on the early skyscraper experiments of 1890s St. Louis.34 When the building was completed in 1925, Adelaide House stood as the tallest building in London. It also partially encircled St. Magnus Martyr, cutting the church off from both London Bridge and the Thames (Figure 4.2). Eliot wrote in his October 1926 Criterion “Commentary” that “the church of St. Magnus Martyr has been concealed on the side from which its beauty was most conspicuous, by a large industrial structure . . . which reduces the church to the proportions and importance of a museum piece.”35 Eliot’s unfavorable comparison of the church to a museum piece shows that he had become interested in preserving more than beautiful or historic architectural features. It was not enough to protect the building as an artifact; the church’s place in the city and function within society must also be maintained.

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Figure 4.1 St. Magnus Martyr and London Bridge prior to the completion of Adelaide House. Engraving for Walks Through London (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1817).

Figure 4.2 St. Magnus Martyr obscured by Adelaide House circa 1930. From the angle of this photograph, a portion of St. Magnus’s tower is visible just to the right of the Monument, but from the deck of London Bridge, the church’s tower is entirely obscured. Raphael Tuck & Sons Postcard No. 2192.

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St. Magnus’s place in the City changed after The Waste Land’s publication; its interior was also dramatically altered. In 1921 the Anglo-Catholic Reverend Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton assumed the rectorship of St. Magnus Martyr and began an ambitious remodeling project for the church. Fynes-Clinton did not have historic restoration of the Wren church in mind for his remodeling project; instead, he devoted his significant personal wealth and his collection of liturgical furnishings to remodel the interior of St. Magnus Martyr into a space where Anglo-Catholic liturgy could be practiced in its fullest expression. Under Fynes-Clinton’s direction, the prominent Anglo-Catholic designer Martin Travers transformed St. Magnus Martyr from a broad-church Anglican house of worship into a sanctuary modeled on Continental, baroque, Roman Catholic churches. To achieve this transformation, Fynes-Clinton added a collection of shrines around the church. In its northeast corner, Fynes-Clinton and Travers created an altar to the Virgin Mary that included a tabernacle for reserving the sacrament. Travers also added an altar that celebrated Christ the King in the southwest corner of the church and a statue of St. Magnus the Martyr on its southern wall. Both of the side reredoses were twentieth-century creations, but they appear to be authentic baroque pieces because Travers used reclaimed seventeenth-century woodwork to create them. The statue of St. Magnus the Martyr that Travers installed along the south wall was wholly new, though it too was made to look very old. Michael Yelton describes the result as an “Austrian church which has been washed over by the Counter-Reformation.”36 Neither The Waste Land nor its notes, nor Eliot’s mid-1920s prose comments directly criticize Fynes-Clinton and Travers’s changes to St. Magnus Martyr. However, in a May 1931 submission to the Chichester Diocesan Gazette, Eliot explicitly rejects the type of restoration that the rector and his designer undertook. In the column, Eliot argues against making church interiors into “period pieces” and insists that churches and cathedrals should instead make use of the “best contemporary artists in stone, metal, paint and wood.” Eliot asserts the importance of “modern religious paintings” and other contemporary furnishings to create “a cathedral where art—not merely archaeology—is dedicated to God.”37 Beyond his critique of obeisance to the styles of earlier periods, Eliot affirms his preference for “local” ornament and furnishings. This too is an implicit rejection of St. Magnus Martyr’s adopted Continental baroque style. In Eliot’s expanded architectural sensibility, the liturgical transformation of St. Magnus Martyr is an error equal but opposite to the railroad’s commercial appropriation of St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt. Far from reinforcing St. Magnus Martyr’s tradition as a “fishmen’s” church in the City, Fynes-Clinton’s remodeling cut it off from the aesthetic conventions of Anglican Christianity that had developed over the four centuries since the English Reformation. Though the church remodeling was undeniably more beautifully executed than the faux-Egyptian skyscraper that rose around it, St. Magnus Martyr’s interior renovations separated the church from its historical context nearly as completely as Adelaide House separated it from the Thames. Fynes-Clinton and Travers’s remodeling is what Hobsbawm describes as “invented tradition,” the “attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historical past” where genuine continuity has been broken.38

Eliot’s Later Thoughts on Architecture and Its Preservation Eliot’s understanding of architectural history expanded and matured in the years following his “London Letter,” The Waste Land, and his Criterion commentaries.

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The opening lines of East Coker (1940) mark another waypoint in the development of Eliot’s more nuanced view of architecture. Unlike The Waste Land’s allusions to churches as enduring artifacts, East Coker emphasizes buildings’ mutability and permeability: In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. ... Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.39 To be sure, these lines consider transformations of domestic, not ecclesiastical, architecture, and they better describe Eliot’s removed, destroyed, and restored American architectural context than his adopted English environment.40 However, descriptions of English architecture elsewhere in Four Quartets and the specific history of St. Michael’s in East Coker connect this opening description of domestic American instability to the mutability of England’s built environment. The thatch-roofed village of East Coker is a “completely charming” English country village that even today appears untouched by modern development, but Raymond Preston observes that the poem describes the village with “a rapid sketch of the changing face of the village in the course of several centuries.”41 Nancy D. Hargrove concurs, writing that “The village is pictured as its old stone and timbers give way to the signs of modern ‘progress’; a vacant lot, a sooty factory, a traffic-crammed by-pass.”42 Permeable, mutable, and transient American and English buildings are present throughout Four Quartets beyond East Coker. The dry pool and draughty church of “Burnt Norton” and the firebombed shell of the shrine church of St. Julian of Norwich in Little Gidding parallel the removed, destroyed, and restored houses of East Coker. In Little Gidding, Eliot returns to the derelict buildings that open East Coker, echoing “The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,” and extending the decay they indicate to a country church whose foundation “Water and fire shall rot.” Unlike Fynes-Clinton and Travers’s approach to changing St. Magnus Martyr, St. Michael’s of East Coker makes no attempt to hide its transformations. Instead, its vicar has highlighted the changes wrought upon the church by Puritan reformers with signs and plaques that guide visitors with comments such as “the very tops of the stained glass windows . . . are all that the Puritan reformers left us of the original stained glass windows.” The sign that contains this statement is relatively new; the critical posture it takes toward the Puritans seems to be quite long established. A large painted board depicting the royal coat of arms and dated 1690 hangs above the door to the church and is captioned with the quotation “Feare thou the lord and the king and meddle not with them that are given to chang. Pro. 24.” Instead of enforcing an unbroken link to the past, though, this sign testifies to the tumultuous Civil War and Restoration history of the building and of the lives of its parishioners, including Andrew Eliott, who left East Coker for Massachusetts in 1668.43

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Eliot reckons with the changes that he encountered in the built environments of St. Louis, London, and East Coker in his 1951 address to the Friends of Chichester Cathedral, and incorporates his expanded understanding of architectural history into an updated perspective on historic preservation. In his Chichester lecture, Eliot departs from his Waste Land–era insistence on the preservation of churches as historical and aesthetic monuments to prioritize instead the utility of cathedrals and churches. Early in the Chichester address, Eliot signals the distance he has traveled from his earlier perspective on the value of church architecture by distinguishing himself from “people outside of the Church who would gladly see [cathedrals] preserved simply as ancient monuments of historical and artistic interest.”44 For Eliot in 1951, the preservation value of churches and cathedrals is directly related to their usefulness as places of worship: a church building that is no longer used as a church ceases to have value, and may well cease to be worth preserving. Eliot begins his discussion of preservation with a statement of continuity. “I have always held,” he writes, “that the amalgamation of country parishes is at best a deplorable necessity; and with regard to the City churches of London, that all of which even the shell remains should be preserved and used as churches,” but then he pivots to a revised view that admits that shifts of population sometimes justify the closing of a church. Eliot grants, “where there are two churches near each other, in a neighborhood that needs only one, it is better that one Church should be properly kept up and staffed than that both should be half-empty and half-derelict.” A “useful” church, to Eliot, is one where the “funds and the clergy would not be better employed, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, elsewhere.” Even if there were both money and clergy to staff a half-empty church, Eliot acknowledges, “there might still be something unedifying in there being two churches in near proximity, both very poorly attended.”45 Eliot is not clear whether this justified closing of a church applies solely to the “country parishes” he discusses earlier in his remarks, or to the City churches as well (which he mentions in the sentence before this acknowledgment of “justified closing”), but his opening comments indicate that he regards the content and practice of worship to be much more important than the form or style of the building that houses the worship. Eliot reinforces this point later in the address when he cautions his audience that when people have grown accustomed to “ecclesiastical ornament only of a particular historical period . . . it may be that their religious life and their daily life are too far from each other.”46 Eliot’s insistence upon the importance of churches being preserved—not just as dead artifacts but as living houses of worship—anticipates the preservation principles that are currently articulated by English Heritage. Like Eliot, English Heritage affirms that England’s “historic places of worship should retain their role as living buildings at the heart of their communities.”47 To facilitate this dynamic approach to preservation, English Heritage offers to “help congregations accommodate changes that are needed . . . in ways that will sustain and enhance the special qualities of their buildings.”48 Practically, this means that listed status does not “freeze a building at a point in time”; instead, it ensures that “when change becomes essential or desirable, the significance of a building and its setting can be protected.”49 Whereas Eliot’s interest in church preservation through managed adaption was religious, English Heritage’s interest in helping buildings retain their role as living buildings is a strategic consideration that reflects what has become common knowledge in preservation: “The best way to preserve a

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listed building is to ensure its continued maintenance and repair through keeping it in its original use.”50 Eliot’s 1951 comments were progressive, yet they stop well short of the radical position that Richard Giles—an Anglican parish priest, town planner, and church re-ordering consultant—takes in his 1996 treatise on church design, Re-Pitching the Tent. Giles contends that the majority of English parish churches “are woefully unsuitable and ill-equipped to serve as local centres of worship and mission.” They are hindered by the “debris of yesterday’s church and the preservationist[s’] constraints,” and they are now “fit only for the heritage trail.”51 Far from lamenting Tudor and Puritan iconoclasm, Giles takes inspiration from earlier English reformers who “could be found hacking away at their church building before the ink was dry on the latest theological pamphlet.”52 He also looks to modern supermarkets, which view “buildings as disposable items in an overall mission strategy,” to provide a model for the dramatic “re-ordering” of England’s churches. Giles’s vision for English churches considers all options from “re-packaging” of exterior and interior spaces to the wrecking ball.53 Nowhere in his Chichester comments does Eliot approach Giles’s disdain for English architectural tradition. Indeed, the contrast between Eliot’s comments and Giles’s reveals that Eliot’s revisions to his architectural theory aligned his perspective on architecture with his broader theory of tradition even as it took better stock of the material and historical realities of architecture. Eliot acknowledges the excesses of the Victorians and the constraints that their church designs and restoration projects imposed upon subsequent generations of English churchgoers before stating a doubly hedged position on dioceses’ and parishes’ appropriate relationship to their historic church buildings that contrasts sharply with Giles’s position. Eliot begins by writing that it is “better to put up with what we have inherited, rather than turn a cathedral inside out to suit the taste of each period in turn.” He immediately qualifies this general principle, however: “But while I am conservative in the matter of doing away with what is old, I deplore excessive conservatism where there is new work to be done.” Rather than attempting to imitate the “devotional art of an earlier age,” Eliot recommends that churches “take the risk of a great modern artist, when we have one.” Immediately after insisting that cathedrals make use of modern artists to do “new work,” Eliot doubles back on his own argument to conclude, “Of course, by far the greater work of our cathedrals must be work of restoration, i.e. the work and expense to maintain the cathedral and its identity. And by restoration, I mean the replacement of what was there before as exactly as possible.”54 Though the turns and hedging in Eliot’s position seem inconsistent and confusing, they help him stake out a position between iconoclasm and “excessive conservatism.” So too does his concept of restoration. For twenty-first-century preservationists, restoration is the act of making a building look as it did during a particular—and often the most significant—time in its history.55 Restoration is as unpopular with preservationists today as it was with Ruskin and Morris in the nineteenth century because it strips away the patina that has developed slowly over years of use in favor of pristine, but imposed, reconstruction. To Eliot, however, restoration meant both “replacement” and “maintenance.” At first glance, Eliot’s interest in restoration as “replacement of what was there” seems reactionary, but his disregard for the question of time in his definition—by leaving the “when” off of the “what was there when”—distinguishes his understanding from preservationists who sought to turn back the clock on a particular building. Unlike the

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historical restorationists of his day and ours, Eliot makes no attempt to identify what particular time’s “what was there” is most worth recreating, and he explicitly criticizes churchgoers who “have to be surrounded by reminders of some particular past, and, as they think, some more pious age.” Eliot’s concept of restoration as maintenance suggests that he does not consider churches to be a collection of discrete artifacts set in an ideal arrangement (an altar here, an image there, an organ here, a clock there). He suggests that buildings have something of a historical sense, an always evolving totality of mutable elements that are related to one another both in particular moments and across time. In contrast to restoration as present imposition on an old building, Eliot’s concept of restoration affirms continuity with an always unfolding past in a manner that neither crudely imitates nor appropriates elements as mere ornament. Thanks perhaps in some small way to Eliot’s Waste Land–era prose and poetic architectural advocacy, London’s City churches remain an important part of the everchanging fabric of the City. St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Magnus Martyr in particular are frequently visited stops on the literary pilgrimage tour and have therefore been well maintained, though St. Mary Woolnoth is now a guild church without regular services or parishioners. Eliot’s architectural interest has had a long afterlife, most notably in East Coker. Since 2011, Eliot and his poetry have been enlisted by the organization Save East Coker to resist a proposed urban expansion of neighboring Yeovil into the town’s viewshed. A reporter for The Telegraph asked “why are we here in East Coker, rather than any other village under threat in these new Gradgrind times?” East Coker matters, notes the reporter, because of St. Michael’s, “where the ashes of the Nobel Prize–winning poet T. S. Eliot were interred in September 1965. . . . His remains, his local connections and East Coker, one of his Four Quartets, are the aces in the pack of those fighting to defeat the urban extension. To build here, they say, would be poetic sacrilege.”56 The argument for preservation of East Coker because of its beautiful and ancient fields and because of its association with a famous poet may well have persuaded the T. S. Eliot of the earlier 1920s, but an older Eliot might have seen the 3,700 new houses across a field from, and in full view of, St. Michael’s as an assurance that the church would be well-attended by parishioners (in addition to tourists) and properly kept up for many years.

Notes 1. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester and the former Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, commissioned Eliot to write Murder in the Cathedral for the 1935 Canterbury Festival. 2. Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Italian Trip, Summer 1911: Museums, Cathedrals, Palaces, and Landscapes,” South Atlantic Review 76, no. 3 (summer 2011): 7–8. Hargrove suggests that Forbes’s rigorous course provided Eliot with a level of knowledge that allowed him to engage the built environment with the “air of the professional—and superior—critic.” 3. L1, 18. 4. Eliot marked St. Botolph without Aldersgate, St. Bartholomew the Great, All Hallows on the Wall, St. Vedast’s, St. Mary Aldermanbury, St. Michael’s, All Hallows, St. Mary Woolnoth, St. Magnus the Martyr, St. Dunstan’s in the East, St. Mary at Hill, Salvation Army Headquarters, St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, St. Mary Aldermary, and St. Dunstan in the West. Eliot’s copy of London and its Environs (New York: Baedeker, 1908) is in the Hayward Bequest at King’s College Library, Cambridge. 5. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Italian Trip,” 11, 16, and 22.

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6. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: May 1921,” The Dial 70 (May 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 345. 7. London County Council, Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (London: Oldhams Press, 1920), 3. 8. Complete Prose 2, 345. 9. Quoted in Norman Tyler, Ted J. Ligbel, and Ilene R. Tyler, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to its History, Principles, and Practice (New York: Norton, 2009), 20. 10. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1849), 179. 11. Ibid., 181. 12. William Morris, “The Manifesto,” Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 2009, http://www.spab.org.uk/what-is-spab-/the-manifesto/. 13. English Heritage, “New Work in Historic Places of Worship,” 2012, 1, http://www.englishheritage.org.uk/publications/new-work-in-historic-places-of-worship/. Morris explicitly compares buildings to great works of art in The Manifesto, “For our part we assure them fearlessly, that of all the Restorations yet undertaken, the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; whilst the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly-perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of today.” 14. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The New Criterion 4 (October 1926), in Complete Prose 2, 832. 15. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The New Criterion 5 (January 1927), in Complete Prose 3, 4. 16. Eliot seems not to realize that the adjectives are Morris’s and attributes the quotation to Lord Viscount, who delivered the forty-ninth annual address. 17. Complete Prose 3, 4 18. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The New Criterion 7 (January 1928), in Complete Prose 3, 318–20. 19. Eliot used his Criterion “Commentary” to advocate for the preservation of English architecture two other times in the 1920s. His August 1927 “Commentary” expanded his advocacy beyond the City churches, to urge the preservation of English cottages and London’s open spaces. He also called for a central organization that would unify and magnify the efforts of England’s various preservation societies (Complete Prose 3, 157–58). Eliot’s July 1929 “Commentary” extends this 1927 call for a national preservation organization and lobbies for a “central organization under government auspices and with government funds” to look after “the City Churches as well as the Wye Valley; . . . buildings which are merely perishing from decay as well as those which are in risk of demolition” (Complete Prose 3, 652–53). As with the 1927 “Commentary,” Eliot’s 1929 argument acknowledges the importance of preserving “places of historical interest or beauty” (652). 20. Atkins observes that Eliot’s “view of the aesthetic value of churches was subordinated to his growing sense of their importance as sacred places” as he was being received in the Church of England. “As his own spiritual life developed and changed, so too did his responses to church architecture,” writes Atkins in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. Benjamin G. Lockerd (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 173–74. 21. London County Council, Proposed Demolition, 21–22. Gerald Cobb discusses the history of St. Mary Woolnoth deep into antiquity in London City Churches (London: B. T. Batsford, 1989), 164. 22. Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, London: The City Churches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 113. 23. London County Council, Proposed Demolition, 22–23. 24. Bradley and Pevsner, London: The City Churches, 114. 25. Gill Davies, One Thousand Buildings of London (New York: Black Dog, 2006), 237. The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches notes that the church received £136,421 in 1903 for the use of its crypt.

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26. Bradley and Pevsner, London: The City Churches, 114. Davies, One Thousand Buildings of London, 237. 27. J. M. S. Brooke, “Letter to the Editor: The Mummy at St. Mary Woolnoth’s,” The Times, December 26, 1889, 3. 28. J. M. S. Brooke, “To the Editor of the Times: St. Mary Woolnoth,” The Times, November 24, 1891, 7. 29. Brooke defends the attendance record of his church in a letter to the editor of The Times on June 2, 1896. The letter is a response to a House of Commons committee report that claimed the church was of no use and “had no congregation.” 30. Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), 192. 31. See “dead” in OED, definitions 14a and 4. 32. London County Council, Proposed Demolition, 18. 33. Ibid., 19. 34. Adelaide House was completed in 1925, but Pevsner and Bradley note that the foundation was being dug in 1921 (London: The City Churches, 99). A notice in the March 9, 1922 issue of The Times supports Pevsner and Bradley’s claim that site work was under way in 1921. An article titled “New High Buildings” describes Adelaide House as one of two “new high office buildings that are being erected in London” (18). 35. Complete Prose 2, 831. 36. Michael Yelton, Alfred Hope Patten and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006), 64. 37. L5, 542–43. 38. Eric Hobsbawm, introduction to The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 39. CPP, 177. 40. Eliot’s neighborhood in St. Louis was overcome by industrial development and the home he inhabited, the church he attended, and the school where he studied had, by 1940, already begun to crumble or be repurposed. 41. Quoted in Nancy D. Hargrove, Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1978), 148. 42. Hargrove, Landscape as Symbol, 148. 43. Walter Graeme Eliot, A Sketch of the Eliot Family (New York: Livingston Middleditch, 1887), 14. 44. Eliot, The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England Today (Chichester: Moore & Tillyer, 1951), 3. These 1951 comments oppose an earlier statement that Eliot made in “If I Were a Dean,” a contribution to the Chichester Diocesan Gazette 12 (May 1931). In a column he penned at the invitation of the dean, Eliot maintains that “a cathedral is primarily a place of worship . . . not a National Monument,” but he also acknowledges that cathedrals are a “valuable asset to a country, particularly if a dignified urban and rural amenity is preserved around them; they are an asset, that is, to steamship lines, railways, motorbus services, local tradesmen, postcard makers, and tourist agencies” (Complete Prose 4, 296). Eliot mentions the commercial value of cathedrals as justification for the entire nation—not merely the churchgoing portion—paying for their preservation. These 1931 comments by no means advocate for turning cathedrals into tourist destinations, but he is far less hostile to their role as monuments in 1931 than he is in 1951. See L5, 541–42. 45. Eliot, Value and Use, 4. 46. Ibid., 9. 47. English Heritage, New Work in Historic Places of Worship, 2012, 1, http://www.englishheritage.org.uk/publications/new-work-in-historic-places-of-worship/. 48. Ibid., 1.

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49. “Listed buildings” are buildings of “special architectural or historical interest.” Historic England, “Listed Buildings,” https://www.historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/has/listed-buildings/. Listed status is, roughly, the British equivalent of placement on the “National Register of Historic Places” in the United States. 50. David Baker, “Churches and Cathedrals,” in Managing Historic Sites and Buildings: Reconciling Presentation and Preservation, ed. Baker and Gill Chitty (London: Routledge, 1999), 101. 51. Richard Giles, Re-Pitching the Tent: Re-ordering the Church Building for Worship and Mission in the New Millennium (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2004), 5–7. 52. Ibid., 7. 53. Ibid., 105–9. 54. Eliot, Value and Use, 7. 55. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Standards for Restoration and Guidelines for Restoring Historic Buildings,” http://www.nps.gov/tps/standards.htm. 56. Robert Chesshyre, “Hands Off Our Land: The Fight to Protect T. S. Eliot’s Village,” The Telegraph, October 22, 2011.

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Eliot and the Performance Arts Introduction

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n contrast to Eliot’s interest in the visual arts, which requires some archeology to reconstruct, his delight in the performance arts manifestly grounded his work and life. From the playful “Curtain Raiser” that opens his undergraduate notebook to the monumental musical analogy of Four Quartets, Eliot’s poetry salutes, intertwines, and debates with music and theater. His attention to dialogue and stage-setting in the early poems points clearly toward the direction of his later career in drama. As a critic and reviewer, Eliot observed and commented on such artists as Léonide Massine, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Dolmetsch, and Marie Lloyd, especially in the heady London arts scene of the 1920s. He also wrote more generally about the relations of poetry with music, dance, and drama, exploring their likeness and unlikeness as arts, especially later in his career. Over his lifetime, Eliot examined the performance arts from the standpoint of practitioner, spectator, and theorist. Small wonder, then, that his engagement with these arts has long been an important theme in the critical discourse about Eliot.

Music When we read Eliot, music almost always plays somewhere in the background, and this affinity for music was a personal and cultural inheritance. His father was a member of the Philharmonic and Choral Societies of St. Louis (later the St. Louis Symphony), his mother wrote musically themed poetry, and the family lived near the epicenter of ragtime in downtown St. Louis.1 Perhaps his earliest reference to music appears in Fireside, the magazine that he penned as an eleven year old, in a mock advertisement for a “Great Show / ‘A HOT TIME.’ ”2 Though he was unlikely to have heard Mama Lou sing “A Hot Time in the Old Town” at Babe Connor’s nightclub in St. Louis, the fame of her hit song had reached him already.3 How critics understand Eliot’s relation to music depends in large part on what kind of music they hear him hearing, so to speak: Wagner, Stravinsky, Beethoven, ragtime, jazz, and music hall are all acknowledged as important influences, and each ushers us into his oeuvre by a different path.4 Yet for him they were probably a more integrated experience than we now take them to be. Music pervades Eliot’s early notebook, Inventions of the March Hare, as one can immediately see from its preludes, caprices, interludes, several songs, suite, and so on. Scenes of music-listening are set in concert halls, parks, nightclubs, and in the poet’s head; the poems refer to specific works of European art music and popular American songs. Though Eliot’s tendency to title poems after musical genres is well known, even obvious, his full range of musical engagement at this early stage has remained obscure due to the late publication of Inventions in 1996. Eliot’s public disparagement of literary Romanticism has also (incorrectly) led to the assumption

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that he felt similarly about nineteenth-century music.5 The first chapter of this section, “The Musical World of Eliot’s Inventions,” documents more fully the concert scene in Boston and the discourse about music at Harvard during the time when Eliot was writing many of his early poems. Rather than parsing the distinction between “classical” and “popular” music, as we are more likely to do now, Eliot had to negotiate a debate about the mixing of music with other art forms, between Irving Babbitt’s conservative objections on one side and Nietzsche’s embrace of Wagner’s “Dionysian” music-dramas on the other. In particular, Eliot’s relations to music seem tinged by fear of “melomania,” or musical insanity. The variety of musically themed experiments in his notebook—including “Opera,” his first reference to Wagner— show Eliot seeking a way to incorporate music into his writing without crossing the line into musical possession. As an entry point to Eliot, “Wagner” is a door that leads to the influence of Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and the Ring cycle of operas, and, further, to an entire fin-de-siècle literary culture intertwined with music. Many of the French Symbolist poets were first published in La Revue wagnérienne, including Verlaine, whose sonnet “Parsifal” Eliot quoted in The Waste Land. This larger Wagnerian context lends itself to at least three kinds of analysis: interpreting The Waste Land in light of the myths and archetypes central to Wagner’s operas; understanding Eliot’s poetic technique in this poem as an adaptation of Wagnerian leitmotif; and placing Eliot in the musico-Symbolist tradition of the late nineteenth century.6 How important are the findings from these investigations? On the one hand, Wagnerian allusions do pervade The Waste Land at many levels, and we have both Stravinsky’s testimony that “Tristan must have been one of the most passionate experiences of [Eliot’s] life” and the fact that Eliot’s route to the Grail myth passed through Wagnerite Jessie Weston.7 On the other hand, reconciling the spare, ironic, modernist poet with a composer who epitomized Romanticism has remained a puzzle; there is also a temporal disjunction between Eliot’s Symbolist phase and The Waste Land. Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is difficult to appreciate Wagner’s continuing importance in the 1920s, let alone his cultural role at the time when Eliot began writing poetry. In our cluster on Eliot and Wagner, the authors attempt to fill out this picture to explain why the poet returned to Tristan, the Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal in The Waste Land. Adrian Paterson points out that the experience of Wagner’s operas was a highly mediated one even from the beginning: audiences experienced Wagner through orchestral excerpts, plot summaries, libretti, music criticism, and literary adaptations. In “‘Try, if possible, to hear something’: Mediating Wagners,” Paterson examines the many intermediaries through which Wagner enters Eliot’s poem, such as Jean Verdenal’s letters, Verlaine’s sonnet “Parsifal,” Pound’s experimental Noh play Tristan, and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. In turn, Eliot’s poem gives us a silent, fragmented, highly mediated rendition of Wagner’s operas. Paying close attention to the typography and other local details of the Wagner intrusions in The Waste Land, Paterson understands the poem as a commentary on the mediation of Wagner for modern audiences, and more generally, on experiencing music in the absence of sound. Focusing on Parsifal, not quoted directly in The Waste Land yet ubiquitously present through symbol and narrative parallels, Katherine Hobbs explains that this opera had its London debut just months before the start of World War I. In the following years, audiences connected personally with Wagner’s narrative of wounding and

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redemption, with one critic calling on contemporary poets for a “modern interpretation” of the opera. When Eliot answered that call by writing The Waste Land, he spoke in part out of nostalgia for a lost Europe and a dead friend, Jean Verdenal, with whom he had enjoyed discussing Wagner;8 yet, Hobbs shows, his response also updated Wagner for a modern audience (“ ‘So all the women are one woman’: Eliot’s Kundry”). She focuses on Eliot’s adaptation of the character of Kundry in Parsifal, a multifaceted woman who emerges in Eliot’s poem through a variety of female characters—Madame Sosostris, the wife in her dressing room, the tired and bored typist, the woman who “draws her long black hair out tight”—indeed, all the women who struck contemporary readers as examples of debased modern femininity. While Wagner’s exhausted yet dangerous seductress Kundry falls silent and gladly dies, she lives on in Eliot’s poem through her multiple manifestations. Alongside echoes of Wagner (such as “Weialala leia”), The Waste Land integrates at least two other recognizable categories of music: the modern dissonance of Stravinsky and the rhythms of jazz. The analogy often drawn between Stravinsky and Eliot9 rests primarily on Eliot’s review of The Rite of Spring in his September 1921 “London Letter,” where he wrote that Stravinsky’s music “transform[ed] the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn . . . and the other barbaric cries of modern life.”10 This comment has done much to shape the reception of The Rite of Spring and our understanding of The Waste Land, including its “sounds of horns and motors.” In 1921, however, Eliot was alone in hearing the collapse of historical time, as Austin Graham argues in his closely documented examination of this pivotal moment in modernist aesthetics (“Hearing History: Eliot’s Rite of Spring”). While contemporary audiences heard primitive dance or mere noise, and Stravinsky claimed that the “prehistoric birth of spring” was a pretext for his musical “construction,” Eliot’s own beliefs about the contemporaneity of all historical periods had prepared him to receive The Rite of Spring as music. Despite his preparation, though, Eliot was changed by the experience: Graham finds that in the passages of The Waste Land written after Eliot attended The Rite of Spring, the proportion of nonverbal sounds increases. The poem uses sound to bring the past up into the present, to allow the reader to hear history. One of the most important sounds that readers of The Waste Land have picked up is jazz: Louis Untermeyer heard “jazz-rhythms” as well as nursery rhymes, and Clive Bell detected the “ministrations of a black and grinning muse.”11 Eliot’s acute reception of African American music, including ragtime, blues, and jazz (going back to his Fireside days), was more visible to early readers, when he was still an avant-garde poet, than later on, as his reputation became encrusted with respectability. However, the last fifteen years have seen a remarkable resurgence in appreciation of Eliot as a jazz poet.12 Leading this reappraisal, David Chinitz explored Eliot’s practice of integrating popular jazz lyrics into his poetry, culminating in The Waste Land, which he compared to a “rag” in its weaving together fragments of sound. One of the early listeners who heard jazz in this poem was the young Ralph Ellison, who later credited Eliot with turning him on to writing.13 In the present volume, Steven Tracy picks up Ellison’s comparison between Louis Armstrong’s “range of allusion” and Eliot’s, examining the famed cornet player’s recordings to hear how he actually used allusion (“Beauty Is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison”). Tracy then turns to “A Game of Chess” to note jazz elements including verbal syncopation, a call-and-response pattern, and Eliot’s addition of a vaudeville “tic” in his rendition of “That Shakespearean Rag.”

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After The Waste Land, Eliot’s other great musical poem is Four Quartets. The title, along with extratextual evidence such as his comment about Beethoven’s A minor quartet—“There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things. . . . I should like to get something of that into verse before I die”— strongly suggest an analogy with music.14 Unlike The Waste Land, this later work does not engage at every turn with musical sounds or references to specific pieces of music. Yet the analogy accords well with Eliot’s general remarks about music and poetry at the time of publishing Little Gidding: for some poets, he wrote in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, “the poem may begin to shape itself in fragments of musical rhythm, and its structure will first appear in terms of something analogous to musical form”; and in “The Music of Poetry,” “there are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments.”15 These hints have led to extensive analysis of the poem seeking to unlock its structure and meaning in terms of musical form.16 But Eliot himself cautioned against taking the analogy too far: “the use of the word ‘musical’ and of musical analogies, in discussing poetry, has its dangers if we do not constantly check its limitations.”17 Keeping that warning in mind, this volume offers two ways of contextualizing Four Quartets with nineteenthand early twentieth-century writing about music. Aakanksha Virkar-Yates examines how Eliot continues a nineteenth-century philosophical conversation among Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Arthur Symons about the visual and aural dimensions of poetry (“Into our First World: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Music of the Will in Four Quartets”). This dialogue is connected to a Romantic concern with painting and music, reflecting contemporary ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, and the growing association of the sublime with music. Despite extensive consideration of the role of music in Four Quartets, Eliot’s poem has not been read in the light of this nineteenth-century inquiry into the relation between music and the arts. Yet distinct echoes of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Symons throughout the Quartets suggest that Eliot intentionally placed his poem in dialogue with these figures—a philosopher, a composer, and a poet-critic like himself—perhaps to clarify the meaning of his own contretemps with music. The presence of Schopenhauerian language and ideas in Four Quartets provides a basis for the association in his poem between music and a metaphysical reality that lies beyond appearance. Michelle Witen examines Four Quartets and Eliot’s prose in terms of the debate surrounding “absolute music,” a form of pure, instrumental music. This critical discussion interested many modernist writers, who looked to the forms of absolute music for literary structures (“A Musical Pattern of Sound”: Absolute Music and Four Quartets). While Eliot’s early titles combine musical genres with scenes, characters, and narratives (“Prelude in Roxbury,” “Suite Clownesque”), the title Four Quartets identifies with one of the more “cerebral” genres associated with absolute music. Eliot’s prose from the period of composing this poem also employs concepts and terms of absolute music. He was, if anything, slower than some of his fellow modernists to gravitate in this direction; Joyce’s “Sirens” episode of Ulysses is based on a fugue, and Witen discusses a 1922 review by Eliot’s younger friend Aldous Huxley heralding the turn of the musical tide against program music. Drawing particularly on East Coker, Witen examines how Eliot’s patterning in Four Quartets goes beyond poetic repetition, instead providing a gloss of “the music of a word” through the principles of absolute music.

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Theater From theatrical moments and allusions in his early poetry, to his critical study of Renaissance plays and the full-fledged verse dramas of his later years, Eliot’s career truly straddled the arts of poetry and drama. Indeed, there was no clear division between these arts for him (as he felt there was for music and poetry); he was as much a dramatist as a poet. He composed five complete poetic dramas as well as the choruses for The Rock and the “fragments” of Sweeney Agonistes; the creative output of the last three decades of his life consisted primarily of plays.18 Without attempting to do justice to his drama, this volume extends the conversation about Eliot’s interart engagement to his interests in music hall (as much a musical as a theatrical form) and experimental theater in the 1920s. During this decade, Eliot wrote frequently and incisively about the theater, and composed his first and most experimental dramatic work, Sweeney Agonistes. Along with a new appreciation of his debts to African American music, recent criticism has given us the Eliot who was a fan of English music hall.19 He particularly expressed his admiration in the “London Letters” that he wrote for The Dial in 1921–22, looking to music hall as a model for the relations between artist and audience. Barry Faulk examines the influences that shaped Eliot’s understanding of music hall: Laforgue’s marionettes, Bergson’s concept of the semi-human comic figure, the Nineties comedian who embodies the quintessential human being, and Baudelaire’s idea of grotesque or “absolute” comedy (“Eliot and the Music-Hall Comedian”). Faulk argues that when Eliot encountered Wyndham Lewis’s distinctive mode of “inhuman” satire, he worked to develop his own understanding of comedy as dialectic, drawing on these forerunners and on the example of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd. He saw comedy emerging out of dialectic pairs: human / grotesque, metropolis / provinces, local / global. For Eliot, the music hall’s great contribution is its ability to bring opposites together across class, gender, and regional divisions, as well as across the footlights of the stage from audience to performer, to create a sense of shared community. Faulk places Eliot’s dialectical notion of modern comedy next to the European avantgarde of his day to show clear parallels between Eliot’s comments on modern comedy, especially the figure of Charlie Chaplin, and the views of the French Surrealists and Walter Benjamin in the 1920s. The passion with which Eliot wrote about theater in the 1920s reflected his own theatrical ambitions; he was working on his “Fragment of a Prologue” (1926) and “Fragment of an Agon from Wanna Go Home, Baby?” (1927), later combined in Sweeney Agonistes. A transitional work, Sweeney combined the mythic method of The Waste Land with jazz rhythms, vaudeville techniques (“back chat”),20 and the naturalistic domestic setting that would characterize his later dramas. In “Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London Theatre,” Anthony Cuda fills in an important piece of Eliot’s background during the gestation of his first dramatic work: his involvement with the Phoenix Society, an independent London theater group whose immensely popular productions of Elizabethan and Restoration plays were the topic of his sustained attention from its founding in 1919 until its demise in 1926. As well as attending performances with many of the literary luminaries of the day, including Virginia Woolf, he joined the Society’s Board of Directors, promoted its interests among his friends and family, and wrote frequently of their productions in his many nonfiction essays and reviews from the

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period. The upstart Phoenix Society—with its emphasis on gesture rather than expression, on the dramatic text rather than the actors, and on the continued use of conventions like the aside and the chorus—helped Eliot to hone his own ideas about verse drama and the contemporary stage. In fact, each of his major statements regarding dramatic verse during this period is informed by reflections on the performances of the Phoenix. Significantly, it was while he was renewing his debate over the Society with William Archer in 1924 in “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” that Eliot was also beginning to compose his own experimental verse drama, Sweeney Agonistes. Cuda argues that although its colorful and controversial existence has all but vanished from histories of the early twentieth-century stage, the Phoenix Society exerted a deep and lasting influence on Eliot’s dramatic theories and practice.

Dance Eliot’s engagement with dance, from “The Burnt Dancer” to iconic moments in Four Quartets such as “the still point of the turning world,” was grounded in decades of close observation. In Boston and in Paris he had the opportunity to see the greats of modernist dance—Loïe Fuller, Ida Rubinstein, Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky—and in London he attended the Russian Ballet and became a devoted follower of Léonide Massine.21 In “Eliot and Dance,” Susan Jones traces Eliot’s reception of this art and its influence on his concept of impersonality. His interest in dance was probably prepared by his reading of French Symbolist poetry, in which the dancer often appears as a metaphor for poetic composition. Eliot’s first articulation of the impersonality of the poet appears in a choreographed element of his early Symbolist-influenced poems. During the late 1910s and 1920s Eliot continued to identify the vexed relationship between creator and creation of art in the paradigm of dance practice. He now had a specific troupe and dancer in mind: the Ballets Russes’s Léonide Massine, whom Eliot praised in print as “the greatest mimetic dancer in the world,” rhapsodized over in letters, and met in person. Jones argues that Eliot’s appreciation of Massine helped him develop an understanding of dance as a disciplined technique requiring the detachment of both creator and performer of art. This chapter focuses on the poet’s expression of the “still point,” cited in “Burnt Norton” as the location of dance, and examines the ways in which Eliot transformed his first-hand spectatorship of dance into literary material and an expression of transcendence. Conversely, the discussion also shows how twentieth-century choreographers, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, May O’Donnell, and George Balanchine reciprocated in their references to the literary resonances of “the still point.”

Notes 1. For Eliot’s musical background, see Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); Robert J. Nicolosi, “T. S. Eliot and Music: An Introduction,” The Musical Quarterly 66.2 (1980): 192–204; Eric Sigg, “Eliot as a Product of America” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14–30, esp. 20–21; and David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially Chapter 1, “A Jazz-Banjorine.”

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2. Eliot, Fireside, number 1: autograph manuscript with drawings; St. Louis, 1899, p. 11, T. S. Eliot Juvenilia, 1899 (MS Am 1635), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3. Chinitz mentions “the legendary Mama Lou” in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 39. 4. See David Fuller’s concise summary of the influences of these three European composers on Eliot in “Music,” T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 134–44. An important resource for the study of Eliot and music, including all of these topics, is John Xiros Cooper’s volume, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York: Garland, 2000). 5. For Cooper, “Portrait of a Lady” conveys Eliot’s awareness of the “exhaustion,” “corruption,” and “sclerosis” of Romantic music; Cooper sees Eliot as a Schoenberg avant la lettre (“Thinking with Your Ears,” T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 85–108). 6. The most extensive study of Eliot’s Wagnerism is also one of the earliest: Herbert Knust’s Wagner, the King, and “The Waste Land” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1967) examines the incorporation of Wagnerian myth into The Waste Land through quotation and narrative structure but also through indirect references to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron, whose tragic life connects with themes of unhappy sexual relations in the poem. Following Knust, William Blissett provides a more concise review of the Wagnerian aspects of Eliot’s poem, from myth to use of leitmotifs, focusing on parallels between “What the Thunder Said” and the last act of Parsifal (“Wagner in The Waste Land,” in The Practical Vision, ed. Jane Campbell and James Doyle [Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978], 71–86). Philip Waldron’s “The Music of Poetry: Wagner in The Waste Land,” Journal of Modern Literature 18.4 (1993): 421–34, examines Wagner’s specifically musical influence on Eliot’s poem. Finally, Margaret Dana takes a closer look at Eliot’s use of leitmotif technique, drawing on the operas and on Eliot’s remarks about the relations between music and poetry (“Orchestrating The Waste Land: Wagner, Leitmotiv, and the Play of Passion” in Cooper, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 267–94). In “Eliot’s Ars Musica Poetica: Sources in French Symbolism,” John Adames examines the broader context of Symbolist musico-poetics, including both Wagner’s influence and the recapitulation of these poetics in Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 111–28). 7. Igor Stravinsky, “Memories of Eliot,” Esquire (August 1965), 54. In addition to From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge University Press, 1920), Weston also wrote Legends of the Wagner Drama (New York: Scribner, 1896). 8. For a discussion of Eliot’s experiences of opera in Paris, including his correspondence with Verdenal, see Nancy D. Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), Chapter 6. 9. Stravinsky compared himself as a modernist to Eliot (both “trying to refit old ships”) in Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 30. In a helpful overview of Eliot’s musical debts, Robert Nicolosi compares The Rite of Spring to The Waste Land on the basis of their shared use of fertility rituals, melody fragments and ostinato, shifts in poetic time and musical time signature, and Eliot’s multiple voices compared with Stravinsky’s dense texture (“T. S. Eliot and Music: An Introduction”). See also Joan Adkins, “The Dove Descending: Poetics of Tradition in Eliot and Stravinsky,” Renascence 39 (Summer 1987): 470–83; and Jayme Stayer, “A Tale of Two Artists: Eliot, Stravinsky, and Disciplinary (Im)politics” in Cooper, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 295–333. 10. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: September 1921,” The Dial 71 (October 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 370. 11. For these comments and the reception of Eliot as a jazz poet, see T. Austin Graham, The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), 56. 12. Sigg, “Eliot as a Product of America,” 20–21; Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, Chapters 1 and 2, and “A Jazz-Banjorine, Not a Lute: Eliot and Popular Music Before The

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

introduction to part ii Waste Land” in Cooper, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 3–24. Also see chapters by Kevin McNeilly and Jonathan Gill in Cooper; David Yaffe, Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Graham, The Great American Songbooks. For an earlier study of Eliot as jazz poet see Charles Sanders, “ ‘The Waste Land’: The Last Minstrel Show?” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1 (1980): 23–38. See The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 209; Yaffe’s Fascinating Rhythm; and Steve Hemling, “T. S. Eliot and Ralph Ellison: Insiders, Outsiders, and Cultural Authority,” The Southern Review 25.4 (Oct 1, 1989): 841. Letters V, 529. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 18; Eliot, The Music of Poetry (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Co., 1942), 28. In chronological order: Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Keith Alldritt, Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: Poetry as Chamber Music (London: Woburn Press, 1978); Brian Hatton, “Musical Form in Poetry: Four Quartets and Beethoven,” Yeats Eliot Review 6.2 (1979): 3–14; W. G. Bebbington, “Four Quartets?,” Essays in Criticism 39.3 (1989): 234–41; John Holloway, “Eliot’s Four Quartets and Beethoven’s Last Quartets,” in The Fire and the Rose: New Essays on T. S. Eliot, ed. Vinod Sena and Rajiva Verma (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145–59; John Xiros Cooper, “Music as Symbol and Structure in Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Eliot’s Four Quartets,” in Ezra Pound and Europe, ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 177–89; Edward Lobb, ed., Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (London: Athlone Press, 1993); A. David Moody, “Four Quartets: Music, Word, Meaning, and Value” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, 142–57; John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of “Four Quartets” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Barndollar, “Movements in Time: Four Quartets and the Late String Quartets of Beethoven,” in Cooper, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, 179–94. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 18. For a helpful overview of Eliot’s drama, see Richard Badenhausen, “Drama,” in Harding, T. S. Eliot in Context, 125–33; also Robin Grove, “Pereira and after: the cures of Eliot’s theater” in Moody, The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, 158–75. Fundamental critical works on Eliot’s drama include Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Michael Sidnell, Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties (London: Faber and Faber, 1984); Randy Malamud’s T. S. Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992); and Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chief among the critics who have developed this side of Eliot are Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Barry Faulk, “Modernism and the Popular: Eliot’s Music Halls,” Modernism / modernity 8.4 (2001): 603–21; see also Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Chapter 8; Dennis Ryan, “Marie Lloyd and the Last ‘London Letter’: T. S. Eliot’s Transmutation of Ideology into Art in The Waste Land,” Yeats Eliot Review 10.1 (1989): 35–40; and Sebastian Knowles, “‘Then You Wink the Other Eye’: T. S. Eliot and the Music Hall,” ANQ 11.4 (1998): 20–33. See Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 110. See Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies / Performing Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Chapter 5; Terri Mester, Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997); Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel; Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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5 The Musical World of Eliot’s INVENTIONS Frances Dickey

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rom the start of Eliot’s poetic career—to be precise, in 1909, when he began inscribing poems in the notebook he provisionally called Inventions of the March Hare—his poetry engaged a world of musical forms, sounds, and discourse. The notebook’s table of contents indicates the breadth and intensity of his musical experimentation: his titles include three caprices, four preludes, two interludes, two love songs, an opera, a rhapsody, airs, and a suite. In addition to drawing analogies between poems and musical genres, Eliot alludes to specific works of music, such as Chopin’s Preludes, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, Oskar Straus’s Chocolate Soldier, and popular songs such as “By the light of the silvery moon” and the “Cubanola Glide.” The sounds of musical instruments often accompany the poet’s thoughts: violins—passionate, winding, or broken—cracked cornets, an ominous clarinet, a dull tom-tom, a fatalistic drum, street pianos, broken flutes, the sandboard and bones, and of course the sound of singing, from Prufrock’s mermaids and his Madness to the underage girls in “Suite Clownesque” and a female vocalist in “the smoke that gathers blue and sinks.” While little correspondence or other documentation from Eliot’s college days remains, these poems indicate his engagement with a contemporary world of music and musical discourse, and there is much we can learn about his poetry from recovering what was happening in that world. As well as indicating Eliot’s active participation in the music-listening culture of Boston and Cambridge circa 1909–10, Inventions shows Eliot’s reception of and participation in contemporary debates about the relative merits and ideas of various composers—chiefly Wagner and Chopin—and the moral and psychological effects of music. Arthur Symons, James Huneker, Irving Babbitt, and Henri Bergson were among the contemporary critics and thinkers who contributed to Eliot’s understanding of music and its influence. Behind them stands the larger-than-life figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy first appeared in English translation in 1909, nine years after the author’s death. Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses in music—rational and formal on the one hand; irrational, emotional, and chaotic on the other—may be discerned in Eliot’s conflicted responses to music, especially Wagner’s operas. Perhaps more familiar to Eliot, though less so to us, was “melomania,” a turn-of-the-century term used to describe an irrational enthusiasm for music. Whether called Dionysian ecstasy or melomania, this state seems both the object of fear and desire in Eliot’s notebook; moreover, the highly charged nature

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of the debate corresponds with his anxious indecisiveness about how to respond to music. It is notable that in these poems, despite their investment in musical forms, the experience of hearing music hardly seems pleasurable and often illustrates moments of psychic distress. This chapter examines Eliot’s notebook, particularly “Opera” and other poems that include moments of explicit music-listening or music-making, in terms of the conflicting messages about music to which Eliot was exposed in his undergraduate career. There is no simple formula to how Eliot responds to music in his early poetry; rather, he registers anxiety about melomania and the mixing of the arts while experimenting with strategies that safely allow music into poetry. In discussions of Eliot’s relation to music, critics have bifurcated between those who explain his poetry by analogy to classical musical forms and those who see him responding (whether with anxiety or envy) to the siren-song of popular music.1 While there is validity in both approaches, it is important to note that these readings reflect two sides of a contemporary debate that the young Eliot himself was attempting to negotiate. In retrospect, the debate may seem only to be about taste, and thus about social alliances: what kind of music did Eliot feel he ought to, or did he in fact, enjoy? On which side of the musical railroad tracks did his loyalties lie? But as Morgenstern has also pointed out in the context of the visual arts (see Chapter 2), this was an aesthetic debate about how, if at all, music might be allowed to mingle with poetry. To begin with, Eliot’s musical poetics were anything but unusual for the time. Arthur Symons, the critic whose Symbolist Movement in Literature introduced Eliot to Laforgue, was also a poet in his own right, with a reputation for writing about the London stage and music scene. Just to mention a few works obviously echoed in Eliot’s notebook, Symons wrote a “Caprice,” several songs, a “Prelude,” “The Barrel-Organ,” several dances, “The Silence,” “Chopin” and “Parsifal.”2 Such musically themed poems were standard fare in the 1890s. In an American verse anthology of 1895 called Victorian Songs, at least one-third of the poems are titled after kinds of music, mostly “song” but also specific genres such as “madrigal,” “serenade,” “lament,” “Rondel,” “symphony,” and so on. W. E. Henley’s 1893 London Voluntaries opens with a poetic sequence marked by musical tempos. American poets of the day gave such titles to their works as “Prelude to Lohengrin,” “Overture to Tannhäuser,” “Some Mazurkas,” and “A Chopin Fantasy.”3 Eliot did not have to go far afield for his basic model, and it is notable that these examples include references to both Wagner and Chopin, two composers featured in Inventions.4 While his poems have obvious literary precedents, Inventions also reflects Eliot’s immersion in a rich musical world. Walter Pater’s oft-quoted injunction that all arts should aspire to the condition of music cannot do justice to the profound and widespread musical fervor of the late nineteenth century. Music rose to the top of the artistic charts throughout European and American society, at a similar rate on both sides of the Atlantic: the Vienna and New York Philharmonic orchestras were both established in 1842; the Boston Symphony and the Berlin Philharmonic followed in 1881 and 1882. Piano technology and manufacture leaped ahead in the 1840s with the Chickering castiron piano frame, which vastly strengthened the instrument and allowed faster, more efficient production.5 The increased availability and quality of pianos made this instrument the centerpiece of the middle-class home and put amateur music-making at the heart of its social life, a process also assisted by improved music-printing technology.

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Professional music-making also rapidly advanced, with ever more difficult repertoire being performed by virtuosos whose names have become legends, such as Paganini, Sarasate, and Liszt. In those days, it was possible to attend the premier of a new Brahms symphony or Wagner opera, events that occasioned public debate and acclaim. The saturation of late nineteenth-century arts with musical references and analogies reflects a vibrant world of public and private music-making with little distinction between what we now think of as “high” and “low” or “classical” and “popular”; and all of this music, of course, was “live.”6 The idea of music without a player, if even just an organgrinder, would have been completely alien in the nineteenth century. The audition of music was a social experience, invested with the significance that we attach to our interactions with other people. Far from being a cultural backwater in 1909–10, Boston was a center for art music. Symphony Hall, constructed in 1900, was the first concert hall to be built on scientifically derived acoustic principles, and it is still considered one of the best in the world. Along with the regular Boston Symphony season, this concert hall hosted a procession of European musical luminaries. During Eliot’s junior and senior years at Harvard, for example, violinists Mischa Elman and Fritz Kreisler performed; Oscar Hammerstein conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (a work Eliot later noted as one of his undergraduate “discoveries”);7 the early music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch, later championed by Ezra Pound, played Bach on “old-time instruments.” Modernist icons Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller danced to the music of Chopin, Beethoven, and Strauss.8 Isabella Stewart Gardner—with whom Eliot became personally acquainted—opened her Fenway house to the public for chamber concerts and performances of the most recent French music.9 Boston built its own opera house in 1909 as a home for the short-lived Boston Opera Company, and here Toscanini made his Boston debut with Tristan und Isolde in January 1910.10 The Boston Globe’s “Music and Musicians” column from these years is a roll call of the greatest European and American musical talent of the early twentieth century. Eliot’s early notebook poems clearly reflect this musical world. Before he departed for Paris in fall 1910 he had already composed his first two preludes, two caprices, a humoresque, several songs, the poem called “Opera,” a section of “Portrait of a Lady” in which violins and a street piano appear, and “Goldfish,” with its references to The Merry Widow, Chocolate Soldier, and a “Barcarolle.” Reviews and announcements in The Boston Globe and The Harvard Crimson from the years 1908 through Eliot’s graduation in June 1910 reveal that every specific piece and musical genre to which he refers in Inventions was advertised and performed during that period, in most cases multiple times. For example, a Boston Pops concert in May 1908 included a Dvořák Humoresque, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, and Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow waltz.11 The Boston Pops season in May 1909 included preludes by Chopin and Wagner, suites by Grieg and Moszkowski, rhapsodies by Liszt and Chabrier, and again the Merry Widow waltz.12 The year 1910 marked the centenary of Chopin’s birth, providing occasion for many performances of his music, such as by the famous Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski, perhaps “the latest Pole” in “Portrait of a Lady.” Boston was easily accessible by electric streetcar in those days, but the student who did not want to leave campus could hear similar concerts at Harvard for a dollar or less. The Boston Symphony regularly came up to Harvard’s Sanders Theater, as in February 1909 when they performed the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (a regular

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feature of symphony concerts in this period). American composer Arthur Whiting gave a lecture and concert of Bach’s music, including Preludes and Inventions, at the Fogg Museum; this series proved so popular that his next Bach concert in November had to be moved to a larger venue.13 In February 1910, music by Chopin could be heard at a piano recital in Sanders Theater.14 Music-making at Harvard was not restricted to the professionals either. The Pierian Sodality, a student group that claims to be America’s oldest symphony orchestra, performed repertoire ranging from Bach and Handel to, again, the Chocolate Soldier. Music students organized concerts featuring their own compositions. The university glee, banjo, and mandolin clubs performed popular songs and arrangements such as “Grand Opera Gems” on mandolin. Undergraduates made music for their own pleasure and to entertain each other—indeed, editorials in The Harvard Crimson complain that student groups kept their music too much to themselves and ought to share it more often in public concerts. This representative sample of performances at and near Harvard during the time when Eliot began inscribing poems in his notebook is important because it shows that the influences on these poems need not have been primarily literary; indeed, there is an entire dimension of influence that has been neglected in our study of his development. While we are not in a position to identify specific concerts that Eliot attended, the numerous similarities between the concert listings and his musical allusions is compelling. Eliot listened, and the music made it into his verse in the form of generic identifications (i.e. a title naming a musical genre, such as “caprice” or “rhapsody”), references to specific works of music and instruments, and descriptions of scenes of listening. As these varying strategies suggest, Eliot was experimenting with how poetry can profitably engage with music. Whereas later, in “The Music of Poetry,” he would prescribe musical form as the sole contact point between the two media, at this early time his writing is permeated by music in multiple ways.

“Opera” and the Wagner Controversy Despite the background of concertgoing that Eliot’s range of musical references implies, his representation of music-listening is not usually positive in the notebook poems. The speaker of “Portrait of a Lady” associates the lady’s annoying conversation with the whining sound of violins; a street piano reiterating some “worn out common song” disturbs his self-possession. He hears broken flutes in “Interlude in London,” and in “Opera” he feels like “the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.” In other poems, such as “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks,” the speaker’s feelings about music seem ambivalent at best, and he is especially uncomfortable at the point of listening and hearing. Austin Graham has commented that in these poems, “the relationship between music and listener is relatively straightforward, with the two fighting for control over the listener’s interior space (and music coming out on top).”15 Yet while the listener in these poems seems uncomfortable with the effect music has on him, he’s also afraid of missing out on that experience. The problem with music is not just its power over the listener, for the failure to be caught up by music seems equally undesired by the poet. The poem “Opera” exemplifies this musical ambivalence. “Opera” is perplexing because Jean Verdenal’s letters to Eliot suggest that the two friends shared a passion for Wagner, and of course The Waste Land includes lines from Wagner’s operas, including Tristan und Isolde.16 In this poem dated November 1909, however, the same work

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leaves him cold. Beginning with the title of the opera, “Tristan and Isolde,” the speaker works his way into the music, first describing its instrumentation (“the fatalistic horns / The passionate violins / And ominous clarinet”) and then the idea evoked by the music, combined perhaps with the scene appearing on stage before him: “love torturing itself . . . Writhing in and out / Contorted in paroxysms, / Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression.” A stanza break follows, and then the speaker evaluates his own response to the music, concluding: “These emotional experiences / Do not hold good at all, / And I feel like the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.”17 The two stanzas of this seventeen-line poem are divided between criticism of the opera’s melodramatic overstatement—music and singers both “writhing,” “contorted,” “flinging” themselves embarrassingly about the stage—and self-criticism, describing his own indifference and lack of feeling, as “life departs with a feeble smile.” The poem seems to describe a disappointing experience at the opera, where the speaker finds himself left out of the general enthusiasm and not moved as much as he would like to be—yet scornful of the opera’s hyperbolic attempts to reach him emotionally.18 Eliot supposedly told Igor Stravinsky that hearing this opera was “one of the most passionate experiences in his life,” but it is uncertain when he saw Tristan und Isolde.19 Eliot subsequently dated the poem November 1909, so if that date is correct, the Toscanini performance in Boston of January 1910 could not be the occasion for its composition.20 Crawford suggests that Eliot traveled to New York with his friend Tinckom-Fernandez on several occasions, which would have enabled him to see a March 1909 performance at the Met.21 Eliot also had plenty of opportunities to hear orchestral excerpts of the Prelude and Liebestod played by the Boston Pops and the Boston Symphony, as these frequently appear on their programs for the 1909–10 year. Indeed, nothing in the poem specifically indicates a full staged performance of the opera; the speaker focuses on instrumental music played by horns, violins, and clarinet. It is “love” (or possibly, in another reading of the manuscript, “life”) that tortures itself, writhes, is contorted, etc., rather than singers or actors, although of course their presence may be implied. The poem thus seems to deal primarily with Wagner’s music, rather than the whole Gesamtkunstwerk of acting, scenery, and narrative carried along on a river of sound. As Ricks comments, “Opera” “anticipates [Eliot’s] critique of Romanticism,”22 but it does so in a double-edged way, by critiquing his own critique. The poem pivots from a horror of being caught up in the opera’s flood of feeling, to a disappointment at failing to experience emotional intensity. Interestingly, Eliot’s few references to Wagner in his prose suggest mixed feelings. In his Clark lectures, Eliot compares Laforgue to Wagner on the basis of their shared affinity with Schopenhauer, remarking that “in Laforgue there is continuous war between the feelings implied by his ideas, and the ideas implied by his feelings. The system of Schopenhauer collapses, but in a different ruin from that of Tristan und Isolde.”23 Similarly, in Eliot’s “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928), one interlocutor remarks to another, “I have also heard you railing at Wagner as ‘pernicious.’ But you would not willingly resign your experience of Wagner either. Which seems to show that a world in which there was no art that was not morally edifying would be a very poor world indeed.”24 Both remarks evoke a situation in which ideas conflict with feelings, and the existence of at least two incompatible sets of values makes resolution difficult. In “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” the speaker implies that listening to Wagner is an aesthetically and emotionally positive experience, even if it conflicts with reason or morality. Although in “Opera” the experience

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seems negative overall, we might find that the poem cannot be explained without some similar surge of forbidden feeling that the speaker then too well purges from himself, leaving him feeling like “the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.” The ambivalence of the speaker in “Opera” makes more sense in the context of Wagner’s reputation and the public debate over his influence. Later to peak in the United States than in Europe, Wagner’s popularity was strong in Boston; Eliot’s fellow student Haniel Long reported that the city was gripped by a Wagner craze in March 1909.25 Moreover, as Horowitz shows, the American fervor over Wagner was less tinged by fears of decadence than in England; the composer was transformed by Gilded Age optimism into an agent of uplift: “Wagner offered an avenue of intense spiritual experience, a surrogate for religion or cocaine, a song of redemption to set beside Emerson and Whitman. It was both intellectually and emotionally vitalizing.”26 As well as seeing the craze for himself, Eliot could not have avoided reading about Wagner; nearly every critic he consulted at this stage of his life had something to say about the composer. In Studies in Seven Arts (1906), Arthur Symons characterizes Wagner’s art as a form of extremity: “Wagner demanded, in the combination of the arts, two main factors: poetry, carried to its utmost limits in drama; and music carried to its utmost limits as the interpreter and deepener of dramatic action.”27 Like Symons, Eliot represents Wagner as pushing against the limits of his art, “Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression.” But, while Symons represents this tendency as a positive value, Eliot switches the charges to negative. Eliot’s resistance to the Wagner experience, at least in “Opera,” reflects the influence of another figure in the debate, Irving Babbitt. Eliot was taking Babbitt’s class on modern French criticism in fall 1909, just months before the publication of his New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (see Morgenstern in Chapter 2, this volume). There, Babbitt criticizes the Romantic tendency to elevate illusion and sensation over reason, resulting in what he calls “the phosphorescent slime of our modern decadents.”28 He objects to the erasure of generic boundaries in search of ever more powerful sensations, leading to program music, sound-painting, coloraudition, and literature that imitates other arts. Babbitt writes, “Possibly this whole side of romanticism finds its best expression in Richard Wagner and his theory of the music-drama. According to Wagner pure music and pure poetry . . . become effective only when they are rid of an unprofitable restraint and self-limitation and melt together in a mystical erotic embrace.”29 Like Symons, Babbitt uses the language of limitation and transgression, suggesting that Wagner’s aesthetic choice to cross the medial limit between music and poetry equates or leads to the violation of social taboos, namely, to adultery, which is the subject of Tristan and was also a well-known scandal in Wagner’s own life. In the first stanza of “Opera,” Eliot underscores the language of limits with the repetition of the words “in” and “it,” which prepare for or pre-echo the word “limit”: “love torturing itself / To emotion for all there is in it, / Writhing in and out / Contorted in paroxysms, / Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression” (emphasis mine). As well as emphasizing the word “limit,” this repetition suggests that Wagner’s opera goes “in” where it ought not to. The first limit the opera crosses is medial, from music to the realm of poetic drama, and Eliot registers this crossing through the adjective-noun combinations in the opening lines: “fatalistic horns,” “passionate violins,” “ominous clarinet.” These pairings go beyond the qualities commonly attributed to the sounds of

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certain instruments (i.e., mournful, bright, sweet); the horns reflect the “fatalistic” action of the opera, set in motion by the drinking of a love potion. Wagner assigns to each instrument certain patterns that signify aspects of the plot, thus “mixing” the two media. However, Eliot’s repetitions of “in” and “it,” along with “writhing” and “paroxysms,” obviously operate at a deeper level to imagine (while recoiling from) sexual acts that, of course, the opera Tristan und Isolde also implies. So far, Eliot’s response to the opera is all Babbitt, equating the mixing of genres with eroticism and immorality. “Opera” goes on, however, in a spirit of disappointment that has little in common with Babbitt’s principled objections to Wagner: “We have the tragic? oh no! / Life departs with a feeble smile / Into the indifferent.” This rhetorical question ushers us into a different realm of criticism, presided over by Nietzsche, the modern theorist of tragedy. Eliot’s route to Nietzsche was most likely mediated by the American critic James Huneker, just as Symons introduced him to Laforgue. At least a month before composing “Opera,” Eliot opened his Harvard Advocate review of Huneker’s Egoists: A Book of Supermen with the statement, “Now that Arthur Symons is no longer active in English letters, Mr. James Huneker alone represents modernity in criticism.”30 Eliot later wrote—in marginal notes to his 1955 essay on Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues—that as a young man he tried to get his hands on all the works of contemporary European writers mentioned by the critic of “the seven arts,” James Huneker.31 As he suggests by yoking the two authors together in both of these remarks made at opposite ends of his career, Symons and Huneker similarly served as guides and models for the young poet. Eliot’s review of Egoists and his acquaintance with Huneker’s work are significant for several reasons that will unfold gradually here. Egoists consists of essays on ten nineteenth-century intellectual “supermen” including Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was Wagner’s most famous supporter, and later one of the composer’s harshest critics. In The Birth of Tragedy, first published in 1872 but not translated into English until 1909, Nietzsche makes Tristan und Isolde the occasion for developing the distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of music. According to Nietzsche, Wagner rejected the rationalistic or “Apollonian” operatic tradition to let loose primordial “Dionysian” forces of joy and desire in his music. Nietzsche argued that in integrating this chaotic, emotional element with the mythical structure of Teutonic legend, Wagner created works that serve the psychic needs of modern Germans much as Attic tragedy served the Greeks. Huneker patiently explains Nietzsche to his American readership: Music is the archetype of the arts. It is the essence of Greek tragedy and therefore pessimistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces of the Greek art he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic, the other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed to bacchantic ecstasy. Wagner, Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian element, and he was not far wrong, but Greek? The passionate welter of this new music stirred Nietzsche’s excitable young nerves. He was, like many of his contemporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of the Wagnerian sea. It appeared to him . . . as a recrudescence of Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest of the dying waves of Romanticism.32 Eliot’s question, “We have the tragic? oh no!” recapitulates Huneker’s brief summary and refutation of Nietzsche’s claims for Tristan as classic tragedy, and it echoes Huneker’s rhetorical question, “he was not far wrong, but Greek?” With Huneker,

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Eliot mocks Nietzsche’s idea that Wagner’s dramas rise to the level of Greek tragedy. Huneker dismisses Wagner’s music as “the dying waves of Romanticism”; Eliot calls it “paroxysms.” Since Eliot used Huneker as a gateway to European writers, it is likely that he tracked down the new translation of The Birth of Tragedy and read it for himself after learning about it in Egoists.33 Even if Nietzsche’s advocacy of Wagner contradicted Babbitt’s teaching, the philosopher’s condemnation of modern optimism and belief in progress has much in common with Babbitt’s own attack on Romanticism. Nietzsche has particularly harsh words for the rise of a scientific, analytical mindset, for which he blames Socrates in the first instance. He sees the ascendancy of the music critic as a symptom of the Socratic mindset, and he complains that “the student, the school boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature” now experiences art critically rather than intuitively. As a result of this development, according to Nietzsche, “art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind, and aesthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously unoriginal sociality . . . so that there has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it.”34 The poet who would soon write “In the room, the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” obviously shares common ground with the philosopher here. Nietzsche characterizes the “Socrato-critical hearer,” with his “half-moral and half-learned pretensions,” as, in essence, a walking corpse: In his sphere hitherto everything has been artificial and merely glossed over with a semblance of life. The performing artist was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically-comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remains of life in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment.35 However, Nietzsche celebrates the coming of Wagner—the “birth of tragedy”—as the advent of a new Dionysian art capable of inspiring wonder, of giving access to “sublime ecstasy” and “the highest artistic primal joy.”36 Tristan und Isolde is his case in point. He challenges the reader “to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the true aesthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community of the Socrato-critical man” by attending a production of Tristan or Lohengrin and judging his own reactions. Eliot’s “Opera” records the results of such a test. The speaker attends Tristan und Isolde, and fails to experience wonder: “Life departs with a feeble smile / Into the indifferent. / These emotional experiences / Do not hold good at all.” His reaction identifies him with the “Socrato-critical man”—“barren and incapable of enjoyment”—rather than the true aesthetic hearer. At the end of the poem he sees himself as a lifeless observer incapable of emotion: “I feel like the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.” These curious lines correspond closely to Nietzsche’s description of the critic, in whom the musician seeks for “the last remains of life.” The “undertakers’ ball” brilliantly metaphorizes Nietzsche’s idea of an audience of corpses “glossed over with a semblance of life” for show; the speaker, as a “ghost of youth,” fits in perfectly here. While Eliot does not specifically quote or verbally echo The Birth of Tragedy, an accumulation of likely associations strongly suggests a link between the two works: Nietzsche’s negative characterization of contemporary aesthetic discourse, particularly by women and young people; the idea of testing oneself by attending a Wagner

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opera; and the figure of the critic as a corpse with a “semblance of life.” All the relevant passages appear within a few pages of each other, where Nietzsche specifically takes Tristan as a case in point, referring to the Liebestod and quoting lines from Isolde. The presence of Nietzsche in the second half of the poem is important because it explains the source of emotional conflict that seems to lead across the stanza break from a criticism of the opera (in the first stanza) to the speaker’s self-criticism (in the second). In this conflict over Wagner, we can begin to understand the anxiety that accompanies moments of music listening in Inventions of the March Hare. The ambivalence so marked in Eliot’s representation of music reflects his position as a young poet trying to figure out his aesthetic principles, vacillating (or “pinned and wriggling on the wall”) between two seemingly incompatible opinions about the desirability of mixing poetry with music. Babbitt exerted enormous influence on Eliot as a student and throughout his life. Eliot wrote of him in 1941: he remains permanently an active influence; his ideas are permanently with one, as a measurement and test of one’s own. I cannot imagine anyone coming to react against Babbitt. Even in the convictions one may feel, the views one may hold, that seem to contradict most important convictions of Babbitt’s own, one is aware that he himself was very largely the cause of them. The magnitude of the debt that some of us owe to him should be more obvious to posterity than to our contemporaries.37 It is interesting that Eliot speaks of Babbitt’s ideas as a test, for this wording mirrors Nietzsche’s challenge to attend Tristan as a test of one’s sensibility, and it evokes an image of the young poet caught between two intellectual giants with mutually opposed opinions of Wagner’s art.

Melomania Whether Eliot’s speaker feels untouched by music (as in “Opera”), uncomfortably invaded by it (when street pianos disturb his self-possession in “Portrait” or “Caprice”), or experiences his own thoughts as music (the dull tom-tom), he’s not sure how he should feel when he hears music. Its influence is either too great or not great enough. The psychology of Eliot’s day held that music could invade and suspend the hearer’s will. Henri Bergson, for example, viewed the hypnotic power of art, and particularly music, as a universal psychological phenomenon.38 But Babbitt, again, disagrees. He sees art’s “power to enthrall the individual sensibility” as a Romantic notion that poses a moral problem. Citing Bergson disapprovingly, Babbitt writes: “the romanticist . . . rests in the hypnosis for the sake of the hypnosis, or . . . in illusion for the sake of illusion. . . . [T]o accept this aestheticism as final would be to turn poetry into a sort of lotus-eating.”39 Babbitt is particularly critical of the infiltration of music into the other arts. He diagnoses color audition, or “the habit of interpreting light or color in terms of sound” as the “sign of nervous disorder”: “Color audition has found literary expression only in those who belong to what we may term the neurotic school. It manifests itself in connection with the melomania of the German romanticists, their tendency not only to worship music but to reduce to music all the other arts.”40 Babbitt’s use of the term “melomania” suggests the high stakes of the argument over music. “Melomania” entered the English language from French around 1880—the first

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instance listed in the OED is from a work by Vernon Lee—and refers to an obsessive passion for music. However harmless music-making and listening may seem to us now, fears that audiences could be hypnotized by music were widespread in the nineteenth century, following the psychological experiments of Mesmer, Charcot, and others. The practice of hypnosis directly challenged conceptions of selfhood and autonomy and was thought to dissolve sexual inhibitions. Critics of Wagner—including the later Nietzsche, in his Case of Wagner of 1888—accused him of being a hypnotist. In 1894 an American psychologist, Aldred Warthin, reported “self-induced hypnosis” in Wagner’s audiences, and in 1896 Max Nordau argued that Wagner’s “powerful orchestral effects create hypnosis. . . . [T]he formlessness of the endless melody corresponds to the sleeping wandering of the mind.”41 This is the context Babbitt has in mind when he refers to the melomania of the German Romanticists. Melomania is a clinical diagnosis of what Nietzsche identified as an archetypal state, the Dionysian impulse. Perhaps the most fascinating contemporary study of melomania was written by James Huneker, the author of Egoists, the work that introduced Eliot to Nietzsche. An advertisement for Huneker’s short story collection Melomaniacs (1902) appeared on the back of Egoists. While there is no positive evidence that Eliot read it, Melomaniacs explores a range of attitudes toward music similar to his own, and at the very least, it helps us to understand Eliot’s mindset at this time. The advertisement describes Melomaniacs as “playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos.” Each of Huneker’s twenty-four stories (the number of major and minor keys) dwells in a different musical milieu, such as Wagner’s Bayreuth or downand-out urban dives sheltering the illegitimate sons of Chopin and Liszt. The plots mix science fiction, Edith Wharton–like sketches of high society, and hyper-realist urban descriptions reminiscent of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Unlike these fellow New York authors, however, Huneker focused on the hypnotic, consciousness-altering effects of music. In “Dusk of the Gods” (a translation of the title of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung), a listener hypnotized by piano playing sees scenes of the history of the earth from its creation to the present time, corresponding to works by composers from Bach to Richard Strauss. Another story, “A Spinner of Silence,” describes the influence of a famous pianist on his audiences: “As in sullen dreams one struggles to throw off the spell of hypnotic suggestion, so there were many who mutely fought his power, questioning with rebellious soul his right to conquer. But conquer he did.”42 When Belus plays, his audiences have supernatural visions of “Baby faces, withered faces, girls and mothers, the sweetest and the most fearful you ever saw. . . . And there were wings and devilish things. I couldn’t stand the air, it was alive. . . .”43 (Here it is impossible not to hear connections to The Waste Land’s “bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings.”) In “The Piper of Dreams,” music composed by the anarchist Illowski causes people to see visions of the end of the world; as one character explains, “It isn’t art. It’s science—the science of dangerous sounds. He discovered that sound-vibrations rule the universe.”44 When the audience exits the theater after a performance of Illowski’s symphony entitled “Nietzsche,” Paris is being sacked and burned. Huneker represents music as a threat to individual autonomy as well as social cohesiveness in these stories, such as the one in which a mad composer sends his orchestra members into the fourth dimension and can only retrieve them by playing his music backward on a player organ. In other, less hysterical stories, Huneker closely observes

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music performance in urban settings. “The Red-Headed Piano Player” opens with a local-color sketch of Coney Island: The two young men left the trolley car that carried them from Bath Beach to the West End of Coney Island, and walked slowly up the Broad Avenue of Confusing Noises, smoked and gazed about them. . . . The clatter was striking; ardent whistling of peanut steam-roasters, vicious brass bands, hideous harps, wheezing organs, hoarse shoutings and the patient, monotonous cry of the fakirs and photographers were all blended in a dense, huge symphony.45 In all this noise the young men hear strains of Chopin being played and enter a bar to see a young man at the piano: The B flat minor Prelude, with its dark, rich, rushing cascade of scales, its grim iteration and ceaseless questioning, spun through the room, and again came the curious silence. . . . The waiters paused midway in their desperate gaming with victuals, and for a moment the place was wholly given over to music. The mounting unison passage and the smashing chords at the close awakened the diners from the trance into which they had been thrown by the magnetic fluid at the tips of the pianist’s fingers; the bustle began, Harry and Billy ordered more beer and drew deep breaths.46 This story has multiple connections with moments in “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady”: two men walk about the city hearing its sounds, including barrel-organs, otherwise known as street pianos; they enter a squalid city restaurant; they hear Chopin’s Preludes played, transmitted like magnetic fluid through the pianist’s finger-tips; they experience a moment of trance-like suspension from themselves; and they drink beer. Huneker’s Melomaniacs seems like an important context for and analogue to Eliot’s Inventions notebook. Both books announce their theme in the musical titles of individual works; we encounter music in a mix of urban settings from the concert hall and the parlor to crowded or dingy street corners; and the characters’ responses to music are diverse, ranging from terrifying lapses of autonomy to boredom. Huneker, himself trained as a pianist, treats music less as entertainment than as an obsession leading to dissipation, madness, and murder, or to ecstatic pleasure. Eliot’s more muted responses range between hypnotic possession and an anxious resistance to music. Melomania lurks in the background of his notebook. We can perhaps best see it in “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” the excised portion of “The Love Song”: “I fumbled to the window to experience the world / And to hear my Madness singing, sitting on the kerbstone / [A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, / With broken boot heels stained in many gutters] / And as he sang the world began to fall apart.”47 This passage brings to a climax four stanzas of increasingly disturbing urban imagery that besets and threatens the speaker with the collapse of his autonomy and moral virtue: women spilling out of corsets, boys smoking cigarettes, evil houses that point a ribald finger at him, and the darkness stretching out its tentacles, prepared to leap. Though all of this is terrifying, the world only begins to fall apart when he hears his Madness singing. The sound of singing marks the moment when the speaker acknowledges his terrifying visions as madness, rather than simply aspects of “the world.” At this moment, the music he hears seems to come both from outside (he fumbles to the window), and from within (it is his madness).

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While hearing your Madness singing is a special case of listening to music, it might also be a paradigm case, for music penetrates our heads, quite literally, becoming part of the rhythm of the body and texture of our thoughts. Perhaps therein lies its power to undo the fragile structures of identity. From “Opera” to “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” Eliot’s notebook poems range between apathy and madness in their response to music. When we place Eliot’s musical poetics in the context of melomania, I think we can see his own ambivalence more clearly. Music can overtake you and deplete your will; yet it promises a release from self and access to heightened emotional states. As the poem “Opera” suggests, Eliot was capable of feeling at the same time both repelled and drawn to the experiences offered by music. The most powerful art of the day, music was a force that Eliot had to reckon with. If music is hypnotic, the poet who taps into its ancient power becomes the hypnotist rather than the patient, the performer rather than the audience. Mad or sane, the singer is the archetype of the poet.

Invention and Musical Form Given Babbitt’s disapproval of the mixing of genres and Eliot’s anxiety about musical madness, the question of how to tap into music as a poetic resource without losing control may have been a challenge for the young poet. But even at this early stage, his notebook shows that Eliot had a strategy, one that he continued to refine and develop throughout his career. In contrast to the poems that stage scenes of listening, to which the poet responds with anxiety, many others identify themselves with musical genres, adopting formal patterns derived from music. This is the side of Eliot’s musical poetics that he perfects in Four Quartets; as he wrote in “The Music of Poetry” at the time of finishing Little Gidding: The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. It is in the concert room, rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened.48 Critics often point to this passage to explain Eliot’s approach to music throughout his career, but it is obviously an incomplete account. The limitations that Eliot places on musical inspiration—not the opera house, still less the jazz club, music hall, or dance floor—reflect not his actual experience, but an ideal state of musico-poetic relations. His late essay purges the Dionysian possibilities from this relationship, leaving musical form as the contact point of the two arts, a compositional strategy already in evidence in Inventions. Eliot’s tentative title for his notebook, later crossed out, suggests a mixture of the Dionysian in his early poetry with something more Apollonian. Like the title the young poet settled on—The Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot—“Inventions of the March Hare” identifies a genre (inventions) and an author (the March hare). Yet what kind of poem is an “invention”? In one sense, the most common meaning, an invention is fiction, something made up. In combination with “March Hare”—recalling Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter and perhaps the courtship antics of the English hare, giving rise to the

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expression “mad as a March hare”—“inventions” suggest that the notebook contains fantasies, distortions, and other creations of the poet’s disturbed mind. Thus Eliot’s title nods at the theme of madness that runs through his notebook. The idea of artistic creation as a form of insanity is, of course, a common Romantic trope. “Inventions” may also mean “discoveries” or “findings,” however. The idea of invention as a finding is connected to the word “inventory” and goes back to the rhetorical practice of “inventio.” In classical rhetoric, inventio was the development of a topic through various techniques, such as definition, amplification, and argumentation. Revived in the eighteenth century, inventio was still an important component of rhetoric instruction in Eliot’s primary-school days.49 The two meanings of invention—as fiction, on the one hand, and as finding and development on the other—are obviously somewhat at odds, a tension that probably appealed to Eliot because it left ambiguous whether his poems were mere figments of his imagination or developments of a subject.50 In the eighteenth century, the rediscovery of classical inventio gave rise to a musical kind of invention, a short keyboard piece that elaborates a single idea through the use of counterpoint. This genre is most closely associated with the two- and three-part inventions of J. S. Bach, whose work was single-handedly revived in America by its first music professor, John Knowles Paine of Harvard University. Paine’s music appreciation course was a fixture of Harvard education for four decades up to the year Eliot matriculated, and probably as a result of Paine’s influence, Bach’s keyboard works had a presence in the musical life of the college (such as in the series of concerts by Arthur Whiting, mentioned above). So it is not far-fetched to think that Eliot might have had the musical meanings of this word in mind too when he tried out “Inventions” as the title of his book and the generic name for its contents. Nothing could be farther from mania than Bach’s inventions. Written as composition exercises for his oldest son, they epitomize musical rationality. Each invention begins with a short motif, sometimes just a few notes, which Bach then subjects to a series of transformations: inverting the motif, starting it in different parts of the scale, repeating elements of it in combination with each other, and exchanging voices between the upper and lower registers of the keyboard, thoroughly exploring the motif using all the available strategies of counterpoint. Paine wrote in his 1907 History of Music, “As a contrapuntist Bach is acknowledged as the foremost of all masters. . . . Within this sphere he shows infinite variety and originality . . . his music . . . is free from conventionalities.”51 For Paine, Bach’s orderly contrapuntal developments are compatible with, indeed make possible, the freedom, naturalness, and originality of his music. Eliot reflected this view of originality in his 1928 introduction to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems: When I say “invent,” I should use inverted commas, for invention would be irreproachable if it were possible. “Invention” is wrong only because it is impossible. . . . True originality is merely development; and if it is right development it may appear in the end so inevitable that we almost come to the point of view of denying all “original” virtue to the poet.52 Eliot’s resistance to Romantic ideas of originality and inspiration runs through his critical oeuvre—even if, at times, he seems more susceptible than most poets to a kind

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of mad possession. In Inventions, musical development offers an alternative to inspiration and its cousin, musical madness, as the source of poetry. While a full examination of the analogy between musical and poetic form in Eliot’s notebook is probably a topic for another time, I will close with a few observations about how the principles of musical invention might inform a number of these poems, especially the earlier ones. Like Bach’s Inventions, most of these poems are short exercises gathered together in sequences, such as the three caprices, four preludes, “Mandarins,” “Goldfish,” “Suite Clownesque,” and “Easter: Sensations of April.” Musical inventions, as well as preludes and caprices, were composed in a sequence of keys, either all twenty-four major and minor keys or a subset thereof. Eliot’s early sequences similarly move through a progression either of time or space; “Preludes,” for example, seems to take place over the course of twenty-four hours. Within individual lyrics, Eliot develops simple themes through a variety of transformations. For example, his three Caprices present three similar urban scenes in different weathers and moods. Each begins with a not-unpleasing image or auditory perception (“a street piano, garrulous and frail”; “this charm of vacant lots”; “a landscape grey with rain”) and moves to a more aesthetically challenging detail (“bottles and broken glass”; “ashes and tins in piles”; “a mass of mud and sand”). This move might be thought of as the inversion of the motif. Each concludes with the attempt to find meaning in the cityscape, which seems somewhat thwarted, leaving the speaker with an inconsequent remark: “Oh, these minor considerations!”; “What: again?”; “But why are we so hard to please?” Rather than progressing through a narrative or developing a central character (the chief modes of development in Victorian poetry), the sequence returns to similar gestures, altered each time. Eliot is riffing on a theme, and the themes are familiar to readers of his poetry: the vacant lot, piles of rubbish, the undecided man hesitating, the rain, the “yellow and rose” evening. The musical model gives guidance on how to develop these themes in a poetically unconventional way. The non-narrative, associative mode of development also gives these early sequences an improvisational air, which seems deliberately encouraged or cultivated by Eliot’s choice of musical titles to guide his compositions. Not only inventions, but also (and more frequently) interludes and preludes were improvised at the keyboard. Preludes, for example, had a practical function in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century keyboard performance of allowing the musician to warm up, test out the instrument, and prepare the audience for a longer piece to follow. Chopin’s Twenty-four Preludes of 1839—a work that bears an important relationship to Eliot’s “Preludes”— marks a period of transition when the increasing technical difficulty of piano music led composers to write in a style that seemed improvised, though it was actually notated. As for Eliot, after publishing two perfect sonnets in the Harvard Advocate, he never returned to this form, but many of the free-verse poems in Inventions hover around fourteen lines in length and make some kind of volta two-thirds of the way through, as if a casual variation on the sonnet. The early notebook poems also lack traditional devices of closure, leaving us hanging with non sequiturs such as “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; / The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” These devices create the impression of impromptu composition—just as, at the time of Chopin’s composition of the Preludes, Clara Schumann introduced the practice of memorizing her repertoire to give the impression of improvisation.

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The general principle of a musical model of invention thus stands behind many of the notebook poems, while a specific context of short, free-form solo piano works by various Romantic composers informs Eliot’s sequences. While differing in many respects, the Baroque invention and the Romantic prelude, caprice, and interlude share three main qualities: brevity of individual movements, their sequential structure, and an element of improvisation or an impromptu quality. Chopin’s Preludes were, after all, partly an homage to Bach, so likening them is not so far-fetched. Eliot’s reference to Chopin in “Portrait of a Lady” has generally led readers to believe that, as John Xiros Cooper writes, Eliot found Chopin and Romantic music to be “exhausted,” clichéd, and “sclerotic.”53 The reality of Eliot’s attitude toward Romantic music, like the literature of the same period, is likely more complex. James Huneker again provides a guide. While excoriating what he sees as the feminized performances of Chopin’s music (“Poor Chopin! devoured by those ravening wolves, the concert pianists, tortured by stupid pupils and smeared with the kisses of sentimentalists”),54 he wishes to recuperate the composer of the Preludes, those “modern,” “immortal,” and “masculine” pieces.55 His picture of Chopin as the composer of moody, spontaneous, unfinished “sketches” bears a striking likeness to the poet of Inventions.56 Using musical form as an inspiration and guide became one of Eliot’s most consistent habits of poetic composition in a career marked by radical changes in style and content. Developing this strategy in his earliest experiments, he continued to profit from it creatively in Four Quartets. His analogy between musical and poetic form—and what this analogy is designed to exclude—makes more sense when we see it emerging from a highly charged world of musical performance and discourse about music around 1910. In this world, music can capture and corrupt you; it can lift you to the skies or reveal you as a dried-up critic incapable of feeling. Music is everywhere, penetrating your consciousness. Eliot’s recourse to invention as a poetic strategy, and to short, informal, impromptu keyboard pieces as the models for his poems, was an inspired way to deal with this musical double bind. Or, perhaps, the double bind itself was the source of his inspiration. The allure of music and fear of melomania join together in Prufrock’s memorable final words: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me. . . . We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By seagirls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us and we drown.”

Notes 1. The preponderance of criticism on Eliot and classical music has either concerned the musical structures of Four Quartets or the correspondences between The Waste Land and Wagner’s operas, including the leitmotif technique. For an account of these approaches, see notes 6 and 16 to the Introduction to Part II, this volume. In a move that has become more common since the publication of his T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, John Xiros Cooper portrays Eliot as a modernist scourge of Romantic music from as early as “Portrait of a Lady” (“Thinking with Your Ears,” in Cooper, ed., T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York: Garland, 2000), 85–108). For readings of Eliot as enjoying and / or envying the appeal of popular music, see note 12 to the Introduction to Part II, this volume. 2. These poems appear across Symons’s oeuvre, suggesting that Eliot was familiar with all his volumes, including London Nights (1895), Silhouettes (1892–96), Amoris Victima (1897), Images of Good and Evil (1899), and Fool of the World (1906, not collected in Symons’s Poems, 1906).

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3. Mary Alice Vialls, A Music Fancy and Other Verses (1899); Robert Underwood Johnson, The Winter Hour and Other Poems (1892) and Songs of Liberty and Other Poems (1897). 4. Indeed, even Eliot’s mother had written a poem titled “Musical Reverie,” with tempo markings for each section (Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964), 29–30). 5. David Rowland, “The Piano Since c. 1825,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Piano, ed. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43. Chickering, Steinway, and other American companies won top prizes in European competitions throughout the nineteenth century, and by the end of the century, the majority of pianos sold around the world were American in origin or design. Michael Saffle, “Exhibitions and World’s Fairs,” in The Piano: An Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Palmieri (New York: Routledge, 2004), 131. 6. See Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 7. Eliot, “Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,” Drama New Series 36 (spring 1955): 16. 8. Performers and works mentioned here appear in the “Music and Musicians” column of The Boston Globe on the following dates: Elman, January 10, 1909 and February 6, 1910; Kreisler, February 6, 1910; Hammerstein / Debussy, March 28, 1909; Dolmetsch, November 21, 1909 and January 23, 1910; Duncan, December 15, 1908 and November 28, 1909; Fuller, January 2, 1910. 9. The exact date of Eliot’s acquaintance with Gardner is not known, but Robert Crawford speculates that he may have come to know her through the Signet and Stylus societies at Harvard, whose members associated with Boston’s cultural elite (Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 114). Gardner also held an annual open house for Harvard undergraduates. For a fascinating study of Gardner’s musical patronage, see Ralph P. Locke, “Living with Music: Isabella Stewart Gardner,” in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, ed. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 90–121. 10. See “Music and Musicians,” Boston Globe, January 10, 1910. 11. Announced in The Harvard Crimson, May 5, 1908, for a performance the same evening. 12. The Harvard Crimson, May 4, 10, and 25, 1909. 13. The Harvard Crimson, February 11, 1909; November 23, 1909. 14. The Harvard Crimson, February 26, 1910. 15. T. Austin Graham, “T. S. Eliot and Ubiquitous Music, 1909–1922,” in Music and Literary Modernism, ed. Robert P. McParland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 197. 16. “Try, if possible, to hear something by Wagner in Munich,” Verdenal writes in July 1911. “I went the other day to the Götterdämmerung. . . . [T]he end must be one of the highest points ever reached by man” (L1, 25); “I should be happy to know that you too are able to hear some Wagner in America . . . if you get the opportunity. This is what I am most interested in at the moment” (L1, 32). For more on Eliot’s engagement with Wagner in The Waste Land, see Paterson and Hobbs in Chapter 6, this volume. 17. IMH, 17. 18. Crawford, Young Eliot, 135. 19. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 125; noted by William Blissett, “Wagner in The Waste Land,” in The Practical Vision, ed. Jane Campbell and James Doyle (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 72. 20. Christopher Ricks, annotations in IMH, 119. 21. Crawford, Young Eliot, 135. 22. Ricks, annotations in IMH, 119. 23. Eliot, Lecture VIII, “The Nineteenth Century,” in Complete Prose 2, 745.

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24. Eliot, “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928) in Complete Prose 3, 406. 25. John J. Soldo, The Tempering of T. S. Eliot (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 58; Crawford, Young Eliot, 135. 26. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 8. For a study of the Wagner phenomenon in England, see Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a representative sample of the accusations of immorality against this opera, see Eva Rieger, Richard Wagner’s Women (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011), 69–70. 27. Arthur Symons, Studies in Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906), 276. While The Symbolist Movement in Literature is probably the most alluded-to work of criticism in Ricks’s annotations of Inventions of the March Hare, Ricks also finds at least three references to Seven Arts—enough to suggest that Eliot was familiar with the book. 28. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoön: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 105. 29. Ibid., 106. 30. Eliot, “A review of Egoists, A Book of Supermen, by James Huneker,” The Harvard Advocate 88 (October 5, 1909), in Complete Prose 1, 24. 31. Eliot, “The Art of the Theatre: Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogue,” Hayward Bequest (HB / H, Vol. 1), King’s College Library, Cambridge University. Thanks to John Morgenstern for calling this comment to my attention. 32. James Huneker, Egoists: A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 251. 33. Ricks cites Nietzsche as a source for this poem, without the intermediary of Huneker (119). In 1915, Eliot reviewed a book on Nietzsche by A. Wolf, regretting the omission of any account of “Nietzsche’s views on art, with the interesting pessimism with respect to the future of art evinced in Human, All-Too-Human” (Complete Prose 1, 402), and wrote to his mother, “I now am reading some of Nietzsche’s works which I had not read before” (L1, 132). 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism, trans. William A. Haussman (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 172–73. The second part of Eliot’s poem seems pertinent to Nietzsche’s discussion of Tristan und Isolde as a test of the listener. 35. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 171. 36. Ibid., 156, 169. 37. From Eliot’s reminiscence collected in Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher, ed. Frederick Manchester (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1941), 104. 38. Eliot, who made his plans to travel to Paris in 1910 in order to study with Henri Bergson, was most likely aware of Bergson’s view of the hypnotic power of music expressed in Time and Free Will. Babbitt refers to the following passage in his own book: “In the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis.” Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 14. 39. Babbitt, Laokoön, 129–30. 40. Ibid., 169. 41. James Kennaway, “Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing,” Social History of Medicine, October 5, 2011 (1–19): 8–9. 42. James Huneker, Melomaniacs (New York: Scribner’s, 1902), 316. 43. Ibid., 320. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. Ibid., 158.

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50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

frances dickey Ibid., 162. IMH, 43. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry,” Partisan Review 9, no. 6 (1942): 465. For example, a standard rhetoric textbook of 1890, John Genung’s The Practical Elements of Rhetoric, is divided into two parts: style and invention. The author explains, “Invention, as applied to literary undertakings, comprehends the various procedures involved in finding, sifting, and ordering the material of discourse” (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1890), 217. Eliot may have taken the word “inventions” from the title of Rudyard Kipling’s Many Inventions, a book containing a story that investigates the difference between discovery and fabrication in literary composition. Eliot referred to this work, “The Finest Story in the World,” in his introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber, 1941), 31. In the story, a young poet delves into his previous lives as a Greek slave and a Viking explorer, but neither he nor his friend, the narrator, are able to turn these “memories” into literature. “The Lords of Life and Death would never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his pasts, and I must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor inventions.” Kipling, Many Inventions (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1893), 144. John Knowles Paine, History of Music to the Death of Schubert (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1907), 222. Eliot, Introduction to Selected Poems by Ezra Pound (1928), in Complete Prose 3, 519. Cooper, “Thinking with Your Ears.” James Huneker, Mezzotints in Modern Music: Brahms, Tschaikowsky, Chopin, Richard Strauss, Liszt and Wagner (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), 163. James Huneker, Chopin: The Man and His Music (New York: Scribner’s, 1900), 221. Too numerous to mention here, additional correspondences between Huneker’s account of Chopin and Eliot’s language in “Preludes” and “Portrait of a Lady” suggest a significant influence on his musical poetics.

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6 Wagner in THE WASTE LAND “Try, If Possible, to Hear Something”: Mediating Wagners Adrian Paterson

T

he problem when considering Wagner’s place in The Waste Land is that not one, but many Wagners are at play. For a start, there are (at least) six conspicuous acknowledged intrusions in the poem, deriving from three different operas: Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and Götterdämmerung. In “The Burial of Dead,” Eliot quotes from the sailor’s song that opens Act One of Tristan und Isolde: Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind Wo weilest du?1

Then, following the “hyacinth girl” passage, he quotes the shepherd’s report from Act Three, “Oed’ und leer das Meer,” as the mortally wounded Tristan lies waiting for a ship carrying Isolde. Next, “The Fire Sermon” includes the closing line from Paul Verlaine’s Wagnerian sonnet “Parsifal”— Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!2 —and, perhaps strangest of all, three sonic transcriptions emerging from Der Ring des Nibelungen, from Götterdämmerung Act III. Twice the Rhine-daughters intervene with Weilala leia Wallala leialala3 before a final fading la la foretells the section’s disintegration. Of this motley of Wagners some preliminary observations might be made. In total they make up a small percentage of the poem, yet there are clear typographic indications of importance, or at least of difference, in the careful use of italics and indentation. All in some way concern love. All are in a language that is not English, which only partially explains the use of italics; the Götterdämmerung extracts appear to be syllable sounds. This comes before a consideration of any wider thematic resonances the poem shares with Wagner operas such as grail legends, musical forms, and indeed an obsession with ships and with the sea. What binds them, finally, is that all come to

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the reader in some way mediated; and that such mediation is intrinsic to the effect of all. As readers, therefore, we are dealing not just with direct interventions from Wagner’s operas, his music and drama, but with larger Wagnerian waves that potentially involve Wagner’s biography, his opinions, his myth, and the impact of his work on the world. Any poem navigating the cultural detritus of the nineteenth century is perhaps bound to include Wagner. But as is clear from the title of Stoddard Martin’s Wagner to The Waste Land, Eliot’s poem has been convincingly seen as a culmination (or aborted endgame) to a period of unprecedented Wagnerian cultural dominance.4 What Wagner never himself called a “leitmotif” has been identified as a structural principle behind The Waste Land.5 Wagner has been invoked as a major progenitor of the “mythical method” Eliot claimed to find newly minted in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Timothy Martin’s Joyce and Wagner gives credence to the significance of Wagnerian tropes in modernist thinking.6 Not that there is agreement on what this means: since F. R. Leavis, critics have ploughed into the field, taking Wagner’s appearances in The Waste Land as momentary Romantic solace, or as ironized cliché.7 These might be taken as indicative of the many Wagners we can identify in the poem, from those mediated by Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Arthur Symons, to those from Eliot’s friends Ezra Pound and Jean Verdenal. When considering a poem once titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” this proliferation should be no surprise. Yet how are these voices to be heard? And how is Wagner to be played, seen, sung, heard, and above all to be read in a poem so conspicuously lacking music? Though invoking Wagner unquestionably takes us toward music, this music is absent, and must be invoked, mediated, imagined, suppressed. The complex nature of this mediation, as well as the proliferating Wagners that occasion and surround it, is the theme of this chapter. Taken as a series of episodes—Munich after 1865, Paris in 1911, London in 1916, Lausanne and Dublin in and after 1921, and London again in 1922—this study examines the receptions and paratexts through which Wagner enters The Waste Land, as a measure of the experience of different audiences, which is itself a vital preoccupation of the poem.

1865 and After: Munich More than the work of any other composer in history, Wagner’s music came already mediated. The “massive dimensions” of Der Ring des Nibelungen produced an “overwhelming impression” on Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who admitted that “getting to know it well requires much time and, most of all, several hearings.” “I am to blame,” he noted drily, “for not having yet grown to a full understanding of this music [but] having devoted myself to a careful study of it, I too shall at some time side with the wide circle of true connoisseurs.”8 Bayreuth became the site of pilgrimage, and the tendency of Wagner’s operas to confront an audience with difficulty became legendary, as well as part of their appeal. Wagner’s work itself was a phenomenon, an object of study and subject to the reverence of initiates. From Paris James Joyce demanded that his brother send him “at once (so that I may have it to read in performance . . .) my copy of Wagner’s operas.”9 Operagoers were equipped with libretti, piano scores, and audience guides; they were often readers as well as listeners. Audiences even interacted, whistling or humming

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musical motifs “correctly and incorrectly,” as Joyce noted outside a performance in Rome.”10 So saturated was this mediation, coming in so many forms, that it was hardly surprising that at times the offstage noise could get in the way of the works themselves. Many early audiences did not have the luxury of actually attending full-staged performances. The exigencies of concert programing had the effect of making the early reception of Wagner’s operas necessarily piecemeal. Even Baudelaire, whose essay “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” did so much to transform French opinion of Wagner, was commenting on excerpts from operas in a rare concert programed especially by Liszt, and himself never heard the mature music dramas. Especially following the Prussian war, what Eliot called “a growing spirit of revenge against Germany” surfaced in Paris.11 This strain of French nationalism led Debussy to mark his mature scores with French words rather than Italian or German, and, hardly helped by Wagner’s rudeness about the Paris Opera and its audience, was one reason why it was many years before Wagner’s operas were audible in totality in France. Enthusiasts at La Revue wagnérienne, including Édouard Dujardin, had in many cases not heard more than fragments of his music; for Mallarmé, in particular, this would profoundly affect his view of the work. Such a fragmentary, erratic, difficult, disorienting multimedia experience, surrounded by spiraling commentary, might be compared to readers’ receptions of The Waste Land. To a degree we can speculate that such receptions represented something of Eliot’s own experience. Even as Wagner became a European cultural phenomenon, the difficulty of hearing operas staged in toto did not entirely diminish. Jean Verdenal wrote to him in 1912, “I should be happy to know that you too are able to hear some Wagner in America, and something by Franck as well, if you get the opportunity.”12 That Eliot had previously taken this opportunity is suggested by his poem “Opera” (1909), in which an actual performance of Tristan und Isolde, with the straining efforts of singers and instrumentalists (singled out and damned with the overbearing adjectives “fatalistic horns,” “passionate violins” and “ominous clarinet”), leaves the poem’s persona cold.13 Frances Dickey has described the thriving music scene in Boston and Harvard (see Chapter 5): Eliot’s poem appears likely to refer to the Boston Symphony’s concert performances of the most hand-wringing abstracts from the opera, the “Prelude” and “Liebestod.” The poem appears to suggest that for Eliot the actual experience was a letdown, the idea more potent than the reality.

1911: Paris In July 1911, Verdenal made a point of urging Eliot, who had just left residence in Paris for Bavaria: “Try, if possible, to hear something by Wagner in Munich. I went the other day to the Götterdämmerung, conducted by Nikisch; the end must be one of the highest points ever reached by man.”14 Even as Verdenal’s letter about this performance of Wagner’s opera mediated Eliot’s experience of the music, the poet had already encountered Wagner through the written word, especially French literature. Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) is essentially a treatise on music’s infection of French literature under Wagner’s auspices. Coming “as an introduction to wholly new feelings, a revelation,” Eliot recalled, “the Symons book is

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one of those which have affected the course of my life.”15 Studies of de Nerval, Maeterlinck, Laforgue and others culminate in an exposition of Mallarmé’s desire for “the supreme Music,” “an art which shall complete the transposition, into the Book, of the symphony.” Symons comments: “Carry the theories of Mallarmé to a practical conclusion, multiply his powers in a direct ratio, and you have Wagner. It is his failure not to be Wagner. And, Wagner having existed, it was for him to be something more, to complete Wagner.”16 Mallarmé’s emphasis was on reading, not listening, assembling shards of musically charged language to make “a lonely quiet concert for our minds.”17 If this ambition was claustrophobic, taking music from the concert hall into print remained a vivid possibility, as in Mallarmé’s typographically sophisticated Un Coup de dés. In “The Ideas of Richard Wagner,” Symons quotes at considerable length the prose that Wagner wrote in order to influence the reception of his own operas.18 It was in Paris, notes Symons, that Wagner first complained of the “distraction and unloveliness” of “seeing music as well as hearing it.” Hence his “transformation of the whole auditorium,” and his creation of a unique theater in Bayreuth with orchestra and conductor housed “in a recess between the stage and the amphitheatre.”19 Unlike the experience recorded in Eliot’s poem, at Bayreuth audiences would have seen the whole opera and no players. “Your essay is a substitute for more volumes than anything of the kind I have seen,” W. B. Yeats had written.20 Its importance to Eliot is such that we shall keep returning to it. How close we are to Bayreuth and the direct experience of Wagner’s music mattered. This is manifest in Verlaine’s sonnet “Parsifal,” first published in La Revue wagnérienne. Like its companion sonnet by Mallarmé, “Hommage (à Richard Wagner),” which begins in funereal silence and ends in sybilline sobbings even ink cannot mute, it is a poem in part about the contradictions of listening, a sonnet about self-denial that takes pleasure in sensual gratification. Parsifal is seen overcoming the luxuriously described temptations of the flower-maidens (“the girls, their gentle banter and amusing lust”) and Kundry (“the beautiful woman with the subtle heart”).21 He has even vanquished Hell, and returns triumphant to the throne with spear ready to adore the grail. After a pause, a full stop, the very last line hails the voices of children singing in the cupola, mirroring earlier action from the opera where the music of a boy soprano choir emerges from the dome. Eliot quoted the line with a single comma out of place: “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” The line from Verlaine’s poem acts at several removes. Firstly, Wagner’s score directs that in performance the boys should not be visible. In Bayreuth’s exclusive theater they sing from the dome, with the orchestra and conductor concealed. Further, the music they sing seems disembodied, the high plain harmonies suggesting the purity of the hymnal, a pre-sexual ecstasy. Whether Parsifal even hears the choir is not clear: the boys’ choir sings from the cupola at the close of Act I, excluding Parsifal, who has not yet attained wisdom. Verlaine’s last line reflects so distant a record. Separated from the rest of the poem, it is easy to excerpt, but it becomes a last hurrah, a fading memory. The line describes an aesthetic experience to which we are denied access. We cannot see or hear these voices or measure their effect, distanced as they are by successive mediations. Bayreuth, like the grail, is a long way away. Wagner’s Parsifal was a crystallization of that sense of rooted German folk culture identified by Johann Gottfried von Herder, the eighteenth-century philosopher, linguist and proto-anthropologist, whose influence can be felt throughout Bayreuth.

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And Eliot’s poem was confessedly “deeply . . . indebted” to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance—a book, its preface notes, determined by conversations Weston had at Bayreuth during the 1911 Festival. Her 1894 translation of Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach is even dedicated, “To the memory of RICHARD WAGNER whose genius has given fresh life to the creations of mediaeval romance.”22 Yet her companion book The Quest of the Holy Grail describes the “most perplexing and extraordinary . . . fascinating group of problems” concerning the conflicting versions of the Perceval story in French and German.23 The Waste Land incorporates the myth’s manifold languages as well as its symbolism. By exhibiting the scars of this complex musical and textual history, The Waste Land stages a discussion about nationality, and more specifically about foreignness.

1916: London Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde in Zurich, Venice, and Lucerne; his impassioned letters to Mathilde Wesendonck; his apartment in Munich near the Hofgarten with his new mistress Cosima; the premier of Tristan und Isolde in Munich; his later move to the Starnbergersee; and the founding of Bayreuth, much of it made possible by the patronage of the eccentric “Swan” King, Ludwig II of Bavaria (who idolized him, lived life like a Wagner opera, decorated his castles with Wagnerian symbols and then drowned, mysteriously, together with his doctor in the Starnbergersee): all make up the Mitteleuropean hinterland, the collective memory from which the vocabularies and vocal textures of The Waste Land emerge. So much hinges on the question of what is “echt deutsch,” a question to which Wagner’s operas obsessively return. Wagner’s Das Judentem in der Musik suggests the meretricious values of modern art were Jewish;24 despite hints of anti-semitism in its drafts, Eliot’s poem, however, addressed to “Gentile or Jew,” chooses to remember nationality’s complexity.25 So it is that the Cornish-English sailor of Tristan und Isolde should, in German, sweetly but with dramatic ironies not lost on an opera audience (nor entirely on Isolde, who believes herself mocked) espouse the values of an Irish girl. In an earlier version, The Waste Land began at Tom’s place, a Boston bar where singing popular songs is a primary way to express nationality (“I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me”), whence the drunken personages career on to Myrtle’s place, and then to “the German club,” where they “found it shut.” Bringing Tristan und Isolde into this context must have set up direct ironic echoes.26 The opening’s clichéd association of Irishness and song (and expatriate longing) plays again in the sailor’s song that opens Wagner’s opera: The wind is wild blows homewards now my Irish child where whilest thou?27 Retaining such a dissolute opening could have left quite a hangover. Tristan and Isolde is, after all, an opera whose action depends upon its protagonists’ intoxication by a love potion, or Liebestrank. Jean Verdenal expressed hope that he would hear from Eliot in Bavaria “before German beer has dulled your wits.” “History tells us that the formidable Schopenhauer was a great beer-lover,” he went on. “He also played the

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clarinet.”28 Verdenal’s comment is the more pointed because of Nietzsche’s accusations that Wagner was lulled and dulled by a lethargic, beery German nationalism, derived in part from Herder and from Schopenhauer.29 Eliot himself would compare ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore to “an attraction as fatal as that indicated by the love-potion motif in Tristan und Isolde.”30 Yet even as Eliot tried to resist it, such intoxication could be a heady experience. Nietzsche excepted Tristan and Isolde from all criticism; Verdenal meanwhile related to Eliot, “Tristan and Isolde is terribly moving at the first hearing, and leaves you prostrate with ecstasy, thirsting to get back to it again.”31 Eliot’s skepticism might not be entirely proof against such narcotic enthusiasm. Verdenal reminds us that protagonists and audience in Tristan and Isolde undergo intoxication by music, not by alcohol. Dramatically speaking, the love draught takes effect borne on the billows of music that accompany its drinking. Eliot’s decision to omit the drunken songs from his earlier draft suggests a tender gesture toward “Mein Irisch Kind” couched in these verses of memory. Reading the poem as continuous consciousness, the hyacinth girl seems almost to reply to the song’s question, if not directly to answer it. Tristan und Isolde received renewed visibility in 1916. Although at this time the composer Gustav Holst, like Ford Madox Ford, felt it politic to change his name (from von Holst), and Pound, on account of his accent, was suspected of being an enemy agent, Wagner was somehow inoculated against the wartime suspicion of all things German. Notably, that year Thomas Beecham toured England with Tristan und Isolde. With his wife Dorothy, Ezra Pound attended the June 19 performance at the Aldwych Theatre in London, under Beecham’s baton. It isn’t clear whether Eliot went too, although he certainly had the opportunity; the opera played all summer, while Eliot divided his time between London and the south coast. He also had the motive: he was reviewing Nietzsche for the International Journal of Ethics, as he confirmed to Bertrand Russell, and as he explained after a day at the British Museum, “nearly everyone has faded away from London, or is there very rarely. . . . Ezra holds out in London, and refuses to rusticate.”32 Moreover, this Tristan was an astonishing production, with dramatic sets by the painter Adrian Allinson (who before the war had exhibited in Munich’s Secession exhibition) and Beecham’s own company providing players and singers. As was their custom, too, the opera was performed in English. The production certainly affected Pound, who, as Eliot was well aware, was developing a theory of how to write a long imagist poem. Pound found his answer in Noh theatre.33 In April that year Eliot had accepted an invitation to the private drawingroom premiere of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, where, promised Pound, “there will be no compromise, actors will wear masks, scenery will be mostly imagined, at most a cloth or a screen.” Pound was himself “doing some Noh of my own, don’t know if they’ll ever get finished,” and had been long obsessed by Tristan.34 As H. D. recalled from their earlier courtship: “He bought me the Portland, Maine, Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story. He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day: he bound them in a parchment folder.”35 But it was only after that summer’s performance Pound completed what Daniel Albright considers his best Noh play, Tristan.36 Its plot derives from a moment in the life of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (who had died the previous year), recalled in Pound’s memoir: “Gaudier had been through Wales. He had made a particular pilgrimage to a certain tree, that blooms on a set day

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in the year because of the warmth of the Gulf-stream. (This might be out of a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, but it isn’t).”37 On a quest to find this tree, the play’s protagonist, a Francophone sculptor, finds instead a woman and a man who dance and pass before him like apparitions, glowing and hiding against the backdrop, their costumes allowing them to “flash and fade through each other.” They are Tristan and Isolde, and borrow the sculptor’s voice; without quite understanding, the sculptor too begins to ventriloquize their love: “Knowing you and not knowing you / There is too much between us.” Possessed as he is by their voices, it is not clear if the sculptor’s pilgrimage is entirely successful, but we do learn that the quince tree is in bloom. “And you must find a meaning in all this,” says the prologue.38 The Waste Land shares elements in common with Pound’s Tristan. Pound’s play is a reanimation of lost voices, lost dramas, and in the manner of the Noh revives its ghosts. It considers foreignness, language, and the memory of words, through conscious and unconscious ventriloquism. Pound increased the Noh’s resemblance to opera by naming the texts of Noh plays “libretti” and emphasizing that “the incomplete speech is filled out by the music or movement.” By exploiting the “half shadows” of the Noh form and its traditions of reanimating ghosts, Pound produced a pithy, compressed, skimmed-milk distillation of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Pound’s Tristan was not aired in performance, but like Yeats’s Noh plays it required music to make it go. Beecham’s 1916 production inspired another contemporary revival, this one by Arthur Symons, who himself had Welsh and West Country connections. Years before, a young James Joyce accompanying Yeats discovered Symons playing Wagner, with the score of Tristan und Isolde on the piano stand. Soon Symons would write a fouract verse play, Tristan and Iseult, and dreamed of its performance on the Continent: “imagine,” he writes, “the splendour of a first dramatic triumph in Rome.” This did not transpire, but in August 1916 Symons was pushing, with John Quinn’s help, for its publication in Paris and New York.39 Published by Heinemann in London in 1917, the play’s use of Wagner without music might be as influential on The Waste Land as Symons’s essays. Not all these Tristans required music, though all remembered it. The sailor’s song is perhaps the most jaunty, singable motif in the opera, and thus the most out of character. Such a tune can be remembered and whistled, unlike many melodies in the piece that rely rather on the shifting harmonies beneath. The implication in the opera is that the sailor himself is remembering the melody. In this sense it already has quotation marks around it. Either he has heard it somewhere, or the sailor somehow knows the opera Tristan und Isolde. He thus represents Wagner’s audiences. Louis Untermeyer’s criticism is strangely perceptive here: “the unseen sailor in the first act of Tristan und Isolde is dragged in (without point or perception) to repeat his ‘Frisch weht der Wind.’ ”40 Again Eliot has fastened on a voice whose point of origin is hidden, and of course the “unseen sailor” repeats his melody. Not only is it not the first time he’s sung it, but as a motif in the opera, the tune has been repeated at every performance and many times afterward. By the time of The Waste Land it is likely not the first time we’ve heard it. This points to Eliot’s familiarity with the dramaturgy of these operas and to an engagement with their fictive space. The receptions and hearings that happen within and without the opera echo in a more complex fashion in the consciousnesses of the poem. Tristan und Isolde comes already considerably mediated. As Eliot later wrote: “to work out a play in verse is to

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be working like a musician. . . . [I]t is to see the whole thing as a musical pattern.”41 Such a musical pattern, as in a Wagner music drama, might include a complex set of hearings, as the opera’s music (and its conveyers) remembers itself. Although Wagner’s music might be part of the collective memory of the poem, the reader can’t hear any singing, much less drink any draughts of orchestral accompaniment. The intrusion from Tristan und Isolde conspicuously introduces the idea of music into the poem without allowing direct access to its sound. Each reader experiences this soundlessness differently, whether by remembering or not remembering the tune, looking it up, or remaining “tone-deaf” to its nuances. Not hearing Wagner’s music might be as important as hearing it. Each reader, remaining in their own experience, is to some degree deaf to other readings: “Oed’ und leer das meer.” Reading the poem untethered, without its music, the tone of these two fragments from the opera remain opaque: a blank. What tone exists is conveyed by typography. In a poem obsessed by “intonation (and the sound of sense),” Christopher Ricks has suggested, “the tonal recesses of foreignness echo before even the first line.”42 He instances the Cumean Sybil and the use of the Greek alphabet; we can further note the italic ventriloquism of describing Ezra Pound as “il miglior fabbro.” For Ricks this presence of a disorienting multilinguistic texture, plain in the paratextual apparatus, spills over into the poem. Eliot’s first readers did not have the advantage of these epitaphs; their first concerted experience of difference would have been through the italicized Wagner quotation. These italics seem merely to fulfill a convention of expressing linguistic difference. But not all foreign-language phrases receive this treatment, such as “echt-deutsch,” a spoken or remembered phrase, or “hypocrite lecteur,” reminding us of our readership. As a self-consciously written presence, these italics draw attention to themselves, and we experience silently, “looking into the heart of light, the silence.” The first of the Tristan quotations is also indented, set apart, printed in verse, which we know for Eliot implies a form of punctuation.43 Unusually for Wagner, the fragment rhymes, bespeaking song. These italics express difference then also in sonic terms. Yet “Oed’ und leer das meer” is a darker, deader melody—a voice quite different from the onboard sailor. Are we in the presence of a libretto, as Pound’s Noh plays are libretti? Perhaps, but Verlaine’s poem (quoted in italics) cannot ever be sung, so song is not their meaning. What then binds the italics together? Until the re-emergence of Dante and Gerard de Nerval at the very end, italics are reserved for Wagner. Such typography sets Wagnerian allusions apart from the rest of the poem. They are thus trebly foreign: notations of difference in language, music, and nominated origin. They express at once the possibility of hearing something and the possibility of not hearing something—of music, and its lack.

1921 and After: Lausanne, Dublin Until the close of the poem italics are left exclusively for Wagner, with the exception of the Upanishad articulations of thunder: Datta Dayadhvam Damyata. Each italic command is preceded by a capitalized single-line “DA.” Dominating the poem’s end, these are capital inscriptions of powerful force made spatially and visually present. But because “Da” repeats in the following italicized sounds, “DA” intrudes a sonic force,

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embodying a bedrock of elemental sound. Philosophically speaking, “DA” returns to Schopenhauer’s conception of music, what Wagner called the “sound-world” as a fundamental reality and manifested in the Ring with the thunder-god Donner. His combinations of words and music aimed thus to return to the beginnings of things, as Symons records: “the oldest lyric arises out of tone and melody, in which human emotion at first uttered itself in the mere breathing of the vowels, then through the individualisation of the vowels by consonants.”44 “DA” then is not the earliest, but the first directed utterance. Each following italic echo produces a different translation or transcription, which mediation of elemental sound may be necessary for human ears.45 Such silent sounded syllables are not the first employed in the poem: the lines “Weilala leia / Wallala leialala” at the end of “The Fire Sermon” are Wagnerian, but unlike all the other Wagnerian allusions, they do not come in italics. Italics, being reminders of the written, must be used for language that can be transcribed and made assimilable. They are not to be extended to inarticulate syllable sounds, however Wagnerian. According to Eliot’s notes, these lines come from the third act of Götterdämmerung, where the Rhine-daughters cavort joyously in the river, resuming their aquatic dance in honour of the Rheingold. In Eliot’s poem they chart a Thamesside disintegration. Again, tone is hard to judge, but without music such utterances appear sucked dry, a generative European Gesamtkunstwerk left now entirely desiccated. Eliot’s dry notations are doubly indented, a quoted lyric within a lyric, drifting into meaninglessness, with the last disjointed “la la” an echo faltering into an epitaph. What Eliot’s notes do not specify is that these sounds also echo the Ring’s evening-long prologue, Das Rheingold, where unfolding E major elaborations ripple into the nymphs’ flirtatious song: “Weialala” remembers the opening “Weia! Waga!” and “Wagalaweia! Wallala weiala weia!”—the very beginnings of song and speech in the Ring.46 Remembered outside its lyric confines, outside all quotation marks, the syllables “la la” thus return to beginnings. George Moore remembered Dujardin’s cry “it is not the music that counts, but the words.”47 Eliot’s poem, however, inclines more toward Verdenal’s comment: “I am not making much sense, it is all so confused and difficult, and impossible to put into words, and necessarily so (otherwise, no one would have felt the need to express it in music).”48 Wagner’s music is buried deep in The Waste Land’s collective unconscious. Readers, it might be argued, do not expect music in a poem, although Thomas MacGreevy’s Crón Tráth na nDéithe (1929) shows that it was not impossible to include music in a poetic text. His staff-notated snippets of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung are both enlightening and jarring. The melodies chosen are orchestral and range too far for any one singer; the double staff requires sight-reading or pianistic skills. In practice his notation is a further inscription of loss. Many readers are excluded from the graphic squiggles, and even for the musically literate, staff notations amongst words cannot replicate an operatic experience. The Waste Land is less goading and more aurally experiential than this. “It is musical with a new music, and that without any straining after newness,” Edgar Jepson had commented on Eliot’s debut Prufrock and Other Observations.49 The Waste Land is musical with an old music, an unheard music. While expressing lack, this effect also allows a silent echoing that continues today. Stravinsky’s Introitus in Memoriam T. S. Eliot is a tribute to Eliot’s musical as well as poetical subtlety.50

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1922: London In a final instance of mediation, the first readers of The Waste Land encountered Wagner’s presence on the pages of The Criterion directly preceding Eliot’s poem. The first of two instalments of T. Sturge Moore’s “The Story of Tristan & Isolt in Modern Poetry” appeared in the first issue of Eliot’s new magazine. Subtitled “Narrative Versions,” the essay examined poetic castings of the story from Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and “moderns” like Laurence Binyon and Michael Trell. Moore was critical of construction, plot, and narrative plausibility, becoming especially concerned if the psychology of characters’ actions appeared unprepared or inadequately foreshadowed. Much the same criticisms could be cogently leveled at Eliot’s poem. Condemning inorganic and psychologically incoherent works despite moments of felicity, Moore’s conclusion astonishingly acts as a direct prologue for what follows: Yet . . . if beauty of style lies in the number, coherence, and justness of relations between the perceptions invoked . . . then it is evident that beauties of detail which lack organic relation to the whole or present an inept one, must, like cut or wired flowers doomed to sterility, ill compare with bloom on thriving plants. (To be concluded).51 Turning the page, a reader is confronted with The Waste Land, here lacking its dedication or now-familiar Dantean epigraph, plunged instead directly into “I / The Burial of the Dead”: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.” Coming after such reflections on bloom and sterility, these lines are a hellish elaboration. This turns Moore’s essay on the Tristan poems into an astonishing paratextual commentary on exactly how The Waste Land is not written, but assembled from details plucked from context, lacking immediate organic unity or psychological coherence, and obsessed with questions of fecundity. It is put together “like cut or wired flowers doomed to sterility.” The cut flowers in the arms of the hyacinth girl have been nowhere so incisively critiqued. These flowers are framed by the quoting of Tristan und Isolde, just as Eliot’s poem was by Sturge Moore’s two essays: a second appeared in the following issue of The Criterion. At this distance it is impossible to know how deliberate was the juxtaposition—certainly Eliot had the opportunity to arrange it. Sturge Moore’s praise of Tristan und Isolde as the story’s supreme telling is qualified by doubt about the “meaningless sounds indicated by the libretto,” as if reading Wagner without music.52 So too, such meaningless sounds play in “The Fire Sermon” and in “What the Thunder Said” to considerably different effect. Again, for the early readers of The Waste Land, the truth that culture came mediated was made plain by their own experience. Experiencing Wagner was also to experience him second- or third-hand, as much about not hearing Wagner as hearing him. The Waste Land’s Wagners come to us displaced, truncated, and lacking context that must be supplied: we are always, indeed, at several removes from each. Plucked from an original “source,” like Wagner’s mythical Flying Dutchman, they are unmoored, adrift, borne up by waves of imagined musical and cultural surrounds and, potentially, washed ashore to the reader like detritus. Yet by their very borrowing, these quotations carry with them Wagner’s wider cultural reception, which goes so far (in Sturge Moore’s essay) as to lap around the edges of the poem. “The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context.”53 Set free so brutally from context, syllable sounds might seem

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barely meaningful. But they are not thereby the less musical. By trying to examine the indefinitely expanding contexts of words—those immediate surrounds, within a poem and its wider framing, and off into the wider culture—it might be possible if not to hear, then to understand something of their music. In Eliot’s “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” one speaker is accused by another of double Wagnerian standards: “I have also heard you railing at Wagner as ‘pernicious.’ But you would not willingly resign your experience of Wagner either.”54 Once experienced, however uncomfortably or recalcitrantly, Wagner could not be unexperienced. The Waste Land is a record of the complexity of that experience, or rather, a reexperiencing, a “dreaming back” in Yeatsian terms, of so many experiences of Wagner, filtered potentially by many different auditory and vocal and intellectual capacities within and without the operas—experiences that include hearings, viewings, readings, overhearings, and the overwhelming experience of all possible Wagner paraphernalia. In this sense the poem simulates an authentic Wagnerian experience, and also that of an experience of Western culture—even that of its own readership.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

CPP, 61–2. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 69–70. Stoddard Martin, Wagner to The Waste Land: A Study of the Relationship of Wagner to English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982). See, for example, William Blissett, “Wagner in The Waste Land,” in The Practical Vision, ed. Jane Campbell and James Doyle (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 71–86; Margaret Dana, “Orchestrating The Waste Land: Wagner, Leitmotiv, and the Play of Passion” in John Xiros Cooper, ed., T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York: Garland, 2000), 267–94. Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Leavis suggests that the appearance of the opening song from Tristan is “[o]ffering a positive in contrast—the romantic absolute, love.” F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 109. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “The First Bayreuth Ring,” Faber Book of Opera, ed. Tom Sutcliffe (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 327. James Joyce to John Joyce (25 Jan 1903), Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann and James F. Spoerri (London: Faber, 1962), 25. James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce (February 14, 1907) Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2, 214. Eliot, “Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Literature” (1916); Complete Prose I, 473. Jean Verdenal to Eliot, February 5, 1912; L1, 32. IMH, 17. L1, 25. Eliot, review of Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Five Essays, by Peter Quennell, The Criterion (January 1930); Complete Prose 4, 11. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Dutton, 1958), 62. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 27.

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18. Arthur Symons, “The Ideas of Richard Wagner,” Studies in Seven Arts (London: Archibald Constable, 1906). At key moments Symons even goes to the extent of revising William Ashton Ellis’s translation of Wagner (with the translator’s consent). Symons’s essays on Wagner and other musical figures place particular emphasis on what any concertgoer knows, that different individual performances and venues matter. See for instance “Pachmann, Parsifal, and the Pathetic Symphony,” Plays, Acting and Music (London: Duckworth, 1903). 19. Tchaikovsky, “The First Bayreuth Ring,” 322; Symons, Studies in Seven Arts, 123. 20. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 4: 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 175. 21. Original: “les Filles, leur gentil / Babil et la luxure amusante”; “la Femme Belle, au coeur subtil.” Paul Verlaine, “Parsifal,” La Revue wagnérienne (January 8, 1886). 22. Jessie L. Weston, Parzifal: A Knightly Epic (London: D. Nutt, 1894), v. 23. Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (London: G. Dell, 1913), 6. 24. Wagner’s overt nationalism and anti-semitism is of course one of the reasons Nietzsche fell out with him, as is made clear in Nietzsche contra Wagner. 25. See Jahan Ramazani, Transnational Poetics (London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 26. WLF, 5. 27. Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, with English translation by H. and F. Corder (London: Schott, 1880), 5. 28. L1, 21. 29. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. III, ed. Alexander Tille (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899). 30. Eliot, “John Ford,” Times Literary Supplement 1579 (May 5, 1932), in Complete Prose 4, 477. 31. LI, 32. 32. Eliot to Bertrand Russell, June 7, 1916, L1, 131; Eliot to Conrad Aiken, August 21, 1916, L1, 144–45. 33. See Ezra Pound, Translations, ed. Hugh Kenner (New York: New Directions, 1965), 237. 34. Ezra Pound to Loomis Pound, February 1916 and April 7, 1916, quoted in Pound, Plays Modelled on the Noh (1916), ed. Donald C. Gallup (Toledo: University of Toledo, 1989), ix. 35. H. D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1979), 23. 36. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 78–81. 37. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 76. 38. Pound, Plays Modelled on the Noh, 36–38. 39. Arthur Symons, Selected Letters 1880–1935, ed. Karl Beckson and John M. Munro (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 176, 240. 40. Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 94. 41. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” The Listener (November 25, 1936), 994. 42. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), 176. 43. “Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation.” Eliot, “Questions of Prose,” Times Literary Supplement (27 Sept 1928), in Complete Prose 3, 495. 44. Symons, Studies in Seven Arts, 261. 45. It is probably music’s fault that poets typically play with end-rhymes: see Chapter 2 of James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 46. Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelungs, with English translation by H. and F. Corder (London: Schott, 1880), 13.

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47. George Moore, Hail and Farewell (1911), ed. Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1985), 165. 48. L1, 32. 49. Edgar Jepson, “Recent United States Poetry,” English Review 27.1 (May 1918): 91–92. In T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge, 1982). 50. Igor Stravinsky, Introitus in Memoriam T. S. Eliot (Boosey and Hawkes, 1965). First performed April 17, 1965 by the Chicago Symphony and Chorus. 51. Thomas Sturge Moore, “The Story of Tristan & Isolt in Modern Poetry: II: Narrative Versions,” The Criterion Vol. 1 No.1 (Oct 1922): 49. 52. Thomas Sturge Moore, “The Story of Tristan & Isolt in Modern Poetry: II: Dramatic Versions,” The Criterion Vol. 1 No. 2 (June 1923): 176. 53. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942), in OPP, 32. 54. Eliot, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928), in Complete Prose 3, 406.

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“So All the Women Are One Woman”: Eliot’s Kundry Katherine Hobbs

I

n February 1914, just months before T. S. Eliot’s arrival in England, Wagner’s 1882 opera Parsifal was staged in London for the first time. Although the work had premiered in Germany more than thirty years previously, Wagner had instituted a strict copyright. Performances outside of Bayreuth, where the composer’s opera house was located, were forbidden until the copyright expired.1 This performance ban was typical of late nineteenth-century Wagnerism, which had a reputation for being exclusive, cult-like, and prone to fanaticism.2 This was particularly true of Parsifal, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel, or “festival play for the consecration of a stage,” which was an interpretation of the Grail legend, adapted from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (Figure 6.1).3 In the early 1920s, aspects of the Grail story were again reworked to

Figure 6.1 Parsifal unveils the Holy Grail while Kundry dies at his feet. Postcard illustrating the final scene of Wagner’s 1882 opera Parsifal, early 20th century.

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fit a new form when Eliot borrowed elements from Wagner’s version of the tale for The Waste Land. By incorporating themes and motifs from Parsifal, Eliot brought the opera into a new age and a new cultural medium less than a decade after the end of Wagner’s ban. Foremost among Eliot’s Wagnerian borrowings in The Waste Land is the multifaceted character of Kundry, who, transformed by Eliot into a central figure, unites “all the women” of the poem. The story of Eliot’s adaptation of Wagner has been told before, but not with Kundry at the center of the tale. A short synopsis helps to explain Kundry’s role in the opera. Parsifal opens in Monsalvat, the domain of the Grail Knights, who are sworn to protect both the vessel and the holy spear that pierced Christ’s side. Their king, Amfortas, suffers from a wound inflicted by this same spear. Klingsor, the magician who stole the spear and wounded the king, had earlier been spurned by the Knights because he could not attain their exemplary level of physical and spiritual purity. In retaliation, he keeps an enchanted garden populated with beautiful “flower maidens” dedicated to leading the Grail Knights astray. Amfortas was wounded in this garden after being seduced by Kundry, a woman cursed with immortality. Because she laughed at the suffering of Christ, Kundry is punished with eternal life, doomed to serve Klingsor in one capacity and the Grail Knights in another. She is fated to perpetuate a cycle of exhausted life, as exemplified by her role in inflicting Amfortas’s wound, which cannot heal but also cannot kill. Like Kundry, Amfortas wants desperately to die. In the hope of death, he stops uncovering the Grail for communion. When the Grail ritual ceases, the Knights’ order slowly falls apart. The Knights can only be rescued by an “Innocent Fool” who maintains his purity among the temptations of Klingsor’s magical garden and retrieves the spear. This fool is Parsifal, who, after an unpromising first encounter with the Grail Knights,4 resists Kundry and eventually succeeds in his quest. He heals Amfortas with the spear, becomes the new Grail king, and baptizes Kundry, releasing her from the curse. Having been symbolically cleansed, Kundry dies during the Grail ceremony.5 Eliot’s appreciation of Wagner is often traced to his time in Paris and the influence of the Symbolists, many of whom were dedicated Wagnerians (and contributors to La Revue wagnérienne).6 Yet there is a contemporary context for Eliot’s Wagnerism as well as a long pedigree. This story of human weakness, waste, and salvation had a particular appeal in British society around the time of World War I, reaching deeper than mere popularity.7 Parsifal premiered in London at an opportune time: “The war may have an excellent effect upon the reputation of Wagner . . .” wrote a reviewer in 1916, “Henceforth we are going to have Wagner’s music without the Wagnerians . . . the worst enemies of Wagner.”8 The works of the Bayreuth “master” were still revered within the more traditional Wagnerian circles, but a wider public was beginning to regard Wagner’s music, along with certain Wagnerian devices and symbols, as their own.9 Bayreuth and London were growing figuratively “nearer”; Bayreuth was no longer a “private shrine,” and London now had an audience that could appreciate Parsifal without merely turning it into “a stricken field for rival critics.”10 While Parsifal continued to have its detractors,11 some viewed the opera as a means of processing the horrors of war and providing cultural and spiritual consolation to a Europe exhausted by years of struggle. At the end of the war, a reviewer wrote that Parsifal “answers to a real need of the moment” for spiritual sustenance, and he called for a “modern interpretation,” although as yet, “not a whisper has come from our spiritual

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leaders and not more than a quavering snatch of song from our poets.”12 From this point of view, Parsifal was no longer an obscure German ritual to be conducted at a Bayreuth shrine, but instead an artwork that could stand adaptation and flexibility of interpretation while remaining an object of universal resonance—or, in another critic’s words, “a long symphonic poem on the suffering of mankind.”13 In Parsifal, the source of this “suffering” has a bodily manifestation in the immortal seductress Kundry. Unlike other characters in Wagner’s opera, the mysterious Kundry is not taken straight from Wolfram’s epic. Jessie Weston claimed that the role of Kundry “will be sought for in vain elsewhere; the elements of her many-sided character are indeed present in the legend, but to Wagner alone belongs the credit of having combined these scattered indications.”14 Kundry is a composite, drawn from multiple characters of Wolfram’s Parzival: Kondrie, the Grail messenger and hag, and Orgeluse, lover of Amfortas, among others.15 Contemporary reviewers were alternately fascinated and irritated by her complexity. In 1882, the year of the opera’s Bayreuth premiere, Kundry was called “incomparably the greatest” out of “all the characters Richard Wagner has imagined”16 and “the most interesting character in the work.”17 But a bitter review of 1901 criticized Wagner for “heap[ing] up one art, one idea upon another” in the figure of Kundry, raging that Wagner “little cared for the dramatic properties or the feelings of his audience when he composed Kundry, a ridiculous hag, an Astarte, a Herodias, a Meg Merrilies and a Mary Magdalen in one.”18 Letters to the editor in 1914 defended Kundry from charges of immorality, protesting that Wagner “is treating material of profound human interest” and Kundry is “not merely a character in a play [but] the symbol of Matter, as Parsifal represents spirit.”19 Nonetheless, critics found a deeper, universal relevance (or problem) buried among the disparate elements of her composite character. Searching for salvation and closure, Kundry resonated with the problems of the postwar world. The same reviewer who called for a “modern interpretation” of Parsifal appreciated Wagner’s rejection of “the negative asceticism of the extreme medieval ideal” and acceptance of the interaction of “flesh and spirit,” particularly in the music of the opera, if not in its plot.20 A “modern interpretation” of Parsifal must account for new phases of life, an abandonment of the old “asceticism.” Kundry, a character who contained within one body both the potential for salvation and the threat of damnation, already was part of the “modern” in uniting these elements of “flesh and spirit.” Just over two years after this review appeared, Eliot published The Waste Land, which can be read as a “modern interpretation” of certain aspects of the Parsifal story. Kundry inhabits The Waste Land as strongly as she inhabits Parsifal. Created from “scattered indications,” she is indispensable to the opera’s plot, simultaneously demanding, endangering, and enabling the hero’s triumph through purity. Weston called Kundry “Wagner’s great contribution to the Perceval legend”; Kundry is also his “great contribution” to The Waste Land and one of the major characters in the poem.21 The ambiguity in Kundry’s characterization suits her to Eliot’s method of building many-sided symbols that, like the contemporary perceptions of Kundry, have the potential to be both transcendent and parodic or “ridiculous.” In her double role of hag-like servant to the Grail Knights and captivating seductress in the service of Klingsor, Kundry is “throbbing between two lives.” Cursed to laugh eternally without the relief of tears, she waits for purifying water like the subjects of Eliot’s poem;

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composed of “fragments” and “broken images” from many aspects of the myth, she is both enabler of and obstacle to salvation. Most critical responses to Wagner in The Waste Land tend to underemphasize or even ignore Kundry,22 despite her thematic resonance and affinities to the composite structure of the poem. Critics acknowledge Eliot’s debt to Parsifal (beyond the basic Grail story outlined in From Ritual to Romance),23 but focus their attention on Amfortas, the “Fisher King” character, on Eliot’s use of symbols,24 or on musical techniques and patterns from the entire Ring cycle.25 As the character who inflicts the wound on Amfortas, however, Kundry is just as important, if not more so, than the Fisher King himself, and is more deeply connected to the poem’s confused mixture of contexts and atmosphere of harried timelessness. In The Waste Land, Eliot transforms this already mesmerizing woman into a pervasive archetype. The presence of a female archetype of “the sexually violated yet sterile female” has been identified in the poem by Philip Sicker without connection to Parsifal. She is seen in “the prostitute who, despite innumerable fornications, never conceives nor gives birth. . . . [S]he is characterized by acute neurasthenia, nervous chatter, hysterical laughter, and general physical and psychological debilitation.”26 Kundry too is sexualized but sterile, chronically exhausted, marked by laughter and emotional disconnection. These qualities infuse Eliot’s portraits and suggestions of twentieth-century women.27 Kundry’s double life also links her conspicuously to Tiresias, another archetypal figure afflicted by divine punishment with “two lives.” Eliot’s note includes the observation that “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. . . . [S]o all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.”28 As a named (mostly) male speaker, Tiresias tends to eclipse the more elusive Kundry in readings of The Waste Land. But Kundry is an equally powerful unifying figure. Fascinatingly, the statement “all the women are one woman” applies to Wagner’s Kundry, who, as demonstrated by the reviews, captivated turn-of-the-century operagoers and scholars because her character fused all of the women in Wolfram’s epic. Kundry is the “one woman” mentioned in the note. Although Kundry is not named in the poem, this “nameless woman”29 is certainly an “important personage,” not merely watching events as Tiresias presumably does, but actively participating in and shaping them. Kundry is present throughout The Waste Land as a source of the wound, a mocker or punisher of the wound, and a necessary element of salvation. These three sides of her character, however, do not unfold chronologically as they do in Wagner’s opera, but instead blend into the more discordant mixture of Eliot’s voices. Although the poem’s jumble of voices and lack of narrative structure limit the analogy between Eliot’s method and Wagner’s, Eliot nods to Wagner through overt references to the music-dramas and emulates him through the use of verbal “leitmotifs.” Wagner was known for employing daring chromaticism in his operas and prolonging harmonic tension while delaying tonal resolution to an unprecedented degree.30 He also frequently employed offstage or unseen voices (the Woodbird in Siegfried, the Rhinemaidens in certain parts of the Ring, and the voices in the dome of Monsalvat in Parsifal are just a few examples) to convey crucial information. In these characteristics, Wagner’s own compositional techniques bear a loose similarity to Eliot’s blending of operatic and modern voices, which interact and “harmonize” with one another in a rich texture. In fact, most of Eliot’s direct Wagnerian allusions in The Waste Land refer to such

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disembodied voices, notably the sailor’s song from Tristan und Isolde in “The Burial of the Dead” and the quotation from Verlaine’s sonnet “Parsifal” describing the voices in the dome of the Grail Castle (“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!”) in “The Fire Sermon.” Wagner’s Kundry is momentarily a disembodied voice in Act II of Parsifal when she calls to the hero in Klingsor’s garden, but she is for the rest of the opera a strikingly physical presence. From a musical standpoint, Kundry’s vocal behavior in Parsifal follows the arc of her character from immortal sinner to penitent servant; in Act II she is a clamoring voice, first begging Klingsor to leave her alone and then calling up any and all images that may induce Parsifal to give in to her advances. Her demonic laughter marks the first two acts, recurring in a descending motif. But in Act III, when Kundry’s character achieves narrative resolution, Wagner grants her a curious type of musical resolution: she remains entirely silent (with the exception of one word—“dienen” or “serve”).31 Even though Kundry dies in religious rapture, she does not sing a climactic Liebestod like Isolde or a piece full of suicidal strength like Brünnhilde’s immolation scene. Amidst some of Wagner’s most famous and powerful music—the “Good Friday” music, the “Dresden Amen” associated with the Grail—Kundry, whose ancient knowledge and enticing speech filled up most of the previous act, is quiet. With her cackling laughter, she mocked purity and worked against her own hope of salvation. But with her silent tears, she is spiritually reborn and can at last physically die. In Parsifal, Kundry the seductress plays a direct role in the wounding of Amfortas. “The plot of Parsifal concerns the damage done by Kundry, decadence personified, to men, to male culture, to masculinity,” writes music historian Michael Steinberg. “Hers is the damage wrought by modernity, troped as female and decadent. The redemption of humanity becomes, in Parsifal, the redemption from modernity and from history.”32 Like some of the contemporary reviewers, he interprets Kundry as a modern, predatory, and possibly immoral figure, representative of something that must be purged.33 However, Steinberg further suggests that Kundry and Amfortas together create a blend of masculinity and femininity representing “cultural pollution”: In [Amfortas’s] case, cultural pollution is also seen as gender confusion. If Amfortas’s wound opened through his seduction by Kundry, the wound becomes a metonym of male invagination at the hand of the phallic woman. Furthermore, the bleeding wound suggests here a menstruating man, with the attendant qualities of femininity and pollution.34 Here, the wound is represented as not only a byproduct of “modern” female “decadence,” but as a complex episode of “gender confusion.” Kundry remains the active agent, “pollut[ing]” Amfortas’s purity, but the “pollution” requires the melding of male and female characteristics. This layer of “gender confusion” is important for linking the existing criticism of the wounded Amfortas in The Waste Land to the female figure in the poem who is both his counterpart and antagonist. In addition, the “gender confusion” inflicted by Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal distinctly resonates with Eliot’s Tiresias, who suffers from his own “gender confusion” due to a punishment from above. It is Kundry, not Amfortas, who has “two lives,” and her agency (as opposed to Amfortas’s passivity) necessitates a closer investigation into the specifically female side of this figure in which “the two sexes meet.” While Amfortas lies suffering, Kundry

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is forced to wound again and again at the orders of Klingsor. When Klingsor calls Kundry at the beginning of Act II of Parsifal, he calls her by several names, invoking her myriad identities. Klingsor addresses her as “nameless woman: / She-Lucifer! Rose of Hades! / Herodias wert thou, and what else? Gundryggia there, Kundry here.”35 In The Waste Land, the Kundry figure, like Klingsor’s many-named servant, is connected to waste and wounding, and this connection in the poem also depends upon Kundry’s multiple identities. In “What the Thunder Said,” the quester faces an unnamed woman who tempts him as he approaches the “Chapel Perilous”: A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.36 While this passage might seem to have little to do with Wagner, Kundry is present in many images here, ranging from a woman “[drawing] her long black hair out” to the “voices singing out of empty cisterns.” According to Wagner’s stage directions, Kundry was to have “black hair flowing in loose locks” which, in the last act, she uses “drawnout” to dry Parsifal’s feet after she has washed them.37 “Voices singing out of empty cisterns,” moreover, recalls John the Baptist in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the very picture of a “modern and decadent femininity.”38One of the many names by which Klingsor calls Kundry in Act II is Herodias, Salomé’s mother in Wilde’s play. In some versions of the story, Herodias and Salomé are the same person. As with Herodias and Salomé, who try to corrupt the purity of John the Baptist, Kundry’s duty under Klingsor is to corrupt the purity of the redeemer, Parsifal. Regardless of the name used for this dangerous female type, the act of seduction with the aim of killing a prophet or disabling a redeemer is an interesting metaphor for the aftermath of a war that disrupted traditions and led to the needless deaths of many young men. Kundry’s laughter is also relevant to the The Waste Land, and particularly to its loveless relationships. Wagner’s Kundry must eternally ridicule the wounded: her unending life is punishment for mocking the agony of Christ, and even as she is unsuccessful in defying Klingsor’s orders, she laughs at his pathetic, self-inflicted castration.39 The curse also continually reopens her own spiritual wound; she cannot weep, but her dry laughter reminds her of her own dire sin. Matthew W. Smith has argued that Parsifal represents a (Schopenhauerian) move in Wagnerian opera away from the body toward “dematerialization” and that “Kundry’s laughter marks her as a hysteric and a femme fatale . . . [it] binds music closely with gesture” in its threatening, “emphatically corporeal” presence.40 The Waste Land also draws back in horror from female corporeality even as its characters fail to connect beyond the strictly carnal, and Kundry’s laughter is ever-present in the background, mocking these failures. Some of the poem’s most noticeable moments of laughter or hysteria occur in instances of seeming parody,41 passages that also can be connected to Kundry’s loveless existence. In “But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear,” the speaker does not seem to have any apprehension regarding “Time’s wingèd chariot.”

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Instead, he or she is spurred into a mocking “chuckle” by the “rattle” of bones. More than a morbid joke, the bones are part of a motif often associated with the Kundry figure, who mocks time and death, and is also mocked by it, since she cannot physically die. A similar graveyard humor makes light of Madame Sosostris’s threat of “death by water” even if her prediction later turns out to be correct. Like Kundry, the typist in “The Fire Sermon” and the neurotic wife in “A Game of Chess” reside in an undefined area between mockery and tragedy. In the garden scene of Parsifal, Kundry has made every effort to be enticing. She employs flattery, laughter, her sad personal story, references to Parsifal’s mother, and obscure information about Parsifal’s childhood in an attempt to break down his defenses. Similarly, the woman in the opening section of “A Game of Chess” prepares for a seduction in the midst of bright objects and images reminiscent of Kundry’s garden—“fruited vines” and a “sylvan scene” recalling Milton’s Eden.42 Her seduction plans, however, dissolve into hysterical exclamations and recriminations. In “The Fire Sermon,” the clerk’s assault on the typist represents an aspect of modern sexuality that accords with another dimension of Kundry. When Klingsor summons her at the beginning of Act II before the garden scene, Kundry is just as “tired” and reluctant as Eliot’s typist (but horrified rather than “bored”). She resists Klingsor’s initial order, longing for “Sleep, sleep— / Deepest sleep!—Death,” but she must eventually carry it out.43 Kundry unites both the hysterical seductress and the tired woman through her reluctance to serve Klingsor and her over-the-top efforts to tempt Parsifal. The tie between sexual love and wounding, so prevalent in Wagner’s opera, also emerges from Eliot’s female figures when they are interpreted as aspects of Kundry. The man and woman in “A Game of Chess” seem to be separated by some sort of wound or trauma, probably war (suggested by “I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones,” yet another instance of the bone motif, and by Lil’s husband, who is “demobbed”). In a parallel traumatic experience that disrupts Kundry’s seduction of Parsifal, Parsifal suddenly recalls Amfortas’s wound and recognizes Kundry’s guilt. While Kundry and Parsifal are both saved by his realization, however, memories of “quests” or wounds among the couples in The Waste Land distract rather than save.44 Seduction functions differently in The Waste Land than it does in Parsifal. In Wagner’s opera, Kundry’s seduction attempt is an obstacle placed in the way of salvation, yet without which salvation would be impossible. The women of The Waste Land, on the other hand, suffer through unfulfilling or nonexistent sexual encounters without any resolution or even relief from their dull routine. Eliot presents interpersonal disconnection as an endemic situation; successful seduction does not lead to wounding or damnation, and failed seduction has none of Parsifal’s spiritually edifying qualities. The spiritual damage has already been done, and the couples in the poem exist in a state similar to that of Kundry, pre-salvation, positioned beyond the reach of time or death. Like the “bones” and their macabre associations with loveless sexuality, these relationships are deprived of vitality but continue to exist, sordid, mortal, and deserving of both pity and mockery. The women of The Waste Land miss out on Kundry’s most important experience: spiritual transformation. The moral scheme of Parsifal, as Smith observes, “can only admit laughter in order ultimately to banish it.”45 The couples in The Waste Land certainly “admit” Kundry’s dimension of mockery and failure, but it is less clear whether they are able to “banish” it. They seem to lack the crucial quality that allows Parsifal

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to gain wisdom and complete his quest: compassion. While the poem admonishes us to “sympathize” (“Dayadhvam”),46 its characters do not seem to benefit from this advice. Wagner’s foolish hero gains important knowledge when he feels the sting of Amfortas’s wound after Kundry’s kiss. This act of deep sympathy allows Parsifal to resist Kundry and wield the spear, even as Kundry curses him in a final desperate attack and condemns him to wander. Kundry does not appear again until the following act, where she washes the hero’s feet and undergoes baptism. Her mocking laughter has been silenced, and her agony finally comes to an end through her embrace of humble, silent service. The Waste Land’s female characters, however, incessantly fill silences with talk and noise: the wife in “A Game of Chess” relentlessly pesters her husband, Lil’s friend jabbers insensitively, the typist fills the air with mechanical music from a gramophone, and Madame Sosostris dithers over her cards while warning of “death by water.” As part of her progress toward redemption, Kundry experiences a form of “death by water” in the opera’s final scene, a tableau in which the newly wise Parsifal holds the glowing cup and Kundry lies dead at the feet of her redeemer. Eliot’s quotation of Verlaine’s “Parsifal” alludes to this scene: “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” (“And O those children’s voices singing in the dome”). Yet Eliot gives the scene a sordid contemporary resonance. Rather than celebrating the triumph of spirit over body, as in Parsifal, Eliot’s image of the dome in the Grail castle harks back to Kundry’s prostitute-like role under Klingsor. The “children’s voices” of Verlaine’s poem refer to unseen voices at Monsalvat who close Wagner’s opera with their praises of “Salvation to the Saviour.”47 But the music that Eliot quotes in this stanza is a military song about a brothel: “O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water.” This bawdy music places Kundry’s penitent act of foot-washing in the context of modern prostitution. Instead of being baptized, Eliot’s Kundry figure remains tied to acts of meaningless seduction. This reference collapses the cursed Kundry of Act II with the redeemed Kundry of Act III. Furthermore, while Verlaine’s line refers explicitly to the end of Parsifal, it appears almost directly in the center of The Waste Land, also complicating any sense of chronology or progression in the poem. Kundry’s mocking laughter cannot be separated from her penitent tears, and instead of pointing toward salvation, Eliot merges associations of purity with those of deliberate violation. Even as Eliot disrupts the idea of a linear progress toward penitence and salvation in the foot-washing scene of “The Fire Sermon,” he leaves open the possibility of spiritual fulfillment by other means. In “What the Thunder Said,” the chapel is “empty” except for “Dry bones [that] can harm no one,” and the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” to temptation moves into the past (“By this, and this only, we have existed”). Just as Kundry appears in “The Fire Sermon” both as seductress and penitent, the source of the wound and the remedy are conflated in this moment of the poem’s final section. Like water, which can fill a “dull canal” or kill even as it promises to renew the dead land, Kundry up to the last is simultaneously an agent of violation, a violated woman, and part of the plan for redemption. Kundry, Wagner’s “great contribution” to The Waste Land, is an important archetypal figure but an ambivalent one; as with Tiresias, Kundry’s “two lives” are neither entirely separate nor unified in the poem. Whereas Wagner’s Kundry undergoes transformation within a single body, Eliot’s Kundry is more difficult to isolate—we hear snatches of her laughter and see images that mirror her discontented presence in

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Klingsor’s garden, but her “scattered indications” remain distributed across the poem rather than combined in the manner of Wagner’s multifaceted individual. References to Parsifal pervade Eliot’s poem but cannot be identified with any single object or body, and Kundry likewise is not isolated in any one place or figure. Appropriately, the 1919 periodical reviewer who called for a “modern interpretation” of Parsifal in England admired that Wagner, in creating his music, proposed “no sick rejection of life” and had “discarded his old obsession of the conflict between flesh and spirit” in musical terms even as Kundry’s physical presence had to be visually purged to fit an operatic template.48 Eliot’s Kundry does not represent a clear-cut binary between “flesh and spirit”; on this level, The Waste Land, unhindered by opera’s requirements for narrative or definite mythical or moral resolution, can be read as this “modern interpretation” of the Grail legend. In The Waste Land, Eliot, unlike Wagner, never clearly rejects Kundry: instead, she is fully assimilated, a crucial, undying, but essentially human component of the “quest” in a new era.

Notes 1. Margaret Dana, “Orchestrating The Waste Land: Wagner, Leitmotiv, and the Play of Passion” in John Xiros Cooper, ed., T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York: Garland, 2000), 268; “The ‘Parsifal’ Copyright,” The Musical Standard, February 22, 1902, 118–19. 2. See Elliott Zuckerman, The First Hundred Years of Wagner’s Tristan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), and Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. Stanley Sadie and Laura Macy, eds., The Grove Book of Operas, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 472. Jessie Weston saw the opera as a brilliant amalgamation of Christianity and different aspects of Germanic legend (Legends of the Wagner Drama (New York: Scribner, 1896), 176–217), and some popular reviewers and operagoers associated it with Easter and ideas of Christian redemption. More recently, Margaret Dana emphasizes how Wagner “Christianized” the Parsifal legend (“Orchestrating The Waste Land,” 268–70), while Paul Schofield argues that the opera is an expression of Buddhist ideas and a continuation of the Ring of the Nibelung (“Die Sieger and Die Wibelungen: How Parsifal is the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring,” Religion and the Arts 17.3 [2013]: 246–49). 4. During Parsifal’s initial visit to Monsalvat, he kills a swan (breaking a sacred rule of the order) and then cannot articulate what he has seen when Gurnemanz, one of the leaders of the Knights, asks him if he understands the Grail ceremony. He also does not remember his past or even his own name until Kundry reminds him. Parsifal must grow “wise through compassion,” which occurs when he recalls Amfortas’s wound in Klingsor’s garden. See Dana, “Orchestrating The Waste Land” for an analysis of moments of Wagnerian epiphany in relation to Parsifal in The Waste Land. 5. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, trans. H. L. and F. Corder (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1903); Sadie and Macy, Grove Book of Operas, 472–76; Milton Cross, The Complete Stories of the Great Operas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 404–12; Weston, Legends of the Wagner Drama. 6. Dana, “Orchestrating The Waste Land”; Philip Waldron, “The Music of Poetry: Wagner in The Waste Land,” Journal of Modern Literature 18, no. 4 (1993): 421–34; and William Blissett, “Wagner in The Waste Land,” in The Practical Vision, ed. Jane Campbell and James Doyle (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 71–86.

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7. Eliot may have had some contact with the opera before he arrived in England since its music was circulated well before the ban on Parsifal was lifted. While there is no evidence showing Eliot’s attendance, Parsifal was performed in Boston in 1904 (“ ‘Parsifal’ in English at Boston (Mass.),” The Musical Standard, December 10, 1904, 373–74). There was also a highly controversial New York staging at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903 (Sadie and Macy, Grove Book of Operas, 472). Vocal scores of Parsifal (along with Wagner’s other operas) with English translations were also published around the time of the premiere in 1914, making Wagner’s works more accessible to the general public (“A New Edition of Wagner,” The Saturday Review (February 28, 1914): 278). 8. “Wagner in London,” The Saturday Review (July 1, 1916): 10. 9. London even saw an English-language production of Parsifal in 1922 (which would probably be considered heresy at Bayreuth). But the reviewer of this production claimed that “we should be proud of this performance in English by a British company. . . . In the old days ‘Parsifal’ seemed to me a rather hysterical expression of religion. . . . Yet now, perhaps because I am older and perhaps, because the world has suffered and is suffering much, the music makes a curious and very real appeal” (“ ‘Parsifal’ at Covent Garden,” The Saturday Review (May 13, 1922): 488). 10. “ ‘Parsifal’ in London,” The Saturday Review (February 7, 1914): 168. 11. In late 1913, music critic John F. Runciman published a vehement attack on the opera claiming that “The whole work, so far as a moral teaching is concerned, must be condemned; and insofar as its music is concerned, it is only to be regarded as the decrepit work of a splendid musician’s old age” (“Concerning ‘Parsifal,’” The Saturday Review (December 27, 1913): 805). 12. “The Triumph of ‘Parsifal,’ ” The Saturday Review (December 20, 1919): 582. 13. “ ‘Parsifal’ at Covent Garden,” The Saturday Review. 14. Weston, Legends of the Wagner Drama, 204–5. 15. See ibid., 155–73, 205. Weston also notes that “The fact that Wolfram knows of a second Kondrie, Gawain’s sister, resident in the Magic Castle, who is ‘Kondrie la Belle,’ seems to indicate that the Kondrie of the Parzival, too, had originally this double character” (205–6). 16. “Wagner’s Kundry,” The Musical World (March 11, 1882): 153. Strangely enough, the writer of this brief article sees Wagner more as a literary figure than a musical one—the author calls him a “mighty poet” but (somewhat sarcastically) suggests that “In music he is Satan” and should be regarded in general with “mixed curiosity and awe.” 17. “Parsifal,” The Saturday Review (August 12, 1882): 207. This writer goes on to say that in Kundry, “Herr Wagner has combined terrible phases of human character with the idea which was at the root of the story of the Wandering Jew.” 18. “ ‘Parsifal’ and Bayreuth,” The Musical Standard, October 5, 1901: 218. 19. “Parsifal,” Letters to the Editor, The Saturday Review (January 3, 1914): 16. 20. “The Triumph of ‘Parsifal,’ ” The Saturday Review. 21. Weston, Legends of the Wagner Drama, 205. She quotes this phrase from Alfred Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail. 22. Blissett merely suggests that the song about “Mrs. Porter” could be a “parodic allusion to Kundry and Parsifal” and refers to “the Kundry figure with many names and natures— whether as Maiden (the hyacinth girl) or Harlot (Mrs. Porter) or crone (the Sibyl, Mme. Sosostris)” (“Wagner in The Waste Land,” 80–82). Dana has cited Kundry as a figure “reminiscent of the Cumaean sibyl” with her curse of eternity and longing for death (“Orchestrating The Waste Land,” 283) and has called Madame Sosostris “Kundry-like” for revealing the protagonist’s name (275–76), but she does not linger on the character. 23. Herbert Knust, Wagner, the King, and “The Waste Land” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1967), 8–25; Blissett, “Wagner in The Waste Land,” 82–85; Waldron, “The Music of Poetry,” 433.

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24. The most commonly mentioned of these is the water motif: Knust connects Eliot’s water themes, King Ludwig II’s own “death by water” in the Starnbergersee (Wagner, the King, 3–16, 33–43), and Wagner’s interest in Eastern religions and the cult of the rain-maker, Indra (22–32). Blissett follows Eliot’s water motif through all five sections, eventually identifying the end of “The Fire Sermon” with the “destructive cleansing of the halls of men and gods by the combined action of river and fire at the end of The Ring” (“Wagner in The Waste Land,” 79–81). 25. Waldron, for instance, argues that Eliot’s Wagnerian allusions must be analyzed within the wider musical context of the operas due to the “strongly aural nature of Eliot’s memory and imagination” (Waldron, “The Music of Poetry,” 423). Dana has interpreted the Wagnerian threads in The Waste Land as an essential part of the poem’s musical language. (“Orchestrating The Waste Land,” 268). 26. Philip Sicker, “The Belladonna: Eliot’s Female Archetype in The Waste Land,” TwentiethCentury Literature 30, no. 4 (1984): 420. 27. Some 1920s critics saw affinities between Wagnerian female characters and the women of the new era, such as Horace Shipp in “Brynhilde and Bobbed Hair,” The Sackbut (June 1924): 340–41. 28. CPP, 78. 29. “Nameless woman” is one of the epithets applied to Kundry by Klingsor. See below and Wagner, Parsifal, 23. 30. This characteristic has been especially noted in Tristan und Isolde. For a musicological analysis of this technique in the context of Tristan, see Richard Taruskin, “Deeds of Music Made Visible (Class of 1813, I),” Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 528–57. 31. Wagner, Parsifal, 36. 32. Michael P. Steinberg, “Music Drama and the End of History,” New German Critique 69 (1996): 166. 33. Matthew W. Smith points to Kundry’s apparent hysteria and notes how this was interpreted as a Jewish and female malady: “Kundry is . . . explicitly identified with the Wandering Jew. . . . Kundry represents the Other upon which the Gesamtkunstwerk relies, the Other whose purpose it is to not belong. . . . Kundry is a great cauldron into which all the necessary exclusions of the late-Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk are thrown” (“Laughing at the Redeemer: Kundry and the Paradox of Parsifal,” Modernist Cultures 3.1 (2007): 11). 34. Steinberg, “Music Drama and the End of History,” 171. 35. Wagner, Parsifal, 23. 36. CPP, 73. 37. Wagner, Parsifal, 10. 38. Richard Strauss’s scandalous 1905 opera based on Wilde’s play and influenced by Wagner did not premiere in England until 1910. In the opera, John the Baptist (Jochanaan) is imprisoned in a cistern in Herod’s palace, and he speaks from within to curse Salomé and warn of her mother Herodias’s lack of virtue. After failing to seduce Jochanaan, Salomé requests his head and, in a famous but grisly scene, sings rapturously to it as she kisses the dead lips (Sadie and Macy, Grove Book of Operas, 550–53). 39. This self-castration was an attempt by Klingsor to gain the acceptance of the Grail Knights even though he still lacked the necessary moral fortitude to join the order. 40. Smith, “Laughing at the Redeemer,” 14–17. 41. Knust has argued that the re-contextualization of Wagnerian elements in The Waste Land amounts to parody; Eliot’s “aesthetic modifications” are “metamorphoses, inversions, ironic contrasts to—or travesties of—motifs in Wagner’s myth,” and Wagner “idealizes in heroic terms,” while Eliot “caricatures in modern, realistic terms” (Wagner, the King, 59). Kundry’s demonic laughter, however, makes Wagner complicit in the parody rather than its idle object, adding a mythical legitimacy to what might otherwise seem like mere iconoclastic cynicism.

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42. Significantly, Jessie Weston sees Kundry as part of a larger narrative of man’s fall and salvation. Commenting on Kundry and the magical garden, Weston claims that Wagner alone was responsible for introducing the garden scene into the Parsifal story and that “we cannot but feel that there is a dramatic significance and propriety in Wagner’s choice of the scene of Parsifal’s trial which cannot be overlooked. . . . [A] garden was the scene alike of man’s Fall and of his Redemption; what more fitting than that Parsifal, the type of the Saviour of mankind, should be tempted, and conquer, in a garden?” (Weston, Legends of the Wagner Drama, 210). 43. Wagner, Parsifal, 24. 44. In Parsifal, Klingsor’s magic garden, not the Grail Kingdom, is the realm that is turned into wasted land. When Parsifal makes the sign of the cross with the spear, “the castle falls to ruins” and “the garden withers up to a desert” (Wagner, Parsifal, 35). This could suggest a parallel between the “Unreal” world of Eliot’s “Waste Land” and the very unreal atmosphere of the garden. 45. Smith, “Laughing at the Redeemer,” 18. 46. While drawn from Eliot’s reading of Indic texts, this language also ties to Wagner, who described a version of the Grail legend in which the Grail resides in India (Schofield, “Die Sieger and Die Wibelungen,” 256). 47. Wagner, Parsifal, 44. 48. “The Triumph of ‘Parsifal,’ ” The Saturday Review.

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7 Hearing History: Eliot’s Rite of Spring T. Austin Graham

How misleading are all literary descriptions of musical form! Igor Stravinsky, 19591

I

t was not enough to write one of the epochal poems of the twentieth century, and to pen some of the most influential literary criticism of his day. In September of 1921, T. S. Eliot distinguished himself as a music critic as well, reviewing a London performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in an essay that continues to reverberate many decades later. First heard in 1913, The Rite would turn out to be one of the new century’s landmark works, sounding dissonances and propelled by unfamiliar rhythms that fascinated subsequent generations of artists and audiences. It also suggested, at least to Eliot’s ear, a new way to understand history. Stravinsky’s music was utterly modern in its compositional techniques, but it had been written to accompany a primeval Russian ballet of earth-worship and human sacrifice. The result, Eliot wrote in a “London Letter” for The Dial, was that The Rite seemed to drift about in time when he listened to it, and his essay described the experience in an evocative sentence: Whether Strawinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.2 The correspondences between pagan ceremony and the urban workday, the synchronization of savage and industrial rhythms, the modernity of barbarism and barbarism of modernity—the unique fusion of the prehistoric and the contemporary that Eliot heard in 1921 has since come to be appreciated as a crucial part of Stravinsky’s work. When the centenary of The Rite arrived in 2013, Eliot’s words were in the air once again, repeatedly cited and invested with wise authority. Eliot’s critique of The Rite is often remembered today, but we have forgotten how unusual it was when it appeared, and how many challenging questions it posed. It has come to seem more obvious and less strange than it ought to, largely because we latterday moderns read it in the light of what was to come. Historians of music, looking back on a time when The Rite was hissed as much as applauded, invoke the prescient Eliot who defended a not-yet-canonical work. For their part, literary scholars hear an echo of The Waste Land in Eliot’s review, and they speculate that The Rite helped him

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shape the historical juxtapositions and dislocations of his in-process poem in much the same way that The Golden Bough and the first chapters of Ulysses did.3 But what would happen if we returned to the scene of 1921, banished present-day legacies and reputations from our minds, and thought more deeply about Eliot’s claim that Stravinsky had captured both ancient and contemporary time in his music? To begin, we would find out that Eliot’s sense of The Rite was quite eccentric. Virtually no one heard the “barbaric cries of modern life” in the piece’s early performances, to say nothing of two historical periods merging with each other. Most listeners spoke of The Rite as an exercise in blunt-force primitivism, a brutal evocation of “the very beginnings of history.”4 The “rattle of machinery,” meanwhile, was seldom associated with Stravinsky’s music—the Italian Futurists and other such composers were the more obvious techno-modernists. And at the same time that Eliot was working on his review, Stravinsky himself was making a vigorous public case that The Rite was entirely abstract, free of any historical content whatsoever. The Rite, in other words, might have been an occasion for thinking about or discussing the relation between past and present, but it made no self-evident statements about it. Eliot would later say that “what a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author,” and he seems in many ways to have invented a new meaning for Stravinsky’s composition in 1921, creating an imagined, transhistorical Rite of his own.5 In pondering the historical character of The Rite, Eliot did more than offer a novel interpretation—his review rested on assumptions that in turn raised profound questions about the nature of music and the act of musical listening. A critic of Eliot’s essay might well ask: do I believe that musical sounds can actually communicate history? If so, how does such a thing happen? What must listeners do if they would hear historical time expressed in music, and why would they listen for it in the first place? There are few obvious answers, and Eliot’s provocative review offers none of its own. But in the very attempt to hear history in The Rite, Eliot reveals a great deal about why he and so many others turn to the art of music, and about what they hope to find there. Eliot’s essay suggests several desires: to escape the flow of time, to move freely in history and perhaps to master it, and to do all of this in a way that cannot be watched or expressed in words, but only heard. Eliot may or may not have been correct to hear what he did in The Rite, insofar as anyone can be. But the fact that he believed he had heard history in Stravinsky’s music is every bit as interesting as the question of whether history was actually there. Let us go, then, down some of the avenues that Eliot opens up in his essay, and think with him about how artists might write complex histories in musical forms. If a composer like Stravinsky hoped to depict a historical moment, or more than one historical moment, in a series of sounds, how might he proceed? First, he might pair his music with an extramusical narrative—perhaps with lyrics that expressly announced the period that the music was meant to evoke, or with a dramatic performance that achieved the same thing through visual means. Second, he might deploy idioms—he could write in a style that listeners would associate with a particular era, or with a particular stage in a historically segmented musical canon. Third, he might write mimetic music—this would entail having performers imitate or approximate nonmusical sounds, more specifically sounds that evoke an identifiable time or place. The Rite has been said to exploit all of these techniques, and it endures in no small part because

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it invites listeners to ponder the relation between sound and story, contemporary art music and ancient folk song, and musical and worldly rhythms. Yet it is hard to say that any of this led Eliot to hear The Rite in the way that he did, and scrutinizing his response to Stravinsky from these angles has the effect of making it seem more and more idiosyncratic. Indeed, Eliot’s essay may say more about him than it does about the composer’s work, and it may suggest a fourth way to express and hear history in music—an associative, creative, distinctively literary way that combines elements of the other three methods and entails “reading into” sound. And if this is the case, then it would seem that The Rite did not shape the poet of The Waste Land so much as the poet of The Waste Land, in a moment of listening, shaped a new Rite.

Narrative We should first dispense with the kind of musical history that Eliot was emphatically not hearing in The Rite in 1921—namely, musical history communicated by narrative. The work has never had lyrics—Eliot listened to Wagner and to the anachronistic “Shakespearean Rag” for those—but in its first Paris performances in 1913, The Rite was famously, even notoriously, accompanied by a prehistoric ballet. Audiences watched pagan youths, a council of elders, and men in bearskins as they cavorted about the stage, with the spectacle culminating in a sacrificial virgin dancing herself to death. It was obvious to everyone that the depicted Rite was an ancient one, but it was much less clear that it had anything to do with urban modernity. One reviewer came close to articulating what Eliot later would, comparing the show to the “cacophony,” the “absurdity of contradictory gestures,” and the “strange general impression of harmony” that can be found at a circus: The song played by the carousel-organ is not the same as that of the roller-coaster, the siren of the steam calliope shouts without caring about the victorious fanfares from the shooting-gallery, the magnesium flare of the photographer explodes for its purposes without concern for the rifle-shots or the bells of the Aunt Sally stand. . . . It is this same impression that we get from these jerky motions of prehistoric automata, from the spontaneous and irrational attitudes that Le Sacre du printemps offers us, and the whole, despite the dissonances, gives an impression of animal automaticity, of convulsive reflexes in a very precise style, of a clearlydefined genre.6 Writing in a somewhat similar vein, but a few years after the fact, Jean Cocteau remembered the first performance of The Rite as “the dance of an insect, of a hind fascinated by a Boa, of a factory explosion.”7 So too did Jacques Rivière, in a review that Eliot read, suggest that it was simultaneously “part of the primitive globe” and something “started anew, everything fashioned on the spot.”8 But for all of their superficial resemblances to Eliot’s description of The Rite, these accounts tended to emphasize the visual elements of the work rather than its musical sounds. Eliot never encountered this version of The Rite, and by the time he heard it performed in London, the music press had begun to wonder whether Stravinsky’s composition could stand on its own, without the ballet’s supplemental narrative. It had been eight years since The Rite’s last performance by a major orchestra, but in the summer

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of 1921 Londoners had the opportunity to hear it five times in the space of a month, and under circumstances like those of a controlled experiment. On two occasions The Rite was performed as a dance-free concert piece, “well prepared,” as Eliot put it in his review, by the conductor and composer Eugene Goossens.9 Audiences for these performances were offered a set of program notes explaining that The Rite in fact had little to do with ancient civilizations and ceremonies. “As often happens in music,” they read, “the suggestion of a ‘programme’ has done more harm than good” and proven “a stumbling block to many, leading them to suppose that Stravinsky’s purpose was to express the beginnings of musical ideas amongst primitive people.”10 Instead, The Rite was said to be “in all but name a modern symphony, and is therefore to be regarded as abstract music.”11 And while the piece could still be thought of as having a “subject”—that is, “spring”—it was a spring “stripped of its literary associations, presented bare, sans phrases.”12 There were three more London performances of The Rite toward the end of June, this time accompanied by a newly choreographed ballet, and critics were all but invited to state which of the two versions they preferred. Several reviews mentioned the attempt by Goossens to treat The Rite as “abstract” music, and the unkindest ones declared that Stravinsky’s composition was meaningless when listened to on its own. One writer found that “the brutalities of the music, and the strong, relentlessly reiterated rhythms, seem to have no reason apart from the story in question.”13 Another, who had been at the 1913 premiere, reported that he could not get the dancers out of his mind as he listened to the instrumental version, and “found myself ‘seeing things’ ” throughout.14 And another judged that the music was a catastrophe under all circumstances: he attended and disliked the Goossens performance, resolved to see the ballet to find out whether dancing would “give the music a helping hand when it needed one,” and concluded that The Rite was a “dull and ugly thing” either way.15 This was the public conversation that Eliot entered when he penned his Stravinsky essay, and his piece stood out because it praised the music of The Rite while finding its extramusical qualities to be “interesting . . . but hardly more than interesting.”16 He attended the first of the ballet performances on June 27 and thought its visuals were poorly fitted to Stravinsky’s sounds, largely because the “spirit of the music was modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony.”17 The problem, essentially, was one of uneven sophistication. Stravinsky, Eliot wrote, had started with ancient materials and then put them through a process of “interpenetration and metamorphosis,” and the historically complex music that resulted was a kind of a sonic equivalent to “Ulysses with illustrations by the best contemporary illustrator.” But Eliot detected nothing modern in the dance, only simple atavism, and so he reported that “In everything in the Sacre du Printemps, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present.” If Eliot is to help us understand how music can impart a layered sense of history, then it seems we cannot turn to narrative for an explanation.

Idiom Eliot found no historical complexity in the story or action of The Rite, but he might have heard it in the piece’s inventive use of musical idioms. Listening to The Rite in this way would have required some degree of musical familiarity or acculturation on

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his part: if Eliot was able to associate particular musical forms or styles with particular moments in history, and if he heard Stravinsky juxtaposing two such forms or styles in The Rite, then it is easy to imagine why he would have felt the historical drift that he did in 1921. It is impossible to know, of course, just what Eliot thought or how he reacted while he listened to Stravinsky’s music unfold. But there is much in the idiomatic composition of The Rite that invites listeners to compare antique forms with modern ones in the same musical moment. Moreover, this sort of idiomatic composition and listening had become increasingly common in the years since The Rite was premiered, thanks in no small part to the advent of new musical works that were characterized by a promiscuous jumbling of historically grounded styles. Consequently, Eliot had interpretive advantages—a certain critical vocabulary and awareness—in 1921 that Stravinsky’s 1913 audiences probably did not. To begin by stating the obvious: no matter how primal its sounds may be, The Rite was and remains a recognizably “modern” work of art because it tends to be performed by symphony orchestras in the not-exactly-barbaric environs of the concert hall. Its 1913 and 1921 audiences were told that Stravinsky’s composition was a contemporary or near-contemporary work, and a popular topic of conversation was just how “new” it was in relation to previous symphonic pieces and idioms. (To borrow the title of a well-known musicological study, the question was where The Rite ought to be situated within “the imaginary museum of musical works.”)18 For those who were well disposed to it, The Rite was audibly modern because it represented the next step in the perpetually evolving art of composition. According to one admirer in 1913, such a piece could only have been written and heard in the twentieth century: Carried away in the ardor of his youth, no doubt with complete sincerity, the composer with an impetuous energy has leaped forward, burned his bridges and offered us this year the music that we should hear around 1940. Heard thirty years later, his music would not have provoked in the well-intentioned amateur this resistance which, while recognizing the innovator’s genius, they could not resist. So the score of Le Sacre du Printemps is a premature specimen of the music of the future? Yes, if the current trend continues toward a growing complexity at once rhythmic, polyphonic, and instrumental.19 But where one person might hear “complexity” and therefore a modern idiom in Stravinsky’s work, another might hear a regression so extreme as to suggest a time before composition had even been invented: “in the apparent desire to make primitive, prehistoric, he has worked to make his music like noise,” charged a reviewer.20 The debate continued eight years later during the London performances, with some critics arguing that audiences had finally adopted modern tastes and thus caught up to Stravinsky’s radical innovations, and others scoffing that the “bluffers” who believed they had heard “a new aesthetic” in The Rite had in fact “grossly overpraised” an ordinary, even derivative work.21 Several reviewers, meanwhile, declined to put their necks out and hazard any predictions about whether The Rite would endure as a representative specimen of early twentieth-century culture, as when Eliot declined to say whether it would have a “permanent or ephemeral” place in the classical canon.22 If early listeners were unsure whether The Rite heralded a modern idiom, the case was made yet more complicated by the fact that it contained a great deal of old music, in the form of Russian folk songs. As the dean of Stravinsky studies, Richard Taruskin,

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has shown, the composer and his collaborators did an immense amount of research on ancient Russian peoples when mounting the original production, holding themselves to “rigorous standards of ethnological authenticity.”23 As a consequence, there are at least a dozen melodies in The Rite that can be traced to folk sources, and therefore at least a dozen opportunities for knowledgeable listeners to think about the historical relationship between archaic music and modern composition.24 And as the Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh has observed, the composer’s use of folk idioms in his works sometimes led to sharply divergent audience reactions, usually breaking down along national lines. Here is Walsh on the subject of Stravinsky’s earlier Petrushka, which he describes in language that will sound familiar to any Eliot scholar: The borrowed tunes—the urban popular songs, the rural folk songs, the tradesmen’s cries—were so well known to ordinary Russians that it was genuinely hard for them to hear the work as in the fullest sense an original product, rather than just a brilliantly assembled, stunningly orchestrated medley stitched together with a few pages of bizarre, no doubt clever, but ultimately insubstantial mood music.25 The Rite received a famously poor reception in Russia, and while there were many reasons for it, the problem was at least partly related to Stravinsky’s use of his nation’s musical heritage. There is little evidence of non-Russian listeners reacting to the first performances of The Rite in this way, and when Eliot claimed to have heard “the rhythm of the steppes” in Stravinsky’s music, it was not because he had a lifelong familiarity with its folk idioms. But even if Eliot had not been able to explain the historical elements of The Rite in precisely those terms, he still might have been predisposed to approach it as a sophisticated temporal mélange. In the years since The Rite had premiered in Paris, after all, stylistic pastiche and historical capriciousness had become ever more fashionable in the world of experimental composition, and by 1921 there were several new musical works that modeled the kind of transhistoricism that Eliot would later identify in Stravinsky. Nowhere was this more evident than in the postwar productions of the Ballets Russes, which had performed the first Rite and then, around 1919, begun to explore an aesthetic that the dance historian Lynn Garafola has dubbed “period modernism.”26 Drawing on folklore and writing in passé compositional idioms, the troupe and its associated composers gave old materials a twentieth-century sheen and reveled in the resulting anachronisms, thereby wedding “the retrospective themes of traditional lyric theater to the styles and techniques of the avant-garde.”27 Standout works of this sort included Manuel de Falla’s Le Tricorne of 1919, Sergei Prokofiev’s Chout of 1921, and, in 1920, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a commedia dell’arte based on repurposed musical fragments by the eighteenth-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Pulcinella was performed in London on July 4, 1921, and it may have contributed to Eliot’s sense in his essay that Stravinsky had been “our two months’ lion” that concert season.28 Musical juxtapositions of past and present were rather à la mode when Eliot heard and wrote about The Rite, but in certain ways they were echoes of a musical phenomenon about which he had known for years—Italian Futurism. The Futurists had made several cultural splashes in the years since 1913, most especially by rhapsodizing over modern technology, but so too had they demanded a new approach to music that

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would collapse the old canons and defy straightforward, linear conceptions of history. In a 1913 essay on the “Variety Theater” and its motley cultural offerings, for example, the Futurist impresario F. T. Marinetti praised popular entertainers for “helping along the Futurist destruction of immortal masterpieces by plagiarizing and parodying them, by making them seem commonplace in stripping them of their solemnity and presenting them as if they were just another turn or attraction.”29 Marinetti saw such impudent burlesquing of the past as a way to keep its weight from crushing presentday creativity, and he went on to praise artists who irreverently juxtaposed old musical works with modern forms; who violated the structural integrity of landmark compositions (“Put life into the works of Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Bellini, and Chopin by inserting Neapolitan songs into them,” he recommended); and who created historical spaces of impossible, confusing, but nonetheless productive disorder.30 Eliot’s awareness of Futurism went back at least to 1915, when two of his poems appeared in the second and final issue of Ezra Pound’s Futurist-inspired journal BLAST, a few pages away from a Wyndham Lewis essay on Marinetti. And while Stravinsky was not himself of the Futurist camp, it was not uncommon for others to associate his music with it. See, for example, Siegfried Sassoon’s 1922 poem “Concert-Interpretation (Le Sacre du Printemps),” which was inspired by one of the same London concerts that Eliot wrote about, and suggested that the best response to Stravinsky’s music would be a furiously Futurist annihilation of bourgeois cultural institutions: Come, dance, and seize this clamorous chance to function Creatively,—abandoning compunction In anti-social rhapsodic applause! Lynch the conductor! Jugulate the drums! Butcher the brass! Ensanguinate the strings! Throttle the flutes! . . . Stravinsky’s April comes With pitiless pomp and pain of sacred springs . . . Incendiarize the Hall with resinous fires Of sacrificial fiddles scorched and snapping! . . .31 Eliot does not link Stravinsky with Futurism quite so aggressively as this, of course. But the point is to understand that while it may have been strange for Eliot to describe The Rite as containing more than one historical era, it was not at all unusual at the time for other musical works—including works by Stravinsky—to attempt something similar through idiomatic juxtaposition. In many ways, Eliot’s essay on The Rite was just the sort of argument that a student of period modernism or Futurism would have published in 1921.

Imitation The problem, though, is that Eliot’s essay does not say that The Rite mixes ancient and modern idioms with one another, or that its historical character is audible in relation to other sorts of musical works—it claims that The Rite in fact captures and depicts ancient and modern life itself. Eliot had heard something mimetic in The Rite, the transformation of the “rhythm of the steppes” into the sounds of a late industrial city, and the further transformation of those “despairing noises into music.” This

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would presumably require a very different approach to both composition and listening, dependent on the kinds of sonic emulations and imitations that had flourished in nineteenth-century “program music” and had come to be known as “sound effects” in the early days of radio. It would also be quite far from what Stravinsky believed The Rite had actually accomplished. It is in some ways a credit to Eliot that he heard urban modernity in The Rite, because a handful of younger composers seemed to have heard something similar around the same time, and they began writing orchestral music that approximated the sounds of machines and cities. Between 1918 and 1922 Edgard Varèse wrote his Rite-indebted Amériques, a gigantic symphonic work that juxtaposed peaceful, “pastoral” sections with riots of sirens and boat whistles. George Antheil, who idolized Stravinsky, spent the 1920s producing pieces with titles like Airplane Sonata and Ballet Mécanique, the latter of which included sixteen synchronized player pianos and three propellers in the instrumental lineup.32 The Italian Futurists, meanwhile, had created so-called noise-tuners that could imitate industrial sounds more efficiently, and they tried to convince Stravinsky to include them in his works when he met with them in 1914. (He declined.) Indeed, The Rite inspired so much explicitly technological music that it has in retrospect come to sound like an almost uncanny prediction of the coming machine age: see, for example, Cocteau’s framing of it as “the prelude to the war,” or Modris Ekstein’s historical study Rites of Spring, which figures the 1913 performances of Stravinsky as the first movement of the brutal, technological fighting that would begin in July of the following year.33 Stravinsky did not deploy these sorts of mimetic effects in The Rite, but there is still something about it—its rhythms, its repetitions, its regularity—that has struck many listeners as mechanical and moved them to analogy: like a latter-day Eliot, Alex Ross writes in a recent history of twentieth-century composition that he hears “sounds like pistons pumping, whistles screeching, crowds stamping” in the music.34 Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that more critics did not make this connection, given that one of Stravinsky’s first major compositions had accompanied a ballet about an automatonlike figure. (Petrushka, first heard and seen in 1911, was the story of an animated puppet, and Stravinsky’s music approximated mechanical instruments like hand-organs and music-boxes.)35 So too did Stravinsky’s own pronouncements tend to emphasize the impersonality, radical objectivity, and vaguely robotic compositional logic of his works. As his ghostwritten, mid-career autobiography would famously put it, “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.”36 Instead, music was to be thought of as a kind of sonic “construction” or “order” whose unfolding could be appreciated in much the same way as “the interplay of architectural forms.”37 Stravinsky might have denied that any of his music was a depiction of the machine age or of real-world gadgetry, but it is still not hard to understand why a listener might hear something “mechanical” in such an aesthetic. But as has been stated already, it was still quite unusual for the first audiences of The Rite to make the kinds of technological comparisons that Eliot did, and that have since become commonplace. Whether in Paris in 1913 or London in 1921, the music’s primitive, archaic character commanded much more attention than its modernity, and any discussion of mechanism tended to be confined to the choreography (which Eliot, ironically, found to have no modern spirit whatsoever). The rare exception that proved

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the rule came from Russia in 1914, when the critic V. G. Karatïgin wrote a series of essays that discussed The Rite in quasi-Futuristic terms. Echoing Luigi Russolo’s 1913 declaration that the “evolution of music is parallel to the multiplication of machines,” Karatïgin thought The Rite well suited to a world of “Motors, moving pictures, telephones, aeroplanes, radium, a whole series of discoveries and improvements in all areas of art, science, culture as a whole—each more unusual than the last, all following upon one another with greater and greater rapidity.”38 Russolo had argued that the human capacity for hearing had been evolved and “trained by modern life,” and so too did Karatïgin find that The Rite reflected “modifications in the whole psyche of contemporary man” and “a certain general nervousness, a heightened pressure in the whole cultural atmosphere that surrounds us.”39 Composed amid and responding to such conditions, The Rite obeyed what Karatïgin called an aesthetic of “displacement,” an idea that in many ways anticipates Eliot’s sense for the decentered histories in The Rite.40 It is one thing, however, to say that a composition is imbued with the vague spirit of modern life, and quite another to suggest, as Eliot seems to, that specifically modern sounds can be isolated and identified as ingredients in a musical work. But nothing can make Eliot’s interpretation of The Rite seem more novel than reading it alongside Stravinsky’s own public assessment of the piece in 1921, for the two men were then speaking at absolute cross purposes. While in London, the composer was reveling in the new, purely instrumental performances of The Rite—he told one of his acolytes that they were the finest he had yet heard—and on July 3, 1921, The Observer published an interview with him that differed strikingly from Eliot’s later review. Stravinsky began by distancing himself from the scenario and ballet of The Rite, claiming that “I have never tried, in my stage works, to make the music illustrate the action, or the action the music.”41 Instead, “I have always endeavoured to find an architectural basis of connection. I produce ‘music itself.’ Whenever ‘music itself’ is not the aim, music suffers.”42 As for the idea that his music had any connection to ancient cultures or primordial eras, Stravinsky was yet more dismissive: [T]he pretext of the prehistoric birth of spring, has suggested to me the construction of the work that I have called “The Rite of Spring.” The “pretext” I choose is but a pretext, like the painter’s pretext for painting. If anyone objects, and prefers anecdote to a simple musical monument, they are surely in their mental infancy.43 It is a fascinating irony. As Eliot formulated and wrote his essay, he was hearing historical complexity and modernistic mimesis in the very place where Stravinsky said such things could not possibly be found.

Literary Listening We must again ask: why and how did Eliot hear a layered complex of ancient and modern history in The Rite, and what can his essay tell us about the relation between musical sounds and historical eras more generally? Narrative, idiomatic, and mimetic explanations are all unsatisfying, whether because of Eliot’s indifference to the work’s ballet, his cultural distance from its folk sources, or his fundamental disagreements with its composer. But they are only unsatisfying if we assume that Eliot was attempting to describe something that Stravinsky had actually put in his music; or that Eliot

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was appreciating one of the unique achievements of The Rite; or that Eliot was learning a lesson about history that he could apply to the long, transhistorical poem he was in the process of forming. But what if Eliot was approaching The Rite not as a musical listener, but as a listening poet? Further, what if Eliot’s sense of musical history had less to do with the music that Stravinsky wrote, and more with ideas he had arrived at long before he heard the bassoon that begins “The Adoration of the Earth”? Thinking in this way would make Eliot’s unusual review much easier to explain in context. It would also suggest that Stravinsky did not condition The Waste Land so much as The Waste Land conditioned Eliot’s response to Stravinsky. And so too would it imply that history, whether complex or not, is most audible in music when listeners imagine it is there. By the time Eliot heard The Rite on June 27, 1921, he had already written the first two sections of The Waste Land, and perhaps parts of the third.44 Some of the poem’s most memorable vortexes of ancient and modern life had been typed up the previous month: a London church bell tolls “the final stroke of nine” while a man remembers the Punic Wars in “The Burial of the Dead,” and the song of a nightingale recalls Ovid recalling the myth of Philomel in “A Game of Chess.” The foregrounding for the poem’s unusual sense of history, meanwhile, had been even longer than that. James Longenbach, in his classic study Modernist Poetics of History, has traced this story well, showing how Eliot’s tutelage under Pound after 1914 led him to adopt an “existential” perspective on the past and to reject “presuppositions . . . that make the construction of any sort of teleological or even linear history possible.”45 As early as 1910, Pound had been making statements like the following: All ages are contemporaneous. . . . It is bc, let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries.46 Eliot, moreover, had encountered any number of literary works before 1921 that turned history into much the same, relativistic phenomenon that Pound had described. The most famous of these were the early, pastiched chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, which would later inspire Eliot to theorize a dynamic “mythical method” in modern fiction that would depend upon maintaining “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.”47 “No one,” Eliot wrote in 1923, had “built a novel upon such a foundation before,” and we do not have to strain to hear notes of admiration for Joyce in Eliot’s music criticism, as well.48 Indeed, Eliot’s review of Stravinsky all but demands that readers compare musical models of history with literary ones, because in its second half it turns to George Bernard Shaw and some of the playwright’s wilder meditations upon the relation of past, present, and future. This section of the essay is less well known than the one on Stravinsky, but it is entirely consistent with it. Here Eliot figures Shaw as deeply representative of his Edwardian moment—he will be remembered by future readers as a type for “what, in retrospect, the ‘present’ generation will be found to have been”—and he discusses Shaw’s 1921 play cycle Back to Methuselah, an impossibly ambitious “panorama of human history” that ponders “ultimate questions” at various points between the years 4004 bc and 31,920 ad.49 Eliot goes on to praise Shaw’s “free and easy mind,” his willingness to take up a “farrago” of subjects, and his refusal to pursue his ideas in a “more

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scientific, more logical, more rigorous” way.50 Ranging freely across history, Shaw’s “process ceases to be progress, and progress ceases to have any meaning,” and Eliot finds him wondering “whether the beginning and the end are not the same, and whether, as Mr. Bradley says, ‘whatever you know, it is all one.’”51 We can only speculate about whether Shaw’s transhistoricism helped Eliot hear a musical variety of it in Stravinsky, or vice versa. But ironically, Shaw seems not to have felt any of Eliot’s affinities with the composer, for he attended one of the London performances of The Rite and later asked the conductor why he had been obliged to “pay a guinea for a shilling’s worth of music and twenty shillings’ worth of noise.”52 The historical complexities of The Rite, then, were not quite bolts from the blue for Eliot. But if he did not need Stravinsky to show him how to mingle epochs, and if his sense for The Rite seems to harmonize a bit too closely with some of his pre-existing aesthetic convictions, it is still the case that The Waste Land became louder after he heard the music. A reader can hear as many as twenty-six distinct, nonverbal sounds in the sections of the poem that Eliot is believed to have composed before the concert; in the rest, there are something close to forty. Sometimes the effect is like that of a Futurist composition, with “What the Thunder Said” suffused with the sorts of elemental noises that Russolo had hoped to hear in the next generation of orchestral works: “Rumbles Thundering Explosions Crashes,” “Whispers Murmurs Mutters Buzzes Gurgles,” “Screeches Creaking Rustles Throbs,” and so on.53 Readers also encounter an array of mysterious, evocative sounds that almost seem to demand reflection and interpretation, borne into the past by “reminiscent bells” and moved to speculation about a booming “DA.” Eliot may have heard Stravinsky’s music in a literary-minded way, but if his in-process poem was any indication, he still seems to have come away from The Rite convinced that the sounding arts have special properties all their own—among them, the ability to inspire uniquely adventurous historical thinking in listeners. And while The Waste Land is condemned to language and cannot become music or sound itself, it still registers, depicts, and emulates the process by which sounds stir the consciousness and free it from present moments. The poem does so many times and in many places, but an early passage of “The Fire Sermon” is especially rich, looking upon the River Thames and hearing a great deal: Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of bones, and a chuckle spread from ear to ear. Then, seven lines later, bones “rattled by the rat’s foot” intrude again, and at his back the speaker hears The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! As the speaker twice describes a sound “at my back,” the poem becomes a space of ever-expanding possibilities. Sound is ambiguity—our sense of the “blast” would

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change a great deal depending on whether it were a blast of wind or music or artillery, while the “sound of horns” might initially come upon us as music before the puttering of “motors” transforms it into traffic. Sound is also re-examination—in twice saying that he hears something behind him, the speaker creates a refrain and asks his listener to listen a second time, and listen differently. Sound is also association—one sound brings another to mind here, with the repeated tones of eer and ing and aw-ter inspiring memories of new characters and, beginning with the first “O,” a musical ditty. And sound is also history—with different sonic associations come different eras, from Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth century to Sweeney’s modern times to the Grail choir’s imaginary Middle Ages. To repeat, in Eliot’s poem, sound is—or at least can be—history. Indeed, Eliot had been thinking about how the aural communicates the historical for some time before publishing The Waste Land, most helpfully in his essay “Andrew Marvell,” which appeared the same year as his piece on The Rite. Here Eliot quotes the lines of Marvell that he would eventually respond to in The Waste Land, and he dwells upon an act of listening: But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. The sound at Marvell’s back is time itself, a heard reminder of the passing present and the impending future. And as the poet listens to time, his poem opens out upon an immense historical vista. Eliot notes that Marvell’s message, his “Gather ye rosebuds” sentiment, is an ancient one, able to be found “in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense levity of Catullus.” But Marvell “renews the theme” in his poem, and he does so in a conspicuously modern way, speaking “clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age.” In hearing time, Eliot’s Marvell has also triumphed over time, fusing past, present, and future in his poem. “A whole civilization resides in these lines,” Eliot writes. Later in life, Eliot attempted to define “The Music of Poetry” in a lecture, and it should come as no surprise that he did so by attending to historical complexity every bit as much as pleasing, beautiful sounds. For Eliot, a word’s “music” was a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.54 In the hands of a truly talented poet—a poet like Marvell—“a word can be made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilisation,” and a truly “musical” poem is one that unifies “a musical pattern of sound” with “a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it.”55 The present and the past can therefore be brought into a pleasing counterpoint by “musical” poetry, with the words of a poem sounding in sequence even as distant historical associations chime in the reader’s mind. The poet’s art and the reader’s historical associations with that art are “indissoluble and one” in truly “musical” poetry, and without that vital sense of history, no “music” can be heard.

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To ask how Eliot heard history in Stravinsky’s music, then, is in many ways to pose the question the wrong way—for him, it may have been history and historical association that allowed him to hear Stravinsky’s work as music in the first place. The composer would surely have found such an idea to be strange, and perhaps even a failure to appreciate what music, at its best, can achieve. Humanity’s tragedy, Stravinsky’s autobiography argued, is that it is “doomed to submit to the passage of time— to its categories of past and future—without ever being able to give substance, and therefore stability, to the category of the present.”56 Music is to be thought of as a response to that tragedy, and its greatest gift is the sense of immediacy it conveys, its order and its heightened sense of the now. Stravinsky would claim to live and compose wholly within the present: “That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity,” his memoir concluded.57 But whatever Eliot’s disagreements with Stravinsky might have been—and however much they might have been eased when the two men became friends later in life—his desire to hear history and his determination to find the past in music were striking, unusual, and yet strangely familiar. And to have heard history in The Rite may have been the greatest compliment he could bestow.

Notes For Robert Fink, with gratitude. 1. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959), 17. 2. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: September 1921,” The Dial 71 (October 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 370. 3. Peter Ackroyd, for instance, writes that Eliot saw the “trivialities of contemporary existence . . . rendered significant by an artistic vision which made use of the primeval drum beat” in both The Rite and Ulysses, at a moment in his career when he felt an “ambition to create in poetry something similar.” T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 112. 4. C. H., “Stravinsky at the Queen’s Hall,” reproduced in Le Sacre du printemps: Dossier de presse, ed. François Lesure (Genève: Minkoff, 1980), 69. 5. UPUC, in Complete Prose 4, 673. 6. Gustave de Pawlowski, quoted in Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 309. 7. Jean Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin: Notes Concerning Music, trans. Rollo H. Myers (London: The Egoist Press, 1921), 47. 8. Jacques Rivière, “From ‘Le Sacre du printemps,’ ” reproduced in Nijinsky Dancing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 164 and 168. 9. Complete Prose 2, 369. 10. Edwin Evans, “First Concert-Performance in England of ‘Le Sacre du printemps,’” (London: Messrs. Chappell & Co., Ltd., 1921), 1. Concert program held in the General Reference Collection X.0431/534, “Programmes of concerts given in the Queen’s Hall between 1909 and 1945,” British Library, London. My thanks to Christopher Scobe at the British Library for his assistance in locating this. 11. Evans, “First Concert-Performance,” 1. 12. Ibid., 2. 13. Alfred Kalisch, “London Concerts,” reproduced in Lesure, Le Sacre du printemps, 73. 14. Christopher St. John, “Music à la Mode,” reproduced in Lesure, Le Sacre du printemps, 68. 15. Ernest Newman, “The End of a Chapter,” reproduced in Lesure, Le Sacre du printemps, 75. 16. Complete Prose 2, 370.

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17. Ibid. On the circumstances surrounding Eliot’s trip to the concert hall, see Lawrence Rainey’s critical apparatus in The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 188, note 4. 18. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (London: Clarendon Press, 1992). 19. Léon Vallas, “Le Sacre du printemps,” reproduced in Kelly, First Nights, 316–17. 20. Adolphe Boschot, “Le ‘Sacre du printemps’: Ballet de M. M. Roerich, Stravinsky et Nijinsky,” reproduced in Kelly, First Nights, 306. 21. Newman, “The End of a Chapter,” 75. 22. Complete Prose 2, 370. 23. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 870. 24. Ibid., 895. 25. Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France, 1882–1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 166. 26. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 82. 27. Ibid., 82. 28. Complete Prose 2, 369. 29. F. T. Marinetti, “The Variety Theater,” reproduced in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 162. 30. Marinetti, “The Variety Theater,” 163. On the recombinant historical aesthetic of Futurism, and on the unique tension of the old and the new in modernism more generally, see Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 144–71. 31. Siegfried Sassoon, “Concert-Interpretation (Le Sacre du printemps),” The Nation & The Athenaeum 30, no. 17 (January 21, 1922): 619. 32. Eliot would go on to attend the premiere of Ballet mécanique a few years after his Stravinsky review, in 1924. 33. Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 45. 34. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 93. 35. Valerie Eliot would later say that Petrushka had been an inspiration for Eliot as he wrote “The Hollow Men.” See B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 210. 36. Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 83. 37. Ibid., 84–85. 38. Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto,” reproduced in Rainey, Poggi, and Wittman, Futurism, 134. V. G. Karatïgin, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1027. 39. Karatïgin, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1027. 40. Ibid. 41. Igor Stravinsky, “Interview with Stravinsky,” reproduced in Lesure, Le Sacre du printemps, 76. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 77. 44. I have relied on Lawrence Rainey’s account of the poem’s composition. In addition to The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, see also Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 45. James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 6. 46. Pound quoted in Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History, 68.

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160 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

t. austin graham Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 75 (November 1923), in Complete Prose 2, 478. Ibid. Complete Prose 2, 371. Ibid. Ibid. Eugene Goossens, Overture and Beginners: A Musical Autobiography (London: Methuen & Co., 1951), 162. Russolo, “The Art of Noises,” 137. OPP, 32–33. Ibid., 33. Stravinsky, Stravinsky, 84. Ibid., 278.

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8 Beauty Is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison Steven Tracy

The Waste Land seized my mind. I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand then, its range of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong. Yet there were its discontinuities, its changes of pace and its hidden system of organization which escaped me. Ralph Ellison1

W

hen czech composer Antonin Dvořák came to America in 1892 to direct the National Conservatory of Music, the cachet of African American music was high. Dvořák opined that the future of American classical music swung in the balance between African American and Native American Indian melodies. His own “New World Symphony” (1893) incorporated a modified version of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; in turn, jazz pianist Art Tatum, vocalist Paul Robeson, and saxophonists Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, among others, recorded an adaptation of the “Largo” of this symphony in the song “Goin’ Home.” In Dvořák’s prescription, the creators of the new American classical music would need to have “a delicate ear, a retentive memory, and the power to weld the fragments of the former ages in one harmonious whole.”2 These could be Eliot’s words in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or a description of The Waste Land’s quest for spiritual wholeness. Indeed, it was Eliot’s proliferation of allusions ranging from elite to vulgar that captivated novelist Ralph Ellison about the poet’s work. Ellison himself employed Dvořák and tunes from the African American hot music tradition in his writing, ranging across a democratic variety of thematic and stylistic sources. As the epigraph to this chapter demonstrates, Eliot was a powerful influence on Ellison, whose first—and some say only—novel, as well as his criticism, are informed by Eliot’s epic poem. Ellison’s comparison of Eliot to Armstrong may well puzzle people who judge Eliot and his Harvard education to be a long way from Armstrong’s “Colored Waifs’ Home” New Orleans training. However, a closer look into both their backgrounds and work reveals some remarkable similarities. Eliot’s interest in, even fascination with African American culture has been noted. Michael North devotes a chapter of Dialect of Modernism to “Pound and Eliot’s

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Racial Masquerade,” and Eric Sigg observes that Eliot lived only a short walk from the Chestnut Valley “sporting district.”3 His grandfather Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot wrote The Story of Archer Alexander from Slavery to Freedom, expressing a “vacillating but clearly negative view of slavery,” and Eliot was a fan of the wildly popular racist performances of the Two Black Crows, who were sometimes accompanied by ragtime specialist “Luckey” Roberts.4 More recently, Robert Crawford emphasizes in greater detail the musical nature of Eliot’s boyhood home in St. Louis, “where the highbrow European music of Wagner was performed not far from sophisticated ragtime,” and nearby Eliot’s home Mama Lou (Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine, the “St. Louis street singer and ‘voodoo princess’ ”) starred at the Castle Club.5 Eliot also heard Cyrano, the ragtime comic opera By the Sad Sea Waves with its minstrel songs, and Tin Pan Alley material there as well.6 A vibrant pre–World War II blues scene grew out of the ragtime and jazz, as Kevin Belford has demonstrated, and folk and formal sources created there a broad variety of “hybrid musical styles.”7 It was a heady and hearty mix of music that anticipated his allusive method and rhythmic complexity, dubbed in the African American vernacular a “mixtery” of materials that “shaped their acoustic environment.”8 Indeed, folklorist Willis Laurence James called some of the more complex folk performances “coloratura,” with obvious reference to operatic bravura.9 As for Armstrong’s range of allusions, they are indeed broad. We know, for example, that Armstrong was schooled in New Orleans jazz tradition under the wing of early master musician King Oliver, and there began to develop the first Armstrong soloist style in Oliver’s aggregation. (Oliver spent significant time in Oklahoma City, Ellison’s birthplace.)10 In 1929, Armstrong’s visit to Oklahoma City taught Ellison that whites and blacks could be brought together freely and illegally, even if for only a few hours, when Louis Armstrong’s white fans broke into the town’s Slaughter Hall to hear him despite vigorous segregation laws.11 Ellison must have been impressed not only by Armstrong’s performance, but by the power of his art to blend disparate, even warring elements, black and white. As a young man Armstrong served as a day laborer and longshoreman, where he certainly picked up pieces of the vernacular tradition. Pianist Lil Hardin, who also became his wife, “drilled Armstrong in classical literature and, possibly, theory” in the 1920s. In Erskine Tate’s Orchestra at the Vendome in 1926, Armstrong plied his abilities in this genre: “The Orchestra played light classical pieces like von Suppé’s ‘Poet and Peasant’ and Rossini’s ‘William Tell’ overtures along with performing jazz and popular numbers, Armstrong playing solos and alternating between first and second chair.”12 At the Vendome, Armstrong reported, he worked out a solo to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and was featured in the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, and at other times performed on Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Liszt’s Liebestraum. These songs were often played alongside pop songs, novelty numbers, sweet, Guy Lombardo–esque tunes, Charleston dance music, and Tin Pan Alley favorites.13 A master musician, Armstrong filtered Austria, Italy, Germany, and Hungary through an American jazz sensibility to produce a new style. With regard to individual performances, Armstrong’s 1924 composition “Cornet Chop Suey,” recorded in 1926 by his Hot Five, is a case in point. Armstrong himself pointed out that the song “could be played as a trumpet solo, or with a symphony orchestra.”14 Although critic Brian Harker finds the ensemble passages of the recording to be “light hearted,” and Armstrong’s opening cadenza to be “studious” and

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“serious,”15 a comprehensive hearing of the performance reveals Armstrong’s brilliant welding of fragments of hot jazz, swing, classical, and pop into a unified, successful, and highly influential composition and performance. The title of the song itself indicates Armstrong’s varied stylistic intentions. The term “Chop Suey” means miscellaneous leftovers, a highly suggestive and understated description of Armstrong’s successful creation. Chop suey is, after all, an American Chinese creation, rooted in Chinese culture but birthed on American soil, much like jazz’s relation to Africa and America. It is a transported “exotic” culture blended with American life (Armstrong recorded other such songs as “Oriental Strut,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” and “King of the Zulus”). The dish itself is a varied mix of meat, eggs, celery, bean sprouts, cabbage, and sauce, much like the “American” stew praised by Huckleberry Finn, swapping juices in the mix.16 Such a concoction emphasizes once again the diverse ingredients that combine to create a sumptuous meal, delivered by Armstrong’s powerful cornet. Although it is a Hot Five recording, the song is somewhat atypical in that the solos are primarily by Armstrong, with an interlude by Lil at the piano, rather than a passing around of solos among the group. Thus the decidedly mixed ingredients are primarily soloed by one person—tradition and the individual talent. The opening cadenza is, in fact, brisk, energetic, and nimble, more forceful than most of the rest of the song, and quite impressive in its confidence and verve. As Armstrong commented in Esquire magazine, it has an attractive melody with “a mellow fragrance”—a synesthetic reference that corresponds to Eliot’s incorporation of the sound of jazz in his written words.17 He also described the song as “a swing tune,” though the music known as “swing” still had a few years before it would emerge, calling attention to Armstrong’s seminal contribution to that jazz genre as well.18 The lighter swing feel continues throughout the song, contrasting itself with some of Armstrong’s more intense moments accompanying blues singers and on his own recordings such as “Gully Low Blues.” However, this gentle swing feel in “Cornet Chop Suey” is supplemented by forays into other genres within the song. These forays are often organized around the stop-time breaks of the song, a hallmark of the hot music of the time, featuring often virtuosic breaks while the rest of the band lays out. Here was a new landscape for such “hot breaks,” something more laid back in the style of swing, and more variable in expression. At measures 23–24 of Armstrong’s first solo, he plays a rather gently attacked break, though it is still jazzy and brisk, with two figures of six and nine notes respectively. There is a bit of forceful repetition here, with triplet figures that seem to anticipate a highly popular melody of the future, the famous big band swing tune “I’m in the Mood for Love.” It will not be the only time they occur. At measures 29–32 there is another stop-time passage, though this time Armstrong plays in a more formal, classical style, playing only notes along with the rest of the ensemble, seven notes with no syncopation or improvisation. The chord progression and harmonies are indeed suggestive of classical music. However, at measures 37–40, Armstrong ramps up a bit and produces both “hot” tension and slurs in his break. Thus, in the first half of the song, Armstrong has played swing, formal, and hot jazz to the backing of a swing tune. This leads to the solo by Lil, who sticks close to the melody, if she does improvise a bit in the execution. However, at measure thirteen of her solo, she produces a surprise—a brief passage of strongly syncopated stride ragtime piano style that nonetheless has

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distinct classical-sounding chords and progression, putting Lil’s solo, at least briefly, in the same spirit and style of Armstrong’s mixed combinations. When Armstrong picks up his second solo, he immediately provides sixteen measures of improvised, blue-noted soloing over stop-time by the band, measures 9–12 employing the pre-“In the Mood” triplet figure, effectively blending the swing and hot music traditions. His next stop-time centered break at measures 23–24 features a faster execution than in his other breaks, but next Armstrong returns to a backing passage that figured in his first solo, with a difference. The rather staid seven-note unison notes that Armstrong had played in measures 29–32 are now embellished. That same restrained, classical setting is transformed in his second solo by his mellow improvisation over that background. Following this break at measures 37–40 of his second solo, Armstrong provides an improvisatory burst in a gentle and highly inventive swing mode. He ends the performance, beginning with measure 49 of the second solo, providing a repetition of licks leading to a very poppish, roller coaster of a figure to bring the song to a close. It is quite a ride, fast and slow, swing and hot, restrained and emotional, jazz and pop and classical, in various combinations—surely a prime example of what Ellison meant when comparing Armstrong’s range of allusion to Eliot’s. Armstrong’s “fragments” are “shored” quite neatly and profoundly against the potential ruins of such a stylistically varied and allusive piece. Of course, this performance is not an isolated instance in Armstrong’s repertoire. “Symphonic Raps” with Carroll Dickerson’s Savoyagers features a complicated arrangement and unique chord progression suggestive at times of classical music. This provides a sometimes flurrying, sometimes mellowing, energetic and difficult base for Armstrong’s hot solo, which at times blends seamlessly in and out of ensemble passages, at one point the solo played in unison with saxophone. There are also fleeting interludes by other instruments, and a forceful hot stride piano solo by the great Earl Hines. On “Son of the South,” Armstrong opens with a relaxed solo, proceeds to lyrics sung decidedly behind the beat, followed by melodic ensemble passages, and then quite contrastingly ends with a dramatic, bravura spotlight that critic Dan Morgenstern calls “operatic,” along with the ending to “Mighty River.”19 Armstrong excelled at signifying upon songs and lyrics, virtually rewriting them and teaching listeners to hear them in entirely different ways. His version of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” excises lyrics to change the emphasis in the song, and then proceeds to emphasize transcendence by featuring a masterful trumpet solo for the first half of the song. And he subverts expectations on “Twelfth Street Rag” by slowing down the usual barn-burning pace to an elephantine lumbering, and then plays a solo that seems nearly impossible, ferreting out rhythmic nuances unheard before or since, and creating a sense of time in the solo that is truly miraculous. Eliot’s own explorations of the subject of time in his works provide an interesting parallel to Armstrong’s work in splitting the rhythmic atom. A photo of Armstrong with nuclear physicist Niels Bohr in which Bohr is preparing to finger the keys of the trumpet poised at Armstrong’s mouth certainly juxtaposes two seminal figures of the twentieth century, and reminds us of Eliot’s interest in Bergson, as well as the Bergson-Einstein debate and Bohr’s role in the disagreement. “Hurry up, please, it’s time.” Ellison, as we know, was a trumpet player who was schooled especially in formal control of his music by Zelia Breaux in Oklahoma City. Additionally, he sat in as a high school junior at practice sessions with the Blue Devils band.20 He also reported to

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blues researcher Leroy Pierson that he sat in with blues performer Peetie Wheatstraw (William Bunch), a prototype for the blueprint man in Invisible Man.21 As a result, Ellison was especially attuned to the effects and importance of music, both technically and analogically. Importantly, Ellison made a crucial connection between Eliot’s work and that of his own jazz hero, Louis Armstrong: as stated in the epigraph, for Ellison, The Waste Land’s “range of allusion was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong.”22 Arnold Rampersad notes that “[b]oth were responses to the deforming cultural pressures during and after the disaster that was World War One,”23 though one might add that African American hot music had been responding to oppressive and repressive cultural pressures throughout slavery, Reconstruction, industrialization, and the Great Migration that made them rather “hyper-prepared” with thematic and stylistic elements for the decade during which The Waste Land appeared. Not only that, but, somewhat disrespectfully, Ellison expressed the view that Eliot’s poem was, in its rhythms, “often closer to those of jazz than were those of Negro poets.”24 Praising the African American vernacular tradition at the same time as he was criticizing African American writers’ employment of the musical tradition—though he mentioned no names, it is hard not to think of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown— Ellison called Eliot an “ancestor” (artistically more important to his aesthetic) and Hughes a “relative” (someone not of his own choosing).25 Ellison managed to alienate a large segment of the African American intelligentsia while aligning himself with the modernist tradition represented by Eliot—clearly not a popular position in the late Civil Rights to early Black Arts Movement era, and still a subject of contention. It was not in traditional stanza patterns or rhyme schemes that Eliot transmitted a jazz “feel” or philosophy. It was in his dazzling, dizzying, seemingly improvisatory weaving of his material into a seemingly impossible, always surprising whole, making leaps from one phrase, one language, one time to another, in the process of reading. The notion of linking fragments into a distinctive and unified whole I have elsewhere dubbed “ragmentation.”26 The term blends the Eliotic strategy of “fragmentation” with “augmentation,” referring to the addition of vernacular, multi-vocal elements that syncopate and call and respond to other, seeming disparate, elements. In ragtime, European and African American elements are brought together and transformed into a new experience and aesthetic. Armstrong, too, taught us how to hear what he was playing in performance, something new and whole and yet drawn from a variety of sources, and strongly colored and directed by the African American tradition of jazz. It is no wonder, then, that in 1921 Clive Bell connected Igor Stravinsky with what Bell called “nigger music,” and then placed Eliot in the school of “jazz poets” currently writing.27 Louis Untermeyer had called attention to Eliot’s “jazz-rhythms” and nursery rhymes, though without mentioning how frequently nursery rhyme–like lyrics turn up in African American vernacular music as well.28 As late as 1958, on the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz: Jazz and Other Arts, Gilbert Seldes named Eliot the pre-eminent jazz poet—this on a show that featured Langston Hughes reading his poetry to musical accompaniment by Billy Taylor and others! Owing to the changing perceptions of Eliot’s oeuvre, and even greater mainstreaming of ragtime, blues, and jazz, however, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown are now considered the jazz poets par excellence. However, there have been numerous critics who have explored Eliot’s relation to the various manifestations of African American hot music and employment of it in his work. David Chinitz demonstrated Eliot’s use

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of pop-jazz manifestations in vaudeville, music-hall tunes, and vernacular verse forms in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003). Chinitz illustrated how Eliot’s weaving of fragments in his work are like the weaving of fragments in a rag.29 Noting rightly that jazz as we classify it now was not differentiated from other highly syncopated popular musical forms in the Jazz Age, Chinitz charted Eliot’s exposure to a variety of African American vernacular and popular musics and related genres, including minstrelsy, theater songs, and dance. Eliot’s own feelings of marginalization as a savage presence in a civilized albeit fading Victorian land (England) allowed him to establish an “ironic affection for the popular,” and encouraged him to employ these African American vernacular-related materials in his work, at times rhythms adapted from popular songs and “rhyming lines of irregular length with rhymes coming in irregular places,” gleaned from Jules Laforgue, along with jazzy components to create his own Hot-Modernist style.30 In many ways, “A Game of Chess” is the section of The Waste Land that seems most influenced by African American hot music, this not despite but because it opens with an allusion to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and to the profusion of richness that characterized Cleopatra’s court. Chess has been dubbed, after all, the game of kings, but the distinctly downscale tawdriness of this section—the king is “barbarous,” a phrase often applied by racist whites to African Americans at that time—is quite prominent. It is very much a “bored game” rather than a board game in the opening scenario. Shakespeare’s play itself has been notoriously slippery as to genre—history, tragedy, comedy, romance—and depicts situations of violence, illicit sexuality and ennui that Eliot will explore among the lower classes later in this section of the poem. In contrast to the end of “The Burial of the Dead,” many of the lines in “A Game of Chess” are enjambed, putting meter and rhythm in counterpoint to each other and creating a kind of verbal syncopation. In the dialogue between husband and wife, enjambment is augmented by staccato phrases and bursts and by repetition, such as the two speakers’ use of the word “bad” twice in one line, “speak” three times in one line, “thinking” four times in two lines, and “nothing” seven times within seven lines. Eliot rephrases a single note in different rhythmic contexts, much like a jazz improviser producing polyrhythms. If one listens to Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Twelfth Street Rag,” the analog becomes clear. First, Armstrong the virtuoso sets up some rhythmic expectations by choosing such a song, which is normally played at a brisk pace. How breakneck of a pace will Armstrong set, the audience asks, anticipating fireworks. Instead, Armstrong’s version violates audience expectations by taking a slower tempo, as I have already stated. Yet when Armstrong begins to play, he plays the triplets of the melody in an amazing variety of configurations, turning them every way but loose, playing the melody notes, but to different rhythms, at different speeds, and with brief or extended elements of improvisation as suits his fancy and art. Eliot’s lines have this same kind of rhythmic feel, though Armstrong’s is rollicking where Eliot’s is manic and weary. In “A Game of Chess,” these techniques reflect an astute and masterful manipulation of jazz modes—ways of producing sounds and playing things, rather than mimicking melodies. Beginning with “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me,” the male speaker responds with a decidedly slower, wearier style than the nervous woman, producing a call-and-response stylistic dialogue quite characteristic of West African and

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African American vernacular music. This pattern can be executed by one performer responding to herself, or between two players, or among large groups of participants, but call and response is ubiquitous in the African and African American traditions. By now it is common knowledge that Eliot makes a reference to an actual ragtime song in The Waste Land. “That Shakespearian Rag,” as McElderry points out, was both published in 1912 and performed in the Ziegfeld Follies that same year.31 It should also be pointed out that both writers, Herman Ruby and Gene Buck, were prolific writers who co-wrote hybrid-jazz material inspired by the African American tradition for such artists as the white singer Marion Harris and Bert Williams, who was black.32 Eliot’s “hammy,” drawn-out pronunciation distances the song from serious hot music origins and places it in a more satirical position. We might plot the words with the timing of the song thusly, in 4/4 time: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 OooooooooooooooooOoooooooooooooooOooooooooooooooooOooooooooo 1

2 3 That Shakespe hear

4 ean

1 2 3 4 1234 Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag

As Eliot reads the poem, it sounds rather world-weary and academic, though with a bit of lilt in appropriate spots. As sung, we can see that while each of the “O”s are sung on the 1 and 3 beats, there are two points at which the words come between the beats in syncopation—exactly the effect Eliot is looking for to capture the stagey ambience. “That” shades behind the beat, and three syllables rush together to syncopate: “That Shakespe.” Where does the “he” come from? Eliot’s added syllable is a tic common among vaudeville singers singing “coon” or “mammy” songs, both designations used during those days. One can hear it in the shtick of a blackfaced Al Jolson, or in white singer Sophie Tucker’s hugely popular 1911 version of “Some of These Days” for the Edison label, written by black songwriter Shelton Brooks. Tucker, who was billed earlier as “America’s Greatest Coon Shouter” and “the Best Coon Shouter in Captivity,” can be heard singing “Some of these day-haze” in several places, along with “o-ho-nly” and “lo-ho-nely” for “only” and “lonely,” and then ending up with a “you gonna miss your little da-ha-da-ha-daha–da-ha daddy some of these days.”33 Eliot seems to be setting up a gulf between the notion of an elegant and intelligent Shakespeare and the vaudeville singer, a degrading “coon” (Eliot used the parlance) imitator and cultural outsider whose humorous take on Shakespeare’s name suggests a comicalizing or trivializing of his work. And yet the addition of the syllable takes the “spear” out of Shakespeare, replacing it with a “hear,” inviting us at the same time to listen to the rhythms and syncopation of the line—a pun and rhythmic tactic worthy of the “highbrow” but at times decidedly lowdown bard who could play to the cheap seats. Both Shakespeare and Eliot make the “lowbrow” an integral part of the artistic whole, which leaves us wondering whether Eliot, who could be known to use such insulting language as “coon” seriously, might be signifying upon it here. T. Austin Graham has observed how Chinitz and other scholars have “been quite successful at rehabilitating the broadminded Eliot of the 1920s,” but it is not only the “broadminded Eliot” who pokes his head out from his shell: the Shakespearean Eliot also makes a cameo.34 The Shakespearean Eliot was accomplishing something like the writers of the New Negro Renaissance: In “The Negro Artist

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and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes wrote about “the low-down folks,” who drank alcohol and talked loudly and fought and loved openly. Hughes meant “low down” to signify “high up,” praising the low-down folks for their openness, honesty, vigor, and rejection of sexually repressed middle-class values. “Low down” retained its characteristics, but without the negative judgment. After all, American local color and frontier literature could provide Eliot with plenty of examples of the power of the vernacular, such as Huck Finn, or Sut Lovingood, who calls the delirium tremens “delishus tremenjus,” transforming a tragic seriousness into a rip-roarin’, rollicking pleasure.35 Howard W. Odum’s character Left Wing Gordon declares his pleasure in “rockin’ in the slime.”36 The binary between high and low is challenged by the use of a language or style that calls attention to its opposite, not undercutting but augmenting in a rough and ragged fashion the total meaning of the experience. In the final episode of “A Game of Chess,” from “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said,” to the end of the section, Eliot employs white English lower-class vernacular speech to discuss issues of sexual availability, attractiveness, and birth control controversies. Once again he uses repetition to establish rhythm within the temporal structure of the bartender anxious to close up. The welter of “I said,” “he said,” and “she said” virtually establishes a communal voice and reflects, once again, the call and response tradition, an insistent chorus riff underlining the urgency of the moment, much in the way a riffing brass section might help drive a woofing tenor sax to greater heights. Eliot winds down with “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night,” similar to the way Armstrong sometimes wraps up a forceful song with a rather sedate passage, almost in irony, as in “West End Blues” where, after a bravura opening and a hard-driving final solo, he drops out to four bars of gently tinkling piano in groups of two before re-entering with a soft lower-register line. Surely the lady’s ennui, Lil’s pain, and Armstrong’s abjectness are seeking such a restful ending, even if it is not achieved, and thus becomes an ironic statement. Eliot’s ending is a type of check-mate to Armstrong’s performance. A number of critics have commented upon the impact of The Waste Land in Ellison’s work. Among the earliest was Mary Ellen Williams Walsh’s “Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Wasteland,” in which Walsh enumerates a number of parallels: the fruitful agricultural college, presaging the identification of the Founder as the Fisher King; the absence of fertility in that land; “Oh, oh, oh, those multimillionaires” compared to Eliot’s Shakespearean rag; the parallel of Trueblood’s act with the rape of Philomel; the singing of “London Bridge” by Trueblood’s children, as the song occurs in “What the Thunder Said”; and so on, though Walsh makes no references to hot music touches.37 In Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (2006), David Yaffe observes that Ellison “never fully develops this particular cultural and aesthetic synesthesia.”38 We are left, rather, to fend for ourselves, which is as it should be. Ellison implied that discovering the connection between Eliot and Armstrong allowed him to write Invisible Man. But he did not identify any references to jazz in the poem for us to parse. Rather, Ellison provides a key to unlocking the immediate invisibility of jazz in the poem. In the words of his Vet, “learn to look beneath the surface”;39 in the confirming yet re-configured words of the yam man, “everything what looks good ain’t necessarily good.”40 Significantly, the yam man follows with “But these is.”41 Having already experienced the battle royal blindfolded, the assurances about the letter from the college president that turn out to be false, and the

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duplicity of Kimbro, will these words finally sink in? Not quite yet. But the trope of blindness is related synesthetically to deafness as well, in particular as he deals with folks from a primarily oral culture or in oral circumstances. In slavery times, it was the grapevine that was the slave’s newspaper, and reading faces and hearing words served as strategies for the illiterate seeking useful news. Looking and seeing are of paramount importance, as Ellison emphasizes on the first page of his novel—even if the seeing is with your ears. Many people would argue against Ellison’s association of Eliot and Armstrong, insisting that in immediate terms they do not sound alike; strictly speaking, this is true. One may make the same point about the comparison between West African and African American music, which is characterized more by a similarity in modes of performance rather than instantly recognizable melodies and harmonies. The mode or manner of producing West African and African music—the vocal growls and tension, the use of pitch spaces and polyrhythms, copious use of something like syncopation, call and response elements, for example, all with distinct communal functions—connects the two. One must listen past superficial melody and similarities to deeper, less obvious, less Western characteristics to perceive the crucial connections. Ellison, indeed, was seeing and hearing parallel techniques and rhythms by listening through jazz to Eliot. This does not mean that Ellison was making up the connection, but that, based on what he knew, he heard analogous techniques at work, similar to what jazz was doing, but in Eliot’s own style, much like any jazz musician attempting to negotiate the tradition. Because he was exposed to a variety of offshoots from the African American vernacular music tradition, he was able to draw from and create a variety of hybrid forms that characterized his style, while maintaining his Western literary roots, employing Eastern philosophy and literature, and seeking to integrate them in a system that was large enough to contain them all. Armstrong, the strong progenitor of the lead instrument that supplanted group soloing, simply stepped in and gave all the voices a hearing from his limitless palette of sources and allusions. This was what Ellison heard in Armstrong and Eliot that made him liken the two, brothers under the skin, comparable artistic aesthetics connecting them with one another.

Notes 1. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 209. 2. John C. Tibbetts, ed., Dvořák in America, 1892–1895 (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1993), 378. 3. Eric Sigg, “Eliot as a Product of America,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20. 4. Steven C. Tracy, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 173–75. 5. Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 22. 6. Ibid., 47. 7. Kevin Belford, Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues of St. Louis Missouri (St. Louis, MO: Virginia Publishing, 2009), 7. 8. Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 7. 9. Ibid., 24.

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10. Lawrence P. Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002), 58. 11. Ibid., 73. 12. Brian Harker, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136. 13. Ibid., 136–37. 14. Thomas Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong in his Own Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133. 15. Harker, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, 24. 16. Samuel Clemens, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2. 17. Brothers, Louis Armstrong, 132. 18. Ibid. 19. This operatic connection, Dan Morgenstern points out, was initially examined by musicologist Joshua Berrett. “Liner Notes,” The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (BMG 0902668682-2, 1997), 24. 20. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 73. 21. Steven C. Tracy, ed., A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 104–8. 22. Ellison, Collected Essays, 209. 23. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2007), 77. 24. Ellison, Collected Essays, 209. 25. Ibid., 185. 26. Tracy, Hot Music, 6. 27. Clive Bell, “Plus de Jazz” (1921), in T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34–36. 28. Brooker, T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, 94. 29. David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7–8. 30. Ibid., 28, 35. 31. B. R. McElderry, “Eliot’s Shakespeherian Rag,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 185–86. 32. Tracy, Hot Music, 189. 33. Susan Ecker and Lloyd Ecker, “Liner Notes,” Sophie Tucker: Origins of the Red Hot Mama, 1910–1922 (Archeophone CD 5010, 2009). 34. T. Austin Graham, The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57. 35. George W. Harris, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” Warped and Wove for Public Wear (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867), 54. 36. Howard W. Odum, Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Blue Trail of Black Ulysses (1928) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 129. 37. Mary Ellen Williams Walsh, “Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Wasteland,” College Language Association Journal 28, no. 2 (December 1984): 150–58. 38. David Yaffe, Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 44. 39. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 153. 40. Ibid., 264. 41. Ibid.

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9 The Music of FOUR QUARTETS “Into Our First World”: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Music of the Will in Four Quartets Aakanksha Virkar-Yates

A

s the chapters in this volume demonstrate, Eliot engaged with many art forms, in a body of writing that necessarily reflected on the relation of the arts to one another. Four Quartets in particular is predicated on a musical analogy and makes use of musical devices, including the development of motifs. Yet the poem also depends largely on images, such as that of the rose or falling sunlight.1 While all poetry partakes to some degree in both the visual and aural dimensions, Eliot’s late sequence examines this relationship in a particularly deliberate way, continuing a nineteenthcentury philosophical conversation among Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Arthur Symons. This dialogue is connected with a Romantic concern with painting and music, reflecting contemporary ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, and the growing association of the sublime with music.2 Despite extensive consideration of the role of music in Four Quartets, Eliot’s poem has not been read in the light of this nineteenth-century inquiry into the relation between music and the arts. Yet distinct echoes of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Symons throughout the Quartets suggest that Eliot intentionally placed his poem in dialogue with these figures—a philosopher, a composer, and a poet-critic like himself—perhaps to clarify the meaning of his own contretemps with music. Surprisingly overlooked by critics, the presence of Schopenhauerian language and ideas in Four Quartets provides a basis for the poem’s association of music with a metaphysical reality that lies beyond appearance. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer argues that the whole of the phenomenal world is the manifestation of the one inner reality of a universal will, “the thing-in-itself, the inner content, the essence of the world.”3 Between the will and the world of appearance exist the intermediary Platonic Ideas, universal forms instantiated within phenomena. Unfortunately, humans are bound by their individual wills to a cycle of suffering, pain, and desire. The significance of the aesthetic realm, for Schopenhauer, is that it can offer liberation from this cycle and allow us to gain knowledge of the eternal Ideas or of the universal will itself. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics also posit a key distinction: all of the arts, except for music, communicate knowledge of the Ideas that are contained within phenomena and apprehended perceptually. Music alone bypasses the Ideas to express directly the whole of the will and the inner nature of all manifestation. Eliot studied Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics and they underlie his musical thinking most notably in Four Quartets. Though Eliot

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himself testified to the relation between his Quartets and Beethoven’s late string quartets, the musical analogy of Eliot’s poem also relies significantly on Schopenhauer’s alternative worlds of music and phenomena. Harry Costello’s account of Josiah Royce’s 1913–14 Harvard seminar, of which Eliot was a member, provides documentary evidence that Eliot studied Schopenhauer as a doctoral candidate in philosophy.4 A number of papers and reviews that he wrote up to about 1920 demonstrate how closely Eliot read The World as Will and internalized its implications for his own practice as a poet.5 Most notably, Schopenhauer’s conception of the objective nature of aesthetic contemplation influences Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), published three years after the completion of his doctoral thesis in philosophy.6 Here, Eliot suggests his famous chemical analogy for verse-writing in terms that strongly echo Schopenhauer’s description of the poet-chemist who employs images to precipitate a perceptual Idea. Eliot’s essay shows his familiarity with section 51 of The World as Will, which argues that poetry, like the plastic arts, conveys a primarily visual knowledge of the Ideas, despite using the abstract concepts of language. In section 52, Schopenhauer goes on to discuss the special metaphysical status of music, the one art that exceptionally expresses not the Idea but the universal will itself. As Schopenhauer writes, “these [other arts] speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”7 The influence of Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics on Eliot’s Quartets also passes through two important mediating figures. The first of these is Wagner, Schopenhauer’s best-known disciple. Schopenhauerian philosophy influences Wagner’s operas, particularly Tristan and Isolde, which Eliot quotes in The Waste Land. Wagner himself read The World as Will in 1854 and described the work as having a “radical” influence on him.8 Indeed, Wagner was responsible for bringing about a Schopenhauerian renaissance from the 1860s onward. Schopenhauer’s ideas find particularly extensive expression in Wagner’s important essay “Beethoven,” published in 1870 to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Despite the vast influence of Schopenhauer on Wagner, this is the only public context in which Wagner explicitly draws on the philosopher. In his essay, Wagner argues that the music of Beethoven best exemplifies Schopenhauer’s conception of music as expressing the interior world of the will. Wagner’s essay effectively brings together the music of Beethoven with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and it is this work that is central to a reading of Four Quartets.9 In “Beethoven,” Wagner develops Schopenhauer’s distinction between the phenomenal world and that of music. He calls upon Schopenhauer as the first philosopher to define clearly the position of music among the fine arts, ascribing to it an entirely different nature from that of either plastic or poetic art. Drawing directly on Schopenhauer, Wagner notes that music does not need mediation through abstract concepts, “which completely distinguishes it from Poetry, in the first place, whose sole material consists of concepts, employed by it to visualise the Idea.”10 So while the Ideas of the world comprise the “object” of the other arts, the “object” of music, as Schopenhauer writes, is the will itself. Wagner’s essay develops Schopenhauer’s binarism at length, describing this as the central and founding paradox of the philosopher’s musical aesthetics. If the Idea is concerned with physical perception, Wagner points to music as originating “upon that side of consciousness which Schopenhauer defines as facing inwards.”11 Wagner writes:

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our consciousness has two sides . . . in part it is a consciousness of one’s own self, which is the will; in part a consciousness of other things, and chiefly then a visual knowledge of the outer world, the apprehension of objects . . . the Thing-in-itself— inconceivable by that physical [or “visual”] mode of knowledge—would only be revealed to this inward-facing consciousness . . .12 Having located the genesis of music in this inward-facing consciousness, Wagner develops his discussion analogically, in relation to Schopenhauer’s dream theory. Wagner suggests that beside the world envisaged by the waking brain there exists another, “second world.”13 This second world cannot be “an object lying outside us,” but rather “must be brought to our cognisance by an inward function of the brain . . . [what] Schopenhauer here calls the Dream-organ.”14 For Wagner, it is not only the genesis of music but also the “sympathetic hearing” of music that enters us into this dreamlike state “wherein there dawns on us that other world.”15 Wagner’s essay effectively differentiates a world of appearance and of music, of waking and dreaming, a “light-world” and a “sound-world.”16 All of these ideas come together in the figure of Beethoven himself, whom Wagner curiously compares with Tiresias—the deaf musician seen in parallel with the blinded seer.17 Wagner’s intention is to suggest the music of Beethoven as achieving a kind of interior vision divorced from phenomena, embodying a “second world” of the will. In Four Quartets, the presence of Beethoven is importantly connected with the motif of artistic exploration. When Eliot writes that “old men ought to be explorers” (East Coker V), he is likely drawing on J. W. N. Sullivan’s description of the composer in his 1927 book, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development.18 Reading the Quartets against Wagner’s worlds, Eliot’s poem can be seen to explore precisely the transition from a “light-world” to a “sound-world,” from the world as appearance to the world as will. The third mediating figure in Eliot’s reception of Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics is Arthur Symons. Eliot’s debt to Symons is well known, particularly his introduction to the French Symbolists through Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). Christopher Ricks has also identified references to Symons’s Studies in Seven Arts (1906) in Eliot’s early notebook poems. Yet little attention has been given to Symons’s essay “Beethoven,” collected in this later volume. In “Beethoven,” Symons draws heavily on Wagner’s 1870 essay, similarly discussing Schopenhauer’s doctrine of music as expressing the will. Symons also reflects on Wagner’s distinction between two worlds and on the dreamlike nature of Beethoven’s music. He cites Wagner’s description of Shakespeare entering the world of light even as Beethoven enters the world of sound.19 Symons writes: To Shakespeare, to Michelangelo, who are concerned with the phenomena of the world as well as with “the thing itself which lies behind all appearances,” something is gained, some direct aid for art, by a continual awakening out of that trance in which they speak with nature. Beethoven alone, the musician, gains nothing: he is concerned only with one world, the inner world; and it is well for him if he never awakens.20 Aligning the verbal and visual in a manner in keeping with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, Symons emphasizes too the somnolent quality of Beethoven’s inner music. Quoting liberally from Schopenhauer, Symons writes that music “ ‘reveals the innermost essential being of the world.’ ”21 This “ ‘is not an image of phenomena,’ but represents ‘the

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thing itself which lies behind all appearances.’ ” Here Symons cites Schopenhauer’s reference to the scholastics: “ ‘concepts are universalia post rem, actuality universalia in re, whereas music gives universalia ante rem.’ ”22 Schopenhauer’s words draw on the medieval understanding of human concepts as posterior to particular things (“universals after the thing”), in comparison with the universal features inherent in things themselves (“universals in the thing”). For the scholastics, the “universals before the thing” are found in the universal exemplars in the divine mind; in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, they are given in music. So music suggests an ante-world, a world that precedes action much as the will itself exists outside of time and space. Symons too emphasizes this idea. The best of Beethoven, Symons suggests, is the sublime, not in action but in being. He describes Beethoven’s music as the gaiety which cries in the bird, rustles in leaves, shines in spray; it is a voice as immediate as sunlight. Some new epithet must be invented for this music which narrates nothing, yet is epic; sings no articulate message, yet is lyric; moves to no distinguishable action, yet is already awake in the void waters, out of which a world is to awaken. Music, as Schopenhauer has made clear to us, is not a representation of the world, but an immediate voice of the world.23 There could scarcely be a better introduction to the opening stanzas of “Burnt Norton” I than Symons’s words here, as these lines draw on both Schopenhauer and Wagner. While “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is preoccupied with the image and Schopenhauer’s world of appearance, in Four Quartets Eliot attempts to write poetry that explores the world of sound and thereby the inner reality of the will. At the start of the poem, Eliot’s depiction of an eternal present containing both past and future immediately recalls Schopenhauer.24 Describing a world of “possibility” and “speculation,” Eliot suggests the noumenal not only through his treatment of time but, vitally, through a presentation of sound and echo. Leading us to the “other echoes” that inhabit the rose garden, Eliot describes a timeless realm in the very sounds used by Symons: birdcall, vibrant air, leaves that will be filled with the laughter and voices of children. In pursuit of these echoes we follow: “Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, / Round the corner. Through the first gate, / Into our first world, shall we follow / The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.” In this first world are only echoes, “dignified, invisible,” moving “over the dead leaves.” Eliot’s shadowy sounds and invisible echoes, I would suggest, are an expression of Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics; they evoke a “first” or anterior world, the world of will that precedes action. As in Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Symons, this world of sound is suggested by Eliot to be one of two worlds. Twice repeating the phrase “into our first world,” Eliot goes on to contrast these elusive echoes with the image of roses, subtly suggesting a Schopenhauerian distinction between sound and perception. “And the bird called, in response to / The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, / And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at.” In this movement between worlds, Four Quartets is conceived as an exploration of a new musical aesthetic and a new world that is also, paradoxically, the “first world.” The imagery and contrast of worlds seen in “Burnt Norton” I returns in section V: “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight / Even while the dust moves / There rises the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage.” Here, the “shaft of sunlight” echoes the “unseen eyebeam” of “Burnt Norton” I, even as the “hidden laughter / Of children in the

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foliage” replays the “unheard music hidden in the shrubbery.” We see now that the echoes contained within leaves and shrubbery at the start of the poem look forward to this laughter of children amid the greenery. Eliot’s linking of these echoes with the ephemeral sounds of children’s voices is important, and makes it easier to understand this rendition of sound as a portrayal of the noumenal will. Although the noumenon lies outside time and space, the closest Eliot can get to it is through music, represented here by voice, echo, birdcall, and laughter. Indeed, Eliot’s movement between sunlight and sound recalls Wagner’s contrast between a light-world and a sound-world, even as the elusivity of these sounds suggests the dreamlike quality of music emphasized by Wagner. At the same time, Eliot’s portrayal of sunlight and laughter suggests both the visual and musical as implicitly transcendent. This too is in keeping with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. For though Schopenhauer and Wagner privilege music over perception, it is also in perception that we transcend flux and movement, apprehending the eternal Platonic Ideas, which “always are, never become and never pass away.”25 The opening of “Burnt Norton” V, frequently cited for its reflection on the nature of poetry and music, returns to this relation between the visual and aural. Eliot begins by comparing the temporal movement of words or music to the temporality of what is living: “Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die.” On the one hand, the time-bound nature of music and language as experienced in reality seemingly contradicts a model of music as expressing the timeless will. But Eliot moves quickly to imagine musical form removed from time, likening sound with the image of a Chinese jar: “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” Both ghostly music and aesthetic object are framed in perpetuity, paradoxically still and still moving. In the case of the static object, one way to conceive this movement is from image to Idea. In the case of music, stillness is variously the length of a note and the pattern of the whole: “Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, / Not that only, but the co-existence . . . / And all is always now.” It is music that expresses the whole of the will in its eternality, and Eliot’s words here notably recall his Schopenhauerian conflation of time past and future in “Burnt Norton” I. Like the philosopher, Eliot suggests that time and death belong to the realm of phenomena: for what is “only in time” is “only living” and can “only die.” Beyond this limited condition of being, however, Eliot obliquely refers to that higher reality of the will that alone is changeless and eternally present. Eliot’s poem also draws directly on a Schopenhauerian aesthetic of the sublime, further supporting the connection between his musical thematics and a metaphysics of the will.26 While Schopenhauer does not speak of music in terms of the sublime, both Wagner and Symons clearly apply Schopenhauer’s sublime to music. Wagner emphatically asserts that music can ultimately only be judged by the category of the sublime.27 He bases his musical aesthetics on Schopenhauer’s argument that, whether in nature or in art, the sublime brings us into direct contact with the universal will. According to Schopenhauer, we experience the sublime when the very object that invites our contemplation seems to have a hostile relation to the human will. In this case, we must struggle to turn away consciously from our individual wills and in doing so we experience an exaltation (“Erhebung”) to the universal will itself. Extending Schopenhauer’s discussion, Wagner writes, “the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as the universal Will.”28 I would suggest that

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Wagner also implicitly draws on Schopenhauer’s conception of exaltation. He claims that, in the case of the plastic arts, we see “the will in the Individual as such . . . unable to lift itself above its barriers save in the purely disinterested beholding of objects; whilst there, in the musician’s case, the will feels one forthwith, above all bounds of individuality.”29 In “Burnt Norton” II, Eliot directly employs Schopenhauer’s conception of sublime exaltation in presenting the “dance” at the “still point of the turning world.” In this important passage, it quickly becomes apparent that the “dance” is rather a condition of being that cannot be described in terms of time or space. “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.” Eliot then moves immediately to what can only be read as a transcription of Schopenhauerian doctrine: “The inner freedom from the practical desire, / The release from action and suffering, release from the inner / And the outer compulsion.” Eliot effectively describes a “release” from the individual will in the very terms used by Schopenhauer: “freedom” from “desire,” “action,” “suffering,” and “compulsion.” Having described such an aesthetic escape from individual willing, Eliot suggests the sublimity of this state of being; it is “still and moving, / Erhebung without motion, concentration / Without elimination, both a new world / And the old made explicit.” Returning us to the realms of music and phenomena, Eliot now hints at a reconciliation of worlds through the discourse of the sublime. As we have seen, Schopenhauer speaks of the sublime in the context of visual contemplation, whilst Wagner and Symons apply the sublime to music. Eliot’s figure of the dance offers just such a synthesis, simultaneously suggesting both music and visuality. On the one hand, the image recalls Mallarmé’s citation of Hegel in his description of dance as pure symbol, “ ‘a visual incorporation of the idea.’ ”30 But through both the visual and aural, the sublime works to effect an exaltation outside of motion, space, and time, to that which is both still and moving. It is the dance of the universal will, whose apprehension is the liberated condition of being Eliot describes here. At the close of Four Quartets, Eliot returns again to Wagner’s worlds of music and phenomena, now in crucial conjunction with the metaphor of exploration. Eliot writes, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started.” As I noted earlier, the influence of Beethoven in the poem is connected with the trope of exploration, specifically Eliot’s injunction, “old men ought to be explorers.” Concluding the Quartets, Eliot reinscribes the music of Beethoven and the metaphysics of the will that this music expresses. Importantly, the place or condition that we will “discover / Is that which was the beginning; / At the source of the longest river / The voice of the hidden waterfall / And the children in the apple-tree / Not known, because not looked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea.” Not only does Eliot emphasize the difference between what is known or looked for and what is heard, but he describes again the voices of children in the foliage, the very sounds by which he suggests a music of the will in “Burnt Norton.” Eliot also draws on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in his evocation of the river and the sea. As we read in The Dry Salvages I, “The river is within us, the sea is all about us.” The dance of the will that Eliot describes at the still point of the turning world returns now at the poem’s close. For what is heard in the stillness between two waves is an echo of this universal will and “that which was the beginning” is none other than the first world of sound with which the poem began.

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Notes 1. The repetition of the image of sunlight in Four Quartets is discussed by Helen Gardner in her essay “The Music of Four Quartets,” in Essays on Form: Literature and Music, ed. Nancy Anne Cluck (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 94–106. Other useful studies of Eliot and music include T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. John Xiros Cooper (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), especially John Adames’s essay “Eliot’s Ars Musica Poetica: Sources in French Symbolism” and Brad Bucknell’s “Eliot’s Impossible Music.” Also of note is Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” ed. Edward Lobb (London: Athlone Press, 1993). 2. General studies on the subject include Edward Lockspeiser’s Music and Painting (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1973) and, more recently, The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century, ed. M. Morton and P. Schmunk (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 275. 4. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 213. Magee notes that Royce’s whole thought was strongly influenced by Kant and by the postKantian philosophy of will as developed by Fichte and Schopenhauer (xiii). 5. Eliot, “Report on the Kantian Categories” (1913) and “A Review of The Philosophy of Nietzsche, by A. Wolf” (1916), in Complete Prose 1, 34, 402. Also “Euripides and Professor Murray” (1920) and “The Criticism of Poetry” (1920), in Complete Prose 2, 198, 238. 6. Aakanksha Virkar-Yates, “An Objective Chemistry: What T. S. Eliot Borrowed from Schopenhauer,” Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 2 (2015). 7. Schopenhauer, The World, 257. 8. Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 360. 9. The only previous critical acknowledgement of this connection is in Keith Alldritt’s Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: Poetry as Chamber Music (Ilford: Woburn Press, 1978): “There is an awareness here similar to that which Wagner discovered in Beethoven’s late quartets. Interestingly Wagner saw Beethoven as a Tiresias figure, but one that is significantly different from that of The Waste Land. In these last quartets, he maintains, Beethoven, like Tiresias, who was barred from the world of things seen and to whom it was granted to perceive the reason for all things with his inner eye is ‘the deaf musician who listens to his inner harmonies undisturbed by the noise of life, who speaks from the depths to a world that has no more to say to him.’ Eliot’s Four Quartets report both a similar isolation and a similarly intransigent denial of solipsism” (124–25). 10. Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 5, trans. W. A. Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1896), 65. 11. Ibid., 67. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 68. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 74. 16. Ibid., 68. 17. Ibid., 92. 18. In his article “Eliot, Beethoven and J. W. N. Sullivan,” Herbert Howarth offers internal and external evidence that Eliot was familiar with Sullivan’s book. Sullivan himself refers three times to “Beethoven the explorer” and Howarth reads Eliot’s line as an endorsement and extension of Sullivan’s words. See Howarth, “Eliot, Beethoven and J. W. N. Sullivan,” Comparative Literature 9, no. 4 (1957): 328–89. 19. Arthur Symons, “Beethoven,” in Studies in Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906), 213.

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178 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

aakanksha virkar-yates Ibid., 195. Ibid., 194. Ibid. Ibid., 193. Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 213. In his footnotes to Chapter 9, Magee observes that Schopenhauer is called to mind by the opening lines of “Burnt Norton.” Schopenhauer, The World, 171. Aakanksha Virkar-Yates, “Erhebung, Schopenhauer and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton,” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 126–27. Wagner, “Beethoven,” 77. Ibid., 72. Ibid. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, quoted in D. Reynolds, “The Dancer as Woman: Loïe Fuller and Stéphane Mallarmé,” in Impressions of French Modernity, ed. R. Hobbs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 164. The Hegelian formulation Mallarmé applies to dance is itself connected with Schopenhauer’s sublime; see Virkar-Yates, “Erhebung and Burnt Norton,” 126–27.

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“A Musical Pattern of Sound”: Absolute Music and Four Quartets Michelle Witen

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n his 1942 essay “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot outlines a particular understanding of how the two arts of poetry and music can coexist in a “musical poem.”1 He writes: “My purpose here is to insist that a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one.”2 This is by no means Eliot’s first reference to the way in which musical patterning can be transposed onto forms of literature. In an earlier essay, “The Need for Poetic Drama” (1936), he similarly describes the composition process for verse plays in musical terms: “To work out a play in verse is to be working like a musician as well as like a prose dramatist: it is to see the whole thing as a musical pattern.”3 That is to say, the “musical pattern” and the “dramatic pattern” act in tandem,4 where, “underneath the action, which should be perfectly intelligible, there should be a musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level.”5 In both of the above cases, the emphasis lies in the integrity of the “pattern” or structure to engender the musical quality of the poem, implying the inseparability of the structure of the poem from its content. Given that “The Music of Poetry” was published in the same year as Little Gidding, it requires little stretch of the imagination to infer that Eliot’s poetic intentions with regards to the “musical poem” should be read alongside Four Quartets. How this musical patterning should be applied to these poems is less clear, however, unless one considers the changing evaluation of music (and by extension, its relationship to literature) from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth. This chapter problematizes Eliot’s musical patterning by examining how the musical terminology in his prose reflects the terms and forms of the debate surrounding “absolute music,” a form of pure, instrumental music—a debate that filtered into the writing of many modernist authors, especially in terms of how the structural component of absolute music could be harnessed in literature. In fact, by the time forms of absolute music, such as the sonata, quartet, and fugue, were privileged as the pinnacle of the “cerebral in music”6 and conveyed the association of “intellectual and musical engineering,”7 many modernist authors were carrying out their intention of incorporating these forms into their writing. To name a few, James Joyce famously wrote the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses as a fugue,8 Ezra Pound also claimed to have incorporated a fugue in The Cantos,9 and Virginia Woolf wrote “The String Quartet.” As such, Eliot’s allusion to the quartet form in the collective title of his last four significant poems, Four Quartets, places him at the center of a modernist preoccupation with the effects of absolute music and its transposition in literary form. In this chapter, I suggest that this musicological debate provides a context for Eliot’s appeal to the form and structure of absolute music in Four Quartets.

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Drawing particularly on East Coker, I examine how Eliot’s patterning goes beyond poetic repetition, instead providing a gloss of “the music of a word” through the principles of absolute music.10 At the turn of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had brought with it the “means to create cheaper and more responsive musical instruments, with technical improvements that strongly influenced [their] sound.”11 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney outline the arc of these changes in The Enjoyment of Music: new wind instruments such as the tuba and the saxophone were developed; valves were added to brass instruments, making them more versatile and enabling composers such as Wagner and Tchaikovsky to write melodies for them that would have been “unplayable in the time of Haydn and Mozart”; the piano acquired its now standard cast-iron frame and thicker strings through improved manufacturing techniques, “giving it a deeper and more brilliant tone” as well as hitherto unknown dynamic capabilities.12 These improvements incentivized a change in the sound of music: the piano (soft) and forte (loud) dynamic range of eighteenth-century music was expanded into the “heavenstorming crescendos and the violent contrasts of loud (fff) and soft (ppp), which lend such drama to the music of the Romantics.”13 As such, a Beethoven or Tchaikovsky symphony sounded drastically different from those of Haydn, and a Wagner opera had completely different acoustic qualities from one by Mozart. As the sound of music changed, so too did the vocabulary of talking about music. For composer and listener alike, the adjectives used to describe the greater versatility in instruments were akin to those traditionally associated with the voice: dolce (sweetly), cantabile (songful), dolente (sorrowfully), con amore (with love), and so forth. These designations, in turn, led to higher expectations about the potential of music to express emotions, and these expectations were also reflected in the ways of talking about music: musical reviews changed, as did the way in which music was treated in the philosophical writings of the time. The most salient example of this alteration in the treatment of music in writing is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5, where Hoffmann moves away from the more traditional reportage of venue, performers, and pieces played, into an analysis of the emotions evoked upon listening to the music. This was also the first review that privileged the independence from words demonstrated by pure instrumental music over music accompanied by “literary or pictorial associations, the nature of which is indicated by the title of the piece or written ‘program’ supplied by the composer,” hence the adoption of the term “program music.”14 Prior to musical Classicism, instrumental music had been considered “a deficient type or mere shadow of what music actually is.”15 However, during the nineteenth century, pure instrumental music—or absolute music (in Wagner’s coinage of the term, “absolute Musik”)—gained new validity. Absolute music emphasized form: as Machlis puts it, “since there is no prescribed story or text to hold the music together[, t]he story is the music itself.”16 Eliot’s phrase, quoted above, echoes this same framework: the “musical pattern . . . intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level.”17 In the absence of words to mediate the message, the music itself became the exact oral equivalent of the aesthetic idea it sought to express.18 As such, in the words of the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, instrumental music changed from being “a ‘pleasant noise’ beneath language” into “a language above language.”19 Out of this awareness, a musical hierarchy developed, juxtaposing absolute music,

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or “music that is purported to operate on the basis of pure configurations untainted by words, stories, or even affect,”20 against music that contains the “extramusical impetus” of text (opera, program music, songs, airs, etc.).21 These texts outside of the music could include a libretto (such as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, quoted in Eliot’s The Waste Land); a program that accompanied the music, as in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; a title that refers to a particular story (as in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake or The Nutcracker); or, arguably, even detailed musical directions, like Satie’s instructions in his 1913 composition Embryons desséchés: “like a nightingale with a toothache.”22 The criticism aimed at program music extended beyond the musical world, with the value of referential music also becoming a philosophical consideration. In his 1854 pamphlet, On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), Eduard Hanslick writes: “The union of poetry with music and opera is a morganatic marriage. The more closely we look at this union, into which musical beauty enters with its specifically dictated content waiting for it, the more illusory its indissolubility seems to us.”23 Nietzsche uses a similar argument in “The Case of Wagner,” where he accuses Wagner of “presupposing that one first allows that under certain circumstances music may be not music but language, instrument, ancilla dramaturgica.”24 This indictment is a repetition of his earlier fragment “On Music and Words,” where he clarifies this notion of servitude: “To place music in the service of a series of images and concepts, to use it as a means to an end, for their intensification and clarification—this strange presumption, which is found in the concept of ‘opera,’ reminds me of the ridiculous person who tries to raise himself into the air by his own bootstraps.”25 Terminology used in this discussion about the value of absolute over program music can also be seen filtering into the consciousness of the period. For example, amid disclaimers of having no real musical knowledge, Eliot’s Harvard teacher Irving Babbitt proclaims in The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910) that music, “unless accompanied by a very detailed programme” cannot “suggest similar images to different individuals.”26 He also joins the debate of program versus absolute music, first by outlining the conflicting definitions of program music as “an unsatisfactory kind of poetry” in the Oxford History of Music and “the only highclass music” in Niecks’s Programme Music.27 Ultimately, while he disdains the musical trend toward “impressionism,”28 which entails that it become “less interested in its own proper harmonies than in working miracles of suggestiveness—in painting tonepictures, in writing tone-poems, or symphonic odes and ballads, in telling instrumental tales,”29 he nevertheless pronounces that “great musicians of the past were not pedants and formalists, and only pedants and formalists would desire music so ‘absolute’ as to exclude entirely poetical and pictorial suggestion.”30 Eliot studied with Babbitt in fall 1909 and acquired a copy of The New Laokoon in the spring of 1910, and it may well have served as his introduction to the musicological distinction between program and absolute music. Eliot’s position toward his teacher’s censure of the mixing of genres was anything but compliant, as Morgenstern and Dickey both discuss previously (see Chapters 2 and 5, this volume). The titles of his poems from this era consistently suggest referential music, in contrast to his later non-referential Four Quartets. Such titles include “Interlude in a Bar,” “Interlude in London,” “First Caprice in North Cambridge,” “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” “Opera,” “Suite

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Clownesque,” and “Airs of Palestine, No 2,” notwithstanding of course Eliot’s wellknown “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” as well as his “Songs” and “Nocturne.”31 As in program music, each of these titles provides at least the suggestion of a subject: a “Caprice” or “Capriccio” usually refers to performance instructions or to the burlesque, whimsical, humorous, or fanciful character of a piece;32 an opera is a combination of music with words; an air is a secular vocal piece and the term is sometimes used interchangeably with “aria”;33 songs have verbal content and, in Eliot’s use, they also have been given particular subjects (such as “Song: ‘If space and time as sages say,’ ” “Song: ‘When we came home across the hill,’ ” “Song: ‘The moonflower opens to the moth’ ”); the rhapsody usually has content dictated by “popular, national or folk melodies” and has a literary counterpart of epic poetry;34 and the nocturne is often accompanied by a descriptive title (for example, Debussy’s Nocturnes, inspired by Whistler’s paintings, are called “Nuages,” “Fêtes,” and “Sirènes”).35 These early titles announce Eliot’s allegiance to program music in the manner of musical Impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel. A decade later, the tide had turned against program music in many circles. Aldous Huxley, music critic for The Weekly Westminster Gazette and friend of Eliot, traces changing musical trends in a 1922 review, “Busoni, Dr. Burney and Others,” to explain the appeal of Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica. Huxley begins with Dr. Charles Burney, whose General History of Music outlined the prevailing musical taste of the eighteenth century. Living at a time when the appeal of baroque counterpoint was waning, Burney preferred the “modern music” of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach to J. S. Bach’s “sacrific[e of] melody and expression” for harmony.36 This revolt against “the over-elaborate pattern and surface texture of contrapuntal music,” Huxley explains, led to “the development of expressive melody.”37 He describes the difference between J. S. Bach’s fugues and counterpoint and his son’s more melodic compositions as follows: “Emanuel was modern, a melodist, an emotional expressionist.38 Counterpoint, Emanuel thought, was too often mere music for the eye; he wrote for ears—and hearts.”39 Yet this cycle repeated itself during the nineteenth century, so that forms again became more complex, to the point that Wagner became exhausted with harmonic complications, complaining of a horrendous “eye-itching” (Augenjucken) as the result of reading the scores of so many new German operas that focused only on counterpoint and musical forms.40 Wagner’s music-dramas inaugurated another cycle of musical narratives designed to appeal to the ear. By 1922, however, a “music for the eye” was exactly what appealed to Huxley, who was at this very time focused on creating a literary music in Point Counter Point. In contrast to Babbitt, Huxley depicts his audience as already questioning, “Ought music to be program music? Should it have an external literary theme? And does the best music, as a matter of historical fact belong to the literary or the unliterary variety?”41 Huxley concludes that Beethoven’s “last piano sonatas and his last string quartets have no theme but themselves” and are thus eminently preferable.42 He goes on to argue that while the “musico-literary”43 program music of Mussorgsky, Strauss, and Wagner is beautiful and “dramatically expressive of emotions,” ultimately, program music is “never quite so completely satisfying” as the quartet or the sonata, since “this other music . . . has no literary theme and expresses no specific or easily named emotion.”44 In “The Need for Poetic Drama” (1936), Eliot similarly juxtaposes program and absolute music as a way of understanding how musical patterning can be transposed onto literature. Here, Eliot’s distinction between “a play set to music” and

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the musical patterning or structuring of poetic drama by differentiating between two forms of music—the opera and the fugue—becomes particularly significant: poetic drama “is not like opera, but some musical form like the sonata or fugue.”45 This highlighting of “form” is consistent with the debate outlined above, especially in terms of the prioritization of absolute music, unadulterated by reference beyond its own form (as in a fugue or sonata), over program music (such as opera). Furthermore, it demonstrates Eliot’s awareness that he is working with the terminology and forms of absolute music. Eliot’s use of the fugue to illustrate how “a musical pattern [can] intensif[y] our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level” is particularly apt: the fugue is musically structured to induce flight and disorientation in its listener, and thus its form reinforces its effect.46 Eliot continued to draw on the vocabulary and concepts of the debate over absolute music in later writing, such as his 1958 introduction to Valéry’s The Art of Poetry. He writes that, despite his lack of musical training, his enjoyment or understanding of a piece of music is “better for knowing it well, simply because [he has] at any moment during its performance a memory of the part that has preceded and a memory of the part that is still to come.”47 In an earlier draft of this passage, Eliot draws more clearly upon Walter Pater’s famous dictum, “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,”48 illustrating that the ability to anticipate and remember a piece of music and therefore be more susceptible to its effect at any given moment are part of its condition. In the typescript, Eliot illustrates his point with the example of sonatas and symphonies, the quintessential forms of absolute music.49 Arguably, the fact that all poetry consists of written content would prevent it from achieving the condition of absolute music. Eliot, however, accounts for this obstacle by applying the principles of absolute music to poetry, as outlined in “The Music of Poetry”: My purpose here is to insist that a “musical poem” is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective “musical” can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense.50 Here, one can again detect the language usually associated with absolute music. Eliot proposes “a musical pattern of sound” that is “indissoluble” from the “musical pattern of words,” where “sound” and “sense” are married into one meaning. In many works on Four Quartets and music, critics ignore Eliot’s caution about “work[ing] too closely with musical analogies,”51 and attempt to identify specific works as sources for Eliot’s quartet before engaging in musical mappings.52 Rather than focusing on the superficial sourcing of Eliot’s quartets, it is more fruitful to turn to his letter to John Hayward of September 13, 1942: I should like to indicate that these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and that the word “quartet” does seem to me to start people on the right tack for understanding them (“sonata” in any case is too musical). It suggests to me the notion of making a poem weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes: the “poem” being the degree of success in making a new whole out of them.53

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Eliot’s emphasis is clearly not on any exact musical form—hence his concern that the sonata form, with its rigidly prescribed musical structure, is “too musical”—but rather on the distinction between program and absolute music. As Eliot’s remark may register, the quartet form implied a less prescriptive musical pattern: it brought with it a historically determined social context while maintaining the freedom of subject matter offered by non-referential music. The string quartet originally “belonged to a private musical culture,”54 but had, thanks in large part to Beethoven, by the middle of the nineteenth century transitioned from “salon music”55 into “a public style of quartet [where] the change in social character is part of the composition.”56 Dahlhaus, quoting Carl Maria von Weber on the composer’s choice of the quartet, writes: “just by choosing the genre, the composer demonstrate[s] that one could ‘count him among the few who, in these times that often tend toward shallowness in art, is still serious about studying the innermost essence of art.” However, this attention to the inner workings of art is also a private experience: it “reveals itself where one secludes oneself from the world, from the public,” and fully examines the “cerebral element of music.”57 Given the intense, personal significances of the four pieces that comprise Four Quartets, where private musings addressed to a public might be construed as their very subject matter, the choice of the quartet as a form is particularly apt. As Eliot writes in “The Music of Poetry,” “the music of verse is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem.”58 The group as a whole can be seen as Four Quartets—with no dictated subject matter in the title, but still retaining the individuality of four personal pieces. This being said, “the quartet,” especially the quartet of the early to mid-twentieth century, “is less an ensemble of four individuals than a unit,” and this unity is achieved through an overarching patterning.59 As such, Eliot’s use of repetition can be read as a form of musical patterning, where, as he remarks in “Burnt Norton,” “the detail of the pattern is movement.” Here, “movement” can be understood in its musical sense. This interpretation applies to Four Quartets more broadly, but it is most clearly at play in East Coker. East Coker begins with the line “In my beginning is my end” and ends with “In my end is my beginning.” Although this circularity of phrasing is traditionally read as an “inversion of Mary Stuart’s motto,”60 it also incorporates a famous example of the medieval French circular rondeau or canon: Guillaume de Machaut’s “Ma fin est mon commencement, et mon commencement ma fin.” R. J. Schoeck also notes this allusion in his short piece, “T. S. Eliot, Mary Queen of Scots, and Guillaume de Machaut,” but he does not go further in his analysis than to say that “Machaut’s poem establishes the theme evoked by Eliot’s lines with greater validity than the simple motto ‘En ma fin est mon commencement’ embroidered on Mary’s chair.”61 Nevertheless, this rondeau is a useful analogy in relation to Eliot’s musical patterning. As Imogene Hosley writes in Fugue, History and Practice, in Machaut’s time, the term “canon” would have signified “the Latin canon (rule) mean[ing] a short motto or sentence that indicated . . . the way in which a single part was to be performed or another part derived from it.”62 A canon involves “the strict and continuous imitation of a leading part by one or more following parts, usually at fixed intervals of time and pitch,”63 meaning that its parts are governed by their ability to mesh melodically through repetition. This appears to be exactly the case with Eliot’s repetition of “In my beginning is my end” (I.1, I.14), its appearance again at the end of the first section with “in my beginning” (I.50), and the closing of the entire piece with “In my beginning is

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my end” (V.209), which demonstrates a repetition and patterning that is specifically musical in nature if one uses the canon as an indicator for the performance of the single part and for the derivation of other parts from it. One might object that the repetition of the motto of East Coker is not necessarily musical in that it also functions as poetic repetition. However, this exact patterning is specifically musical in Eliot’s own sense: The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.64 This ability to see the relationships between the context and its repetitions, which Eliot ascribes to “the music of a word,” is the key to the indissolubility of the “musical pattern of sound” and the “musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it.”65 He further reinforces this point by likening “poetic structure” to the reminder that “the music of verse is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem.”66 For example, throughout East Coker Eliot references ends and beginnings: in section II, he relates newness and retrospection to the pattern with the lines “The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (II.83–87). Then, in section III, end and beginning become part of the cycle “Of death and birth” (III.134), and the motto returns with “each venture / is a new beginning” (V.178–79) before the ending with “in my end is my beginning” (V. 209). There is also repetition within the stanzas that demonstrates cyclicality and a predictability of repetition based on the patterning. He teases, “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?” (III.133–35). What follows are statements that are then repeated, but in the repetition a new meaning is created. The first statement is “In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.” Unpacking this, one must cease to be outside oneself (ex stasis) in order to know oneself. This is broken into three statements of two lines each that repeat phrases and expand upon each of the ideas contained in this line: knowledge and ignorance; possession and dispossession, which could also be taken in the mystical sense of ecstasy; and arrival and voyage. These are then repeated but with a difference: knowledge and ignorance are combined with “And what you do not know is the only thing you know,” possession and loss in “And what you own is what you do not own,” and voyage and arrival in “And where you are is where you are not.” These are neither ends nor beginnings, but this passage demonstrates how the secondary meaning of the words are patterned through repetition.67 Returning to the choice of the quartet itself, I again draw upon East Coker as a reference for the rest of the Four Quartets. Although the motto is a shaping factor of East Coker, its repetition throughout the other pieces also provides insight into the quartet as a whole. In “Burnt Norton,” Eliot writes, “Or say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end.” In The Dry Salvages, he asks, “Where is there an end of it,” and in the last section of Little Gidding, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And

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to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” These references all flow within their individual contexts. However, when taken as a whole, the “musical pattern” is one of repetition, where the end and the beginning of the poem begin to be called into question. If the end (Little Gidding) precedes the beginning (“Burnt Norton”), then “what we call the beginning is often the end” (Little Gidding). Thus, in reading the last stanza of Little Gidding, one can see elements of all of the Four Quartets recapitulated, though I will examine them only through the lens of East Coker. “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” seems to complete the previously outlined thoughts regarding knowledge, dispossession, and arrival from East Coker; this follows directly into “that which was the beginning” when the reader is taken through the first gate of “Burnt Norton,” now the “unknown, remembered gate” of Little Gidding. Thus, “In my beginning is my end” becomes the proposition that leads to its paraphrased completion in “to make an end is to make a beginning.” By examining Eliot’s use of repetition in East Coker as an example of his “music of a word,” one can see the way in which the “musical pattern of the sound” and “the musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it” operate in tandem to show the relationship between context and repetition in a musical sense. This repetition, combined with Eliot’s choice of the collective title Four Quartets, puts East Coker firmly within the framework of absolute music, in which musical meaning is extracted from musical structure. By tracing the way in which Eliot partakes in the conversation regarding program and absolute music—in his prose, in his poetry titles, and in his structuring of Four Quartets—one can see that Eliot’s statements about musical patterning reveal a nuanced connection to the debate surrounding absolute music.

Notes 1. OPP, 33. 2. Ibid. 3. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” The Listener 16, no. 411 (November 25, 1936): 994; Eliot’s emphasis. 4. Ibid., 995. 5. Ibid., 994. 6. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 16. 7. Imogene Horsley, Fugue, History and Practice (New York: Free Press, 1966), 374. 8. Elsewhere, I have explored the implication of reading James Joyce’s “Sirens” episode as absolute music. See Michelle Witen, “The Sound of Sirens: Joyce’s Fuga Per Canonem and Absolute Music,” Variations 31 (spring 2012): 151–72. 9. Pound contentiously claimed that The Cantos are “[r]ather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue” (The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber, 1971), 210). 10. OPP, 33. 11. Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 270. 12. Ibid., 270. 13. Ibid. 14. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” trans. Martyn Clarke, in Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 298.

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absolute music and 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

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Dahlhaus, Idea, 8. Ibid., 197. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” 994. Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 37. Dahlhaus, Idea, 9. Susan McClary, “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’ Third Symphony,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326. Dahlhaus, Idea, 8. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) for more on Satie’s compositions in 1913. Satie’s original: “comme un rossignol qui aurait mal aux dents.” Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music (1891), trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000), 629. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Music and Words,” trans. Mary Whittall, in Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 116. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 169. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 162, 167. Ibid., 162–63. Ibid., 170–71. Interludes and Caprices are not necessarily musical in nature, as both have literary equivalents. Erich Schwandt, “Capriccio (i),” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press), http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04867. Nigel Fortune et al., “Air (i),” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press), http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/48638. Wendy Thompson and Jane Bellingham, “Rhapsody,” The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/opr/t114/e5627. Machlis and Forney, Enjoyment, 369. Aldous Huxley, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others,” The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922, in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Vol. 1: 1920–1925, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229. Huxley, “Busoni,” 229. “Modern” in this sense refers to Burney’s ideas about “modern music,” which privileged singability over J. S. Bach’s counterpointing. Huxley, “Busoni,” 229. Richard Wagner, “Wagner on Bellini,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 27, no. 516 (February 1, 1886): 66. Although Wagner coined the term “absolute music,” he later redefined this initial classification to make room for his agenda for the Gesamtkunstwerk, music-drama, and politically engaged Zukunftsmusik, making absolute music synonymous with “the death of instrumental music” in its propagation of abstraction (Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 224). See also Richard Wagner, “The Music of the Future,” in Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner, trans. Edward L. Burlingame, 2nd ed. (New York:

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

michelle witen Henry Holt, 1909) and Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Aldous Huxley, “Literary Music,” The Westminster Gazette, June 10, 1922, in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Vol. 1, 255. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 256. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” 994. Ibid. Eliot, “Introduction to Valéry’s Art of Poetry,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 7, ed. Jackson Matthews (London: Routledge, 1958), xiv. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86; Pater’s emphasis. Eliot, typescript of “The Art of Poetry,” Hayward Bequest, H/1/F, p. [10], King’s College Library, Cambridge. OPP, 33. Ibid., 38. For example, Hugh Kenner writes: “There is an empty custom of referring here to the ‘late’ quartets of Beethoven, a parallel which impeded understanding by suggesting that the Quartets offer to be an Olympian’s transfinite testament. Eliot is reported to have said that he was paying attention chiefly to Bartók’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6” (The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), 261). John Xiros Cooper identifies Howarth, Gross, and Alldritt as the primary perpetrators of the “empty custom” of analogies to Beethoven (T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27–33), with the majority of formal analyses resting on the sonata (162). This is certainly the case with Alldritt, Barford, and Rees. More recently, David Fuller responds to this assertion in his chapter “Music” in T. S. Eliot in Context, summarizing that the “analogy with Beethoven is not precise” but “fundamental” in the sense that “Eliot expressed a desire to reproduce in poetry some of the states of experience he heard in Beethoven’s music” (“Music,” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140). Reproduced in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1978), 26. Dahlhaus, Idea, 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. OPP, 36. Cliff Eisen et al., “String Quartet,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40899. Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (London: The Cresset Press, 1959), 52. R. J. Schoeck, “T. S. Eliot, Mary Queen of Scots, and Guillaume de Machaut,” Modern Language Notes 63, no. 4 (March 1948): 188. According to Schoeck, Eliot was likely exposed to this motto via Mary Stuart’s embroidered chair, and “he ha[d] certainly never read this poem” (188). Nevertheless, I think the rondeau is useful to this analysis. Horsley, Fugue, 6. Ibid. OPP, 33. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 33.

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10 Eliot and the Music-Hall Comedian Barry J. Faulk

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liot’s interest in music hall dominates the “London Letters” that he wrote for the American magazine The Dial in 1921–22. In these letters, Eliot looks to music hall and its comic singers for instruction on artistic matters. “The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry,” he writes in “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” (1920); “our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material.”1 Eliot was inspired by the example of the music hall to imagine a new form of verse drama that would attract a wide audience by artfully combining sophisticated ideas with contemporary amusements. He envisioned a new verse drama that would express a tragic view of human existence, in the tradition of Classical drama, with the rhythms and idioms of modern life. Verse would be set to jazz rhythm, and emulate the dynamism of the moving picture image. While Sweeney Agonistes was the partial realization of Eliot’s ideas about modern comedy, his writings also engage with a wider European comedic tradition. Ronald Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel (2001) and David Chinitz’s T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) changed modernist studies by showing the close relationship between Eliot—the icon of high modernism—and popular culture.2 More than a decade later, we have a better understanding of Eliot’s specific debt to music hall and other popular arts. There has been less consideration, however, of what Eliot’s writing on popular comic singers reveals about the broader topic of comedy, both as it informed his work and how it relates to the larger project of modernist writing. Eliot returned frequently to the topic of comedy in essays from 1917 through the 1920s, including several London Letters for The Dial, his review essays on Elizabethan dramatists, “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” his homage to Marie Lloyd, and his Criterion “Commentaries.”3 In a number of these essays, Eliot uses music hall to help him redefine modern comedy as encompassing a conflict between contraries. This chapter first examines some literary precursors whose concept of comedy influenced Eliot’s own: Laforgue’s marionettes, Bergson’s concept of the semi-human comic figure, the Nineties comedian who embodies the quintessential human being, and Baudelaire’s idea of grotesque or “absolute” comedy. Wyndham Lewis’s distinctive mode of “inhuman” satire also had an impact on Eliot, spurring him to develop his own understanding of comedy as dialectic, drawing on these nineteenth-century forerunners and on the example of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd. He saw comedy as

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a dialectic between the human and the more-than-human grotesque, the metropolis and the provinces, and the local and the global. In Eliot’s view, music hall creates a sense of shared community by bringing opposites together across class, gender, and regional divides, as well as across the footlights of the stage. I conclude by demonstrating that Eliot’s dialectical notion of modern comedy was shared by the European avant-garde of his day: there are clear parallels between Eliot’s comments on modern comedy, especially the figure of Charlie Chaplin, and the views of the French Surrealists and of Walter Benjamin in the 1920s. Eliot’s kinship with the Continental avantgarde, conscious or not, helps to set a poet we often regard as politically and culturally conservative in a different light.

Eliot and the Figure of the Comedian, c. 1900 The comedian more generally conceived was a central figure in philosophical and aesthetic formulations of the human in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the twentieth century. George Meredith’s “An Essay on Comedy” (1877) and Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) placed the comic at the intersection between the individual and society, while George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896) situated the comic’s particular form of expression within the field of aesthetics. However, no philosophical system had more impact on Eliot’s developing sense of comedy than “the laughter of the soul” (to borrow Maeterlinck’s phase) that he heard in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Born of Schopenhauer’s assertion that humans act like puppets on a stage, pulled on invisible stings by the inner will to live, Laforgue’s metaphysical Pierrots inspire the marionettes of Eliot’s “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” (January 1910): “Among my marionettes I find / The enthusiasm is intense! / They see the outlines of their stage / Conceived upon a scale immense.”4 In “Suite Clownesque” (October 1910), the comedian replaces the marionette on Eliot’s stage: Here’s the comedian again With broad dogmatic vest, and nose Nose that interrogates the stars, Impressive, sceptic, scarlet nose; The most expressive, real of men, A jellyfish impertinent, A jellyfish without repose.5 Following the example of Laforgue, Eliot brings the “absolute” together with the comedian, who is variously “the child of the absolute” (“Suite Clownesque”) or the “enemy of the absolute” in “Conversation Galante” (November 1909). Laforgue’s dichotomous Pierrot—part organic, part inorganic—reappears in a work by arguably the single most influential philosopher of Eliot’s early formation: Henri Bergson. According to his Laughter (translated in 1909), the response of laughter derives from the very aspects of the comedian that strike an audience as expressly inhuman: “The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.”6 We laugh in response to a jack-in-the-box, as per Bergson, because it gives us “in a

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single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.”7 Although the human aspect must be present (a landscape, he asserts, can never inspire laughter), it works in combination with the explicitly automatic. Bergson’s comedian no doubt complemented the Laforgue-inspired puppet show of Eliot’s poetry notebook, such as the deceased marionette of “Humouresque” (1909), whose lifeless body the poet compares to a framed jumping-jack. When Eliot later was drawn to Wyndham Lewis’s conception of “inhuman” comedy, this new formulation contained in it elements of the old, insofar as Lewis, too, found humor in the mechanical aspects of the human being.

Music Hall and the Nineties In his “London Letter” of May 1921, Eliot wrote: “the music-hall is older, more popular, and is sanctified by the admiration of the Nineties.”8 Into this phrase Eliot compressed both the history of a literary engagement with music hall and an acknowledgement of his own investment in that history.9 I documented in Music Hall and Modernity (2004) how many fin-de-siècle British writers patronized and wrote about the music hall, discovering a wealth of meaning in the entertainment, especially in the artistry of its comic singers. Writers ranging from Arthur Symons to Rudyard Kipling saw an analogy between the struggle of the music-hall performer to win over rowdy audiences, and their own efforts to discipline the unruly medium of language. These writers, many of them poets, created a discourse around the music hall and its various entertainments and entertainers. They reveled in joining an audience that brought social classes and gender groups together, and they savored the pleasures of losing oneself in the crowd. Fin-de-siècle representations of music hall emphasized the ephemeral and elusive quality of the overall experience, as in Walter Sickert’s fragmented, impressionistic pictures of music-hall performers and audiences. Sickert’s enigmatic images suggest that a reservoir of deep meaning lies hidden within the music-hall experience. As David Peters Corbett notes, most of Sickert’s music-hall canvases trick the spectator into putting faith in “deliberately misleading appearances” carefully wrought by the painter.10 In The Music Hall, or The P. S. Wings in the O. P. Minor (1889) (Plate 10), to give just one instance of many similar paintings, what first appears to be a direct view of the singer reveals itself on closer inspection to be a mirror image of what is happening on stage. In this fashion, Sickert suggests a tension between appearance and reality at the music hall, underscoring the mysterious relation that binds performers to their audience. Nineties poets drew an analogy between the poet and the music-hall performer. As Schuchard remarks, the brag of the music-hall comedian in Scottish poet John Davidson’s “In a Music Hall” (1891) invites a comparison between the comedian’s satanic command of the stage and the poet’s own power to seduce readers with words: I twist, contort, distort, and rage and rustle; I constrain my every limb and muscle. I’m limber, I’m Antaean, I chant the devil’s paean, I fill the stage with rich infernal bustle.11

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Arthur Symons, hailing from Cornwall and relocating to London, found in the halls of the metropolis a heady mix of the sublime and the ordinary that he believed could serve as a metaphor for existence: My life is like a music-hall, Where, in the impotence of rage, Chained by enchantment to my stall, I see myself upon the stage Dance to amuse a music-hall.12 Eliot’s debt to the Nineties, and specifically to Symons and Davidson, is now well recognized;13 not only was Symons’s Symbolist Movement in Literature Eliot’s gateway to Laforgue and French poetry, but Symons’s own poetry is echoed throughout Eliot’s notebook, published as Inventions of the March Hare.14 In “Portrait of a Lady” (composed 1910–11), for instance, Eliot’s speaker imagines himself in terms very like Symons’s: “I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression . . . dance, dance / Like a dancing bear.”15 Throughout this poem, the speaker expresses dissatisfaction with a role that he is called upon to perform.

Baudelaire and the Grotesque While Symons and Davidson may have introduced him to music hall, it was Baudelaire’s sense of the grotesque in comedy that helped Eliot develop a more distinctively modern appreciation for the art form. As Patricia Clements establishes in an excellent study, Baudelaire became the presiding spirit over Eliot’s intellectual development both as a critic and poet in the 1920s. Eliot confessed to his friend E. J. H. Greene that “he had taken up Baudelaire for the second time in 1918 or 1919 and that he had not put him down again until 1930.”16 All the essays Eliot wrote in 1921 “declare his interest in comedy—and give evidence of the close attention with which he was reading Baudelaire,” so much so that “what [Eliot] then saw as issues central to the discussion of poetry in general, he now saw as central to the discussion of comedy.”17 The change in Eliot’s focus from poetry to comedy should not distract us from noting the persistence of certain themes in his criticism: the relation between form and idea in art, timeliness and tradition, and the meaning of the human. There is ample evidence that Baudelaire’s subtle analysis of comedy was on Eliot’s mind in 1921, the difficult year when he wrote and revised The Waste Land. A passage from “On the Essence of Laughter” serves as the epigram to Eliot’s May “London Letter”: “To find the ferocious and ultra-ferocious comic, we must cross the Channel and pay a visit to the misty kingdoms of the spleen.”18 Significantly, Eliot remarks that this essay “is more valuable” than Bergson’s and then continues the quotation so that it includes Baudelaire’s shocking statement that “the distinctive mark of this type of the comic [is] violence.” Eliot was no doubt intrigued by the dynamic conception of human nature at the heart of Baudelaire’s account of comedy; for Baudelaire, comedy (like all art) “[indicates] the existence of a permanent dualism in the human being— that is, the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.”19 In this essay, Baudelaire subtly distinguishes the “ordinary comic” from the “grotesque,” which he associates with the “absolute” comic, and regards to be of greater

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aesthetic and philosophical significance. “From the artistic point of view,” Baudelaire asserts, “the comic is an imitation; the grotesque, a creation. The comic is an imitation mixed with a certain degree of creative capacity, or in other words, of artistic ideality.”20 Baudelaire’s grotesque comic begins as a realist artist, working with the materials of everyday life. Grotesque comedy, however, is stylized reality, and transcends the ordinary. The suggestion is that the greatest comic artists achieve a distance from the real while maintaining a vital link to the quotidian and taking bearings from it. Baudelaire’s insights allow Eliot to recognize a profound continuity between the practice of the modernist artist and the popular entertainer. This broad view justifies Eliot in regarding, as Patricia Clements notes, “Nellie Wallace, Lancashire wit, Cruickshank, Rowlandson, Hogarth, and Wyndham Lewis” as embodiments “of the national comic spirit defined from across the Channel by Baudelaire” and worthy of inclusion in his various “London Letters.”21 (Such are the ironies of transatlantic modernity that it requires a French poet to assist an American immigrant in London in the proper appreciation of the English comic tradition.) Crucially, Baudelaire helped Eliot see the work of his contemporary Wyndham Lewis with new eyes. With Baudelaire as his guide, Eliot comes to regard “his bawdy friend” as “the most contemporary manifestation of the ferocious comic in England.”22 At the same time, Lewis’s own practice as a satirical writer provided Eliot with a living example of what Baudelaire meant by “comic violence.”

Lewis and Inhuman Satire Author of three satirical novels—Tarr, The Childermass, and The Apes of God— Lewis himself also “spilled more ink on the subject of satire than any other earlytwentieth century writer,” including Satire and Fiction.23 He uniquely redefined satire as “an unequivocally combative form” in keeping with his own agonistic conception of artistic modernism. Lewis pioneered a polemical mode of satire without clear ethical parameters, ideally suited to a relativist age. “I am a satirist,” wrote Lewis, “But I am not a moralist. . . . And it is these two facts, taken together, which constitute my particular difficulty.”24 As against the “internal” (stream-of-consciousness) method of Joyce and Woolf, he advocated an “external method” of examining people as mechanisms. In The Apes of God, arguably the greatest work of modernist satire, Lewis turned the London literati of his day into grotesque figures that intentionally blurred the boundaries between humanity and the inhuman. (Calling it “a perfectly justifiable article,” Eliot published two extracts in The Criterion in 1924, where it met with a “torrent of abuse.”)25 In his 1918 review of Tarr, a satire of artists in Bohemian Paris, Eliot recognized the element of the “inhuman” in Lewis’s work: “In contrast to Dostoevsky, Mr. Lewis is impressively deliberate, frigid; his interest in his own personages is wholly intellectual. This is a peculiar intellectuality, not kin to Flaubert; and perhaps inhuman would be a better word than frigid.”26 Lewis’s anti-humanist satire made a strong impression on Eliot, who had his own longstanding intellectual quarrel with treating the human as a transcendent standard of value. A distinct uptick in Eliot’s critical interest in satire, caricature, and comedy can be discerned around this time, as seen in his essays on Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden. For example, in “Andrew Marvell,” Eliot

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praises the true “masters” of satire for their aggressive, antisocial qualities: “The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust.”27 At this time Eliot also composed his “Sweeney” poems and undertook a thorough study of comedy, reading Francis Cornford’s account of the ritual origins of Greek comedy and “immers[ing] himself in the savage and violent tradition of English comedy, from Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to Charles Dickens.”28 Eliot’s critical writings in 1921–22 suggest that a combination of Lewis’s inhuman caricature and Baudelaire’s “absolute,” grotesque comic melded in his criticism of comedy. In the coded speech that Eliot derives partly from Lewis, the comic grotesque indicates a performer’s transcendence of the merely human. Eliot hints at an obscure but powerful link between what the comic performer accomplishes on the music-hall stage and what the modernist writer can achieve by deploying satire. In “Marie Lloyd,” originally published as his final “London Letter” of November 1922, Eliot singles out two music-hall comedians for special praise: Little Tich and Nellie Wallace. The four-foot-tall Little Tich was famous for dancing and contorting on stage in three-foot boots, mixing graceful movement with comic pratfall. Nellie Wallace gained fame for her role as a pantomime dame, the Widow Twankey, a stylized caricature of an elderly female. Following in the tradition of Symons and Davidson, Eliot apprehends a wealth of deeper, esoteric meaning in music-hall performance. The terms of his praise for these performers, however, are pure Lewis: “each of these is a kind of grotesque.” Little Tich’s on-stage cavorting represents the triumph of the grotesque over the merely human for Eliot, a point that may have been lost on much of Little Tich’s audience. For Eliot, both the diminutive performer and Nellie Wallace’s panto dame portentously represent “an orgy of parody of the human race.”29 Eliot’s appreciation of the actress Ethel Levey echoes his praise for Little Tich and for Wallace. He notes that it is Levey’s particular misfortune that she has performed in revues rather than in music halls, and therefore before audiences that Eliot regards to be less receptive and discerning than the music-hall audience: She is the most aloof and impersonal of personalities; indifferent, rather than contemptuous, towards the audience; her appearance and movement are of an extremely modern type of beauty. Hers is not broad farce, but a fascinating inhuman grotesquerie; she plays for herself rather than for her audience.30 Again, Eliot’s terms of veneration seem directly derived from Lewis. Little Tich inspires in his audience an unruly laughter at the very notion of the human; in Levey’s case, Eliot emphasizes the “monstrous” aspect of the actress, her “inhuman grotesquerie,” which he significantly equates with a uniquely “modern type of beauty.” Eliot willfully conflates his favorite music-hall performers with the anarchic satire pioneered by Lewis, with its free-floating contempt for the “merely” human. As with Lewis, the laughter inspired by these performers has no specific object or boundaries. Lewis’s unique understanding of satire as a form that calls the human into question seems to haunt Eliot throughout his various accounts of celebrated stage events of the 1920s. The poet’s praise for the Russian ballet dancer Léonide Massine also echoes Lewis, with its hints of an end to the human, and an express longing for a post-human future: “Massine, the completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage.”31

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Marie Lloyd’s Humanistic Comedy Alongside this Lewis-inflected rhetoric, however, Eliot also expresses a more humanistic appreciation of music hall. He repeatedly insists on the importance of the collaborative interaction between music-hall singers and their audience in the creation of their art. Owing little to Lewis’s unswerving anti-humanism, Eliot’s eulogy for Marie Lloyd celebrates Lloyd most of all for her uniquely interactive artistry. Here he seems to retreat from both Lewis and Baudelaire, harking back to Symons and the first wave of music-hall observers, who focused on the halls as a unique social experience, distinct from the literary. Lloyd gained popular renown for her skill at delivering an innocent lyric in a knowing manner that was somehow both innocent and provocative. A successful performance by Lloyd depended on the ability of her audience to decipher her carefully coded message. The singer’s death seems to have had a transformative effect on Eliot’s appreciation of music hall. Rather than praising Lloyd as a modern grotesque, as was the case with Little Tich or Ethel Levey, Eliot extols the singer’s uniquely interactive mode of performance, which allows her audience to feel that they too are part of the act. With Lloyd, Eliot insists, “There was nothing about her of the grotesque; none of her comic appeal was due to exaggeration; it was all a matter of selection and concentration.”32 The following passage is often quoted, but bears repeating here: “The working man who went to the music hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus and was himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art.” Eliot’s terms of praise here are notably different from his appreciations of Little Tich and Ethel Levey. The measure of greatness is not the distance that the performer can achieve from the merely human; instead, Eliot locates the sources of Lloyd’s comic genius in her ability to reach audiences, which the poet sees as the outcome of the singer’s long apprenticeship as a performer in the regional theaters outside the metropolitan center. Eliot suggests that authentic comedy is produced from the struggle between the metropolitan center and the peripheries, one of modernity’s central tensions. In the same “London Letter” where Eliot praises Ethel Levey, he also emphasizes the crucial role of the provinces in nurturing the greatest and most authentically modern music-hall performers. Eliot asserts with a connoisseur’s confidence that the music hall “has flourished most vigorously in the North” and that “many of its most famous stars are of Lancashire origin. (Marie Lloyd, if I am not mistaken, has a bit of a Manchester accent).”33 (It turns out that Eliot was mistaken; Lloyd was born in Hoxton, a suburb of London.) Nellie Wallace is praised once more, but on different terms. The explanation for the exceptional nature of “Lancashire wit,” characterized by Eliot as “mordant, ferocious, and personal,” is that The Lancashire music-hall is excessively intime; success depends upon the relation established by a comedian of strong personality with an audience quick to respond with approval or contempt. The fierce talent of Nellie Wallace (who also has a Lancashire accent) holds the most boisterous music-hall in complete subjection. . . . The Lancashire comedian is at his best when unsupported and making direct set, pitting himself against a suitable audience; he is seen to best advantage at the smaller and more turbulent halls.34

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The point is clear enough: the rough-and-tumble provinces are the ideal crucible for great comedy, a comedy that paradoxically evokes spaces outside the metropolis that are nonetheless central to national culture. The greatest comic art is the product of a dynamic collaboration between a performer and her audience. The crucial connection between creativity and the cultural peripheries explains why Eliot is so alarmed about the smaller provincial or suburban halls being “supplanted by the more lucrative Cinema.” There can be no creativity without the existence of these spaces that have been relegated by the culture to the “margins.” Eliot’s alarm over the possible demise of the cultural fringes would escalate in “Marie Lloyd,” where the critic warns that the ongoing homogenization of culture brought on by ceaseless technological development will destroy the collective will to live: When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars . . . when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians [in extinction].35 Lloyd’s ability to “control the masses with sympathy” and forge a direct and vital relation to her audience in the moment is an antidote to the death drive Eliot sees threatening the culture. Both “Marie Lloyd” and the May “London Letter” make a similar argument: the truly universal artist is also, at the same time, the great provincial. Lloyd’s comedy embodies a crucial modern paradox for Eliot: her universal appeal comes from her being thoroughly “Northern” and at the same time quintessentially English. Great comedy requires a delicate calibration of local experience and more abstract values associated with the nation. The equilibrium achieved by the best music-hall comedian recalls the precarious balance achieved by the exemplary modernist writer between present exigency and knowledge of the past that Eliot describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In both realms, the artist must successfully negotiate between opposing forces. In “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism” (1921), written for Wyndham Lewis’s magazine The Tyro, Eliot also emphasizes the crucial role of the audience in the creation of great comic art. The essay represents Eliot’s most concerted effort to treat all the various strands of English comedy, from Shakespeare and Dickens to G. K. Chesterton, popular caricatures of “John Bull,” and once again, the music hall. The idea that English comedy comprises a tradition and a living myth clearly interests Eliot, but he is ultimately more interested in the “Comic Purgation” that he believes is produced by the imaginative participation of an audience member with the representation of the myth, in a theatrical setting.36 In Eliot’s words: “The romantic Englishman, feeling in himself the possibility of being funny in these people, is purged of unsatisfied desire, transcends himself, and unconsciously lives the myth.” Like Baudelaire’s grotesque comic, Eliot’s myth is both rooted in actuality and allows for a critical perspective upon the real. As Eliot observes: “the myth is imagination and it also is criticism, and the two are one,” also noting that the myth “is a point of view, transmuted to importance; it is made by the transformation of the actual by imaginative genius.” As he would later suggest in his

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May 1921 “London Letter,” Eliot implies that a creative tension between the particular and the universal is required for authentic, “absolute” comedy.

Walter Benjamin and Continental Comedy Despite their different contexts, Eliot’s writing on the popular arts closely parallels the work of the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. There are many cogent reasons to make this comparison. Marjorie Perloff includes both writers in her account of twentieth-century intertextual poetry, and equates the aesthetic of The Waste Land with the “citational poetics” of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.37 Brett Neilson’s recent essay on Eliot and Benjamin traces “deep affinities” between the two in their ideas about time and history, despite the obvious differences between the “Messianic Marxism” of Benjamin and what Neilson labels Eliot’s “conservative modernism.”38 Benjamin’s 1920s writing on film corresponds with Eliot’s in many particulars. I will suggest in this section that there are strong parallels between Eliot and Benjamin on the subject of comedy, particularly in their emphasis on the crucial collaboration of the artist and the audience in creating a truly modern comic art. Benjamin’s early writings on film primarily deal with Charlie Chaplin, and it is here that we see the strongest affinity with Eliot’s own philosophy of comedy. Chaplin, of course, began his performing career in the music hall, and Benjamin’s study of the film star always points back to the historical roots of the comedian’s art. Like Eliot, Benjamin interprets Chaplin’s comic genius as the product of external forces, a dialectical struggle between the local and the universal. The “universal” comedian utilizes a gestural language that produces laughter and unites the performer and audience into a community. This is the case with Chaplin, Benjamin suggests, even though the interaction between performer and the audience is mediated by film. Benjamin reveres the film star for being “the first (and the Russians have followed his example) to construct a film with a theme and variations—in short, with the element of composition—and that all this stands in complete opposition to films based on action and suspense.”39 Not coincidentally, Benjamin’s obsession with Chaplin coincides with the height of his interest in the Surrealists, who also hailed the early Chaplin as a cultural hero. At the same time that Benjamin was working on his thoroughgoing study of the Surrealist movement, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), he composed a brief appreciation of The Circus (1928). In his notes, Benjamin explains Chaplin’s talent for connecting with a mass audience as a result of his ability to suggest a universal human type. Benjamin focuses on the moments in The Circus when the actor’s on-screen image seems to transcend specifics and evoke an archetypal humanity: “His clothes are impermeable to every blow of fate. He looks like a man who hasn’t taken his clothes off for a month. . . . Wet through, sweaty, in clothes far too small for him, Chaplin is the living embodiment of Goethe’s aperçu: Man would not be the noblest creature on earth if he were not too noble for it.”40 Benjamin is especially fascinated with what he believes to be Chaplin’s unique ability to achieve the universal while retaining a firm grasp on the local and particular. He singles out for special praise the return of Chaplin’s “trademark” gait at the end of the film: “you think the end [of the film] is absolutely unavoidable, but then he gets up and you see him from behind, walking further and further away, with that gait peculiar to Charlie Chaplin: he is his own walking trademark, just like the company trademark

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you see at the end of other films.”41 The comedian’s characteristic walk seems to function in Benjamin’s mind both as an emblem and a “trademark” of the Chaplin brand, embodying the era’s own self-divisions, between style and fashion, creative expression and commerce. Apparently running counter to Eliot’s comments about film in “Marie Lloyd,” Benjamin locates an interactive element in this relatively new medium that makes it similar to theatrical performance. Examined closely, however, Benjamin’s claims for Chaplin’s greatness closely parallel Eliot’s own arguments for Marie Lloyd’s importance. Benjamin’s account highlights his own rapt response as a spectator to the image of Chaplin projected on the screen. The role of the spectator in completing Chaplin’s art is as crucial for Benjamin as the interactive relation between the music-hall performer and her live audience is for Eliot. As with Eliot’s imagined spectator of “the Romantic Englishman,” Benjamin’s “Chaplin” is a collaborative creation of both the actor and the audience. Neither Benjamin nor Eliot are concerned with individuals as special persons, as “stars” set apart from the crowd; rather, the relation forged by the performer with the audience through artistic means compels these critics. Benjamin’s account of Chaplin focuses on aspects of the actor’s unique artistry; yet finally, like Eliot, he credits the audience with playing a major role in the Chaplin phenomenon. For Benjamin, the audience has a new role in defining comic art. The audience, not the critic, is now the final arbiter of value for movies: “Nothing points so unmistakably to the fact that the film will have immense significance as that it neither did nor could occur to anyone that there exists any judge superior to the actual audience.”42 Eliot too was fascinated with the range and scale of Chaplin’s success and the global appeal of his comic art. In spite of his misgivings about cinema, Eliot’s references to Chaplin in “The Romantic Englishman” are wholly positive. He not only includes the film comedian among the other “mythic” figures of English comedy he praises; he takes the time to remark on Chaplin’s unique status even among this august company, due to his popularity across the globe: “Charlie Chaplin is not English, or American, but a universal figure, feeding the idealism of hungry millions in CzechoSlovakia and Peru.”43 Benjamin’s longer, more substantive essay on the comedian, “Chaplin in Retrospect,” also written in 1929, leans heavily on Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault’s essay on the film comedian. At the same time, it comes even closer to repeating Eliot’s formulations about the perfect modern comedian, who transforms local experience into a global truth. In this respect, “Chaplin in Retrospect” suggests a still unrecognized affinity between Eliot and the Surrealists, at least on the subject of modern comedy. Parisian life, of course, was a perennial wellspring for the Surrealist imagination. Like Eliot, the Surrealists performed their identity as knowing metropolitans, presenting themselves as connoisseurs of the urban environment. Eliot pronounces on the art of Marie Lloyd from the point of view of an expert on London life, even if he is mistaken about where his favorite music-hall singer was born. The Janus-faced aspect of the metropolis as both a native stronghold and an immigrant destination seems to have led both these metropolitan modernists to the same conclusion, that modern comedy is a volatile mix of contraries. In “Chaplin in Retrospect,” Benjamin grounds his argument in Soupault’s historicist account of the “territorial origins of [Chaplin’s] art,” which “needless to say . . . lie in the metropolis of London”:

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In his endless walks through the London streets, with their black and red houses, Chaplin trained himself to observe. He himself has told us that the idea of creating his stock character—the fellow with the bowler hat, jerky walk, little toothbrush mustache, and walking stick—first occurred to him on seeing office workers walking along the Strand. What he saw in their bearing and dress was the attitude of a person who takes some pride in himself.44 Soupault adds that other city types populate his films, making Chaplin the filmmaker comparable to Charles Dickens, the great novelist and chronicler of life in Victorian London. At this juncture, however, Benjamin departs from his Surrealist source text to make this startlingly Eliotic statement: “With his art, Chaplin confirms the old insight that only an imaginative world that is firmly grounded in a society, a nation, and a place will succeed in evoking the great, uninterrupted, yet highly differentiated resonance that exists between nations.”45 Benjamin’s thinking on comedy most closely intersects with Eliot’s on this dialectical point, that Chaplin’s London origins explain his global appeal. The ability of the comedian to make large and diverse audiences laugh does not express the timeless value of comedy; for both critics, comic laughter points to a struggle between the local and the universal constitutive of modernity. Benjamin’s statement recognizes the same opposition between local difference and universal truth that Eliot apprehends. Benjamin, however, seems to take Eliot’s understanding of modern comedy one step further, by suggesting that the global market for cinema has recast the traditional opposition between the region and the center. The nation, a relatively stable category for Eliot, has become the local in the new, reconfigured world system. Still, for Benjamin, Chaplin’s tie to a specific metropolitan experience is the “secret” of his global success. The broader lesson to be learned from this comparison of Eliot and Benjamin is that neither considers comedy a timeless art that erases differences. On the contrary: modern laughter is best understood as a matrix of difference. Both writers understand comedy as a struggle between contraries that somehow fosters community. Benjamin’s appreciation of Chaplin ends with these words of Soupault, and one can easily imagine Eliot making the same claim about his favorite comedians: “‘Chaplin merely makes people laugh. But aside from the fact that this is the hardest thing to do, it is socially the most important.’”46

Notes 1. Eliot, “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” The Dial 69 (November 1920), in Complete Prose 2, 283. 2. Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 3. Including “The Comedy of Humors” (The Athenaeum, November 14, 1919); “Philip Massinger” (Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1920); “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism” (The Tyro, spring 1921); “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama” (Art & Letters, winter 1920); “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” (The Dial, November 1920); “London Letters” (The Dial, June and December 1921); “John Dryden” (Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 1921); “The Beating of a Drum” (The Nation & The Athenaeum, October 6, 1923); Criterion “Commentaries” of April and July 1924; “English Verse Satire” (Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1926); “Thomas Middleton” (Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 1927).

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4. IMH, 11. 5. Ibid., 32. 6. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 29. 7. Ibid., 69. 8. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: May 1921,” The Dial 70 (June 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 342. 9. In “The Borderline of Prose” (May 1917) Eliot also wrote, “in the age of music-halls and cabmen’s shelters; in the long-forgotten ’Nineties when sins were still scarlet” (Complete Prose 1, 537). 10. David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 180. 11. Quoted in Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 103. 12. Arthur Symons, “Prologue,” London Nights (London: L. C. Smithers, 1895), 3. 13. Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, Chapter 5; Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Chapter 2. 14. Christopher Ricks, annotations in IMH. 15. CPP, 21. 16. Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 369. 17. Ibid., 364. 18. Complete Prose 2, 343. 19. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Baudelaire, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 152. 20. Baudelaire, Mirror, 143. 21. Clements, Baudelaire, 367–68. 22. Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 89. 23. Robert S. Lehman, “Eliot’s Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire in The Waste Land,” Modern Philology 32, no. 2 (winter 2009): 65–79. 24. Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), 106. 25. L2, 356, 392. 26. Eliot, “Tarr,” The Egoist 5 (September 1918), in Complete Prose 1, 746. 27. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” Times Literary Supplement 1002 (March 13, 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 310. 28. Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 89. 29. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” The Dial 73 (December 1922 ), in Complete Prose 2, 419. 30. Complete Prose 2, 343. 31. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” The Criterion 1 (April 1923), in Complete Prose 2, 434. 32. Complete Prose 2, 419; my emphasis. 33. Complete Prose 2, 343. 34. Ibid., 342–43. 35. Complete Prose 2, 420. 36. Eliot, “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism,” The Tyro 1 (spring 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 303. 37. See Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 38. Brett Neilson, “At the Frontiers of Metaphysics: Time and History in T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201. 39. Walter Benjamin, “Chaplin in Retrospect,” in Selected Writings: Volume 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 222–23.

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40. 41. 42. 43.

Ibid., 199. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 224. Complete Prose 2, 304. Eliot and Benjamin are unique in their serious inquiry into the meaning of Chaplin’s universal appeal, but not in making the observation. Compare contemporary theater critic St. John Ervine on Chaplin: “[he] has taken Englishmen and Irishmen, Spaniards and Russians, Frenchmen and Germans, Americans and Japanese, and reduced them all to their elements; and in so doing has achieved very largely what the more sober Dr. Wilson failed to do at Paris” (quoted in Michael North, Reading 1922 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 166). North himself claims that “[if] one had to choose one thing that every human being living in 1922—from Evelyn Waugh to Walter Benjamin—could have agreed upon, it would probably be Charlie Chaplin” (163). 44. Benjamin, “Chaplin in Retrospect,” 223. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 224.

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11 Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London Theater Anthony Cuda

Opening Night: The Duchess

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ho could have anticipated such a spectacular failure? Surely not Eliot and his wife as they waited in line for the doors to the Lyric Theater to open at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 23, 1919 (Figures 11.1 and 11.2). Over dinner with Ezra and Dorothy Pound beforehand, he and Vivien had doubtless discussed the publicity

Figure 11.1 Program, The Phoenix Society, first performance, The Duchess of Malfi (1919) (recto). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Figure 11.2 Program, The Phoenix Society, first performance, The Duchess of Malfi (1919) (verso). Houghton Library, Harvard University. surrounding the highly anticipated production of The Duchess of Malfi by the newly formed independent theater company, The Phoenix Society.1 In the pages of The New Age, where Pound’s work had been regularly appearing, drama critic John Francis Hope devoted a full-page essay to the Society more than a month before its first performance, applauding the ambition to “restore our classic drama to the stage, instead of letting it rot in the library.”2 Before the first curtain was raised, he heralded it “a most gallant enterprise.” In the columns of The Athenaeum, where Eliot was publishing nearly every week, publicity began nearly two months before opening night, with a letter to the editor by the Society’s founders; advertisements appeared both prominently and frequently thereafter. Editor John Middleton Murry even dedicated a full front-page essay to the looming controversy between the Phoenix and its detractors.3 With such intense polemic already under way and with editorials and advertisements appearing everywhere, including in The Times and Times Literary Supplement, the opening night of the unexpurgated, three-hour production of The Duchess was bound to disappoint—but so sorely? According to all accounts, the performance seems to have begun well. The curtain opened on a simplified, elegant set: unobtrusive and deliberately sparse, featuring a sliding middle curtain and minimal props. Cathleen Nesbitt played the role of the Duchess elegantly; a Shakespearean actress and former member of Yeats’s Irish Players, she

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demonstrated, as several reviewers proclaimed afterward, “a perfect comprehension of the character.”4 Reviewers praised the Irish actor William Rea for his dark, melancholic portrayal of the traitorous Bosola, and they also applauded Shakespearean actor Ion Swinley. But as the tensions of the plot grew, and as the betrayals mounted (along with the violently murdered bodies), the company’s lack of rehearsal time began to show. According to multiple accounts, Webster’s verse was enunciated poorly and inconsistently. The real disappointment was Robert Farquharson in the role of the ruthless Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria. Hope described his performance in The New Age: “he grimaces horribly, and vomits his verse in the most ludicrous fashion. . . . He is a marvel of incongruity; he roars for no apparent reason, switches from a roar to a sentimental slaver for no reason, hisses when he should roar.”5 “Duke Ferdinand may have been a monster,” Hope concludes, “but Mr. Farquharson made him a monstrosity, and a ludicrous monstrosity at that.” Two hours into the performance—which featured only a single, fifteen-minute intermission—the restless audience grew impatient with Farquharson and, sensing the other actors vying for attention over his antics, began audibly “tittering” and nudging one another.6 This mild agitation turned to loud giggling in the midst of the exuberantly violent fifth act, when nearly all of the remaining players fall to the sword in sundry ways. Farquharson, however, was not to be outdone. He dramatized Ferdinand’s death by “standing on his head in an arm-chair with his legs in the air above him”: “Mr. Farquharson enlivened the gloomy proceedings,” William Archer reported, “by dying ‘on his head,’ ” a position “which he retained for several minutes, at imminent risk of apoplexy.”7 The denunciation of the Society’s failure was swift and merciless. In The Athenaeum, James Strachey declared the performance abominable: “In the dark records of contemporary acting and criticism this whole episode . . . is conspicuous for the blackness of its disgrace.”8 If Farquharson “is ever allowed to act in any of the later productions,” he writes, “it will be certain that the members of the committee are either incapable or disingenuous.” The Daily News printed its review under the headline “Wholesale Butchery in ‘Duchess of Malfi’: Funnier than Farce,” announcing that the play’s unintentional humor only proved the “hollowness of the old, uncritical praise” of the Elizabethan dramatists.9 To this critique, Leo Chiozza Money added moral objections, asking “what purpose is served by these revivals of blood and filth” and later declaring indignantly, “I did not see the Phoenix production . . . but I hope that some fumigation took place.”10 The Times called the Duchess of Malfi “no longer a live classic, but a museum-classic, a curio for connoisseurs.”11 One man who was elated by the debacle was prominent drama critic and translator William Archer, who seized the opportunity to criticize not merely the performance but the enterprise of reviving old drama altogether. Archer had been instrumental in the earliest attempts to found an independent theater in London, and he deeply resented the revivalist turn it had taken since the war. Putting aside the question of the performance itself, he writes, the vision of life espoused by Restoration plays “is stupid, nauseous, and abominable, beyond anything else that can be found in dramatic literature.”12 He continues: We hold our noses as we read. It is all very interesting from an “historical” point of view, as showing the coarse insensitiveness of our ancestors’ nerves. But, aesthetically, a stench is nonetheless a stench for being wafted to us from the seventeenth century.13

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Elsewhere he continued his assault, referring to the production as “three hours of coarse and sanguinary melodrama” full of “infantile artifice” and “grisly absurdity.”14 Eliot kept out of the debate for several weeks. When he finally published his response, he focused upon the missed opportunity: “scholarly people had collaborated; intelligentsia attended,” he writes, “Yet the result was not only dull: it was ridiculous.”15 In this chapter, I hope to provide an historical and documentary account of the Phoenix Society revivals between 1919 and 1926 and of Eliot’s frequent critical and imaginative responses to them. I will demonstrate how the Phoenix productions helped him to refine and adapt his theories of passivity and impersonality for the stage; how they influenced his composition of The Waste Land; and how they compelled him to articulate the need for artifice and convention in contemporary theater. In conclusion, I will suggest some ways that we might begin to see Sweeney Agonistes in a new light—in part as a dramatization of the conflict between artifice and realism—by learning about the effects that the Phoenix Society had on Eliot’s sensibility (Figure 11.3).

The Rise of the Phoenix The Phoenix Society was a rather late and surprising development in the larger context of an independent theater movement that took hold in Europe and England in the late nineteenth century. Beginning in 1887 in France, the Théâtre-Libre of André Antoine had proven that a small dramatic company could successfully produce modern, experimental plays without regard to government censorship or commercial viability. Antoine’s theater achieved success primarily by only opening its doors to subscribing members and by appealing to younger, aspiring talent for actors and playwrights. After several failed attempts to found a Théâtre-Libre in England, the Incorporated

Figure 11.3 Eliot’s signed ticket to The Witch of Edmonton, revived by the Phoenix Society on April 24 and 26, 1921.

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Stage Society was formed on a similar model in 1899 and enjoyed great success. The Society aimed to produce primarily contemporary work, to promote new playwrights, and to liberate the theater from “the two chief evils of the commercial stage, the star system and the long run.”16 Rather than rely on ticket sales and commit to occupying a single theater indefinitely, the Stage Society opened its subscription membership to 300 people at first and held performances on Sundays in rented theaters. This meant that they could “try out plays and productions” that the expensive West End theaters were not willing to risk, and it also meant that the plays were not subject to the “often arbitrary censorship” of the Lord Chamberlain’s office.17 Its actors and actresses performed in mainstream productions during the week, coming together to rehearse for the Society shows at off-times over the three weeks before opening night, often with only a single full dress rehearsal. The shows were initially staged for one night only, Sunday evening, when actors and directors would have no other engagements because of Britain’s Sunday Observance laws, which prohibited the use of buildings or rooms for public entertainment on Sundays. As the popularity of its productions grew, the Society began to offer matinees on the following Monday and Tuesday, but it rarely exceeded three performances of any single play. It quickly gained success not only among theatergoers but among professional actors as well. As Clifford Bax recalls, “every actor and actress who has been famous in England during this century must have played for the Society.”18 The Stage Society thrived on new plays, but these were increasingly hard to find during the war, so in January 1915 it revived Restoration playwright George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) to great acclaim.19 After a number of subsequent and increasingly successful revivals—and once the war had come to an end—it was decided that the Stage Society had begun to risk losing its focus on experimental and avant-garde playwrights. Another society was needed, one that could devote all of its energies to the work of revival. In September 1919, several former members of the Stage Society met at the Hampstead home of Montague Summers to form the Phoenix Society (Figure 11.4).20 Summers was an eccentric and provocative figure; he was educated at Trinity College, Oxford and ordained an Anglican deacon, though since his conversion to Catholicism in 1908 (a year after his scandalous book of verse, Antinous and Other Poems, was published), he had begun appearing in public wearing elaborate clerical garb and carrying a silver-topped cane that depicted the rape of Leda.21 But before he became notorious for his treatises on vampires, witches, and Satanism, Summers had gained renown as an accomplished and authoritative scholar of Restoration drama, as the editor of a six-volume edition of the works of Aphra Behn and, later, of complete editions of Congreve, Wycherley, Otway and others. Summers was ferociously dedicated to presenting the full, unexpurgated text of each play, which meant that performances would continue for more than three hours, often with no intermission. As scholars have suggested, this commitment arose from a hatred of literary prudery that was likely shaped by his “early and enduring affinity for the Decadent Movement,” which “helps explain his investment in . . . the vision of the passionate, uninhibited, and witty Restoration he thought [the plays] communicated.”22 The producer at the Phoenix was Allan Wade, friend and later bibliographer of W. B. Yeats, who had gained his reputation working with Harley Granville-Barker at the Savoy and, since then, had directed fourteen plays for the Stage Society. For the Phoenix productions, Wade complemented Summers’s emphasis on the full,

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Figure 11.4 Montague Summers, circa 1919.

unexpurgated text by simplifying and streamlining the stage and props. “The chief feature of Wade’s productions,” Norman Marshall recalls, “was their simplicity. Nothing was allowed to interfere with continuity of action and swiftness of speech. He seemed at his happiest as a producer with a bare stage which gave him complete freedom to design bold movement and strikingly pictorial groupings.”23 The producer should sternly avoid, Wade writes in a letter, “all efforts to astonish, to scribble, as it were, his own name across the author’s page.”24 For the actors, too, Wade prescribed a humility before the text. He placed great emphasis on preserving the rhythm of the play’s verse; he was known for encouraging actors to apprehend and appreciate the aural qualities of dramatic verse and not subdue them to a colloquial tone. Wade was joined by artist Norman Wilkinson (of Four Oaks), with whom he had worked on the Granville-Barker productions and whom he could trust to maintain a consistent simplicity of scenery and costume design in all of the Phoenix’s productions. Wilkinson designed a “semipermanent” stage setting to accommodate the Society’s need to shift between Elizabethan and Restoration plays and to eliminate the expense of new sets and scenery for each production. When the Society later began to prosper, he designed a “magnificently spacious and dignified set” specifically for Restoration plays.25 The Society enjoyed the good fortune to hold its entire first season at the Lyric Theater, Hammersmith, on King Street, a one-time opera hall that fell into disrepute in the early 1900s, earning it the unfortunate moniker, “The Blood and Flea Pit.” The new owner of the Lyric, Nigel Playfair, had successfully brought the theater back to life and

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was in the process, himself, of producing longer-running, more commercially viable plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration eras. Playfair (not unlike Summers) cherished the ambition to “give this generation an opportunity of seeing all the leading classics of the eighteenth century upon the stage.”26 With the Phoenix performing on Sundays and Mondays and Playfair drawing impressive crowds during the rest of the week for different plays, the Lyric Theater quickly gained a reputation among the public and the literati as home to what one reviewer called “a revolution . . . in English taste”; at its center were Restoration revivals, which were “drawing all London to Hammersmith.”27 Producing every play in the same theater, with the same set, and under the direction of the same group of men afforded the Phoenix “a stylistic continuity that was a rarity among experimental play-producing societies.”28

“The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama” Eliot did not enjoy the first production, but he did not join the debate about it until the furor had subsided. He was in the midst of an immensely busy period of his early career: preparing his second major volume of verse, Ara Vus Prec (1920), for publication; writing his first front-page Times Literary Supplement reviews; and, since March, working tirelessly in the evenings to keep up with the weekly printing schedule of The Athenaeum, for which he had promised John Middleton Murry regular reviews. In May he had finished a course of lectures on Elizabethan literature in his tutorial class at Southall, Middlesex. The final lecture, in fact, on “The Later Drama,” featured none other than John Webster, whom Eliot called “the greatest of Shakespeare’s followers,” both for “his skill in dealing with horror” and “the beauty of his verse”; The Duchess of Malfi was required reading in his class.29 Eliot finally entered the Phoenix controversy with “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,” a lengthy review essay in Sidney Schiff’s Art and Letters, which he begins by admitting defeat: “It was a triumph, several weeks ago,” he writes, “for Mr. William Archer, Sir Leo Chiozza Money, and that majority of the British public which sincerely hates the whole of English literature antecedent to Cowper’s Task.”30 In a cunning reversal, however, he argues that the failure was an indictment of the modern stage and of modern actors; though they were generally “quite competent and quite professional,” the actors performed according to their training and characteristic roles in modern, realistic plays, which do not allow for the subtle variations, artifices, and intensities of the Elizabethan stage. Simply “to transmit” lines of dramatic verse rather than “interpret” them with realistic mannerisms would reveal the play’s power: “but to transmit lines is beyond the self control of the modern actor,” and so each of the play’s potentially powerful scenes “was demolished; the dominant atmosphere in which the author wraps it was dissipated.”31 The horrific scene of the severed hand and the Duchess’s torture, Eliot remarks, succeeded only because “the actors were held in check by violent situations which nothing in their previous repertory could teach them to distort.”32 Like the modern poet (“a medium and not a personality”), the modern actor can only access the vital energy of such plays by achieving a degree of passivity and impersonality.33 Only then will both modern plays and revivals reclaim the sense of pleasure and vitality that invigorates, for Eliot, an evening at the music hall or even the opera.

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The Society’s production of Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode at the beginning of February 1920 was much more warmly reviewed but still, after the debacle of The Duchess, poorly attended. Reviewers attested to the audience’s “uproarious laughter” at Dryden’s finely crafted comedy, but most of them still felt obliged to argue on behalf of the Society’s cause and drum up support for its continued existence.34 “I must remind readers of the Spectator,” one reviewer writes, “that if the Phoenix is to flourish it must have plenty of subscribers.”35 Eliot began to campaign on its behalf as well, imploring friends and contacts to subscribe, and casting his efforts in the press as part of an urgent cultural struggle. Appealing to Ottoline Morrell on February 15, he writes, “It seems as if there ought to be enough people in London to fill the Lyric five times a year, who could afford to join the Phoenix.”36 To Mary Hutchinson he also laments the paucity of interest, and he interrupts his letter to his mother, explaining, “I must write a number of letters this evening to try to get subscribers for the Phoenix Society . . . on behalf of which I have been trying to fight against William Archer, who is down on it.”37 A week later he took the fight to the correspondence pages of The Athenaeum. “Whether the performances have been good or bad has nothing to do with the matter,” Eliot declares, formulating the conflict in terms of a cultural divide between William Archer and the would-be “Civilized Class,” which should support John Dryden himself: “Dryden is a great poet and a great dramatist, and the Civilized Class has not supported the people who would support him . . . against Archer.”38 After announcing the reduced subscription rates for the season’s remaining three plays, Eliot writes, “we cannot excuse the torpor of people who would despise Mr. Archer.” With the support of Eliot and others, and with the success of its performance of Dryden, the Phoenix enjoyed both increased attendance and admiring reviews for its next two revivals, Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (in April 1920) and Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (in November). One reviewer of Otway’s tragedy even admits, “indeed, the level of acting is . . . much above that usually seen in London theaters.”39 The Phoenix had risen from the ash of its first night.

“London Letters” In March 1921 Eliot began his series of “London Letters” for the American magazine The Dial, promising to canvass the London cultural scene for events of the greatest international significance. As his first installment shows, however, the letters deal more often with dearth than plenty, not with “the literary life of the metropolis” but with, as he tells editor Scofield Thayer, “the reasons for there not being more life than there is.”40 One of the bright spots that invariably draws Eliot’s attention away from the provincial and parochial failures of London literary culture, however, is the Phoenix Society. To conclude the first “Letter” (dated March 1921) he announces its upcoming production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and at the outset of the second he declares that “the performance proved to be the most important theatrical event of the year in London.”41 He recapitulates and criticizes the earlier small-minded attacks by Archer and Money, and he even suggests that the Jonson production “had a significance for us which no contemporary performance of Shakespeare has had: it brought the great English drama to life as no contemporary performance of Shakespeare has done.”42

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The creative stimulant of these unfamiliar plays was felt throughout literary London. W. B. Yeats also attended the production of Jonson’s play and was deeply impressed by its intensity and vitality, writing to the Society’s secretary afterward: “Volpone was even finer than I expected. I could think of nothing else for hours after I left the theatre.”43 Desmond MacCarthy argued to readers of The New Statesman that the revivals were not merely exercises in cultural archeology; rather, they provide “intense pleasure” and offer “precisely the right creative stimulant for contemporary and future dramatists.”44 Quoting admiringly from Eliot’s own remarks in “Ben Jonson” (published in the Times Literary Supplement in November 1919, ten days before the Phoenix’s first production), MacCarthy writes that the unfamiliar and taboo conventions of such “old plays” reveal for modern playwrights “the absurdly narrow” conventions of modern realistic drama, which now parade universally not as conventions but simply as “photographic similitude to life.” In their use of soliloquies, asides, short drop-curtain scenes and the like, MacCarthy argues, the Phoenix revivals testify to “the monotony of our modern plays.” Of course, the late nineteenth-century dominance of realist and naturalist drama had already been long under attack by Symbolist and post-Symbolist playwrights, including Maeterlinck and Yeats. But the verisimilitude of stage conventions established in the work of playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg, Shaw and Chekhov, still reigned supreme over the popular modern stage. In the jarring yet conventional unfamiliarity of the Phoenix productions, MacCarthy and others discerned yet another opportunity to critique and potentially dislodge contemporary dramatic realism. Perhaps even more important than such exceeding praise is the fact that Eliot no longer champions merely the cause of the Phoenix; with the Society flourishing, he now begins to sense himself moved and influenced by its productions. It was during these years that he first mentioned to Virginia Woolf the intention to write his own play, one which would ultimately adapt the anti-mimetic resources of ritual, of the Greek chorus, and of Elizabethan tragedy, as well as the fierce caricature and distorting satire of playwrights like Jonson.45 Sweeney Agonistes was still years from fruition, but the avant-garde experimentation that fused these disparate elements together into that “unfinished” play had already begun to occur in Eliot’s mind. His excitement about the success of the Phoenix’s Volpone spills over into the following sections of the May 1921 “Letter,” for instance, in which he applauds the “fascinating inhuman grotesquerie” of music-hall comedienne Ethel Levey, and the mordant wit and satire of Marie Lloyd and Nellie Wallace.46 And these reflections, in turn, lead him to think about the distorting visual art of caricature, which revives (like the Jonson productions) an element of what he calls “the old English ferocity.”47

Love for Love Many scholars are familiar with the events of the evening in March 1921 when Eliot and Virginia Woolf, having missed the train across town, trod through darkened market gardens in search of a taxi, sharing their vices and fears. “Missing trains is awful,” Woolf reports having said, to which Eliot responded, “Yes. But humiliation is the worst thing in life.” “Are you as full of vices as I am?” she asked; “Full,” Eliot admitted, “Riddled with them.”48 What is rarely included in accounts of this evening is where that missed train was headed. On Sunday, March 20, Woolf and Eliot rode

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together (in a taxi, finally) to Hammersmith for the Phoenix production of William Congreve’s uproarious Restoration comedy, Love for Love. They sat together in the pit, where Eliot surprised Woolf by laughing aloud at the bawdy antics of Sir Sampson Legend, played by comic actor Roy Byford (later renowned for his portrayals of Falstaff).49 In her own review of the play for The New Statesman, Woolf also makes the connection between the comedic vitality at the Phoenix and that of the music halls. “Indeed the character who came out best was Sir Sampson Legend. To begin with, Mr. Roy Byford is a superb figure of a man,” she writes.50 Woolf suggests, further, that the audience was better prepared to enjoy Byford’s character because of his resemblance to the music-hall comedians: “it seems likely that our natural taste for the burly humour and the florid figures of the past has been nourished and is even now kept alive by the humour of the music-halls.” Woolf concludes the review with a postscript (not reprinted in later editions) that reflects both the recent successes of the Society and the lingering uncertainty of its future: “The Phoenix Society should be supported by every one who cares for the drama and can afford to help. . . . Now [that] The Phoenix Society has established its reputation, it must not be allowed to die.”51 It seems likely that Woolf and Eliot shared their impressions with each other afterward, because only a few weeks later he elaborated a similar argument in the first issue of Wyndham Lewis’s The Tyro (1921). There he suggests that Sampson Legend partakes of an enduring English comic spirit, a potent and satirical myth that the modern stage has debased and “pitiably diminished.”55 Recalling Byford’s boisterous performance, Eliot contends that Sampson Legend is larger than life, a magnification and caricature of himself, helping the audience to achieve the “Comic Purgation” by relieving them of unsatisfied desires and raising them, momentarily, above themselves into a mythic universality.53 In realistic drama, the spectator merely sees “himself, sometimes, a little better dressed”; boldly drawn characters like Sampson Legend, on the other hand, appeal to his desire to see himself on the stage, but “more admirable, more forceful, more villainous, more comical, more despicable—and more much else—than he actually is.” Eliot then allows his mind to wander back to Jonson, likely to the Phoenix’s fantastic performance in its first season, arguing that “Volpone does not merely show that wickedness is punished; it criticizes humanity by intensifying wickedness.”54 Though modern dramatists had abandoned this purgative and critical function of the play, it nonetheless endured in the music halls, in the films of Charlie Chaplin, and in the revivals at the Phoenix Society. And its endurance, Eliot contends, is crucial to the way that an entire nation addresses its deepest frustrations and exercises its primitive energies. He argues that the theater is the natural platform for this healing and curative process. Eliot likely missed the final performances of the Phoenix’s second season (including The Maid’s Tragedy [1619] by Beaumont and Fletcher and The Chances [c. 1617] by John Fletcher) while he was attending to his own mental healing and curative process in Margate and afterward at Lausanne. It is illuminating to recognize that the virtuoso dramatic elements of the The Waste Land—as well its wicked intensities, its abstracted and anonymous speakers, and even the comic purgation of its original drafts—were all fusing together during these months, while the Phoenix revivals and controversies were occupying so much of Eliot’s creative and critical attention. In fact, one of the fragments among the poem’s manuscripts is titled “The Death of the Duchess” after Webster’s tragedy. There Eliot obliquely recreates a dark, suspenseful scene from the play when Prince Ferdinand sneaks up silently behind the Duchess, who is gazing

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into the mirror, combing her hair, and wondering aloud whether she is “doomed to live or die”; “Die, then, quickly!” Ferdinand exclaims pitilessly, handing her a dagger.55 Eliot’s draft includes two passages excerpted nearly verbatim from this scene of the play, a scene which had struck him in the Phoenix production as well and from which he quotes in his 1919 review.56 With significant revisions, this section became “A Game of Chess” in the final poem, and the explicit allusions and quotations disappeared. But the “breathless tension” and “impending doom” (as he would later characterize them) remain the subtext for the baroque portrait that begins the section, the anonymous aristocratic woman combing her hair into “fiery points” and weaving together allusions to madness, violation, and rape.57 The composition date of this fragment is uncertain.58 If it was, as some scholars believe, written years before November 1919 (the date of the Phoenix play), then we can still say that Eliot’s experience at the Lyric Theater would have reawakened it in his mind, re-electrified the scene, and allowed it to enter The Waste Land in vivid, quickened form. But it is also possible that the line between the performance and the poem is more direct, that Eliot wrote it after he saw the Phoenix production, and that he was determined to show what a vital and dangerous power the confrontation from The Duchess could conjure. In ways like these—both the particular case of the The Duchess of Malfi and the more general dramatic nature and caricatures of the poem—we can sense the Phoenix productions exerting significant influence upon The Waste Land and, for us, bringing new insight into the pressures and energies under which it took shape. As I have begun to show, the Phoenix productions repeatedly and consistently provoked responses from Eliot, and these occasional and contingent responses became increasingly lucid and crystallized statements of his thought about the modern stage, which then informed his critical reviews, his poetry, and his own earliest attempts at stagecraft. Perhaps the most important of these crystallizing moments occurred shortly after he saw the Phoenix (in its third season) perform John Ford’s controversial tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1631) at the end of January 1923.59 The play was exceedingly well reviewed, with especially high praise reserved for two actors in particular: Ion Swinley (Figure 11.5) and Michael Sherbrooke (Figure 11.6). Swinley played the role of Giovanni, the sensitive and eloquent protagonist consumed by passion for his sister. A regular in Phoenix productions, he performed with conscious self-discipline and detachment; one reviewer applauded him as “a splendidly controlled actor who, without ever raving, allows passion to sweep [over] him again and again.”60 The accomplished older actor Michael Sherbrooke, best known for his roles in Ibsen’s plays (and for the recitation of Poe’s “The Raven” that so awed Isaac Rosenberg), assumed the role of the back-stabbing, villainous servant Vasques.61 Desmond MacCarthy applauded Sherbrooke’s “authentic fierceness”—“the most precisely finished performance of all”—and the Times reviewer agreed that Sherbrooke stole the show when he was on stage.62 He was the Ibsenian realist par excellence. In the newly launched Criterion, Eliot praised the “excellent production” and singled out these two actors’ “brilliant work” as well, but he also took great pains to distinguish sharply between their acting styles.63 Sherbrooke, he writes in “Dramatis Personae,” was one of the best realistic villains I have ever seen: radiating simple energy of evil over the whole stage. Michael Sherbrooke was not an actor, he was an illusionist; it was Ford’s personage in the flesh. Ion Swinley, on the other hand, is always an actor; he makes himself into a figure, a marionette; his acting is abstract and simplified.

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Figure 11.5 Ion Swinley, as Colin in The Fanatics. Illustrated London News (April 2, 1927), 570. Detail.

Figure 11.6 Michael Sherbrooke, in The Willow Tree. Play Pictorial (September 1917): 53. Detail.

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In this clash of acting styles, Eliot discerns not merely a competition but a microcosm for the crisis of the modern playwright as well as a crossroads for the modern stage. Sherbrooke’s powerful realism was compelling, but Swinley’s nearly inhuman abstraction was unfamiliar and inspiring to Eliot, and it resonated with his growing interest in the dehumanizing effects of puppet-plays and marionette theater. Admittedly, some of his very early poems in manuscript are filled with ironic portraits of gibbering, effusive marionettes, likely inspired by Laforgue, Symons, Maeterlinck, and the revival of the commedia dell’arte. But he had recently revisited the idea more seriously when he defended Gordon Craig’s Chapbook essay “Puppets and Poets,” arguing that the use of puppets was simply one way of fulfilling “a necessary condition of all art,” namely, the balance between “the expression of life” and “the counter-thrust of strict limitations of form.”64 Around the same time, Eliot began corresponding with Alfred Kreymborg, author of Puppet Plays (1923), for specific advice on actually constructing his own marionette theater. “As I think I told you,” he writes in August 1923, “I want to build a small theater—a box small enough to stand on a table 3x3 ft.—and preordain every move and gesture and grouping.”65 Eliot and other modernists had long recognized the theoretical directions of the new drama, namely, away from realism and expressivity and toward ritual, artifice, and dehumanization. Gordon Craig’s own The Art of the Theatre (1905), which Eliot read as an undergraduate at Harvard, argued vehemently on behalf of simplification, abstraction, and artifice on the stage. Eliot was familiar with the post-Symbolist experiments in this direction in France, including the plays and scripts of Jean Cocteau. And of course by this time Yeats and Pound had spent three winters together at Stone Cottage, and the ritualized, symbolic abstractions of the Fenollosa manuscripts and Japanese Noh drama had influenced Yeats in essays like “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” (1916) and in plays like At the Hawk’s Well (1917). But Eliot was still searching for a sense of how his own adaptation of similar techniques would produce intense emotional effects, a glimpse of how they would satisfy the affective needs to which realistic theater had ceased to appeal. The Phoenix Society provided just such a momentary glimpse. He writes: So inchoate is the theater, which, if realised, would be the theater of our generation, that we can only guess at the scheme of what we grope for by inference from our perceptions, from observation of any instant on the stage which has aroused an hitherto dormant feeling. Mr. Swinley, with his mask-like beauty, belongs to this unrealised stage.66 Though he refers only to Swinley’s acting style in the review, I think it likely that Eliot’s interest was also provoked by the sexual and spiritual torment that plagues Swinley’s character, Giovanni. He likely recalled the performance when, writing about Ford in 1931, he emphasized “the horror” that Ford “will never allow you to forget” in the play, that is, the horror and torment of Giovanni’s ceaseless passion for his sister.67 And in fact, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore contains a number of lines that reverberate through Eliot’s own work, such as when the friar asks Giovanni, “Has thou left the schools / Of knowledge to converse with lust and death?”68 Swinley’s abstracted, gestural acting became a token for Eliot of what the modern playwright could accomplish with the right actors, the right directors, and, most importantly, the right script. If Swinley could counteract the mimetic impulse within the confines of a largely realistic play and while on stage with actors trained in traditional

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realistic techniques, Eliot seems to ask himself, what could he accomplish with a verse drama based on rhythm, repetition, and gesture rather than colloquialism and expression, on ritual instead of realism? “The realism of the ordinary stage is something to which we can longer respond,” Eliot concludes: instead of pretending that the stage gesture is a copy of reality, let us adopt a literal untruth, a thorough-going convention, a ritual. For the stage—not only in its remote origins, but always—is a ritual, and the failure of the contemporary stage to satisfy the craving for ritual is one of the reasons why it is not a living art.69 From his study of the Cambridge Ritualists (including Jane Ellen Harrison, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook) and others, Eliot had come to accept the theory that drama began with the extreme artifice of religious ritual, and that it only slowly evolved toward narrative, role-playing, and mimesis.70 Eliot implies that the development of realistic drama ignored a fundamental craving of the audience, and that this hunger fuels the contemporary movement against realism. At the Phoenix, he caught sight of modern actors capable of reversing, at least in part, the alleged progress toward realism, of reclaiming the vitality of dramatic ritual by means of abstraction, simplification, and gesture.

The Old Drama and the New Around the same time, the promise of this reversal prompted Eliot to renew the debate with his original antagonist in the Phoenix controversy, Sir William Archer. Since his first attacks on the Phoenix, Archer had published The Old Drama and the New (1923), a collection of lectures originally delivered at King’s College just when the Society was trying to get its footing.71 Archer’s argument begins with an assumption similar to the one espoused by the Cambridge ritualists whom Eliot admired, namely that drama began in the attempt to preserve ancient ritual forms, which were embedded in the choral and non-narrative components of Attic drama. Alongside this ritualized, lyrical form, however, Archer identifies a constant, competing, and even more fundamental imitative impulse that led early plays away from abstraction and toward mimesis. “Imitation was always,” he writes, “the indispensable substratum of drama.”72 He proposes an evolution of drama that begins with these primitive, simplistic forms; continues by casting aside unbelievable and outmoded conventions; and finally arrives at the consummate realism of the contemporary stage, purged of the impurities of its lyric origins. “Slowly, very slowly, has imitation come into its own, and the stage learnt to hold a plain, unexaggerating, undistorting mirror up to nature. . . . [T]he change is quite wrongly described and deplored as a process of degeneration. On the contrary, it may rather be called a process of purification—the liberation of pure drama.” The history of drama, Archer argues, is the history of “this refinement, this toning down,” that is, of the form casting off the vestiges of poetry. And as for the new realism, Archer asks in his introduction to The Old Drama and the New, “who can doubt that the future belongs to it?”73 As I have shown, Eliot believed that the future lay in precisely the opposite direction. So when he prepared to compose an essay “on a new direction for the drama”—the preface to a volume on the Elizabethan dramatists he had been hoping to write, in some form, for years—he found Archer’s evolutionary model the perfect

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counter-weight to his own.74 He tells Richard Aldington on October 5, 1923 about his plans to request a copy of Archer’s book “because I think I can work it in nicely with my four essays,” and he asks, “Can you think of any other conspicuous contemporary whom I could work in in the same way and beat about the ears, or on the other hand use as a support?”75 Eliot’s strategy in the “Preface” is similar to his strategy in “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric,” namely, he first grants Archer the validity of his criticisms of the Elizabethan stage, claiming that he “succeeded in making quite clear all of the dramatic faults.”76 Eliot then challenges Archer’s conclusions and reverses the elder critic’s argument, however, suggesting that the “faults” of the Elizabethan dramatists arose precisely because they did not impede the progressive realism that consumed subsequent drama. In the plays following one of the earliest realistic domestic tragedies, the Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham (1592), Eliot writes, the spirit of realism began its long expansion.77 Since then, “there has been no form to arrest, so to speak, the flow of the spirit at any particular point before it expands and ends its course in the desert of exact likeness to reality.”78 The “progress” of verisimilitude, Eliot argues, results not in a purified realm of ideal drama but in a sterile desert of sameness and mimesis; what Archer views as the triumphant flowering of drama, Eliot suggests is its utter desiccation. Calling upon the Phoenix performances as “most illuminating” in this regard, Eliot suggests that the Elizabethans failed because they refused to submit themselves entirely to their own unrealistic conventions and artifice (the aside, for instance), attempting instead to transcend these conventions toward realism. He writes, “The weakness of Elizabethan drama is not its defect of realism, but its attempt at realism; not its conventions, but its lack of conventions.”79 The drama that Archer desires is nothing but “the photographic and gramophonic record of its time,” and it is doomed to failure precisely because its lack of convention liberates each actor to interpret, improvise, and otherwise improve upon the play’s script.80 And the more successfully each actor individualizes his or her part, the more idiosyncratic the roles become; the more idiosyncratic the roles become, the less “representative” they are of contemporary life. Archer’s desire for purification of artifice, Eliot implies, leads ultimately and simply toward another mode of artifice, all the more insidious for its naive unselfconsciousness. Though Eliot never brought “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” to completion as a book, the preface appeared in The Criterion and he republished it repeatedly in the coming years, sensing in it a lucid articulation of principles that would remain crucial to his own work in the theater.

The Country Wife At the beginning of 1924, Eliot attended the first performance in over 170 years of William Wycherley’s scandalously raucous and lewd The Country Wife, in which the protagonist pretends to be a eunuch and weasels his way past jealous husbands and into the boudoirs of their welcoming wives. J. C. Squire, another of Eliot’s longtime antagonists and one of the high priests of what he called England’s “Established Church of literature,” wrote of the play in the London Mercury, “Until the Phoenix Society came into existence, nobody for two centuries had the bad taste and brazen effrontery to put the thing on,” concluding that, “It is a relief to think that the bold spirits of the Phoenix Society, having now done the filthiest play they could have found, cannot go to such lengths again.”81 Even he, however, had to admit that the play was “outstandingly” well-acted. Another review exclaimed similarly, “what mordant satire, what brilliant

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comedy”: “We almost forgot how wicked it was.”82 Eliot reveled in such comic antics on the stage, which recalled again for him the rollicking performances of the music halls. And here, as in the halls, he sensed a deep and enduring spiritual and purgative value, both for individuals and for the culture. He would later have the pleasure of seeing the leading lady of Wycherley’s comedy, Isabel Jeans, play a role in his own The Confidential Clerk (1953).83 But in 1924, it was another actress, playing a relatively minor role, who caught his attention and whom he praised in his Criterion commentary: It is to be regretted that Miss Athene Seyler failed to receive adequate appreciation for the most individual piece of acting in the performance. Miss Seyler is probably the finest living actress of comedy in England; her personality commands the scene whenever she appears. She played the part of Lady Fidget with a kind of cold ferocity, a pure and undefiled detachment which make her worthy to rank in that supreme class which includes Marie Lloyd and Nellie Wallace.84 Seyler herself would later recall the “gay licentiousness” of The Country Wife and emphasize, in letters dealing with the craft of acting, the stylized performances of Restoration drama and the need to simplify everything in order to attain what she calls a “breadth of gesture” (Figure 11.7).85 In Eliot’s mind, as his “Commentary” makes clear, Seyler and the other actors at the Phoenix were now inheriting the vital tradition that had formerly been held by his most adored music-hall comediennes, especially

Figure 11.7 Athene Seyler, photographed by Bassano, Ltd. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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by Marie Lloyd, who had died just a year before. And as with Swinley, Eliot admires not only Seyler’s detachment but her use of gesture (he calls attention to her hands, in particular) rather than expression in order to achieve comic effects. In referring to her “ferocity,” he recalls the language that he had formerly used to describe the ways that artifice and abstraction can function to intensify emotion. Seyler’s role achieves its savage humor and detachment—like the marionettes, like Swinley, and like the twodimensional characters of Ben Jonson’s drama—not in spite of artifice but because of it. In the fall of 1924, just months after seeing Seyler in The Country Wife, Eliot visited Arnold Bennett at the Reform Club and told him that he had “given up” verse (at least the sort that comprises The Waste Land) in order to compose “a drama of modern life (furnished flat sort of people) in a rhythmic prose.”86 In terms of the dramaturgical territory that Eliot had charted, this description alone should convey something of the demanding challenge that Sweeney Agonistes would pose for him. He aimed to portray, with techniques that emphasized abstraction and artifice, a domestic situation of the very sort that originally gave rise, he had claimed, to the expanding and allconsuming spirit of realism. And these techniques were to be drawn, in part, from the revivals at the Phoenix Society. The play’s opening scenes attempt to respond to this challenge by portraying a realistic, domestic situation in a language that is simplified, conversational, and yet highly rhythmic and metrical. Doris: No it wouldn’t do to be too nice to Pereira. Dusty: Now Sam’s a gentleman through and through. Doris: I like Sam Dusty: I like Sam Yes and Sam’s a nice boy too. He’s a funny fellow87 Neither the diction nor the content of these lines would be out of place in a conventional realistic play, but the insistent and syncopated rhythm, here and throughout, jolts the audience into the recognition of their artifice. The metrical pattern, in other words, intervenes and interrupts the otherwise realistic rendering, much as Eliot desired that ritual and artificial dramatic forms would interrupt and revitalize contemporary realism. One could argue, even, that Sweeney himself embodies the primal energy and reality of the ritual forms that Eliot championed. He interrupts the chatter of the first act with evocative pseudo-rituals: the egg that he shows Doris, the song that he provokes, the Lysol drowning or baptism that he relates, and his increasingly repetitive, drum-like insistence: There wasn’t any joint There wasn’t any joint For when you’re alone When you’re alone like he was alone ...................... Death or life or life or death Death is life and life is death ...................... We’re gona sit here and drink this booze We’re gona sit here and have a tune We’re gona stay and we’re gona go88

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With each rhythmic repetition and ritualized gesture, Sweeney compels the surface of this realistic drama further toward ritual. One could suggest that the play as a whole, in fact, dramatizes the very tension between artifice and realism—perhaps even the triumph of artifice over realism—that had so preoccupied Eliot’s mind in the midst of the Phoenix controversy. The Phoenix had become for him a kind of catalyst, one that provoked the sudden and powerful combination of his new dramatic theories and embodied these theories in living theatrical form. Sweeney’s clipped dialogue and sexual innuendo have been attributed to jazz music and music-hall numbers, but they also have much in common with Restoration comedy.89 In fact, nearly all of the wild experiments, rhythms, and abstractions of Sweeney Agonistes correspond to those elements of the Phoenix performances that stood out to Eliot most boldly and provoked his comment in print. Like Sir Samson Legend from the Phoenix production, for instance, Sweeney is a caricature of himself, a comedic myth of excess: more wicked, more villainous, and more despicable than in the quatrain poems where he had previously appeared or elsewhere. He is a criticism of humanity, but like Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, he is also wracked by spiritual guilt and torment; he has “left the schools / Of knowledge to converse with lust and death.” The play’s ferocious humor seems to be designed to recapture what Eliot admired about the performances by Byford and Seyler. And in the stylized masks that Eliot envisioned for them, the characters of Sweeney assume the puppet-like, inhuman demeanor that made Ion Swinley stand out so powerfully to him at the Phoenix. In short, Eliot’s first play owes an immense and yet heretofore unacknowledged debt to the Phoenix productions that had so frequently absorbed his attention over the preceding five years. The entire experiment, I would argue, is a magnification and expansion of that single intense glimpse of the “unrealised stage” that Eliot had at the Phoenix.

Height and Decline For Eliot, the crowning achievement of the Phoenix was its 1924 revival of King Lear, starring Hubert Carter in a role that one reviewer described as “a masterpiece of memory and sustained force” (Figure 11.8).90 He attended the Sunday evening performance (March 30) with Virginia Woolf, and according to her diary entry, joined her in “jeering and despising” the mediocre production at the time.91 However, as he allowed the performance (and his own response) to settle in his restless memory, he must have begun to reconsider, because he wrote soon thereafter in The Criterion that it was, in fact, “the finest performance in the history of the Phoenix Society . . . an event in a lifetime.”92 He continues by implicitly criticizing his own response, suggesting that Lear could “never be popular in a civilization so corrupted with literary culture that it resents what it cannot diminish . . . which shrinks from direct contact with a great work of art.” Woolf professes her irritation at Eliot’s apparent hypocrisy—“we both jeered & despised; & now he comes out in The Criterion with solemn and stately rebuke of those who jeer & despise”—and she chided him for it afterward: “he sat tight,” she records, “& said that he meant what he wrote.”93 And I think that, in fact, he probably did. In the days that followed, he wrote personally, for the first time ever, to the director, the producer, and three of the lead actors to congratulate them on what he called “an amazingly fine performance.”94

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Figure 11.8 Program, The Phoenix Society production of King Lear (1924). Houghton Library, Harvard University. After Lear, the Phoenix began to lose its spark. Internal quarrels led its wealthy patrons, including Nancy Cunard, to withdraw their support. Montague Summers resigned to pursue more commercially lucrative work, including writing tomes such as Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928). Though Eliot continued to attend board meetings, he also grew discouraged. In a Criterion commentary in 1926, he lists the growing number of similar societies, and though he calls them praiseworthy and valuable, he now recognizes that their business plan is simply unsustainable: “The support . . . comes from a very small number of people, few of whom can be called enthusiasts: they grow tired of signing cheques, and what is still worse, grow tired of seeing each others’ faces.”95 Whether or not the societies could be rescued by a restructuring, he writes, “it would be a very great pity if, in the meantime, The Phoenix were incinerated for ever.”96 Eliot himself offered to resign from the board one month before the society officially closed its doors in July 1926.97 Afterward, he assured co-founder W. S. Kennedy that although he “hardly expected it could be otherwise,” he nonetheless was certain that “the rest of us will want to do anything we can at least so that the society can be wound up without anyone’s suffering financially.”98 “I should like to have been

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more use to ‘The Phoenix,’ ” he concludes his letter, “than merely serving as one of the pall bearers.”99 Of course, Eliot had been of great use to the Society, championing its cause publicly and privately, getting its name into print at every possible occasion, and rebuking its antagonists in international venues. But equally important, in terms of literary history, is the use that the Phoenix Society had been to Eliot. Scholars know much about the importance to Eliot’s poetry and plays of his study of primitive ritual, his love of the music hall, and his admiration for the Ballets Russes. We can now say that his attendance at and sustained admiration for the short-lived Phoenix Society revivals, between 1919 and 1926, proved a powerful and unforeseen catalyst for his thinking about the modern stage, and for the composition of the verse plays that would occupy his imagination for the rest of his career.

Notes 1. Vivien records the dinner and performance in her diary entry for November 23; quoted in the notes to “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,” in Complete Prose 2, 174, note 1. 2. John Francis Hope, “Drama,” New Age (October 9, 1919): 392. 3. W. S. Kennedy, Allan Wade, Montague Summers, and Norman Wilkinson, “The Production of Old Plays, Letter to the Editor,” The Athenaeum 4666 (October 3, 1919): 982. Additional announcements appeared in The Athenaeum on October 31 (1130), November 7 (1143), and November 14 (1211). For the front-page editorial, see “The Phoenix and the Pelican,” The Athenaeum 4669 (October 24, 1919): 1057–58. 4. John Francis Hope, “Drama,” New Age (December 4, 1919): 76; K. A. B., “An Elizabethan Melodrama,” Daily News, November 25, 1919: 7. 5. Hope, “Drama” (December 4, 1919), 76. 6. W. J. Turner, “Drama: The Duchess of Malfi,” London Mercury 1 (January 1920): 368. 7. James Strachey, “The Duchess of Malfi,” The Athenaeum 4674 (November 28, 1919): 1266; William Archer, “The Phoenix Society,” Star (November 25, 1919): 3. 8. Strachey, “The Duchess of Malfi,” 1266. 9. K. A. B., “An Elizabethan Melodrama,” 7. 10. Leo Chiozza Money, “The Phoenix Society’s Revivals” (Letter to the Editor), Daily News, November 27, 1919: 6; and “The Duchess of Malfi” (Letter to the Editor), Daily News, December 2, 1919: 6. 11. “The Duchess of Malfi. Performance by the Phoenix Society,” The Times, November 25, 1919, 10. 12. William Archer, “The Stage of the Day: The Phoenix Society and Restoration Revivals,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (November 20, 1920): 403. 13. Ibid. 14. William Archer, “The Duchess of Malfi,” The Nineteenth Century 87 (January 1920): 126, 129, 130 (126–32). 15. Eliot, “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,” Art & Letters 3 (winter 1920), in Complete Prose 2, 170. 16. Anna Irene Miller, The Independent Theater in Europe: 1887 to the Present (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1931, rpt. 1966), 177. 17. Deborah Kaplan, “Representing the Nation: Restoration Comedies on the Early TwentiethCentury London Stage,” Theater Survey 36 (November 1995): 39. 18. “The Stage Society: A Retrospect and an Appeal,” The London Mercury 21 (November 1929): 39.

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19. The Society offered two performances of the play at the Haymarket Theatre on January 24 and 25, 1915. 20. Summers had assisted the Stage Society with its revivals; he recounts his practice there and with the Phoenix Society, which he claims to have been barely connected with the Stage Society rather than operating under its “auspices” (as the programs indicate) in his Restoration Theater (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1934), 324–29. 21. Joseph Jerome [Brocard Sewall], Montague Summers: A Memoir (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1965), 5. 22. Kaplan, “Representing the Nation,” 43. 23. Norman Marshall, The Other Theater (London: John Lehmann, 1943), 77. 24. Quoted in ibid., 77–78. 25. Ibid., 77. 26. Nigel Playfair, The Story of the Lyric Theater Hammersmith (London: Benjamin Blom, 1925; rpt. 1969), 212. 27. Ralph Wright, “The Phoenix Performance,” The New Statesman (February 23, 1924): 573. 28. Alan Andrews, “Allan Wade’s Later Years,” in Wade’s Memories of the London Theater, 1900–1914 (London: Society for Theater Research, 1983), 40. 29. Eliot, “Syllabus: Modern English Literature (Elizabethan),” in Complete Prose 1, 757. 30. Eliot, “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric.” 31. Complete Prose 2, 171–72. 32. Ibid., 171. 33. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Complete Prose 2, 110. 34. W. J. Turner, “Drama: Marriage à la Mode,” The London Mercury 5 (March 1920): 628. 35. Tarn, “The Theater: The Phoenix’s Second Production,” The Spectator (February 14, 1920): 210. 36. L1, 444. 37. Ibid., 447. 38. Eliot, “The Phoenix Society: To the Editor of The Athenaeum,” The Athenaeum 4687 (February 27, 1920), in Complete Prose 2, 193. 39. Tarn, “The Phoenix,” The Spectator (December 4, 1920): 739. 40. L1, 509. 41. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: May 1921,” The Dial 70 (June 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 341. 42. Complete Prose 2, 342. 43. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955): 664–65. 44. Desmond MacCarthy, “Ben Jonson: An Object Lesson,” The New Statesman (5 Feb 1921): 531. 45. When he was visiting on Sunday, September 19, 1920; see The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. Two: 1920–24, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (New York: Penguin, 1981), 68. 46. Complete Prose 2, 343. 47. Ibid. 48. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 2.103. 49. Ibid., 2.104. 50. Virginia Woolf, “Congreve,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. Three: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1988), 296–97. 51. Virginia Woolf, “Congreve,” The New Statesman (April 2, 1921): 756. 52. Eliot, “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism,” The Tyro 1 (spring 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 302. 53. Complete Prose 2, 303. 54. Ibid., 304.

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55. The Duchess of Malfi, III.ii.70, 72. Webster and Tourneur, ed. John Addington Symonds, Mermaid Series (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888), 177. Steven Matthews offers an extensive discussion of this scene, Eliot’s fragment, and the function of both in The Waste Land in T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–103. 56. Eliot adapts the following passages, with various changes, from The Duchess of Malfi III. ii.61–62 and 59–60, thus: “You have cause to love me, I did enter you into my heart / Before ever you vouchsafed to ask for the key” and “When I grow old, I shall have all the court / Powder their hair with arras, to be like me” (WLF 105, 107). Eliot had misquoted the latter passage (substituting the Prufrockian phrase “When I grow old” for Webster’s original, which reads “When I wax gray”) in his 1919 review as well. “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric,” 171. 57. Eliot used these phrases in 1941 when he recalled the same passage —and, this time, quoted it accurately—in a broadcast on The Duchess printed in The Listener 26 (December 18, 1941): 825–26. 58. Lyndall Gordon, for instance, speculates that “The Death of the Duchess” was composed between 1916 and 1919 (probably closer to the latter) in “The Waste Land Manuscript,” American Literature 45 (January 1974): 559. Christopher Ricks assigns the fragment to sometime in 1919 in IMH, xlii. Lawrence Rainey places its composition earlier, however, in September 1916, in Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 200–1. 59. The performances were held at the Shaftesbury Theatre on Sunday and Monday, January 28–29, 1923. 60. “Phoenix Society, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” The Times, January 30, 1923, 8. 61. Rosenberg met Sherbrooke in 1912 and attests to his dramatic abilities in a letter to Ruth Lowry in March of that year: “He took me home with him and almost made me delirious with delight at some of his marvelous recitations. His power is incredible. I have never seen anything like it and could hardly conceive anything so. He gave the Raven.” In Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 239. 62. Desmond MacCarthy, “Ford and the Phoenix,” The New Statesman (February 3, 1923): 515; “Phoenix Society, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Times, 8. 63. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” The Criterion 1 (April 1923), in Complete Prose 2, 434. 64. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: July 1921,” The Dial 71 (August 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 363. Craig’s pamphlet had appeared in The Chapbook 20 (February 1921), 3–36. 65. L2, 192–93. In the same letter (August 23, 1923), Eliot relates his progress on his “jazz drama.” 66. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” 434. 67. Eliot, “John Ford,” Times Literary Supplement 1579 (May 5, 1932), in Complete Prose 4, 477. 68. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore I.i.57–58. John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Broken Heart, ed. S. P. Sherman (Boston: Heath & Co., 1915). 69. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” 435. 70. For Eliot’s early familiarity with the Cambridge Ritualists, see “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” (1913), in Complete Prose 1, 106–19. In “Euripides and Professor Murray” (1920), he writes: “Few books are more fascinating than those of Miss Harrison, Mr. Cornford, or Mr. Cooke, when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites.” In Complete Prose 2, 197. 71. According to the King’s College London calendar, Archer delivered the first of fourteen lectures on November 19, 1919 at 5:30 p.m. (King’s College London. Calendar for 1919–1920 (London: King’s College London, 1919), 89). Archer himself clarifies further: “By a curious coincidence . . . Webster’s Duchess of Malfy was revived by the Phoenix Society two days

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72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

anthony cuda before, in my second lecture, I attempted an analysis of it” (The Old Drama and the New (London: Heinemann, 1923), 110). Archer, The Old Drama and the New, 16. Ibid., 17. L2, 289. Eliot refers to the essay that later became “Four Elizabethan Dramatists”—first bearing the subtitle “I. A Preface” when it appeared in The Criterion in 1924, later subtitled “A Preface to an Unwritten Book,” in Complete Prose 2, 503–12. L2, 246. Eliot, “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” 504. In the syllabus to his 1918–19 Extension course, Eliot refers to Arden of Feversham as “a unique attempt at tragedy based on contemporary events” and asks, “Why was this kind of realism not more popular?” Complete Prose 1, 754. Eliot, “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” 504. Ibid., 505. Ibid., 507. J. C. Squire, “Drama,” The London Mercury 9 (1924): 543, 542. Squire must have been dismayed to learn that Phoenix founder Montague Summers was, just then, completing his four-volume scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Wycherley, published by the Nonesuch Press in 1924. For Eliot’s remarks on the “Established Church of Literature” in England, see “ ‘London Letter’: March 1921,” The Dial 70 (April 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 334. J. T. Grein, “Congreve’s [sic] ‘Country Wife,’ ” The Illustrated London News, March 1, 1924, 372 (Grein corrected the title in the next issue). Isabel Jeans played Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer in The Confidential Clerk when it opened in August 1953 at the Royal Lyceum Theater, Edinburgh, and she continued in the role when it played at London’s Lyric Theater for more than 250 performances. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 2 (April 1924), in Complete Prose 2, 524. Athene Seyler and Stephen Haggard, The Craft of Comedy (New York: Theater Arts Books, 1957), 76, 113. She also describes the crucial importance, for comedy, of what Eliot refers to as cold detachment, which she calls “the standing outside of a character or situation” or the “dual control of one’s performance” (9, 58). Arnold Bennett, The Journals, ed. Frank Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 483. The entry is dated Wednesday, September 10—and the conversation happened “last night.” And the next day, Bennett goes on: “I was thinking about what T. S. Eliot and I had said about character in fiction. A character has to be conventionalized. It must somehow form part of the pattern, or lay the design of the book.” CPP, 75. Ibid., 84. Steven Matthews argues that both the form and substance of Sweeney Agonistes is, in fact, greatly indebted to Early Modern plays. T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature, 115–19. “King Lear: Production by the Phoenix,” The Era (April 2, 1924): 6. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 2.302. Eliot, “A Commentary,” in Complete Prose 2, 525. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 2.302. L2, 360. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The New Criterion 4 (June 1926), in Complete Prose 2, 785. L2, 786. L3, 177. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 228.

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12 Eliot and Dance Susan Jones

E

liot’s relationship to dance has not, in general, made a leading contribution to accounts of his reputation as a literary modernist. Yet the poet’s significant engagement with the art form developed over the course of his life and career.1 The letters and prose show that he was an enthusiastic social dancer, a connoisseur of ballet and modern dance, and dance played an important part in his relationship with Vivien (whom he met at a dance).2 He enjoyed the music hall, jazz, and popular music (as studies by David Chinitz, Barry Faulk, and others have shown).3 He was an ardent follower of Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, which was the principal source of contemporary experimentation in dance when Eliot was residing in Paris in 1910–11. This avantgarde company was popular with the London intelligentsia and literati of the 1920s, including Eliot, and he continued to show his understanding of experimental ballet in England well after the Russian impresario’s death in 1929.4 However, Eliot’s interest in dance went far beyond these personal associations. His poetic writing benefited from his understanding of ritualized movement, stemming in part from an astute perception of the traditions, discipline, and ascesis of ballet training and technique. By following Eliot’s allusions to the forms and practices of dance as he drew on its primitivist, liturgical, and Symbolist aspects from his earliest poems right through to his latest work, this chapter investigates dance as a central trope of his poetics. Eliot’s imagining of the choreographed body enters his very early poetry and is sustained throughout his career as a compelling figure. The following account begins with Eliot’s early interest in French Symbolism, which I argue stimulated his initial formation of a choreographic element in the poetry. Just as Frank Kermode identified the Symbolist dancer at the heart of W. B. Yeats’s work, dance forms of the fin de siècle also found their way into Eliot’s early consideration of the stylized movement of figures and broadly spiritual resonances of the early poetry. One of the most intriguing effects of these influences was that Eliot’s articulation of the “impersonality” of the poet appears in a choreographed element detectable in the imagery and argument of his early Symbolist-influenced poems. Among the many literary and philosophical sources that inspired his theory of impersonality, dance offered Eliot a compelling visualization and embodiment of this idea. During the late 1910s and 1920s Eliot continued to identify the vexed relationship between creator and creation of art in the paradigm of dance practice, and the second section of the chapter shows the impact on Eliot of the work of a specific Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer, Léonide Massine (Figures 12.1 and 12.2). Eliot’s turn to the traditions of ballet continues to resonate right through the 1920s in his writing on verse drama, and in the late poetry a close relationship again surfaces

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Figure 12.1 Léonide Massine, Parade (1917), with design by Pablo Picasso.

Figure 12.2 Léonide Massine, Les Présages (1933), with design by André Masson.

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between the spiritual element of Eliot’s poetry and his understanding of dance as a disciplined technique requiring the detachment of both creator and performer of art. The final section of this chapter explores the role of dance in Four Quartets as a vehicle for expressing his spiritual journey. By following Eliot’s career from his tentative ideas about the creation of art in the early work to his contemplation of the meaning of divine grace in the Quartets, I suggest that dance consistently forms a provocative thread linking important continuities and developments in his work.

Mallarmé, Fuller, and Eliot’s Early Poetry Eliot’s early poetry has a choreographed quality that can be traced to the influence of turn-of-the-century experimental dance and Mallarmé’s reflections on dance as a metaphor for the activity of poetic creation. In “La Figlia che Piange” (composed 1911), the poet expresses his mental state through the trope of choreographed moves. “The Burnt Dancer” and “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” (both 1914) evoke moments of stillness in motion that Loïe Fuller (Figure 12.3), Isadora Duncan, and Ida Rubinstein exhibited in their experimental dances. Eliot received an understanding of experimental dance of the fin de siècle both through the writings of Mallarmé and, most likely, from personal observation. In an

Figure 12.3 Loïe Fuller, La Danse blanche (1896).

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essay on “Ballets” (1886), Mallarmé wrote that the French ballerina La Cornalba suggested “through the miracle of bends and leaps, a kind of corporeal writing, what it would take pages of prose, dialogue, and description to express, if it were transcribed: a poem independent of any scribal apparatus.”5 The economy of dance form allows the dancer to evoke a particular mood or situation through bodily movement alone. She suggests with great immediacy, with a single gesture or turn of the head, that which the writer might need several pages to capture in prose. Mallarmé refers to an action not yet completed, one that more distinctly aligns itself with the notion of process, of passage, a gesturing toward, a “becoming.”6 Eliot later responded to Mallarmé’s “corporeal writing” when, in “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” he credited the French poet with calling attention to “the actual writing of poetry, the accidence and syntax. . . . Mallarmé gets his modernity, his sincerity, simply by close attention to the actual writing.”7 Eliot, like Mallarmé, placed importance on the phenomenological experience of the creative act; for both, the narrative function of the dancer’s gesture provided an important model for the physical act of creativity and experimentation with poetic temporality. Likewise, Eliot may have appreciated Mallarmé’s understanding of a more radical form of dance. At the Folies Bergère in 1893, Mallarmé saw the American dancer Loïe Fuller perform a solo that contained neither traditional ballet steps nor static poses. Her body was swathed in an expansive cloak of translucent silk, beneath which she held long sticks to extend the circumference of the cloth. As she swooped and lilted across the stage with apparent freedom, the audience would catch glimpses of an outline of the body beneath the moving material. She used her arm movements to manipulate the costume, creating extravagant spiral effects as she performed a series of vertiginous chaînée turns, sometimes traveling, sometimes spinning on the spot, while the stage lights flickered across the moving figure. For Mallarmé, Fuller represented the autographic function of the dancer who is both creator and product of her creation.8 His account of Fuller’s performance, one of a series of prose sketches on the aesthetics of the contemporary theater, praised her musical embodiment, entwined in swirling materials shimmering in the play of light, describing her as an “enchanteresse” engaged in mystical sorcery.9 Her solo was “the theatrical form of poetry par excellence,”10 confirming Bertrand Marchal’s observation that, for this poet, dance “suggests the choreographic dimension of all poetry.”11 He alluded to Fuller’s dance in one of his sketches for Hérodiade (composed between 1864 and 1898), when he described “a sort of frighteningly exquisite dance, on the spot without moving—any place.”12 Fuller performed for a week at the Boston Opera House in January during Eliot’s final undergraduate year at Harvard. A notice in The Boston Globe begins, “Loie Fuller, who will be at the Boston opera house all this week, scarcely needs an introduction to Boston amusement lovers.”13 Given his membership in the Signet and Stylus societies at Harvard, whose members socialized with Boston’s literati and art patrons, as well as his taste for the performing arts, it is likely that Eliot heard of her, and he may well have attended one of her performances. Celebrated later by Yeats in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” Fuller was the foremost inspiration for the Symbolist trope of the “self-begotten” dancer.14 This trope appeared in many guises at the turn of the century: in the abundant interpretations of the dance of Salomé, including Fuller’s in 1900 at the Paris exhibition, Maud Allan’s in 1906, or in the dance in Hofmannsthal’s

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Elektra 1903 (performed by Greta Riesensthal), where the soloist’s movement focuses on the intensity of a single circling figure pivoting on the spot in a pool of light, in a manner that requires considerable muscular control to sustain the fixed location.15 Isadora Duncan and Ida Rubinstein, whom Eliot had the opportunity to see in Paris in 1911, both included this trope in their performances.16 In “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” (1914), the saint circles a lamp, delighting in self-torture, performing in circular movements mirroring those of the self-consumption (or purging fire) of “The Burnt Dancer.” This emphasis on circular, self-reflexive, self-sacrificial movement by a single figure appears repeatedly during the period in many examples of the solo dancer’s performance as she is enrobed and moves in spiraling pivots, bathed in the spotlight. For example, Fuller’s genius for manipulating the innovative technological potential of the contemporary theater stimulated her regular performance of “The Fire Dance” at the Folies Bergère (c. 1896), where she swirled in her cloak on a small glass platform under which red light emanated from below stage. She appeared to be consumed by fire—becoming the fire itself, with the fluttering effect captured in Eliot’s description of the fire-consumed moth of “The Burnt Dancer”: “O danse mon papillon noir!” Other modern dances offered Eliot a far more meditative trope of embodiment. Against the fluidity and grace of the soloist’s vertiginous spinning, dancers often interpolated moments of arrested stillness into their performances. Isadora Duncan’s early dances juxtaposed the imagined freedom and fluidity of “Greek dancing” with the poses of dancers depicted on ancient vases and on the friezes of architectural structures. Duncan’s dancing showed that these positions do not represent stasis—they may be held momentarily, but the stillness always suggests readiness to move. In Paris Eliot also had the opportunity to see Ida Rubinstein, a dancer who specialized in capturing the dramatic stillness of the pose. In 1911 Rubinstein took the lead in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s dance-drama or mystery play, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, written in French by D’Annunzio with music by Debussy, choreography by Michel Fokine, and sets by Léon Bakst. The play was staged in Paris and danced by Ida Rubinstein from May 29 to June 19, 1911, so Eliot could have seen it, as Gross, Hargrove, and Ricks have concluded.17 Even if Eliot did not attend the dance drama itself, he would have read about it in Henri Ghéon’s review in the July 1911 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française, where the critic suggests that through Rubinstein’s interpretation “Sebastian is the archer with the hyacinth hair” and that Rubinstein’s dancing of the Passion “washes away every stain and encloses the work in a circle of purity.”18 Commentators emphasized the quality of Fokine’s choreography for Rubinstein, which focused on dynamic action and arrested movement to phrase a series of what are virtually tableaux vivants. D’Annunzio had envisaged a strongly pictorial effect for his dance-play, “St. Sebastian against the tree—a Daphne . . . A kind of corporeal topography.”19 Rubinstein spent hours studying images of the saint, composing various attitudes and sculpting poses.20 Following her performance in June 1911, the Paris critic of The Boston Herald commented: Exquisitely formed, with the long flowing lines that belong by right to a leading danseuse, Mlle Rubinstein reveals a remarkably artistic perception of the part. There is symbolism and suggestion, more than a positive saintliness, doubtless, in the presentation, but the play as it stands is more paganly mystic than triumphantly Christian.21

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Choreographer Fokine manipulated the crowd scenes to help Rubinstein deliver this “mystical” quality, expressing chaotic energy and movement interspersed with moments of intense stillness.22 Eliot certainly seems to have been drawn to the spiritual focus of the solo dancer and her highly developed sense of “centeredness” in the body. The figuration of the “hyacinth” girl looking into “the heart of light” in The Waste Land, a rare moment of meditative calm within the poem’s fragmentary turmoil, and the dance at “the still point of the turning world” in “Burnt Norton” both capture the active stillness of the poses of the early twentieth-century Symbolist dancer. In terms of Eliot’s enduring poetics, “La Figlia che Piange” is perhaps Eliot’s most important communication with the dance of the fin de siècle. Here he uses the choreographed body in the service of an early meditation on poetic impersonality. The epigraph to the poem, “O quam te memorem virgo?” announces a concern with poetic composition: “O, how should I call you, virgin?” asks Aeneas when his mother appears disguised as a Carthaginian huntress.23 Though he does not recognize her, he believes she is a goddess. In “memorem,” Virgil adopts a deliberative subjunctive often used in questions or asked in some confusion, when no answer is expected, when someone is thinking about a course of action.24 The question of how to memorialize the woman is a question of composition, how to create a poetic image and communicate poetic meaning. The poem opens with a series of commands: Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise— Fling them to the ground and turn With a fugitive resentment in your eyes: But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.25 The poem’s visually photographic, even filmic element, drawing attention to moments of languid gesture and arrested movement, demands of the muse a highly recognizable dramatic register. Yet the situation of the speaker is expressed through a series of excessively qualified “cogitations,” voiced as a number of commands to the muse to act: “stand,” “lean,” “weave,” “clasp,” “fling.” In uttering these verbal directives the voice prompts a predominantly choreographed vision of the subject of poetry. An equivocal indeterminacy in the speaker’s voice generates an imagined movement between poses and hints at the poet’s struggle to craft a scenario that eludes representation: “So I would have had him leave / So I would have had her stand and grieve”; “I should have lost a gesture or a pose.”26 With great economy, the final couplet of “La Figlia” expresses ideas later developed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), where Eliot elides the subjectivity of the poet in favor of his function as “medium” of dissemination.27 The subject “I” of the second stanza—“I should find some way incomparably light and deft”— continues in the third until “I should have lost a gesture and a pose,” and is then dropped in the final couplet: “Sometimes these cogitations still amaze / The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.” Here the speaker deliberately refuses a personal, subjective role. The trochee of the first line of the couplet, “Sometimes,” emphasizes rhythmically the substitution of “cogitations” for the first-person subject of the verb.

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“Cogitations” actively “amaze,” doing the work of the poetry, precipitating the act of creation. The poet as subject gives way to a subject constituted by the process of creation itself—an idea that reminds us of Mallarmé’s wonder at Loïe Fuller’s subsumption of personality in the creation of her “poème par excellence” or of Yeats’s use of the dancer to show his ideas about the sacrifice of the poet to poetry. In “La Figlia,” Eliot explores movement and the arrest of movement as the active and visual material of poetic imagery, but he also alludes to the mental activity of the poet, which itself requires an effort of detachment from subjective feelings, a going through emotion to tap the emotional current of the poem itself. For Mallarmé, Fuller represented the “symbol” of the autographic poet, whose detachment from individual personality allowed the creator to become the creation of her own dance poem. For Eliot too, in “La Figlia,” the “cogitations” of the poet’s creative mind remain detached from the subjective “I” of the poet. Long before Eliot addressed the theme of impersonality in prose, he was experimenting with the subjectivity of the poet through a uniquely “choreographic” presentation, translating into a sense of the detachment, but also the mentally “muscular” activity of poetic creation. The poet is a vessel for the creative act; the poem is not an expression of the subjective self. A precedent for Eliot’s understanding of the choreographic imagination can also be found in Mallarmé, who had downplayed the subjective role of the poet in his own experimentation. Henry Weinfield tells us that while Mallarmé worked on Hérodiade and L’Après-midi d’un faune between 1866 and 1867, his “emphasis on poetic impersonality, which was to have such an important impact on Yeats, Eliot, and twentieth-century poetry in general” found expression in letters of this period, not as a concrete idea, but as an “experience born out of the creative process.”28 The compelling example of the dancer of the period was for Mallarmé a stimulant for these ideas. Fuller’s dance, Mallarmé writes, “as extension of herself,”29 establishes the dance itself as the objective end-point of choreography while the dancer’s subjective personality is elided. The mimetic function of dance is incorporated into Fuller’s identity as creator. As Frank Kermode observed, Mallarmé’s account of Loïe Fuller provided literary modernism, in its early years, with “an emblem of the Image of art, ‘self-begotten’ in Yeats’s favourite word.”30 Yeats expressed the yoking of identity of the creator and creation of art when he famously asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”31 For Eliot, however, the elision of the poet’s subjectivity is couched in somewhat different terms. Writing modern poetry required “escape from emotion,” a going through emotional experience in order to document it without reference to the subjective role of the poet.32 In Fuller’s solo, Mallarmé found just this notion of the creator as medium of the creation, and the dancer provided him with a visual analogy for the effect sought by Symbolist poetics. From the audience’s perspective, Fuller’s entire body was at times obliterated by the moving spiral of her silken costume. Fading and reappearing in swathes of swirling light, her elusive gestures suggested a poetic spirituality acquired through the sacrifice of corporeal presence to the artistic ideal. Eliot’s turn from the first person to the cogitations of the mind as the subject of poetic creativity in “La Figlia” followed in this very tradition, the poet’s self disappearing in the strenuous activity of the production of the poem.

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The Russian Ballet and Dramatic Form In these ideas of the impersonality of dance and the moment of stillness, Symbolist dance left an indelible mark on Eliot’s post-World War I work. But the major dance influence on him during the 1920s was that of the Russian Ballet, and specifically the dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine. The strongest influences of the Ballets Russes on Eliot initially developed in part from his respect for Igor Stravinsky’s music and the famous Stravinsky ballets. Eliot was captivated by the modernity of the music for The Rite of Spring, which had first been performed in Paris in 1913 with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and designs by Nicholas Roerich. Eliot reviewed a revival of the ballet, with new choreography by Léonide Massine, in the “London Letter” to The Dial in September 1921, and although he was not so keen on the choreography, he praised Stravinsky’s transformation of “the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor-horn,” sounds that entered The Waste Land’s cityscape in the “Fire Sermon” with “the sound of horns and motors.”33 He may also have taken inspiration from the scenario of Petrushka, which he most likely saw performed in 1911 during his first year in Paris (1910–11), or in subsequent years, before and after the First World War, when he was living in London.34 In his “London Letter” of July 1921, Eliot recalled that “Two years ago M. Diaghileff’s ballet arrived, the first Russian dancers since the war: we greeted the Good-humoured Ladies, and the Boutique Fantasque, and the Three-Cornered Hat, as the dawn of an art of the theatre. . . . [T]he ballet will probably be one of the influences forming a new drama, if a new drama ever comes.”35 Eliot recognized the cultural importance of the Ballets Russes as a hub of innovation in the arts, often seeking to publish reports of the ballet in The Criterion. In 1924 he wrote to Lady Rothermere, then patron of the journal: “I am writing tonight to Massine, to ask him to come and see me when he returns. I should like to get some sort of notes from him, from Diaghilev, from Stravinsky and from Cocteau”; a month later: “the interview with Diaghilev, and the programme, are just what we want.”36 Walter Hanks Shaw’s account of the inaugural seven-week season of five ballets and two dramas at the Soirée de Paris included notices of the collaborative work of dance with drama, art, and music by Darius Milhaud, Eric Satie, Massine, Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, and Tristan Tzara.37 Eliot also wrote a paragraph on the “inestimable privilege of a season of the Diaghilev Ballet,” in his “Commentary” in the same issue.38 In fact, when the Ballets Russes did appear in 1924 at the London Coliseum (with one of the less successful pieces, Cimarosiana) Eliot was somewhat disappointed, as it did not seem to match the standard of the earlier season that he had praised, and in 1925, like many London literati, he identified a deterioration in the standard of the late Diaghilev works. Nevertheless he expressed an enduring interest in Stravinsky’s contribution to avant-garde dance. He felt that it was “a public obligation . . . to continue to support Mr Diaghileff’s ballet, and use our efforts so that on his next visit to London he may have the facilities for producing the Sacré and the newer work of Stravinski.”39 Eliot felt particular admiration for the dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine (1895–1979), calling him “the greatest mimetic dancer in the world” in a 1924 Criterion “Commentary.”40 Although Eliot did not like the choreography for The Rite of Spring, Massine otherwise inspired the poet between 1919 and 1928, both as

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performer and in almost all his other choreographic work. Massine probably helped more than any other artist to stimulate his ongoing interest in dance as ritual and in verse drama as an ideal form for the future. He provided Eliot with a model for the ritual rhythms of dance and the illustration of “impersonality” in an ideal dramatic performer. Massine was born in Russia, trained at the Moscow Imperial Theatre School from 1904 to 1912 and joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1914, where he established himself as a charismatic performer, especially in demi-caractère roles.41 Shortly after joining the company, Massine was invited by Diaghilev to succeed Nijinsky as principal choreographer. His talents as performer and creator blossomed under the auspices of the great impresario until 1920; during this period Massine created eleven new ballets for the Ballets Russes.42 Both as performer and choreographer, Massine was a great favorite with audiences during the postwar seasons of the Ballets Russes. The Eliots saw Massine dance often during this period, and Eliot especially praised the choreography of those Massine ballets they attended at the 1919 Ballets Russes season after the War. Following Massine’s performance in his ballet Three Corner’d Hat on July 22, 1919, Vivien Eliot wrote in her diary “Massine really wonderful.”43 Eliot, in a letter to Mary Hutchinson on April 27, 1922, confessed that he “quite fell in love with him” and that “I want to meet him more than ever and he is a genius.”44 After the meeting, he wrote again: “I liked Massine very much indeed—with no disappointment—and hope I shall see him again. He was much as I expected him to be.”45 As a postscript to the same letter he added: “Do you think Massine liked me? And would he come and see me, do you think?” Massine’s impact on Eliot was not simply to reveal clarity of movement and rhythmic precision. Massine seemed to imbue his performances with a kind of detachment, a self-contained control that (paradoxically), without forfeiting a forceful presence on stage, appealed to Eliot’s penchant for an aesthetic of impersonality. Massine’s choreography likewise demonstrated a kind of stylistic and aesthetic self-possession. One of his most popular ballets, La Boutique fantasque, a fantasy about toys that come to life, in which Massine also played the role of the toyshop owner, intrigued the London intelligentsia in spite of its frivolous theme. It captured the attention of Ezra Pound, for one, who wrote of the “impersonality” of Massine’s stage presence and his choreography for the “mechanized” bodies of the “toys”: “with ‘La Boutique Fantasque’ the Russian Ballet again lays claim to serious attention.”46 Pound describes this ballet as “a triumph of certain modern aesthetic ideas.” Among other critics, James Strachey also admired Massine’s choreography in 1919 because it succeeded in “extending the classical style” rather than abandoning it.47 For Eliot too, Massine’s choreography was innovative, but, essentially, retained the traditions of ballet. Massine’s particular influence on Eliot presents a tricky problem. Because of the dancer’s stylistic eclecticism and wide-ranging exploitation of a variety of dance forms at this period we have to be careful about identifying his influence on Eliot. Massine was trained in the traditions of ballet technique, but researched and absorbed folk dance and social dance forms and was constantly experimenting with genre. In praising Massine, Eliot was chiefly persuaded by something in excess of his anthropological interest in atavistic forms and dance’s “primitive rhythm.” Of all the figures of the Ballets Russes, as a choreographer and dancer Massine seemed perfectly to embody for Eliot an ideal of “impersonality” and an artist whose modernism was founded on

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a rewriting of tradition. It was essentially the balletic works of the 1919 season that impressed Eliot the most—La Boutique fantasque, Good-humoured Ladies—where the “ritual” techniques of traditional ballet (practiced each day in the repetitions of the class) were for him harnessed to a sophisticated modernist aesthetic emphasizing its urbanity and non-expressivist detachment in performance style. In a review of the Phoenix Society’s production of The Duchess of Malfi on November 24, 1919, soon after seeing Massine’s productions of the 1919 season, Eliot complained that the actors did not fulfill his hoped-for revitalization of poetic drama, failing to “obtain, with verse, an effect as immediate and direct as that of the best ballet.”48 Eliot’s praise for Massine may have aided the poet’s theorization of dramatic form. In The Criterion of 1923, Eliot wrote of Massine as an actor that he was “the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract,” and as such “belongs to the future stage.” Eliot contrasts “the abstract gesture of Massine, which symbolises emotion” with the “untrue, and always monotonous . . . conventional gesture of the ordinary stage, which is supposed to express emotion.”49 Eliot’s application of the word “abstract” to describe Massine’s gestures is significant. The dancer sublimates his (off-stage) personality and becomes the medium of choreographic invention just as, in Eliot’s formulation, the poet becomes a conduit of verbal expression distinct from his subjective personality and feeling. As we have seen, Eliot had already been thinking about these issues in relation to the choreographed movement of figures in “La Figlia” and other early poems.50 When Eliot further explored the possibilities of an ideal dramatic form in “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (1923), he alluded to the Russian Ballet in a similar vein, this time suggesting a “performing” personality distinct from other forms of subjective expression: Anyone who has observed one of the great dancers of the Russian school will have observed that the man or the woman whom we admire is a being who exists only during the performances, that it is a personality, a vital flame which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance.51 Eliot here echoes the Mallarméan homage to Loïe Fuller; the dancer Marie Rambert also described Vaslav Nijinsky on stage in 1913 in similar terms: “He didn’t at all resemble the person he was in life. He . . . created something—unrelated almost to himself, to his self.”52 In fact for Eliot the product of ballet “would appear to be a creation much more of the dancer than the choreographer” because of its “development of several centuries into a strict form.”53 The dancer must learn the art through rigorous training, thus acquiring a kind of detachment and subsumption of subjective personality. Thus the “personality” of the great dancer, like the poet, represents a kind of “impersonal, and if you like, inhuman force.” The act of creation is produced through the intelligent dancer’s delivery of the dynamics and phrasing of movement in the same way that creativity occurs within the interstices of activities of the mind of the poet in “La Figlia.” In his “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928) Eliot brings his ideas of impersonality and tradition into relation with his goals for verse drama. While striving for a future “form” for the dramatic arts, Eliot privileges ballet as an example of what an “ideal” future drama might look like.54 He presents a number of speakers who discuss the status of contemporary drama. “How is the ballet concerned with the permanent

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and universal?” asks one speaker in response to the idea proposed by another that ballet offers a model for drama.55 In the discussion that follows, Eliot envisages an innovative turn for the future of dramatic form, offering a radical place for ballet, not as purely subjective expressivism, but as an “impersonal” form in this scheme. Eliot introduces the case for “ballet” in the “Dialogue” through the voice of the character named E. Having rejected contemporary works of dramatic realism, and those presenting drama of a more didactic nature, E claims ballet as an appropriate theatrical art privileging the formal elements of composition: A few years ago I—and you B and you C and A—was delighted by the Russian ballet. Here seemed to be everything we wanted in drama, except the poetry. It did not teach any “lesson,” but it had form. It seemed to revive the more formal element in drama for which we craved.56 E distinguishes between ballet as technique or style, and ballet as theatrical production, valuing the essential form of ballet as the model for future drama: I concede that the more recent ballets have not given me the same pleasure. But for that I blame Mr. Diaghilev, not the ballet in principle. If there is a future for drama, and particularly poetic drama, will it not be in the direction indicated by the ballet? Is it not a question of form rather than ethics? And is not the question of verse drama versus prose drama a question of degree of form? Eliot’s dialogue then moves from the importance of form to the relationship between the formal and moral components of art. B concedes that while much of ballet is indeed “ephemeral and superficial” (exceptions being those ballets associated with Stravinsky or Cocteau), it is valuable because “it has, unconsciously, concerned itself with a permanent form.” The strength of ballet, B continues, is that “it is a tradition, a training, an ascesis, which, to be fair, is not of Russian but of Italian origin, and which ascends for several centuries. Sufficient to say that an efficient dancer has undergone a training which is like a moral training. Has any successful actor of our time undergone anything similar?”57 E takes up the baton, asserting that “You all approve of the ballet because it is a system of physical training, of traditional, symbolical and highly skilled movements. It is a liturgy of very wide adaptability.” Eliot’s understanding of ballet as a “liturgy” integrates his aesthetic and spiritual journeys, and is of central importance to his future representation of dance in Four Quartets. E develops this idea by comparing the “consummation of the drama” with “the ceremony of the mass.” Eliot made a similar comparison in a 1925 review of two contemporary books on dance, claiming that striving for a state of grace in theological terms is compatible with an understanding of the practice of dance: “For is not the High Mass . . . one of the highest developments of dancing?”58 This surprising claim can best be understood in relation to what Eliot learned from contemporary dance and especially his experiences of watching Massine, whose training required the subjection of the body to a rigorous physical discipline of the sort he equated with the spiritual discipline of religious acceptance. In Massine’s self-contained and often urbane style—he was mesmerizing to watch (even on film that is clear today)—Eliot observed what is essential to all great dancers: the ability to apprehend and control the “centre,” an internal point of origin that forms

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the focal point and stimulus of all movement and line. A dancer’s “good line” not only refers to the ability to create pleasing shapes and extensions of the limbs; its execution derives from a strong sense of “placing,” where the limbs extend outward from a torso and trunk that, when at rest, is squarely centered with shoulders over the hips. The body’s movement originates in a strongly felt inner point that may be located in ballet mid-level in the trunk, and, in contemporary dance forms, lower in the abdomen. Eliot is alert to the physical material from which dance is itself produced, its outward expression of inner states of being and emotional activity, its physiological expression of inner rhythms (which Virginia Woolf connected to the beating of the heart), its musical constitution, the effort and motivations of mind and body that frequently gather when the dancer is apparently at rest.

“The Still Point” in Four Quartets In Four Quartets Eliot assimilates his various meditations on dance to reveal how he has engaged consistently with this art form as a lasting emblem of his poetics. “Burnt Norton” introduces the human experience of timelessness in the figure of dance: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.59 Eliot’s definition of dance here seems paradoxical, claiming that it is neither still nor in motion, yet both. Its spatial and temporal locations are indefinable and unfixed; the place to which Eliot refers cannot be named—the still point is simply there—but the speaker cannot say where. It is both of the body and bodiless, and as such seems not to exist in language nor within the limits of human teleology. It is only to be experienced during an atemporal moment of refined physical and mental activity. The speaker and his companion (“we”) have experienced such a moment fleetingly, but in his struggle to articulate it he can only define it negatively by telling us what it is not. Its very constitution resists definition—the action associated with dance suggests a moment of existence outside time.60 Eliot associates this paradoxical phenomenon of active stillness (akin to the medieval mystics’ idea of ekstasis, which on the one hand suggests a point of being outside the body yet is consciously experienced by and through the body) with a form of spiritual transcendence to be found in the experience of dance.61 Eliot here distinguishes his use of dance from those of his immediate literary predecessors and contemporaries who tended to fall back on dance as a means of metaphorizing poetry, as in Mallarmé’s claim for dance as “poésie par excellence” or Yeats’s explorations of the creative act (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”). Instead, Eliot now takes into consideration the very material of dance itself, saying something about its constitution as corporeal form and its internal properties. Yet he goes further than this. He equates the activity of dance with a finely poised equilibrium of physiological

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and intellectual states that most closely resembles the transcendence he gestured toward throughout his poetry, going back to the heart of light of The Waste Land (which may be a transformation of Ghéon’s articulations of Ida Rubinstein’s hyacinth hair and the stillness of her Symbolist poses).62 At these moments there is a striving for stillness that might be associated with a theology of grace associated with action, or the vita activa, as in “Burnt Norton”: “the inner freedom from the practical desire . . . yet surrounded / By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.” In the subsequent quartets, Eliot develops dance as a figurative trope expressing the spiritual journey, particularly associating the ritual and performance of dance with the sacraments. East Coker I describes the celebration of the ancient sacrament of marriage through dance: “And see them dancing around the bonfire / The association of man and woman / In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— / A dignified and commodious sacrament.” The sacrament is present also in the primitive rituals of this episode: “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing / As in their living in the living seasons.” Eliot here alludes to Thomas Elyot, who conservatively advocated the practice of dance as a means to show nobility and grace in both secular and religious senses, in The Boke Named the Governour (1531, 1564). Linda Salaman suggests that Eliot rejects a “primitivist” version of dance leading to lustful coupling in favor of the civilized courtly manifestation of grace in the dance celebrating the sacrament of marriage of the sixteenth century.63 In fact, the references to dance in East Coker and Little Gidding are in tune with Thomas Elyot’s conservatism, while also suggesting the pure rhythmical dynamics and the physical grace of dance as traditional form. In his study of the politics of early modern courtly dance, Skiles Howard concludes that for Elyot, “Because the movements of the measures [of courtly dances imported from the Continent] simultaneously imitate the perfection of the cosmos . . . and represent the ideal of marriage . . . ‘very honor or perfect nobility’ may be achieved by performing, or even beholding, its actions.”64 Eliot does not entirely separate the primitive “beating of a drum” from the ancient dance forms. In the East Coker passage, ancient traditions incorporate the circularity of the seasons, knitting together his ideas about cycles of history with the contemplation of spiritual growth. Eliot similarly recognizes an element of primitive ritual in ballet. He saw in ballet not simply an art form that draws attention to rhythmic and lyrical movement in time and space, but one that also offered, in its socialization of ritual origins in court etiquette and procedure, a secularization of the liturgical component that he associated with the adoption of a “moral” position, a giving up of the entire body to the practice of the form. In the Dantean pronouncement at the end of Part II of Little Gidding, Eliot expresses something of the technical and rhythmical specificity that characterizes all dance forms and that enables him to imagine the ascesis to which he had referred in the “Dialogue on Poetic Drama”: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”65

Eliot’s Afterlife in the World of Dance Eliot’s poetry influenced several early twentieth-century American choreographers who invoked the spiritual as well as the atavistic resonances of Eliot’s presentation of dance. Allusions to the “still point” find their way into the work of choreographers

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Martha Graham and May O’Donnell, both of whom broke away from balletic form and developed innovative techniques of modern dance. As I have examined elsewhere, both alluded to Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in relation to their work, and in Graham’s case the evidence of her holograph notes to the preliminary choreographic ideas for composition reveal the importance of this source.66 Still more intriguing are the allusions to Eliot’s dance rituals and ceremonies in American ballet. Here the influence of the writer and intellectual Lincoln Kirstein was important in securing an Eliotian afterlife in dance. Kirstein was the great supporter of ballet in the United States in the twentieth century and founder and benefactor of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. As such, he had considerable impact on the choreographer’s work. Kirstein provided the scenario for one of Balanchine’s early American works, “Transcendence” (1935), for which, Kirstein claims, “Ingredients were from a mixture of sources, including . . . Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Eliot.”67 Later in the century, the title of Todd Bolender’s The Still Point (1955) for New York City Ballet, to the music of Debussy’s string quartet, shows the continued resonance of Eliot’s poem in modern American ballet. Balanchine’s career with the New York City Ballet continued to take shape with the help of Kirstein, and the choreographer frequently collaborated with Stravinsky. In 1947 Balanchine produced Orpheus with music by Stravinsky and designs by Noguchi. Kirstein observed an Eliotian resonance yoking ballet and ritual when “Balanchine conceived Orpheus as a ritual ceremonial, in its plangency and pathos.”68 Kirstein had hoped at one point that Eliot might be directly involved in a Balanchine ballet. Although this never transpired, an interesting exchange between Eliot and Kirstein took place at a performance of Orpheus: During an intermission after a performance of Orpheus to which I’d asked T. S. Eliot, we spoke of a possible sequel for which his words might conceivably be set by Stravinsky, as he had handled André Gide’s Persephone. But Eliot knew of the composer’s notorious difficulties with French prosody and Gide’s poetics, and was not enthusiastic. A sung prayer could be imagined, but would take consideration. Eliot, remote, courteous, attentive, thought dancing was sufficient unto itself, requiring nothing by way of words, at least from him. I reminded him of his excellent notices of dancing and music halls when he edited the Criterion; he replied that those were “evocation not invocation.”69 The reference to “sung prayer” as the only appropriate literary accompaniment to an art form that is otherwise sufficient unto itself confirms Eliot’s sense of the ballet as an “invocation” relating to dance’s liturgical elements. But dance holds a more versatile place as manifestation of Eliot’s struggle toward “the fixed point” of the journey (“it is necessary also to have a clear view of the End . . . as something possible in relation to human nature and divine grace . . . by reference to a fixed point”).70 We might think of the way that his presentation of dance in the Quartets significantly moves toward resolution through both “evocation” and “invocation.” The close of Little Gidding—“the fire and the rose are one”—expresses in Dantean terms the culmination of a spiritual and literary journey that brought together the fleeting gestures of the Symbolist figure, the impersonality of Massine’s disciplined training, and the power of the rhythmic beat of primitive dance to illustrate a whole range of theoretical articulations of the work of

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poetry and verse drama. Paradoxically, the resolution is one that can only be achieved through meditation on the “still point,” a point where the mind and body combine in readiness to move. By associating this late “evocation” of dance with the location of the meditative center from which grace is produced, Eliot paid tribute to an art form with which he engaged creatively throughout his career.

Notes 1. See Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot and the Dance,” Journal of Modern Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): 61–88; Terri Mester, Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early Twentieth Century Dance (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997); Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies / Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 300–29; Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 223–49. I am indebted to Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern for their generosity in giving assistance and sharing their knowledge throughout the process. 2. In a letter to the Eliots’ friend Mary Hutchinson, Vivien wrote to invite herself to a dance that Mary was holding, adding “One day you really must try Tom’s Negro rag-time. I know you’d love it” (L1, 239). 3. David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); see also Faulk in Chapter 10, this volume. 4. See Jones, Literature, Modernism, Chapter 10. Eliot may have been aware of Antony Tudor’s ballet Lilac Garden, which was performed at the Mercury Theatre in 1936 concurrently with Murder in the Cathedral and suggests correspondences with the scenario of the “rose garden” in “Burnt Norton.” 5. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Ballets,” Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 131. Mallarmé’s original: “par le prodige de raccourcis ou d’élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu’il faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans la rédaction: poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe.” 6. The theme of latent yet unformed identity would occupy later modernists, such as Virginia Woolf in her presentation of the life of Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out (1915), or James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1922). 7. Eliot, “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” Shama’a 1 (April 1920), in Complete Prose 2, 217–18. 8. I use “autographic” in the way H. Porter Abbott thought about Samuel Beckett—“an author doing something in the present at every point in the text”—in Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 4. Porter Abbot distinguishes the autographic, in terms of tense, from that of autobiographical writing, which he sees as always alluding to a historical past. 9. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (1897), in Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 208. Significant discussions of dance, collected for Divagations under the title “Crayonné au théâtre” (1887), include “Ballets” (1886), a note on Wagner, “Parenthèse” (1886–87), and “Autre étude de danse” (1893–96). All references to these essays are taken from this edition. 10. Mallarmé, Divagations, 207. Mallarmé’s original: “la forme théâtrale de poésie par excellence.” 11. Bertrand Marchal, notes to Mallarmé , Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés, 494. Marchal’s original: “suggère la dimension chorégraphique de toute poésie.”

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12. Gardner Davies, Stéphane Mallarmé: Les Noces d’Hérodiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 114. Mallarmé’s original: “une sorte de danse / effrayante esquisse / —et sur place, sans / bouger / —lieu nul.” 13. “Music and Musicians,” Boston Daily Globe, January 2, 1910, 48. The notice also refers to Fuller’s “serpentine dance” “blossoming” anew, singling out the performances of two of her troupe, Miss Irene Sanden and Miss Gertrude von Axen, who, as exponents of “natural dances,” suggest the transformation of “a Greek statue come to life” (48). Thanks to Frances Dickey for drawing this reference to my attention. 14. Frank Kermode, “Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,” Salmagundi 33–34 (spring / summer 1976): 41. 15. Fuller performed a version of “Salomé” at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. The Canadian dancer Maude Allan produced “Vision of Salomé,” which debuted in Vienna 1906, becoming one of the most famous of the genre. Based loosely on Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé, her version of the Dance of the Seven Veils became notorious for its eroticism, and she was billed as “The Salomé Dancer.” Her book, My Life and Dancing, was published in 1908. 16. Hargrove, in “T. S. Eliot and the Dance,” 62–65, shows that Eliot may also have seen Isadora Duncan. See also Mary Fleischer, Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer Collaborations (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 19–77. 17. See IMH, 269. 18. Henri Ghéon, “M. d’Annunzio et l’art,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 31 (July 1, 1911) : 5–16. Ghéon’s original: “Sébastien est le sagittaire à la chevelure d’hyacinthe . . . la [lave] de toute souillure et [enferme] l’ouvrage dans un cercle de pureté.” 19. Gabriele D’Annunzio, from his notebooks, quoted in Philippe Jullian, D’Annunzio, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 227. 20. D. E. Inghelbrecht, Mouvement contraire: souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris: Daumat, 1947), 218; Jacques Depaulis, Ida Rubinstein: Une inconnue jadis célèbre (Paris: Champion, 1995), 120. 21. Paris correspondent, Boston Herald, June 12, 1911 (Ida Rubinstein clipping file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts). 22. Giovanni Isgrò, D’Annunzio e la mise en scène (Palermo: Palumbo, 1993), 174–76. 23. Aeneid I, 326. Cf. John Dryden’s translation: “O virgin! or what other name you bear,” The Works of John Dryden, Volume 14 (London: William Miller, 1808), 244. 24. “Memorem” is the present subjunctive first person singular of the verb “memorare” (to call, to name, to bring to remembrance, mention, recount, relate, speak of, say, tell); “quam,” in this phrase, is an indeclinable form meaning “what,” “how,” while “virgo” is the vocative of the noun “virgo” (virgin) and “te” is the accusative of the pronoun “tu” (you). 25. CPP, 34. 26. This formulation is similar, as Ricks notes, to “I should arise your neophyte” in “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” (IMH, 78). 27. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Complete Prose 2, 109. 28. Henry Weinfield, introduction to Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems, trans. Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xiv–xv. 29. Mallarmé, Divagations, 207. Mallarmé’s original: “comme son expansion.” 30. Kermode, “Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,” 41. 31. W. B. Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren,” from The Tower (1928), in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1982), 245. 32. Complete Prose 2, 111. 33. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: September 1921,” The Dial 71 (October 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 370.

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34. For example, Valerie Eliot, Hargrove, and Mester have commented that Eliot may have drawn on, among many other sources, the presentation of the central puppet figure of Petrushka in thinking about his poem “The Hollow Men” (1925). 35. Eliot, “ ‘London Letter’: July 1921,” The Dial 71 (August 1921), in Complete Prose 2, 363. La Boutique fantasque was first performed in 1919; The Good-humoured Ladies, 1917; Three-Cornered Hat, 1919. 36. Eliot to Mary Harmsworth, Lady Rothermere, August 11, 1924, in L2, 473, 489. 37. Walter Hanks Shaw, “The Foreign Theatre: The Soirée de Paris,” The Criterion 3 (October 1924). 38. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 3 (October 1924), in Complete Prose 2, 543. 39. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 3 (January 1925), in Complete Prose 2, 567. 40. Eliot, “A Commentary” (October 1924), 543. 41. Massine choreographed and appeared in many films, the most famous being The Red Shoes (1948). Massine transformed the art of the clown into ballet, showing puppet-like precision, bravura, containment of energy, economy of movement, and musical sensitivity. His distinctive presence was mesmerizing on stage and communicates even when recorded on film. 42. For a full account of Massine’s life and career see Vincente García-Márquez, Massine: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995). He lost favor with Diaghilev after his marriage, and spent a period away from the company in 1924, yet he maintained a prolific creative output. Following Diaghilev’s death in 1929 he continued to create new ballets for many post-Diaghilev offshoots of this company, especially the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, as well as for Ballet Theater in the United States, and for companies in South America and in Europe. During his career as a choreographer he collaborated with eminent modernist painters including Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Miró, and Dalí, and composers including Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie, and Milhaud. 43. See L1, 381, note 1. 44. L1, 667. 45. Ibid., 680. 46. B. H. Dias (Ezra Pound), “Art Notes,” New Age (October 23, 1919): 427 ff. “[Edward] Gordon Craig has for years been demanding the super-marionette, and this ballet is his justification” (428). This statement lies at the core of Pound’s interest: the ballet illustrates for him a Craigian theory of drama through the choreography’s literal emulation of puppets, its presentation of anti-realist and anti-Romantic forms in dance. 47. James Strachey, “The Russian Ballet,” The Athenaeum (May 30, 1919): 406. 48. Eliot, “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,” Art & Letters 3 (winter 1920), in Complete Prose 2, 173. 49. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” The Criterion 1 (April 1923), in Complete Prose 2, 434–35. 50. Compare Bergson’s ideas on “The Aesthetic Feelings” in Chapter 1 of Time and Free Will (trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910)). In a striking passage in which he outlines affective responses, Bergson claims that “if musical sounds affect us more powerfully than the sounds of nature, the reason is that nature confines itself to expressing feelings, whereas music suggests them to us” (15). Eliot converts Bergson’s opposition of expression / suggestion into Massine’s power to “symbolize” rather than “express” emotion. Taking into account the likelihood that Eliot’s intended meaning of “symbolize” would have been closer to his understanding of the French Symbolist poets (where the “symbol” is predominantly suggestive), then the act of “symbolizing” emotion would indeed have carried with it the quality of “suggestion.” But Eliot goes on to imply that the kind of “modernity” generated by Massine in his dance practice and choreography (rather like Chaplin’s extraordinary movement control) was, in Massine’s case, produced by the long traditions and disciplines of ballet technique, whose effects point to an anterior “permanent form” that may be harnessed to contemporary aesthetics.

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51. Eliot, “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (1924), Criterion 2 (February 1924) in Complete Prose 2, 506. 52. Marie Rambert, transcript of interview with John Gruen (1974), 32–33. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 53. Complete Prose 2, 506. 54. Eliot wrote the “Dialogue on Poetic Drama” in the context of the wider recovery in England during the thirties of verse plays by Gordon Bottomley, Stephen Phillips, Ashley Dukes, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, a movement closely linked to the educational incentive to recover and promote the oral transmission of verse among schools. Gordon Bottomley discussed in his A Stage for Poetry: My Purposes with my Plays (1948) the influence of Yeats’s Plays for Dancers on contemporary verse drama. Bottomley used choral elements and dance in his own work. In his Ardvorlich’s Wife (1929), Poems and Plays (London: Bodley Head, 1953), 217, stage directions suggest the disposition of solo dancer and chorus, of motion and stillness reminiscent of Rubinstein’s relationship to the crowd in the D’Annunzio dance drama, Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien: “The women at the sides . . . dance a brief, circling, interlacing dance suggestive of the motion of snow-flakes. . . . The dance ceases abruptly, the circle opening out backwards. . . . As the circle opens, a single figure is seen within it.” 55. Eliot, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928), in Complete Prose 3, 400. 56. Ibid., 399. 57. Ibid., 400. 58. Eliot, “The Ballet,” The Criterion 3 (April 1925), in Complete Prose 2, 582. Eliot claimed that Sharpe lacked “a first-hand knowledge of the technique of the ballet,” and should have “studied the evolution of Christian and other liturgy.” 59. CPP, 173. 60. Eliot borrowed the image of “the still point” from his Coriolan I. Triumphal March, published in 1931, but according to Helen Gardner in The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), he originally derived this image from Charles Williams’s novel The Greater Trumps, where “in a magical model of the universe the figures of the Tarot pack dance around the Fool at the still centre. Only Sybil, the wise woman of the novel, sees the Fool as moving and completing all the movements of the dancers” (85). 61. Ecstasy or ecstasis (Greek), from ekstasis, meaning displacement, standing out from the proper place, hence rising above, is a transference of consciousness from the physical plane to another inner and superior plane, accompanied by awareness and memory of the experience. 62. Compare Wyndham Lewis’s very different aesthetic use of a central point, “whereby energy is transformed into stasis.” See Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 40. 63. Linda Bradley Salaman, “A Gloss on ‘Daunsinge’: Sir Thomas Elyot and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” English Literary History 40, no. 4 (winter 1973): 584–605. Salaman observes that recognition of the connection was first made by James Johnson Sweeney in 1941 (584). 64. Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 47. 65. CPP, 195. 66. Jones, Literature, Modernism, Chapter 10. 67. Lincoln Kirstein, Thirty Years On: The New York City Ballet (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1978), 48. 68. Ibid., 100. 69. Ibid., 115. 70. Eliot, “The English Situation: I. The English Tradition: Some Thoughts as a Preface to Study,” Christendom 10, no. 38 (June 1940): 108.

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Eliot and Media Introduction

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he phonograph, moving pictures, and radio: between Eliot’s childhood and his middle age, these new technologies of mass communication developed from novelties to features of modern life, and it would have been strange if they had not made an appearance in the writing of one so alert to the specific character of modernity. The magic lantern that casts Prufrock’s nerves upon a screen and the gramophone played by the typist’s “automatic hand” in The Waste Land are iconic images of modern poetry; yet until recently, they drew little critical notice as commentary on the technologies they represent. In part this is because they had to wait for “the media” to become a distinct disciplinary subject. The following chapters advance our understanding of what “media” meant to Eliot and how he engaged, both as a consumer and as a producer, with the new mass communication technologies of the early twentieth century. The Waste Land’s quickly moving fragments and voices have often invited comparison with film, particularly with the technique of montage.1 Yet as David Trotter observed in his comprehensive examination of Eliot’s references to film, it is hard to know what this suggestive analogy means in practice when the “surprise juxtapositions” of experimental cinema only arrived in London after 1922.2 References to film and a range of film-like visual experiences do appear in Eliot’s poetry, however, including Prufrock’s “magic lantern” (a precursor of the film projector), the “flickering” images of “Preludes,” and a movie star excised from The Waste Land (“So the sweating rabble in the cinema / / Can recognize a goddess or a star”).3 Moreover, Trotter argued, Eliot’s concern throughout his oeuvre with automatism suggests a fascination with the way film both intervenes between performer and audience and also enables a more-than-human capacity for seeing. In his chapter in this volume, “Eliot and the Idea of ‘Media,’ ” Trotter takes a step back to examine what “medium” meant to Eliot in the context of the emergence of modern communication technologies. Eliot’s 1919 Times Literary Supplement essay on Ben Jonson marked a new usage of the term in his lexicon; it was here that he began to think of poetry as a communicative medium.4 This development reflected both a wider historical shift in the meaning of the word and a change in Eliot’s understanding of poetry that would make possible the composition of “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” as The Waste Land was originally titled. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of mediation took shape in the social sciences as the process by which societies comprehend themselves as meaningful entities: “culture,” in short. But it also became, rather more pragmatically, a way in which to assess the transformative effects of proliferating communication technologies. One way into an understanding

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of what “medium” meant in the early twentieth century is through the subject of the female toilette, a topos in common with The Waste Land and Cecil B. DeMille’s early films. Trotter examines the representation of female toilette in DeMille’s Old Wives for New (1918) and Male and Female (1919), as well as in Eliot’s prose and in “A Game of Chess.” This choice of subject matter in both cases provided a means by which to address the same question: how to become a truly modern medium. Recorded sound was the first of the modern communication technologies to shape the twentieth century, and it became one of its most pervasive features. Nonetheless, little has been written about Eliot and recorded sound per se, despite our knowledge that Eliot was a devoted gramophone-listener.5 The figure of the typist in The Waste Land clearly marks the obtrusion of modern media technologies into private life, for not only does she take dictation during the day as she bends over her typewriter, but at night she puts a record on the gramophone to avoid the thoughts that pass across her brain. This moment opens the possibility of understanding Eliot’s poem as a phonographic transcription of uttered fragments, snatches of music, and noises. In “Eliot and the Art of the Phonograph,” Malobika Sarkar discusses the historical context and theoretical implications of the phonograph, examining the impact of the “talking machine” on Eliot’s voice-oriented poetics. The Waste Land articulates an unwilling submission to a machine that challenged if not usurped the human prerogative of speech. The deluge of human voices, living and dead, ghostly and real, past and present, speaking and singing in Eliot’s poem reflects the historically unprecedented experience engendered by the phonograph. Distinguishing what John Hollander calls “echo”—the repetition of ends of words—from Eliot’s repetition of beginnings and entire lines in The Waste Land, Sarkar describes Eliot’s “phonological” emphasis on the simultaneity of voices, rather than their sequential recurrence over time. The advent of radio occurred later in Eliot’s life than phonograph or film; he purchased his first receiver in 1929, the same year he began broadcasting with the BBC. He went on to broadcast over one hundred times, including scholarly lectures, commentary about contemporary literature, poetry readings, and interviews. Eliot’s substantial engagement with radio has given rise to a small but growing body of criticism about the content of his broadcasts and how they fit into his larger oeuvre, his self-conception and role as a broadcaster (Michael Coyle calls him a “Victorian sage”), and his place in the culture (or cultural project) built by the BBC.6 One of the touchstones for discussing Eliot’s relation to mass media is his 1922 homage to Marie Lloyd, in which he imagines a future world made hopelessly boring by the ubiquity of cinemas, gramophones, and motor cars. It will be a time “when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears,” and humanity will be ready to die of boredom. In “Eliot’s Radio Times; or, Listen With Possum,” Edward Allen traces Eliot’s gradual change of heart toward the wireless and its potential to supply what he saw in Marie Lloyd’s performance: the opportunity for collaboration and dialogue. Allen finds that Eliot gradually came round to the fantasy of turning radio into an interactive medium, and he did so in the same measure as he was able to imagine an audience that included children or childish listeners. His radio rendition of Practical Cats and his concern with “Adult Edjjication” are cases in point. Eliot came to consider the radio “a more hopeful medium” that promised—even in the small hours—to pique “the consciousness of ordinary people.”7

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Notes 1. Calling it “the modern montage poem par excellence,” Susan McCabe links “Eliot’s cinematic methods” in The Waste Land with “the ‘displacement’ mechanisms of hysteria” that she finds in the poem and in his life. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40. 2. David Trotter, “T. S. Eliot and Cinema,” Modernism / modernity 13:2 (Apr 2006): 238; Jen Sansom, “The Film Society, 1925–1939,” in Charles Barr, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1986), 306–13. “Surprise juxtapositions” was a comment originally made by Louis MacNeice in “Eliot and the Adolescent,” in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Tambimuttu and Richard March (London: Frank Cass, 1948), 146–51; 146, 150. 3. See Trotter, “T. S. Eliot and Cinema”; Eliot, WLF, 29. 4. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in Complete Prose 2, 150–64. 5. General studies of the phonograph include Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Writing Science, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Following Kittler, Juan Suarez places The Waste Land in the “discourse network” of recorded sound, with a useful overview of the phonographic features of the poem. Suarez, “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network,” New Literary History 32.3 (summer 2001): 747–68. 6. See Michael Coyle, “‘We Speak to India’: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture,” in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 176–95; Coyle, “T. S. Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenges of Mass Communication,” in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 141–54; Coyle, “Radio,” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 145–53; Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Steven Matthews, “T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word,’” in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 97–111. 7. From an essay by George Orwell, discussed in Edward Allen’s chapter: “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945), reproduced in Orwell’s Essays (London: Penguin, 2000), 243.

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13 Eliot and the Idea of “Media” David Trotter

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hat there should be some significant relation between aesthetic modernism and new media,” Michael North remarked in 2005, “seems true almost by definition. Modernism, after all, stakes its initial claim to fame on new modes and new methods, innovations so drastic they seem not just to change the old arts but to invent new and unrecognizable ones.”1 The debate about the nature and scope of the relation between modern literature and modern media, already gaining momentum when North wrote, has since then become as vigorous as any in the field, particularly where cinema is concerned.2 I want in this chapter to give it a further twist by arguing that aesthetic modernism’s most drastic innovation might have been to attempt to reinvent itself not as a new and unrecognizable art, but as a medium.3 My focus will be on the subtle and compelling essay on Ben Jonson that Eliot published in the Times Literary Supplement in November 1919, a year or so before embarking on the poem that was to become The Waste Land. I hope to demonstrate that attention to the idea of media can help us with this poem. The chapter’s first section will address the history and theory of mediation, as that concept took shape in the social sciences, to which Eliot was closely attuned, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Mediation was thought to define the process by which societies are able to understand themselves as meaningful entities: “culture,” in short. But it also became, rather more pragmatically, a way in which to assess the transformative effects of proliferating communications technologies. By no means the least significant of these was film. Classical Hollywood cinema, at the dawn of the studio era: there, surely, was a mass medium that knew it was a mass medium. Not so, I will argue in the chapter’s second section, which approaches cinema’s self-definition indirectly by examining a subject matter shared by the early films of Cecil B. DeMille and The Waste Land: female toilette. The problem, where both literature and film are concerned, is that what people meant then when they talked about “media” is not necessarily what we mean now. The essay’s third section surveys Eliot’s critical prose in order to establish what he thought a medium was, and its fourth returns to The Waste Land and to female toilette. The justifications for this choice of subject matter no doubt differed as widely as the institutional and technological forms sustaining the film industry, on one hand, and avant-garde literary practice, on the other. But it did in both cases provide a means by which to address the same question: how to become a truly modern medium.

The History and Theory of Mediation The idea of mediation has for most of its history not been restricted to a description of what it is that particular technologies do. John Guillory points out that, although

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a process of mediation would seem everywhere to be implied by the way technical media work, few efforts were made before the beginning of the twentieth century to deduce the nature and function of that process from the nature and function of a specific machine or system. Instead, mediation had long been understood to mean, and is largely still understood to mean, the sort of intercession between alienated parties traditionally exemplified in Western societies by the self-sacrifice of Christ the Redeemer. Mediation resolves conflict. It was Hegel, Guillory argues, who gave the concept its modern theoretical shape. In Hegel’s writings, mediation names the dialectic by which subject and object, mind and world, master and slave, enter into relation. For Hegel, after Hegel, there is no such thing as immediacy, either in knowledge or in experience. We might say that the economic, social, and political complexities consequent upon runaway industrialization gave rise to a theory of mediation in general as a way (the only way) to grasp both the scale and intensity of the relations thus newly established. It became the habit in Western theorizing “to present mediatory agencies as necessarily characteristic of society.”4 Philosophical and sociological theories of mediation in general have assumed different forms in different places at different times. One form they took during the early decades of the twentieth century was that of the “culture concept,” as it has come to be known.5 Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, proposed that a particular practice (a tool, a law, a religious ceremony) could only be understood in relation to other particular practices operative within the same functional-organic whole, which itself constituted no more than one way among many to make collective sense of experience.6 A “culture” was an autonomous, mediated, meaningful totality. According to the historian of this episode, George Stocking, the “most notable” advocate of the new anthropology among Boas’s students was Edward Sapir, whose 1924 essay on “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” was widely recognized as a landmark statement.7 Sapir brought a great deal to the interdisciplinary party.8 A linguist, anthropologist, poet, and literary critic, he contributed copiously to small magazines such as The Dial (twenty-two pieces between 1917 and 1929). In “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Sapir drew a vehement contrast between the alienation and “sterile externality” he thought characteristic of all modern Western industrial societies and the “well-rounded life” available to the “average participant in the civilization of a typical American Indian tribe,” whose experiences (economic, social, religious, aesthetic) were “bound together” culturally into a “significant whole.”9 Sound familiar? Marc Manganaro has shown that Sapir’s view of culture matches that articulated implicitly in The Waste Land and explicitly in the later Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948).10 A “healthy” culture, Eliot was to maintain, is much more than an assemblage of arts, customs, and religious beliefs. “These things all act upon each other, and fully to understand one you have to understand all.”11 At Harvard, in 1913, he had given a paper on “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” to Josiah Royce’s seminar, in which he took issue with the line of inquiry pursued by classicists such as Jane Harrison.12 But it is unlikely that he would have disagreed with Harrison’s fundamental point that ritual functions as a mediating agency. “Natures specially gifted can live lives that are emotionally vivid, even in the rare high air of art or science,” Harrison maintained in Ancient Art and Ritual (1913): “but many, perhaps most of us, breathe more freely in the medium, literally the midway space, of some collective ritual.”13 The anthropology with which Eliot and his contemporaries became familiar saw as its main task the investigation of a wide variety of mediating agencies in a wide

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variety of “primitive” cultures: from ritual, myth, and custom through kinship rules to elaborate exchange systems such as the Kula route or circuit described by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Culture was the form most often assumed by mediation in general in the modernist period. Sapir was primarily a linguist, and as such fully aware that, while language does constitute a mediating agency, there is nothing in the least bit organic about the principles according to which it operates. Its essence, as he pointed out in his widely read Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1922), “consists in the assigning of conventional, voluntarily articulated sounds, or of their equivalents, to the diverse elements of experience.” Language is not the garment of thought, but its “prepared road or groove.”14 Sapir took a positive delight in emphasizing speech’s externality to the speaker: when it was not a road, it was an instrument or a machine. “Of all insidious machines words are the most insidious,” he declared, since they “have us at their mercy before we realize that their almost indispensable usefulness has grooved our minds into an infinite tracery of habit.”15 As a reader of The Waste Land, I like to imagine that Sapir derived the metaphor of the groove from the inscription of sound into the new medium of the gramophone record. It is not impossible, because his understanding of language as mechanism led him to develop during the 1920s a powerful interest in the mediating agency of modern telecommunications technologies. He was already using the example of telegraphic Morse code, in which each combination of dots and dashes represents “a symbol of a symbol of a symbol,” to underscore the conventional, voluntarily articulated nature of language.16 By 1931, he had begun to argue that “society,” so often spoken of as a “static structure defined by tradition,” was in fact a “network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity”: a network which had to be “creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature.” In modern industrial societies, much of that creative reaffirmation took place by means of transport and communications technologies: railroad, airplane, telegraph, telephone, radio.17 There is evidence, here, of an important shift of emphasis. The sheer proliferation of such technologies encouraged the thought that the machines, systems, and networks, busily shuffling millions of particular acts of a communicative nature, were now in fact doing most of the mediation.18 They had altered the idea of what a medium could do. In 1913, in a further Harvard paper, Eliot sought to define communication as “an identity in different contexts.”19 Transfixed as we still are, even today, by his strident mythologizing of social and cultural disintegration, we sometimes forget just how chatty a poem The Waste Land is. Its first two sections, “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess,” consist of little else other than the “particular acts of a communicative nature” which by Sapir’s account creatively reaffirm the networks spanning modern industrial society: communications every bit as pointless, to all except those directly concerned, as the average tweet or Facebook post. Too much information, we may feel, as the talk turns to abortifacients or the corpse sprouting in the back garden. In order to establish that these “particular acts of a communicative nature” are not merely fragments to be shored against ruin, or swept up tidily by the poem’s resolving mythic or ritual method, I will need to ask what Eliot himself might have understood by the idea of media as such. To put it another way, why do the first two sections of The Waste Land seem so much more like a new kind of poem altogether than the last

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two? Before I address that question, I want to broaden the basis of the argument by examining the response to the new technologies—and their idea of what a medium might do—of an industry not unduly preoccupied with mythic or ritual method as a commentary on mediation in general.

Hollywood’s Toilettes de Venus By the end of the 1920s, it was possible to speak of “the film medium” in a way that it would not have been possible to speak of “the literature medium.” But that relative certainty had been hard-won. Until the mid-1920s, at least, most commentators continued to regard film as a channel of communication built with a variety of possible functions in mind. The term almost invariably used with reference to it was not “medium,” but “medium of.” Film could not (yet) just be a medium. It had still to present itself as a medium of some already defined activity: art, education, entertainment, news, advertising. This last function, in particular, was the subject of a good deal of debate. When in 1923 the public relations guru Edward Bernays spoke casually of the motion pictures as just one “medium” or “channel” among several by which public opinion might be “crystallized,” he was reiterating an orthodox view.20 In her exhaustive study of the “decline of sentiment” in 1920s Hollywood cinema, Lea Jacobs has done much to rehabilitate the young Cecil B. DeMille—in the era before his biblical epics—as a filmmaker whose early social dramas and comedies provide a vivid and inventive demonstration of what this medium-in-the-making was now capable of.21 Old Wives for New (1918) was the first in a series of three films on the increasingly fashionable topic of divorce. It was followed rapidly (with a certain lack of imagination) by Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). These films look back to D. W. Griffith at his most sententious, and forward to the comedy of remarriage.22 They are cynical, and didactic. They sermonize; and they message mischievously. DeMille came from a distinguished Broadway family. In December 1913, he abandoned a failing stage career and set off for California to take up the post of directorgeneral of a new film studio, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, before long to become Famous Players-Lasky. Lasky and DeMille presented themselves as purveyors of art rather than amusement. Reviews in the trade press began to put increasing emphasis on DeMille’s ability to create pictorial effects, in particular through nuanced lighting. Rembrandt and Titian were among the names cheerfully taken in vain. DeMille certainly believed his own propaganda. In an interview he gave to Moving Picture World in July 1917, he claimed that filmmakers had begun to pose the figures in a scene as a painter would pose them.23 Ten years later, reviewing his own achievement, he felt able to state that he had “brought a certain sense of beauty and luxury into everyday existence, all jokes about ornate bathrooms and deluxe boudoirs aside.”24 There had been good reason for those jokes. The beauty DeMille’s social dramas celebrated was often that of the high-end consumer durable. He must have shifted more equipment than an entire army of salesmen. An article in the leading fan magazine, Photoplay, described how its home furnishing editor had been able to help a movie-struck bride to recreate the “DeMille boudoir,” complete with dressing table, from The Golden Bed (1925). The circuit around which the message concerning toilette passes consisted of a long sequence of relays: DeMille’s reputation as a

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bathroom and boudoir specialist; publicity for The Golden Bed; the “personality” of its star (Lillian Rich); the story the film tells, an odyssey involving various department and furniture stores; and the pages of Photoplay, in which those stores were happy to advertise.25 Gloria Swanson, DeMille’s favorite female lead, became more closely associated with the dressing table, a piece of furniture that she was said to regard as “one of her chief assets in her work and at home,” than any other star of the silent era.26 There is, of course, a rich history of representations of toilette, of which DeMille was no doubt aware. In paintings by Titian, Rubens, Velàzquez, and many others since, the goddess Venus, or one of her mortal equivalents, fresh from the bath, and in varying degrees of décolleté, gazes into a mirror held by an amenable attendant. These paintings describe a beauty made rather than given, even when goddesses are involved. By the 1920s, beautification had become an industry. Hollywood and the fan magazines collaborated enthusiastically with that industry to rework and democratize the toilette of Venus pictorial tradition. Cosmetics firms enlisted the movies in their campaign to broaden the basis of middle-class respectability. “Close-up photographs of the female face, eyes darkened with make-up, projected a provocative but no longer sinful eroticism.”27 No one proved more enthusiastic than DeMille. His early social dramas evade mere advertisement by invoking high art, but then evade high art, in turn, by establishing a more than merely pictorial connection with the spectator. In DeMille’s hands, an (ample) provision for advertisement could also constitute an attempt to imagine film as a messaging rather than a representational medium. What made that possible was the shift of emphasis induced by the spread of new communications technologies. Now behavior of all kinds could be understood as a particular act of a communicative nature. Commentators like Edward Sapir were well aware that in a media age, imitation— the purchase, for instance, of a bathrobe or a dressing table made fashionable by its appearance in a Hollywood movie—was a form of communication.28 Wyndham Lewis meditated menacingly on the millions of modern women “equipped and appointed, in the matter of toilette and artifices for preserving youth, in a way that none of the queens of the pre-industrial age can have been.” For him, as for Sapir, appearance and behavior were now above all communicable. He understood male homosexuality as an imitation of femininity, which had supplied by its “overdone advertisement” the “propaganda-picture of a feminized universe.”29 In these formulations, femininity itself approaches the status of a messaging medium. It is striking that Sapir’s account of the “familiar merry-go-round of fashion” should be drawn into a discussion of the signals sent, respectively, by lipstick and rouge.30 He would perhaps have agreed with Vogue when it announced in 1933 that putting on lipstick had become one of the “gestures of the twentieth century.”31 The communicable shades into the communicative. The opening shots of DeMille’s Old Wives for New introduce us to Charles Murdock, an “Oil King” who has just fallen out of love with his wife, and to the five pairs of hands that are to weave the threads of his subsequent destiny. Each pair of hands merits a brief vignette. The most elaborate of these, and the most provocative, is the one that depicts the toilette undertaken by Viola, a demi-mondaine, or Painted Lady, played by that year’s starlet, Marcia Manon. The four other pairs of hands appear only in orthodox performance of the narrative functions their possessors will fulfill. The Painted Lady, however, behaves in a way that suggests cinema really did not yet altogether know what sort of a medium it was becoming. For one thing, the vignette’s

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Figure 13.1 The Painted Lady winks. Frame grab from Old Wives for New (1918, Famous Players-Lasky, directed by Cecil B. DeMille). effect depends, I think, on a degree of familiarity with canonical Western art; in this case, with the variation on the toilette tradition exemplified by Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) and its momentous modern consequence, Manet’s Olympia (1863). It shows the Painted Lady at her dressing table, reflected in a triptych of mirrors. Like Olympia, she has a black maid whose gaze offers a reflection of and upon the success of her toilette. She then offers a candid stare at the camera, accompanied, startlingly, by a broad wink, and a pout (Figure 13.1). The stare suggests Manet, whose trademark effect was the gaze returned with interest: most immediately, perhaps, given the prominence of the powder puff, the Manet of Nana (1877) rather than of Olympia. But this is no mere allusion to a picture. The wink and the pout do what pictures cannot. In makingup, the Painted Lady imitates the image adorning many an advertisement for lipstick, mascara, and face powder. She is all set to be imitated in her turn. Her wink and pout render explicit the act of communication at a distance—the frankly twentieth-century gesture—which the behavior of imitating demands of its participants. A fashion must be communicable, if it is to be a fashion. The wink and pout render communicative what was until then merely communicable. They are a message sent as if by some other medium than film: a telegram, a Jazz Age emoticon. Pondering the communicable, film becomes communicative in a manner it might not otherwise have considered. One would not expect Hollywood to formalize its interest in film as a method of telecommunication. But it may be that DeMille, at least, had begun to think of the didactic message he wished to send—in between advertisements—as requiring a

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degree of urgency in the transmission: something more than mere rhetorical force. In Male and Female (1919), a drama of social and moral regeneration made between the second and third films of his divorce trilogy, he chose to frame his representation of toilette by invoking the most celebrated satirical treatment of the topic in English literature. In the first extended sequence, Lady Mary Loam (Gloria Swanson) awakens, takes a leisurely bath involving a good deal of product placement, and then, on the other side of a quotation from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock— What dire Offense from slender Causes springs— What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things? —a bit of breakfast (Figure 13.2). Male and Female is not a satire. So why does DeMille choose to claim satire’s privilege? Clearly, he wishes to express disapproval of the kind of brattish self-absorption that takes offence, as Lady Mary does, at a piece of underdone toast. But it is possible that he also admired the pithiness of Pope’s couplet. The need to pare down intertitles, and ideally to eliminate them altogether, was a persistent theme in film commentary at the time, as Jacobs has shown.32 In this case, it is the couplet form that delivers the message (Hollywood’s squeamish substitution of “slender” for the original “am’rous” making no discernible difference). After all, eighteenth-century verse satire had engineered for itself an apparatus of encryption capable of condensing its signal sufficiently for the signal to be heard, by those willing and able to hear it, above

Figure 13.2 Hollywood’s Pope. Frame grab from Male and Female (1919, Famous Players-Lasky, directed by Cecil B. DeMille).

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the general coffeehouse chatter. Eschewing persuasion, the couplet form went straight and infallibly to the point. Verse satire seems to have struck DeMille as a genre that was beginning to think of itself as a medium. He does not want to be satirical. He wants to communicate now like verse satire once did.

Literature as Medium I was led to this formulation by the meaning the term “medium” acquires in Eliot’s 1919 essay on Ben Jonson.33 Before turning to the essay, I want swiftly to survey the variety of meanings this term acquired in his critical writing as a whole.34 I have ignored its merely traditional use to designate the material in which an artist works: the sculptor’s bronze, and so on.35 Of much greater interest is the famous statement concerning poetic impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” first published in two parts in The Egoist in September and December 1919.The poet, Eliot argues, has “not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality.” The term “medium,” as Eliot uses it here, arises out of philosophical debate. It designates a sort of space or zone or atmosphere, at once personal and impersonal, in which “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”36 I do not want to propose a specific source for the meaning thus attributed to it, but comparable discussions are not hard to find. “Milieu,” Henri Bergson’s term for the space or zone or atmosphere in which encounters between mind and world occur, was sometimes translated as “environment,” sometimes as “medium.”37 Eliot had followed the latter usage in the lengthy paper he gave on Bergson at the Harvard Philosophical Club on December 19, 1913. One of the paper’s main topics is the “intermediate reality,” in Eliot’s phrase, constituted, according to Bergson, by the “tension” between life and matter, consciousness and motion.38 Eliot regarded the conclusion to Matter and Memory as Bergson’s most important and interesting account of that tension. “The same needs, the same power of action, which have delimited our body in matter,” Bergson wrote, “will also carve out distinct bodies in the surrounding medium. Everything will happen as if we allowed to filter through us that action of external things which is real, in order to arrest and retain that which is virtual: this virtual action of things upon our body and of our body upon things is our perception itself.”39 In Eliot’s account, the poet’s “particular medium” is that which filters the real action of external things, retaining their virtual significance with unique vividness. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has also been said to measure itself against the serial treatise on the “science of signs” which Dora Marsden published in The Egoist in 1918 and 1919.40 Marsden refers to “medium,” “sensory surroundings,” and “sensory milieu” pretty much interchangeably.41 More remote, and yet in some ways closer, was one of the key concepts of William James’s Pragmatism: “The experienceable environment, as the vehicle or medium connecting knower with known, and yielding the cognitive relation.”42 Eliot himself had already road-tested the idea of an “experienceable environment,” or something like it, in an essay in The Little Review, which argued that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, in contrast to the bleakly illustrative Stendhal, “have a kind of sense, a receptive medium, which is not of sight. Not that they fail to make you see, so far as necessary, but sight is not the essential sense. They perceive by antennae; and the ‘deeper psychology’ is here.”43 My aim, in compiling these examples, is to establish

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just how far our own association of the term “medium” with communications technologies is from the associations developed in literary and philosophical discourse at the time when Eliot began to frame The Waste Land. The antennae he attributes to Hawthorne and James are creaturely. They owe nothing to wireless technology. That began to change, however. By the end of the 1920s, Eliot had somewhat revised the formula of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Introducing Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems in 1928, he argued that a poet’s work proceeds along two “lines”: the accumulation of experience, and a “conscious and continuous effort in technical excellence,” that is, in the preparation of an “adequate medium” for the moment when he or she “really has something to say.”44 The medium is now not what a poet expresses, but the means of its expression. The development of poetic technique (by Pound, for example) amounts to the continual testing of the adequacy of a channel of communication. It is hard to believe that the proliferation of media technologies during the 1920s had no effect at all on this new emphasis. “It is a delusion of cinema producers, apparently,” Eliot declared in The Criterion in April 1923, “that the film, merely because it is a series of photographs, is a realistic medium.”45 The fleeting discussion of the consequences of the medium’s photographic basis foreshadows a debate that was to consume film theorists and historians in the decades after the end of the Second World War.46 But Eliot’s contribution to film theory was as short-lived as it was prescient. Of greater significance, from the point of view of his own work, were his increasingly frequent attempts to conceive the elements of literary art as communicative rather than rhetorical in nature. “The very greatest poets,” he declared, with what cannot help but look like an appeal to cinema, “set before you real men talking, carry you on in real events moving.” Tennyson, alas, could not tell a story at all. “And it is because Tennyson tried to do something he could not do, or rather tried to do with his medium of the idyll what can only be done by telling a story, that The Princess is a dull poem.”47 Idyll is the wrong set of conventions—or, Eliot seems to hint, the wrong apparatus—by means of which to tell a story. Of all the elements of literary form, genre is perhaps the most susceptible to such re-description, since it is constituted by meta-data, by a signal about a signal. Of course, a poet’s preparation of an “adequate medium” is a process far removed from filmmaking; it is in order to keep this difference in mind that I have chosen to concentrate in this essay on industrial Hollywood. For Eliot, the medium of a poet like W. B. Yeats is something like an “idiom.”48 The idea of idiom keeps the idea of medium close to a person’s (or a people’s) way of speaking. But it does also indicate a method of communication rendered distinctive by a degree of encryption. Not everyone will understand the messages thus transmitted; those who do, will understand them at once and in full. Eliot’s most consequential inquiry into idiom and medium took shape in his essays on poetic drama, the theory and practice of which were to become central both to his writing and to his conception of a “genuine” or “healthy” culture. His practice as a dramatist lies outside the scope of this essay, so I will be brief in summarizing the attendant theory. In 1931, the example Eliot chose to follow was that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who had succeeded in developing blank verse into a “conversational medium.”49 In 1942, looking back on twenty years of experiment, he had to admit that there was still a “good way to go” in the design of a “verse medium for the theatre” in which dramatic characters could with equal lack of absurdity both “express the purest poetry” and “convey the most commonplace

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message.” Such theater was, of course, doubly filtered: through the verse medium, and through the “medium of a company of actors trained by a producer, and of different actors and different producers at different times.” The poet’s “idiom” had therefore to be “comprehensive of all the voices, but present at a deeper level than is necessary when the poet speaks only for himself.”50 In 1949, Eliot hoped for a “common medium” evolving from one generation to the next, which would allow “plenty of scope for the expression of widely different poetic personalities.”51 These are steep demands to make of drama. It begins to sound as though the medium he wished to develop was one bearing a distant resemblance to the mass-media behemoths of the age: a film studio, a radio station, a TV channel. Eliot’s 1919 essay on Jonson, written a year or so before he began work on a poem provisionally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” gave some of the preoccupations that were to shape his approach to verse drama an initial airing. The essay concentrates on Jonson’s Catiline (1611). While failing as a tragedy, Eliot argues, Catiline does contain a couple of speeches that function superbly as satire. The most significant of these occurs, we might note, during an extended toilette scene, which includes a lengthy discussion of anti-aging lotions. The speaker is the courtesan Fulvia, who declares that she is not much “taken” with cob-swans or high-mounting bulls, as foolish Leda and Europa were, but would endure pretty much anything for “bright gold.”52 This is satire, Eliot claims: satire operating, not as a genre, but as a “medium” for the “essential emotion” of a work that is “only incidentally a criticism upon the actual world.”53 The play’s “essential emotion” requires for its adequate expression something other than tragic convention. In effect, Fulvia has switched from one channel to another (Eliot does not say how). She has ceased momentarily to behave as a character in a tragedy, and instead speaks directly to us as a newspaper headline might, or a telegram. Eliot has understood that this is a play about communication. The next character to appear is Fulvia’s lover, Quintus Curius, a key participant in the coup d’état Catiline has been planning. Fulvia promises him sex in exchange for information about the conspiracy. The conspiracy’s theme is a gospel of unregulated greed. Not liking the look of it at all, Fulvia spills the beans to Marcus Tullius Cicero, consul-elect and chief defender of the state. Fulvia is the female agent of communication in a play otherwise dominated by competing male rhetorics. It is fitting that a play that in the end puts its faith in communication rather than rhetoric should provoke Eliot into a use of the term “medium” that takes a different direction altogether from the Bergsonian phenomenology of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I want to argue in conclusion that an awareness of the ways in which literature might become more like a truly modern medium freed him to do the police in different voices in the long poem that had already begun to take shape in his mind.

The Waste Land By the end of April 1921, Eliot had completed Parts I and II of The Waste Land, more or less as we know them today, including a dressing-table scene that would not have been altogether out of place in a film by DeMille. There was undoubtedly a convergence of interests. Toilette scenes had become such a fixture in Hollywood movies that in July 1919 Photoplay felt moved to publish a modernist poem of its own on the subject, “Dressing Tables,” by Angele la Driere. The poem’s second stanza describes

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the sort of table, favored in the movies by society girl, debutante, and vamp alike, and in The Waste Land by the Cleopatra of “A Game of Chess,” on which stand “crystal Essence Bottles, / And many things of Ivory, / And of Lace and Silk.” Its fourth stanza describes the sort favored by the Girl Who Came to the City, or the typist of “The Fire Sermon”: “There is always a Comb and Brush / (From Woolworth’s) / And a half-empty bottle of milk / And an open box of crackers.”54 Eliot’s subject matter was already fully cinematic. During the summer of 1921, Eliot drafted, as the opening of Part III, a seventytwo-line passage that introduces us to a fashionably intellectual socialite called Fresca in heroic couplets imitating Pope. DeMille’s Lady Mary Loam awakens, bathes, and breakfasts; Fresca awakens, takes a shit (a nod to Swift, perhaps), then breakfast in bed, followed by a bath. Pursuing his watery theme, Eliot has Fresca step ashore into the genteel “smart set,” a compound of wealth, fashion, sports. He compares her celebrity to that of the film star. Fresca is Gloria Swanson.55 It has to be said that female hygiene was a big issue in the glossy magazines in the early 1920s, with luxury soaps, deodorants, depilatory creams, manicure preparations, and so on, advertised wall to wall. In the Fresca drafts, Eliot notoriously added his own misogyny to the brew. But I do also think that these drafts enabled him to develop his interest in femininity as both communicable (something easily imitated) and communicative (a signal easy to condense), and thus in the idea of media as such. Like DeMille, he chose to distill his representation of toilette by means of a particular, identifiable verse practice. In the end, however, Fresca seems closer to Jonson’s Fulvia than she does to Lady Mary Loam. When, propped up in bed, she composes a verse epistle to a nameless friend, satire becomes her medium, too.56 Ezra Pound, of course, did not like Eliot’s pastiche of Pope, and urged him strenuously to cut the large tracts of narrative that made up much of Parts I, III, and IV of The Waste Land drafts as they then were. I have been reading The Waste Land for what seems like forever, and it had never occurred to me, thinking of modernism from the point of view of representation, to wonder if Pound was right to bin Fresca. We have always been told that he was. Now I am not so sure. After all, the poem needed something at that point, and Eliot had to go away and write a few desultory lines about empty bottles and sandwich papers to fill the gap. Fresca’s verse epistle, by contrast, would have carried the chattiness of its first two sections forward into the third. It is, in its way, delightful. I like its slick rhymes (“new” and “Giraudoux,” for example). Of equal note is its deliberately contentless salutation (“My dear, how are you?”), which alerts us to a question raised in a variety of contexts by twentieth-century linguists, Sapir among them. Does language represent, or mediate, thought? One of the answers put forward to the latter effect was Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960), itself conceivably influenced in some measure by a key text in the history of mediation in particular, Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” of 1948.57 The element in Jakobson’s model that might interest us most in this context is its emphasis on the phatic utterances that open a “channel” of communication between addresser and addressee (the term “channel” may derive from Shannon). His example is the act that initiates a conversation by phone: “Hello, do you hear me?” Fresca’s “My dear, how are you?” serves an identical function. According to Jakobson, the “set” toward “contact” established by an opening salutation draws attention to, and so insists upon the proper maintenance

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of, the material means by which communication takes place. Fresca’s letter puts the matter of media at the center of the poem as it originally was. So it is very much to my point that a revised and drastically shortened version of the episode—Fresca awakens, stretches, begins a letter (“I’m very well, my dear, and how are you?”), eats breakfast—should appear in one of the “Letters of the Moment” Vivien Eliot published under the pseudonym of Fanny Marlow in The Criterion in 1924. The article’s topic is coded communication, and the lines from The Waste Land draft constitute its mise en abîme.58 If Fresca had remained, in some fashion, in The Waste Land, we might have had, not necessarily a better poem, but a modernism that was beginning to think of literature as a truly modern medium, and to wonder what it is that media actually do.

Notes 1. Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), v. 2. David Trotter, “Literature between Media,” in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), forthcoming. 3. For an argument to the contrary, see Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4. John Guillory, “Enlightening Mediation,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 54. See also Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 321–62. 5. Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael A. Elliott, The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 6. Franz Boas, The Shaping of American Anthropology: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 7. George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 288. 8. Eric Aronoff emphasizes the interdisciplinary or “pre-disciplinary” nature of the project: Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 12. 9. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” in Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 318. 10. Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16–55. 11. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 120. 12. Eliot, “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” (1913), in Complete Prose 1, 114. 13. Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 206. 14. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), 11 and 15. 15. Edward Sapir, “An Approach to Symbolism,” in Collected Works, Volume 1, ed. Pierre Swiggers et al. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 163. 16. Sapir, Language, 20. 17. Edward Sapir, “Communication,” in Selected Writings, 104 and 107. 18. See David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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19. Eliot, “Communication and Inspection” (1913), in Complete Prose 1, 120–21. 20. Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Ig Publishing, 2011), 97. 21. Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 85–90. See also Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 22. Charles Musser, “Divorce, DeMille, and the Comedy of Remarriage,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 282–313. 23. Cecil B. DeMille, “Photodrama a New Art,” Moving Picture World 33, no. 3 (1917): 374. 24. Frederick James Smith, “How Christ Came to Pictures,” Photoplay 32, no. 3 (1927): 118. 25. Marguerite Henry, “Use Picture Ideas to Beautify your Home at Very Small Cost,” Photoplay 27, no. 5 (1925): 54–55. On DeMille and consumer culture, see Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille, 142–78. 26. William J. Moll, “Have You a Dressing-Table? This Will Help You Make One,” Photoplay 25, no. 2 (1924): 64–65. 27. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 141–42. 28. Sapir, Selected Writings, 107–8 and 373–81. 29. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 273. 30. Sapir, Selected Writings, 377. 31. Quoted by Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 155. 32. Jacobs, Decline of Sentiment, 34–37, 99–101, and passim. 33. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in Complete Prose 2, 150–64. Originally two separate reviews, subsequently combined in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920): “Ben Jonson,” Times Literary Supplement 930 (November 13, 1919): 637–38; and “The Comedy of Humours,” The Athenaeum 4672 (November 14, 1919): 1180–81. 34. I am very grateful to Frances Dickey for drawing my attention to several uses of the term “medium” of which I would not otherwise have been aware. 35. Eliot, “Matter and Form in Aristotle’s Metaphysics” (1915), in Complete Prose 1, 223. 36. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Complete Prose 2, 110. 37. Compare, for example, Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907), 1, 37, and 170, with Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), xix, 40, and 172. 38. Eliot, “Inconsistencies in Bergson’s Idealism” (1913), in Complete Prose 1, 74–75. 39. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1911), 309. 40. Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), 105–8; Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Philosophy,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 16. 41. Dora Marsden, “Space and Substance,” The Egoist 5, no. 8 (1918): 102–3. 42. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (New York: Longmans, Green, 1914), 41. 43. Eliot, “The Hawthorne Aspect,” The Little Review 5 (August 1918), in Complete Prose 1, 739. 44. Eliot, “Introduction to Selected Poems, by Ezra Pound” (1928), in Complete Prose 3, 526. 45. Eliot, “Dramatis Personae,” The Criterion 1 (April 1923), in Complete Prose 2, 435. 46. The staunchest advocate of film as a photographically based “realistic medium” was Siegfried Kracauer, in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 47. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” in Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 192. 48. OPP, 254.

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Eliot, “Dryden the Poet,” The Listener 5 (1931), in Complete Prose 4, 268. OPP, 38. Eliot, The Aims of Poetic Drama (London: The Poets’ Theatre Guild, 1949), 7. Ben Jonson, Catiline, ed. W. F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner (London: Edwin Arnold, 1973), II.i.177–85. Complete Prose 2, 153. Angele la Driere, “Dressing Tables,” Photoplay 16, no. 1 (1919): 33. WLF, 29. Ibid., 23. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), 350–77. Guillory usefully considers the essay from the point of view of the history of mediation: “Enlightening Mediation,” 59–61. F. M. (Fanny Marlow), “Letters of the Moment—II,” The Criterion 2, no. 7 (1924): 360–61.

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14 Eliot and the Art of the Phonograph Malobika Sarkar

T

he single most revolutionary breakthrough in sound technology, especially in the recording and broadcasting of the human voice, was the invention of the phonograph. The December 22, 1877 issue of Scientific American reported its arrival, and Thomas A. Edison applied for the US patent two days later.1 Born into the “phonograph era,” Eliot came to maturity during the age of its greatest historical influence.2 He was witness to the impact of this remarkable device on the immediate aural environment and on man’s listening consciousness. The unique auditory experience engendered by the phonograph was literally “unforeheard”; Eliot’s sensibility may perhaps be best understood as having taken shape under the inescapable reality of the phonograph’s influence. Eliot’s voice-oriented poetics implicitly register the impact of the phonograph, as this chapter argues. An interpretation of Eliot’s “phonological” poetics rests on his own explicit acknowledgment of the place of the phonograph—or gramophone, as he preferred to call it—in modernity and in his own day-to-day life.3 Perhaps the best known of these moments of acknowledgment is the typist’s placing of a record on the gramophone with “automatic hand” in The Waste Land. In the same year, as Eliot paid homage to Marie Lloyd, he wrote in a similar vein: When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loud-speaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians [by dying of pure boredom].4 Suggesting that recorded sound exemplifies, and perhaps has contributed to, the mechanization of modern life, these negative characterizations of gramophonelistening fit easily into our concept of Eliot as a naysayer of modernity; yet during the same period Eliot frequently mentioned the gramophone positively, as a reassuring aspect of domestic life. In 1917, he reported on London to his mother: “It is very warm and bright; the gramophones across the court have been going without intermission, and the streets are full of people.”5 Writing to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, he contrasted the terrors of the time with the simple pleasure of listening to recorded music:

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I have been living in one of Dostoevsky’s novels, you see, not in one of Jane Austen’s. If I have not seen the battlefield, I have seen other strange things, and I have signed a cheque for £200,000 while bombs fell about me. . . . [I]t all seems like a dream. The most real thing was a little dance we went to a few days ago, something like yours used to be, in a studio with a gramophone; I am sure you would have liked it and the people there.6 Similarly, in the playful sketch “Eeldrop and Appleplex” (also 1917), “Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramophones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.”7 Each of these vignettes of urban life affirms the activities of peacetime leisure. References like these continued to appear through the 1920s; for example, in 1927 he asked Virginia Woolf to invite him to tea and promised to bring a new gramophone record, which he did according to her diary.8 In 1928, Vivien wrote hopefully to Mary Hutchinson that her husband “has taken up dancing again, & is quite enjoying it (gramophone).”9 Eliot listened to popular and classical music on his gramophone; as an editor he actively promoted a recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake; and he made recordings of his own voice. His experience of the phonograph reflects our manifold perceptions of this invention: as a medium for conveying both music and speech; as a source of cultural enrichment that increased the quality of life (such as listening to the latest dances in one’s rooms in London); and as a device that mechanized interactions and dissolved community in the twentieth century. These positions occurred sequentially in history before they became available for Eliot to consider simultaneously. In particular, the phonograph progressed from a “talking machine” to a singing machine, threatening to usurp the poet both as talker and as singer.

The “Talking Machine” The phonograph was considered a perfect embodiment of the technological utopianism dominant in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American thinking. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), to take a popular example, presented technology as the solution to most of man’s problems and a means to improve society. The voice machine was warmly received when it was first introduced on the British market by the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company on April 24, 1878. The Illustrated London News of August 3, 1878 reported the invention of the phonograph as evidence of an age of “scientific marvels, if not of miracles,” comparing the phonograph to the electric telegraph, “which turned into a verity Puck’s boast of girdling the earth in forty minutes.” Unlike the telegraph, whose functional purpose was clear, the phonograph was a novelty with no obvious use. The same issue of The Illustrated London News reports Edison as saying that the phonograph “mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words: and centuries after you have crumbled to dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy . . . that you choose to whisper against the thin iron diaphragm.”10 That it could “mimic,” “speak,” and “utter” words was no less unique than its ability to immortalize the sound of the human voice. Scientific American introduced it as a little machine that “spoke” in the presence of a dozen or more people in the office, and its remarks were perfectly audible.11 Even the 1878 “Song of

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Mr. Phonograph” by one H. A. H. von Ograff emphasized the machine’s ability to talk: “The folks they just yell into my mouth and now I’m saying what’s true / For just speak to me, I’ll speak it back and you’ll see I can talk like you.”12 Along with the telephone and the microphone, the “speaking phonograph” radically transformed the contemporary soundscape. If writing had technologized the word, as Walter Ong argues, the phonograph technologized the human voice.13 The play of pre-recorded voices only simulated the sound of spoken words, without their immediacy or dynamism. It nevertheless drew attention and sensitized listeners to the changing “tones,” as Edison mentioned, and to modulations of the speaking voice, to what Roland Barthes would identify as “the grain of the voice,” and to variations in its pitch through speech acts like whispering.14 It was speech, rather than song, that originally defined the purpose of the “talking machine.” In answer to questions of “What Will Come of the Phonograph?” (the title of an article in the June 1888 Spectator), Edison’s agent in London, George E. Gouraud, convinced William Gladstone to record his voice on the phonograph, as well as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, and Robert Browning. The actor Henry Irving made several recordings, including a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Richard III.15 The machine demonstrated its utility and effectiveness in immortalizing the voice in the very domains of politics, poetry, and performance, where speakers hold sway. The Wordsworthian image of the poet as a man speaking to men, Coleridge’s “conversation poems,” and the Victorian dramatic monologue may well be regarded as literary antecedents of phonographic utterance in which the speaking voice, its tone, modulation, and other elements become increasingly the poet’s preoccupation. Despite the steep price of the phonograph (60 pounds and up), its utility as a dictaphone made it a popular tool for stenographers and typists, and Edison was convinced that its “future lay in the office.”16 Its ultimate commercial success, however, was for entertainment. In 1889 many phonograph companies were building a repertoire of “speaking records” and musical recordings, led by the Washington-based Columbia Company.17 The success was immediate. Columbia set up offices in New York and elsewhere as they developed the entertainment side of recording. Louis Barfe observes, “The range of fare on offer was rather limited, majoring in honest crowd-pleasing vulgarity, at the expense of the highbrow.”18 For example, George W. Johnson achieved fame with two recordings, “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song”; Len Spencer played Irish-American characters; and in a series of humorous recordings, Russell Hunting impersonated an Irishman, Michael Casey. The gramophone began to make a virtue of the fact that it could only play prerecorded discs that would never be tainted by amateur offerings. In the early 1890s, recordings of marches by John Philip Sousa and arias from Verdi’s Rigoletto persuaded Edison finally to agree “to promote the phonograph as a medium of entertainment, and he began to outline the design of a simpler and far cheaper model—one that would fit the means of the average American family.”19 In an article for Appleton’s Magazine, Sousa predicted “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste . . . by virtue or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”20 This prediction was accurate, argues Roland Gelatt; much of the music recorded was of a less enduring variety: “The marches and ‘coon songs’ of 1900 were succeeded by the one-steps and the waltzes of World War I, and these in turn were

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followed by the jazz of the Twenties, the swing of the Thirties, and the mood music of the Fifties.”21 Exactly how pervasive, and in certain ways invasive, too, was the influence of this gadget in American society can be understood from Mark Katz’s remarkable study “Making America More Musical: The Phonograph and ‘Good Music.’ ”22 The role of the phonograph in America’s struggle to find its musical identity, he asserts, cannot be underestimated. The “musical meliorism” it effected resulted from its deployment as a cultural and educational tool popularizing the habit of listening to European classical music both at home and in schools, which in early twentieth-century America was considered indispensable for developing a discriminating musical sense. Its affordability enabled most to acquire a set, and through it close familiarity with the European classical music tradition. The phonograph brought about a shift in focus from music performance to appreciation. In American colleges and universities, music appreciation courses took the place of musical instruction and sometimes even aided the process of learning and teaching music.23 As Edison emphasized in an article he wrote for the North American Review, the phonograph was to be used most effectively as “a musical teacher.” Indeed, the practical utility of the phonograph in enabling “one to master a new air, the child to form its first songs, or to sing him to sleep”24 eventually turned out to be the most revolutionary of all the roles envisaged by Edison for the phonograph. Its impact on the music market was immediate; over the next half-century, poets worked out the implications of this shift in the general soundscape for the creation and reception of their art.

“The Bird, the Phonograph, Sing” The phonograph realized a longstanding poetic trope of the immortality of the word: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this.”25 Faithfully recording and transmitting human utterances, the imperishable voice box recalls most closely Keats’s “immortal bird” whom no “hungry generations” tread down, or the “unbodied joy” of Shelley’s skylark, who “ever singest.” The Romantic image of the singing bird also imparts mobility to the poetic word: Keats speaks of the “viewless wings of poesy,” Shelley of the “winged word.” The portability of the phonograph, too, enabled it to reach where poets and musicians could not. Referring to the music of Paul Verlaine’s poetry, Arthur Symons expressed a similar ideal for the 1890s: “to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul.”26 The phonograph’s dual capacities as speaker and as singer may underlie or motivate the modernist concern with modes of poetic voicing. In his essay “How to Read,” Pound observes that “melopoeia,” poetry designed to appeal musically, requires the poet to be engaged, in the context of live oral performance, in three forms of vocalization: singing, chanting, and speaking.27 Acting as Harriet Monroe’s London correspondent for the newly launched American magazine Poetry, Pound wrote in 1912 that the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore came to England from Bengal, which “superficially seems to be beset with phonographs and railways. Beneath this there would seem to be a culture not wholly unlike that of twelfth-century Provence. Tagore is their great poet and musician.”28 Pound’s impression of Tagore as the troubadour from Bengal was based on his reading of verses from Gitanjali, literally meaning an offering of

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songs. Tagore’s translations of these “songs” were popular in English literary circles at the time. Pound’s 1912 essay on Tagore was composed when he was engaged in an extensive study of medieval European poetry, scrutinizing the art of the troubadours in “Arnault Daniel” (1910), “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions” (1913), and “Cavalcanti” (1920). It is in the last of these essays that his imagination brings together the bird, the troubadour, and the phonograph. Studying the metrical intricacies animating troubadour verse in “Cavalcanti,” Pound observes in medieval Italian or Tuscan poetry the presence of “something which had not been or not been in any so marked and developed degree in the poetry of the troubadours.”29 Pound regards the metric as the chief source of the musical appeal of troubadour poetry; in speculating on the peculiarity of the “Tuscan aesthetic,” however, he is led to consider the properties and sources of sound in general: Man shares plastic with the statue, sound does not require a human being to produce it. The bird, the phonograph, sing. Sound can be exteriorized as completely as plastic. There is the residue of perception, perception of something which requires a human being to produce it. Which even may require a certain individual to produce it.30 From his own experience of the arts in his age, Pound observes that the plastic arts, involving the activities of molding and shaping, require human agency in a way that sound, though completely “exteriorized” and objectified like plastic, does not. Sound requires human agency not to produce it but only to perceive it. Equating the bird and the phonograph as “singers,” Pound connects the Romantic trope of the poet as bird with the technology of the twentieth century. In the increasingly mechanized culture of the twentieth century in which machines “work” and devices like the phonograph “speak,” “sing,” and “play,” the role of the human agent in the processes of sound production, as Pound notes, appears to have been considerably minimized; in fact, “sound does not require a human being to produce it.”31 Pound deliberately dissociates the human factor from the processes of sound production. Instead, Pound associates human agency with “the residue of perception.” In Pound’s view, the human (poetic) agent is repositioned as the only perceiving consciousness who can transform his auditory experience into creative insights and perceptions. With the bird and the phonograph having usurped the agency of song, the poet can no longer regard himself as a singer. Moreover, unlike the troubadour who was both composer and performer, the modern poet is a composer only and cannot associate himself with either the singer or the musician. Both the bird and the Aeolian lyre mark a significant stage in the history of the evolution of the phonograph—the final dissolution of man’s hegemony over the sources of production of song and music, symbolized respectively by the bird as natural agent and the Aeolian lyre as mechanical agent. Seeing the phonograph as finally monopolizing voice production, the poet in Pound’s vision is perhaps relegated to the position of a listener generating perceptions. The shift in human involvement from the area of sound production to that of perception indicates an awareness of the other vital aspect of the auditory experience, the physical act of sound reception. As the Romantic poets’ response to birdsong shows, they were preoccupied with two vital aspects of the sound experience: production and transmission. Pound’s association of birdsong with the phonograph alerts us to the human reception of sound without which, in the words of the eagle

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that flew the frightened Chaucer on its back, “sound is nought but air y’broken.” Human reception attributes meaning to what otherwise is an indifferent physical event in the outer world. In a sense, the modernist response to the phonograph returns to an early modern conception of music. In seventeenth-century thought, the philosopher’s concern with the theoretical aspect of music ranked higher than the musician’s technique in operating an instrument. As a part of the university curriculum, the study of music did not include training in the skills of playing. Although there were a few “scholastic musicians,” most Renaissance scholars of music regarded music-making as a form of experimental practice and attended musical performances by professional musicians to observe and study the sonorities and aural effects of instruments. The scholastic attitude to music derived from the medieval philosopher Boethius’s hierarchical and tripartite classification of music and musicians. Penelope Gouk mentions the three distinct categories of musicians outlined by Boethius in Fundamentals of Music: [T]he most lowly perform on instruments, the middle category compose songs and the third have a capacity to judge instrumental performance and songs. Only this last category, being totally grounded in reason and thought “will rightly be esteemed as musical” since instrumentalists are lacking in thought and poets are led to song by a certain “natural instinct.”32 Perceptive listening on the part of the Boethian philosopher was, as Gouk points out, the chief form of observation required for the scientific study of the physical properties of sound. Listening comes to regain in modernism the importance it once held in the early modern period. Katz notes how the phonograph placed man in the role of the listener. “In the nineteenth century,” he notes with reference to the American experience with the phonograph, “the primary goal was to teach students how to make music, particularly through singing. In the twentieth century, however, the focus began shifting from the practical to the aesthetic. The ideal became known as appreciation—generally understood as the intelligent enjoyment of music, typically classical music, as a listener.”33 Many poems from Eliot’s notebook, Inventions of the March Hare, invoke scenes of listening to music. Most notably, in “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot portrays the female interlocutor attempting to engage her visitor in conversing “intelligently” on the experience of listening to “the latest Pole” play the “Preludes.” In a similar manner, “poetry develops,” asserts Eliot in “Rudyard Kipling” (1941), “a virtuosity of appreciation on the part of the audience.”34

Disembodied Voices Eliot, whose poetic experimentation rested mainly on the speech mode, seems most disturbed by the phonograph’s capacity as a speaker. In 1928, thanking John Gould Fletcher for compliments on a recent lecture, he deprecates his own abilities as a talker: I am a very poor lecturer. I have had a certain experience and I never improve and I never find it any easier; even this short and badly prepared talk ruined my peace of mind for two or three days beforehand. I will try to take your tip about the mantrams although, as I say, I never speak in public when I can help it; the idea sounds

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plausible. It reminds me of my own idea for making money: that is, to make gramophone prayer records to be fitted to electrical gramophones to be sold in Thibet. I believe there is plenty of water power in Thibet, so there ought to be no difficulty about the electricity. There should be millions in it.35 Here Eliot playfully imagines the phonograph as the antidote to his own tongue-tied state as public speaker: broadcasting his own voice, or someone else’s, chanting Buddhist mantras across the Indian subcontinent. The imaginary compensation for being a “poor lecturer” is the “millions” to be made from selling gramophone prayer records. From the very outset of his career Eliot was alert to the significance of the sound of a word in conveying the meaning. “No word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle,” he asserts in “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” (1917), whereas Pound studied the fusion of sound (son) and meaning (senz). Both sought ways of making poetry not simply sound meaningful, but also audible as meaningful sound, often enhancing the “phonogenic” effects to make it suitable for producing the desired effect. The poems collected in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) show Eliot exploring poetic possibilities inhering in speech cadences. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for instance, appeared to shock ears more accustomed to the cadences of song; it was a “song” that could hardly be sung or set to music.36 Eliot later related these modes of expression in his 1942 “Music” essay: “singing is another way of talking.”37 Appearing two years after Pound’s “Cavalcanti” essay, The Waste Land (1922) brings to an almost feverish climax the poet’s acute anxiety, a fear as it were, regarding speech. The Waste Land articulates not a willing renunciation of speech for that unspoken, but an unwilling submission to a machine that in a sense challenged if not usurped the human prerogative of speech. Sound and noise as products and byproducts of industrialization had increasingly come to constitute a large part of the urban soundtrack, but the deluge of human voices, living and dead, ghostly and real, past and present, speaking and singing in Eliot’s poem perhaps wakes us to the unique experience engendered by the phonograph, and we drown in the waste land of speech, dialogue, song, and echoes. Phonographic transmission of voices and music seemed to dissolve the difference between the natural and the artificial, the living and the dead, producing a terrible confusion of realities as well as of identities. Man himself came to be almost indistinguishably associated with a machine that could speak and sing like him. (In D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Dog Tired” (1913), man is referred to as “the chattering machine.”) In The Waste Land the typist switches on the gramophone with “automatic hand”: is the arm of the gramophone an extension of her body, or is her hand an extension of the mechanical arm? In this poem, urgent exhortations to speak (“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.”) and the desperate attempt to strike up a conversation (“There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! / You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’ ”) reveal an acute desire to hear a living voice and through it to be assured of a living presence, which alone has the power to generate speech. In a poem where intense dryness is registered aurally in the hallucinatory hearing of water dripping, speech is largely borrowed or reproduced from recordings, mechanical and mnemonic. The poet expresses an inability to originate speech (“Son of man, / You cannot say”; “I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed”); Lil, who never speaks directly

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but rather through second-hand reported speech, has lost her teeth. The phonograph severs speech from the living source of its origin. The voice of the thunder sounds the natural sources that sustain life amidst the unnatural proliferation of mechanical speech acts. In The Waste Land, both singing and phonographic singing appear to function as mechanical and manual forms of reproduction; the nearest poetic equivalent is the traditional device of the echo. In his “Notes” to The Waste Land, Eliot cites Spenser’s Prothalamion as the source of the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” which is repeated thrice within a brief span of about ten lines and without quotation marks. Only the third iteration is varied: “Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.” Eliot recalls and “sings” a Spenserian song-line and, like the singer, owes the words of the song to the composer. Singing is a form of musically echoing and in the process recalling the words composed by another. The absence of quotation marks heightens the sense that the citation is to be appreciated aurally, as if actually sung. In The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, John Hollander observes, “Until an astoundingly late moment in the history of technology—that of Edison’s sound transcription—the only means of perpetuating sound per se (as opposed to writing and musical notation, which preserve instruction for producing it) were echoes and perhaps parrots.”38 Hollander reads Eliot’s use and variation of the Spenserian refrain “Sweet Thames, run softly . . .” as echoic in two ways. First, Eliot’s repetition is a “mocking echo,” and second, in varying the line, Eliot provides a “richer” echo that affirms by interpreting the prior textual voice.39 In Eliot, technology shapes an aesthetic of repetition that is perhaps as rich and varied as Hollander shows echoes to be. As Hollander points out, in echoic transmission the end part of a line or word is usually repeated and prolonged, exactly the part that Eliot has changed. In my understanding, Eliot’s rendering here makes us aware that phonographic transmission does not necessarily dwell on the end part exclusively as an echo does; rather I see the change Eliot makes as the effect of phonographic transmission, which fostered a form of creative auditory response in the poet. In Wagnerian musical motifs the beginnings are generally repeated and follow the pattern of conscious recall in which the mind identifies a tune usually by the first part. Baudelaire sees the operation of these Wagnerian motifs as what he calls “mnemonic echoes” creating, he says, a “despotic music.”40 The phonograph revived repetition and its aesthetic possibilities, which were an integral part of musical as well as poetic aesthetics of aural-oral art forms, difficult to experience before recorded music was available and generally avoided in written and printed poetry. The exact recurrence of the Spenserian song-line may be heard as phonographically reproduced and repeated, rather than as a recurring echo. The echo device is aural, and diachronically relates Spenser’s prior voice with Eliot’s later utterance. In the third iteration the Spenserian song-line mutates precisely at the point where echoing traditionally and acoustically occurs, suggesting that Eliot’s voice and Spenser’s, the past and the present, are simultaneously audible, an experience that the phonograph provided. While allusion is conscious and deliberately adopted, the echo belongs to the less conscious levels of assimilation. Identifying a reference to Shakespeare in one of Massinger’s lines, Eliot observes, “This is, on Massinger’s part, an echo, rather

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than an imitation or a plagiarism—the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing.”41 In The Waste Land, echoing appears to be far from unconscious. Eliot deliberately adopts the phonographic means of reproducing and repeating literary and musical texts he actually heard played through the phonograph, such as “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.” Eliot’s transcription of the Shakespearian Rag imitates not the words on the printed page of the song, but the singer’s elongated, syncopated performance of the music. Katz argues that the technology of recording shaped the art of jazz, essentially based on improvisation. With no notated, printed music, each live performance of jazz signifies the creation of an original musical text. With the advent of recording, however, the phonograph could fix and freeze a particular piece of jazz, more so when the audience found a particular performance appealing; in which case it had to be repeated in live performance with the band following the recording with the same strict fidelity as classical instrumentalists performing a piece of notated music. Although recording appeared to prevent improvisation, Katz argues that jazz thrived by developing innovative means. Recounting the challenges jazz musicians faced during recording sessions, Katz points to slips, memory lapses, and mistakes in the rendition of beats that were often recorded by accident. With the moment—of slip, of break, the sliding of a note, or playing of a wrong beat—recorded as part of the performance, the accidental became audible as deliberate strokes of artistry, the moment of lapse, of perfection. Because of the changes in the sound of musical instruments on recordings, jazz musicians came to select “phonogenic” instruments that would produce the desired effect when played back, as Katz explains. Washboards were often used in place of drums, for example.42 Eliot reminds us that “it is out of sounds that he (the poet) has heard that he must make his melody and harmony” in poetry.43 The “Shakespearean Rag” moment in The Waste Land offers a counterpoint to the typist’s mechanical act of listening, for here Eliot introduces a poetic innovation motivated and inspired by a phonographic recording. Indeed, perhaps what the typist hears is the same song that runs through the husband’s head in “A Game of Chess” as he listens to his wife’s distracted conversation. In The Waste Land Eliot introduces “voices” as disembodied, severed from their living sources and made a part of the other noises of the city. In a letter dated September 8, 1914, Eliot writes: “The noises of a city so large as London don’t distract one much; they become attached to the city and depersonalize themselves.”44 Removed from their origin, voices acquire the status of what in Walter Ong’s words is an “autonomous discourse”: “vatic sayings or prophesies, for which the utterer himself or herself is considered only the channel, not the source. The Delphic oracle was not responsible for her oracular utterances.”45 The phonograph is the channel, not the source, of the “voices” that fill the urban space, just as Shakespearean and Spenserian lines sound disembodied, deoriginated, and decontextualized in Eliot’s poem. After the departure of the clerk, the typist switches on the gramophone and the music brings into immediate creative replay speech-lines from Shakespeare and Goldsmith blended seamlessly with contemporary song. The gramophone offered a listening experience in which voices from the past fused with present ones. What is the place of the poet in a world of depersonalized voices? The typist seems to draw comfort from the companionable presence of the gramophone, whose mechanical voices fill the void of her empty flat. In Sweeney Agonistes, Doris complains that

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on a “cannibal isle” without gramophones, “I’d be bored.” (“There’s no telephones / There’s no gramophones / There’s no motor cars . . .”). Doris prefers to choose her aural environment through the gramophone rather than hearing the sounds of nature, of sea surf breaking against the shore. The gramophone and other modern conveniences permit Doris to avoid “the facts” as presented by Sweeney: “Birth, and copulation, and death. / That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.” Doris’s freedom from the labor of making music and her freedom to listen to what she pleases indicate Eliot’s awareness of his position as a music-maker in a market of many sonic alternatives. Like Shelley’s skylark, the poet’s compositions must be captivating so that “the world will listen to (him)” as Shelley does to the bird. In his 1936 essay “A Note on the Verse of John Milton” (later “Milton I”), Eliot speaks of the hypertrophy of the poet’s auditory imagination, the excessive sound his poetry makes, perhaps following Pound’s comment on Milton having set the “noise tradition” in poetry.46 Eliot wishes to wish away the phonograph and its proliferation of speech. The jocular irreverence of the swinging jazz rhythms in Sweeney Agonistes, whose title echoes Milton’s “Samson Agonistes,” marks the moment when the poet must make “a new appeal to the ear,” as he says in “Milton II.”47 Doris’s choice of the gramophone over the live, natural music of the surf indicates a rejection of the music of Romantic poetry and masks a more serious threat that both jazz and the portable machine disseminating it posed to the voice of the modernist poet. In fact, one notes the poet’s growing interest in silence, an absence of voice, which appears in a rare moment in The Waste Land (1922) in arrested speech: “I could not / Speak.” As yet silence signifies little: “I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Eliot observes in the first of the “Choruses” from The Rock (1934): “Endless invention, endless experiment / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness / Knowledge of speech but not of silence.” Eliot’s response to a highly mechanized culture and the repetitiveness impressed upon his listening consciousness through the phonograph finally moves beyond criticism into aestheticization. Eliot draws upon the literary resources of non-English oral cultural practices in which repetition inheres in different mnemonic forms and patterns. Incantatory rhythms often replicate the repetition of patterns inherent in seasonal cycles, the primal and perennial rhythms of life that Eliot appreciates in Four Quartets. Repetition forms the aesthetic core of the structure of Four Quartets. The musical form of this poem, argues Jewel Spears Brooker, “reveals the structure through repetition even while it resists reduction to specific meaning.”48 “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?”49 Repetition leaves an impression of the sense being ultimately irreducible. The transition is evident decades prior in The Waste Land, in which Eliot represents death through phonographic reproduction and repetition of past voices. The recurrence is mechanical; its use is intended to convey mindless casual gestures in the phantom land embedded in the sensitive, pained perception of an observer poet, the “medium” through whom different poetic voices articulating death are audible.

Conclusion Eliot belonged to the first generation experiencing what Walter Ong refers to as “secondary orality,” in a culture where telephones, radios and gramophones privilege verbal communication as primarily aural. In attempting to re-relate the processes of

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writing poetry with his experience of listening to the phonograph, Eliot perhaps tries to revive in the written form what Ong refers to as “the psychodynamics of orality.” Writing, Ong argues, is passive, “an alienation from the natural milieu,” reducing the opportunity of interaction and exchange. “As a form of technology writing initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.”50 Eliot consciously attempts to reverse the process, relating poetry-writing to the larger experience of living in one’s own time, infusing the poetic word with the rhythms of everyday speech, enlivening poetry with the sound the poet hears in his environment. Linked as poetry traditionally is to the visual arts of painting and sculpture and to the auditory arts of music, song and oratory, The Waste Land in particular may be seen and heard as the photographic and “phonographic” image of Eliot’s times. Indeed in the technologically transformed context of modernism, the poet’s art relates to both photography and “phonography.” This term waits to be familiarized as “sonography” has been; the Greek origin phone of the word phonograph means both sound and voice, while son means only sound. Perhaps the poet may be regarded as a phonograph, a voice-line or channel like the telegraph, the medium for transmitting “voices.” This medium may not always function well, of course. Anita Desai’s novel In Custody (1984) might be said to register a later episode in the history of the phonograph. Desai’s 1965 novel, Voices in the City, clearly shows The Waste Land’s influence in her evocation of the city and use of voices (“He Do the Police in Different Voices” is not far from her title). In Custody concerns a young lecturer in Hindi, Deven, who has been assigned to interview the great Urdu poet, Nur, who is drunk and dissolute, ailing, and uncooperative most of the time. Composed orally and recited by the poet, his poetry emerges at times as broken, indistinct whispers, at times too loud and jarring, brilliantly poignant, passionate, and pathetic, the perishable made imperishable in the custody of the phonograph and outlined by the narratorial voice, the phono-graph. Desai’s novel reveals the frailties not simply of the voice but of the very device itself, what Gelatt refers to as “the waywardness of the phonograph, its habit of performing beautifully on one occasion and breaking down completely on the next.”51 In the predominantly oral culture of India, Deven’s faith in the phonograph’s promise of permanence is not shattered by any dawning awareness of the everlasting ephemerality of man and machine, voice and the phonograph. It is simply rendered irrelevant. The narrator’s voice makes audible the imperishable appeal of the art of phonography, its relentless fidelity to the brittle, frail fragments of sound it shores up.

Notes 1. Louis Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 6. 2. In Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), William Kenney identifies the period of the phonograph’s greatest influence as 1890 to the 1930s (xiii). 3. The terms have been used interchangeably in this paper, as they were in Eliot’s day, though “gramophone” was gradually dropped from the American vocabulary. Roland Gelatt claims that the gramophone is a later development on the Edison phonograph by the Italian

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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immigrant to America, Emile Berliner. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977, 2nd ed. (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977), 60. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” The Dial 73 (December 1922), in Complete Prose 2, 420. L1, 201. Ibid., 210. Complete Prose 2, 528. L3, 517. L4, 312. Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 9. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1988; rpt. 1991). Ong’s main argument is that writing or literacy has led to the word, which initially existed in the oral-aural medium, being “technologized.” Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977; paperback ed., 1978), 179–89. Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 17. Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 3. Gelatt uses this term in The Fabulous Phonograph, 53. Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 21. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 55–56. Cited in Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 27; quoted by Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 146–47. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 11. Mark Katz, “Making America More Musical: The Phonograph and ‘Good Music,’ ” in Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Katz, “Making America More Musical,” 66. Cited in Barfe, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?, 6. William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” The Harpers Monthly (November 1893): 868. Ezra Pound, “How to Read,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968), 28. Ezra Pound, “Rabindranath Tagore,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography 36 (March 1964): 571. Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 150. Ibid., 151. Ibid. Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 81. Katz, “Making America More Musical,” 61. OPP, 231. L4, 86. MS copy of the BBC Third Programme titled “Prufrock and Other Observations” by John Hayward, produced by James Farlan, dated August 4, 1948 (King’s College, Cambridge, HB / M / 9). OPP, 31. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1–2.

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39. Ibid., 71–72. 40. Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris,” in Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1992). In this 1861 essay Baudelaire records his response to Wagner’s music as he heard it performed by the young artist in Paris, and soon after, he tells us, “heard in the casinos open nightly to crowds” (332). 41. Eliot, “Philip Massinger” (1920), in Complete Prose 2, 246. 42. Katz, “Making America More Musical,” 81. 43. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942), in OPP, 32. 44. L1, 55. 45. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 78. 46. Ezra Pound, “Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 238. 47. Eliot, Milton (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1947), 207; later printed as “Milton II” in OPP. 48. Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 154. 49. East Coker III, in CPP, 181. 50. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 82. 51. Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 38.

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15 Eliot’s Radio Times; or, Listen with Possum Edward Allen

He’s behind you! Oh, no he isn’t. Oh . . . . . . but you know the rest, of course. Oh, yes you do. As deviations in the theater go, it is difficult to imagine an aside more tightly scripted than this notorious calland-response; an automatism so deeply encoded, so beloved and involuntary, that guardians of the fourth wall had best run for the hills. The mechanics of pantomime might cause us to blush or sigh, holler or squirm, yet audience participation has not always been the embarrassment it appears to be today. Lending one’s voice to the proceedings of a stage piece only began to sound really peculiar in the late nineteenth century, as Susan Kattwinkel observes, and even then the tendencies of an earlier, more “vociferous” age continued to inform the ways certain kinds of performance were devised and consumed.1 More camp than cringeworthy, the skits, songs, and sketches commonly associated with the music hall are understood now to have stimulated a wide range of responses, and indeed to have generated a mode of lyrical collaboration that far exceeds the energy and quality of attention we tend to expend on stand-up artists and sing-along songs.2 While declining to style himself as an expert, Eliot turned in late 1922 to precisely this matter of “collaboration” in his tribute to the late Marie Lloyd, Queen of the Music Hall. Her talent, he remarks, had always been for rousing “sympathy,” an ability to involve the working man in “the work of acting,” and so to keep him busy while others (the bourgeoisie) lumber on in a mood of “listless apathy.” With Lloyd dead and gone, what now could possibly occupy the working man? When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.3 Slipping between the senses of medium, Eliot expresses a worry in this final paragraph that nothing but the flick of a switch or press of a button separates the working man

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from a jellied fate: a form of arrested development, a “state of amorphous protoplasm,” awaits the new media junkie, not because the products of “applied science” lack the power to stimulate, but rather because they threaten to stimulate too much, to burden or flood the brain with “continuous action.” Eliot points, by way of example, to the predicament of Melanesia in the South Pacific, whose people have simply lost the will to live. “[T]he natives of that unfortunate archipelago,” he reports, “are dying out principally for the reason that the ‘Civilization’ forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life.” For most subscribers to The Dial in 1922, Melanesia would remain a remote curiosity, but some may well have taken Eliot’s bulletin to heart, shaken by the idea perhaps that the affliction in question was something more than a tropical disease. The Melanesians may have been spared moving pictures for the moment, but they are dying, the poet warns: “they are dying from pure boredom.” It has been noticed before that boredom had begun to play on Eliot’s mind in the early 1920s, and that it would continue to do so, in fits and starts, throughout the period we are coming to know as the “long 1930s.”4 His writing is full of it, as David Chinitz has shown—full of bureaucracy and red tape, of commuters, of waiting and awaiting, of ennui.5 In its way, boredom—or the prospect of it—might be said to have become an occupation of Eliot’s; a word to occupy and a thing to be occupied by. 1922 was not a dull year for the moonlighting poet, yet he continued to think (through The Waste Land) about what it might mean to be “bored and tired,” and about the ways one might stave off boredom, or share it, by making it someone else’s problem through the act of collaboration.6 Eliot’s correspondence reveals without doubt that he considered his dealings with Ezra Pound in 1922 exactly that—“collaboration”—and the word plainly stuck in his mind long enough for him to recycle it in his tribute to Marie Lloyd.7 In seeking to illuminate the intertexture of these two states of being, collaboration and boredom, I want in this chapter to dwell on just one of the technologies that Eliot supposed would put paid to the sort of interaction once espoused by Lloyd, and which he imagined in 1922 to be one of the chief harbingers of doom: the “wireless receiver.” Eliot, we now know, put off buying a receiver until May 1929, just a few months into his first assignment at the BBC. Though eager to encourage the impression that he had finally splashed out because he wished to hear “two talks on birds,” Eliot had good reason to stump up for one on the basis of his own twittering, which seemed to him “inexperienced” and not quite up to his correspondent’s delivery, which showed that it was possible—and desirable—“to handle [the] medium with the greatest ease.”8 The rest, you might say, is history. Some fine criticism has been written about Eliot’s employment at the BBC, which Michael Coyle rightly characterizes as a “long commitment,” underpinned from the start by a “personal sense of mission.”9 We may even have grown used, perhaps, to the idea that Eliot became a divine presence on the radio, particularly in the 1940s, as he sought to resurrect a Reithian philosophy, and planned for the first time to intersperse talks on pan-European culture with readings of his own religious verse.10 It must seem a nuisance, then, or an oddity to begin by returning to the gloomy conclusion of his Lloyd tribute; but it is as well to remember, now we know (or believe we know) the scale of Eliot’s philosophy on air, that it all began for him with the expectation of growing inconsolably bored. Such fears would be realized in due course, if not by him, then by those who came in the 1940s to suspect the culture industry of turning leisure time into a series of “standardized operations,” thereby prompting

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Adorno and Horkheimer to conclude that so many kinds of amusement had become “after-images of the work process itself.”11 This, assuredly, is not the sort of “work” Eliot has in mind when he remembers the working man entering into the spirit of the music hall, responding to the come-ons of Marie Lloyd. So rather than settling for the notion that Eliot may have anticipated in 1922 the teachings of the Frankfurt School or the hang-ups of midcentury sociology, I wish to gauge instead the extent to which he continued to play with the idea of media stupefaction, and to worry about the sort of labor required of a listener and a speaker when neither party has anything more tangible to go on or work with than a disembodied voice. In doing so, as we shall see, Eliot gradually came round to the fantasy of turning radio into an interactive medium; one that could be relied upon not to send a child to sleep at night, but to keep her awake—to keep her, as we might say, wired—well beyond her bedtime. The image of a child plugged in to a receiver, both ears “attached,” is a peculiar one. It may be a premonition that has begun to haunt twenty-first-century parents in a very real way, along with the news that their offspring are more likely these days to arrive at nursery school—finger poised—raring to activate a monitor rather than to pick out the right stickle brick.12 Eliot’s image of a thoroughly mediated childhood, of hearing stories intoned through a tube, is beginning to come true; more and more, the ABC of “electrical ingenuity” is taken as read. Yet the really striking thing about his vision in late 1922 is not that he appears ahead of his time—though there is an element of science fiction about it—but that he is utterly in tune with his own. November 1922, the date of Eliot’s last “London Letter,” was also the month the British Broadcasting Company went live. Marie Lloyd’s death was evidently something to write home about, but so, in a smaller way, was the first incarnation of the BBC, whose inaugural broadcast on November 14 did much to reassure the British public that the government had kept abreast of developments in North America.13 Eliot may not have been wise to the details of the inchoate Company, or to the role of the General Post Office, but he would certainly have registered a growing warmth for the idea of an organized outfit—a service rather than a monopoly—in the approach to his annus mirabilis. Anyone of Eliot’s reading and listening habits would have been hard pressed to escape coverage of the new medium, as artists on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond) began to imagine a wireless future. Navigating the usual channels, readers were treated week on week to views such as this one in The Illustrated London News (Plate 11), an “English household” gathered around the “receiver,” enticed by “the pleasure of ‘listening in.’ ”14 Among the visual incongruities of this tableau is the mess of equipment in which the father seems to have become entangled, and which the family may well be surprised to see, given the equipment’s name: though easy to obtain and “simple to operate,” the wireless receiver is made to look and sound very wiry indeed (“A copper wire suspended at one end of the garden, with the other end of the wire coming through the window, is attached to the receiving set. Another wire from the receiver is fixed to a water pipe. That is all that is required . . .”). Still, if the circuitry of W. R. S. Stott’s sketch is convoluted, its message comes through loud and clear. Getting “attached” will be fun for all the family, including the child who braces herself for transmission, totally absorbed, eyes fixed on the receiver. Radio companies did what they could to capture the imagination of children, and to drill them in the ways of wireless etiquette. On October 7, 1922, the Prince of Wales delivered a special message to Boy Scouts around the country (“I wish you every

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possible success and good camping”), and companies were quick to follow suit in setting aside airtime for younger ears, a policy that accounts for the early creation of Children’s Hour on the BBC in December 1922.15 In some cases, the riveted child was allowed to take full control. One of the most popular “theme songs” to do the rounds in late 1921 was a ditty recorded by Irving Kaufman on the Victor label, “I Wish There Was a Wireless to Heaven” (Plate 12). Part lullaby, part prayer, the lyric recounts the predicament of a lonesome little girl on the verge of “slumber deep,” who waits to hear a message “from far away.” Following each short verse, the refrain goes like this: I wish there was a wireless to heaven, And I could speak to mama ev’ry day, I would let her know, by the radio, I’m so lonesome since she went away. I wish that I could only send a message, And hear my mama answer me and say, “Hush a bye my darling, dry your tears, don’t cry, Mama dear is watching baby from the sky.” I wish there was a wireless to heaven, Then mama would not seem so far away.16 It has been said many times before that technologies of reproduction, and to a lesser degree those of instantaneous transmission, encouraged early listeners to believe in an afterlife. “[D]eath,” as Jonathan Sterne puts it, “is everywhere among the living in early discussions of sound’s reproducibility.”17 Less often pronounced, though no less keenly felt by listeners of Eliot’s generation, is the sense in which the broadcast medium was expected to retain something of its primordial function as a means of point-to-point communication.18 The pathetic thing about the child’s ethereal elegy is not that she’s taken in by the idea of resurrecting her mother—that is the uncanny bit—but rather that she is clinging to the illusion of reciprocity. The desire to “let her know, by the radio” emanates from a little body that is doubly haunted, in both cases by the memory of intimate connection, by the dream of interacting one on one. It will be clear that Eliot’s move to satirize bedtime listening in November 1922 was by no means inadvertent. Less obvious, perhaps, is what he hoped to do by way of lightening his glimpse into the technological abyss. Indeed, the very notion that Eliot may have found either the time or wherewithal to remedy the lonesome child’s predicament is almost as preposterous as the idea (some have called it “implausible”) that Walter Benjamin may once have pondered the same difficulty himself, thereby converting an economic necessity into an opportunity to engage the children of Frankfurt and Berlin.19 Both, in fact, are quite true, and though Eliot would lag behind his German counterpart in launching a Kinderfunk [children’s programme], the poet appears to have taken on board the suggestion of his colleagues in London that his verse might appeal to younger ears. After eight years of occasional employment at the BBC (a corporation now, and no longer a company), Eliot gave a bemused but firm nod in late 1937 to the airing of his poetry on cats, the first in a sequence of broadcasts that helped to convince him, and to reassure the board at Faber, that his “nonsense verse” would perform well in the public domain.20 The poems’ textual evolution has been well documented, from their first mention and appearance in letters between Eliot and the families Tandy and Faber, to their various (and variable) musical elaborations after

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the war.21 Less often remarked is the possibility that Eliot may have found precisely the right medium for the poems when he agreed to their transmission, not once but several times, in the winter and spring of 1937–38.22 We cannot say for sure which of Eliot’s cats Tandy addressed on air, though we do know that “The Rum Tum Tugger” was ejected on one occasion “at the very last moment” on account of the schedule overrunning.23 There’s no doing anything about such mishaps, of course, but we can speculate about the sorts of accidents and patterns of address that listeners may have warmed to when they tuned in to hear Eliot’s practical nonsense. It isn’t just one of your holiday games . . . I’m deaf of an ear now . . . Please listen to me and don’t scoff . . . I ought to have told you before. . . .24 It is true, as one critic has observed, that many of Eliot’s Practical Cats drop clues and cues that might pull “one’s eye toward the popular stage”;25 but more arresting, as these sound bites suggest, are those moments of petition and imagined complicity that punctuate the feline skits, and which seem at every turn to render more tangible the texture of disembodied conversation. So while Gus, the Theatre Cat, recalls that he once knew “ ‘how to gag’ ” in the style of Marie Lloyd, it is worth noting that his talents also extended well beyond the parameters of visual spectacle. “ ‘I’d a voice that would soften the hardest of hearts.’ ”26 For Gus, perhaps, a home at Broadcasting House was always in the cards. When the BBC came to promote Eliot’s new selection, Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats, it did so in a manner that would leave listeners in no doubt about the identity of the creatures’ owner: On Christmas Day and on January 29 Geoffrey Tandy read a selection from a series of poems on cats which T. S. Eliot had been writing for the amusement and instruction of his friends’ children. These poems proved such excellent broadcasting material and were so well received that this further selection is to be broadcast of poems of a kind not usually associated with the name of their author. They have not yet been published.27 Lest readers should think this advertisement an April fool, the Radio Times makes a special effort to anticipate the qualms that might otherwise attend a hearing of Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats if you had been led to expect (for instance) a “Death by Water” or a fit of “Hysteria.” That the poems had already proven “such excellent broadcasting material” was evidently not proof enough, and so there follows the cagey spoiler that these poems represent a departure, though of what “kind” exactly it is hard to tell.28 The BBC would continue to field questions from listeners who had heard “T. S. Eliot” and could not believe their ears. Later, in 1941, for example, a memo from the broadcaster Zulfiqar Bokhari arrived on the desk of the Director of Religious Talks, apparently baffled by a recent program: On Wednesday, 2nd April, in the H. S. at 7:40 p.m. a talk was broadcast by T. S. Eliot, Litt.D. on “Towards a Christian Britain.” . . . I am sure it cannot have been the T. S. Eliot, the poet, but his name was given as “T. S. Eliot” in the Radio Times and the speaker was announced over the microphone as “T. S. Eliot.” I think probably the man who broadcast was not “T. S. Eliot,” but some other Eliot.29 By this time, perhaps, the BBC assumed that Eliot required next to no introduction, particularly among its own employees: he had been on the Corporation’s books for a little over a decade, and had moved happily in that time between the Regional and

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National Services. Even so, Bokhari’s memo was duly noted and filed away, along with the inevitable riposte: “Thanks for your memo. The T. S. Eliot who gave the talk on April 2nd is the poet. (He happens also to be a Christian sociologist of some repute).”30 If Bokhari had mistaken the voice of “T. S. Eliot” for another’s, there was no chance of his mistaking the tone of this stiffly worded memo. As belittling as that parenthesis may sound to us now (“He happens also to be a Christian sociologist of some repute”), Bokhari’s bloomer does help to illuminate the circumstances and reception of the Practical Cats series. More cautious than catty, the advertisement in the Radio Times reveals that the BBC had serious cause for concern, not that listeners would mistake the body behind the voice (few were likely to take Tandy’s for Eliot’s), but that they might balk at the mind behind the script. The BBC was probably right to surmise that parents would want to know in advance that the poems were fit for consumption by children; but perhaps the Corporation also wanted to suggest to grown-up listeners that those who had read or heard The Waste Land (as indeed some had in January 1938) might also find something to like, compare, or favor in Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats.31 It was vain to imagine that only children would want to listen in, and Eliot was alive to the possibilities of a mixed audience. Where, in 1922, he had imagined that a child listening to a wireless receiver at night might do so in solitude, he had long since come to realize that radio was for sharing. For one thing, the technology had changed almost beyond recognition—a fact Eliot was careful to register when he returned to revise the piece on Marie Lloyd for his Selected Essays (1932). The victim of wireless stupefaction, it seems, could no longer be expected to while away the evening unaccompanied—with a receiver “attached to both ears”—for “electrical ingenuity” had now made it “possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loud-speaker.”32 So much, you might say, for suffering in silence. Eliot’s dealings at the BBC, particularly in the years leading up to Practical Cats, indicates that the communal nature of listening was something he and others were encouraged to embrace rather than to regret or stifle. Things would change after the Second World War, when the Corporation’s output was newly stratified so as to cater for listeners who wished (apparently) to “move up the cultural scale” from the Light Programme to the Home Service, and thence to the ethereal heights of the Third.33 Until that time, however, Eliot was constantly advised by producers to mix and experiment with registers, not only to ensure that he avoid those avenues of discussion that had once appeared to haunt his work (“Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent”),34 but also, as the same poem might have put it, to prepare a voice to meet the voices that you meet: I don’t think [your talk] is at all too high-brow and it seems to me that you have on the whole succeeded admirably in giving the impression of conversation in what you have written. . . . A personal note, especially where it is one of literary appreciation, does not come amiss in a broadcast talk. Indeed, this personal note as between you and your listener, the intimate confidences of personal preferences and enthusiasm for those whose work you are describing, are just the sort of thing which makes a broadcast talk appeal perhaps more vividly than a formal lecture or a written article. Is this an impertinence? I hope it isn’t.35 An impertinence, no, but perhaps a sort of impiety. Eliot, after all, would not have quibbled with the idea of expressing his “literary appreciation” more effectively—in

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this case, his appreciation of “Elizabethan translators”—but he might have disputed, or striven to qualify, the suggestion that a “written article” had somehow become the broadcast’s poor relation. Whatever his admiration for the “excellent medium” of radio, Eliot would never turn his back entirely on the tonal contours of typographic expression, and nor indeed have his best critics, one of whom observes that Eliot’s “printed page” always entails “the exercise of various responsive responsibilities.”36 The question in 1929, as throughout the following decade, was how to encourage readers to realize a similar set of responsive responsibilities in the vicinity of a wireless receiver—to persuade them, in other words, not to switch off when they tune in, but to treat broadcast material as they might treat an essay that hopes “to revive old communications and to create new ones.”37 Eliot agreed with Siepmann’s analysis, by and large, and the fledgling broadcaster reported as much a couple of months later, while taking care to smooth over the alleged cracks. “I have just had a very nice letter from the head of that department of the Broadcasting Company [sic] expressing appreciation and a hope that I will give another series later,” he told his mother: “I should like to do that; once you get used to talking in that way, without seeing an audience, it becomes very easy; and there is a pleasure in thinking that the people who listen really are listening, and not like so many people at a lecture who come merely to find out what you look like.”38 There is no way of knowing if “the people who listen really are listening,” of course—that has always been radio’s difficulty—but Eliot did learn how to improve his chances of commanding attention, both from children and adults. Many of the pieces Eliot went on to write and perform in the thirties were devised with “discussion groups” and “study circles” in mind, so that the very process of writing a talk became also a process of anticipating the sorts of conversation that might take place between programs or in the wake of a series.39 One example pertains to the first of four installments in a sequence called The Modern Dilemma in March 1932. Having delivered the opening talk on “Christianity and Communism,” Eliot was informed by an editor that some chopping would be necessary if they were to ready the piece for publication in The Listener.40 “I wonder whether you could cut as much as 9 inches?,” the editor wrote, with a perceptible touch of angst: “I am afraid it seems rather a lot, but as the talk stands now it is a good bit longer than the usual length of Listener articles.”41 What appears to have justified the cut, in part, was the likelihood that Eliot had planned already to cover some of the condemned material in his next broadcast. “I wonder,” the editor hurries on, “whether it would be possible to cut out the whole of the last long paragraph, as I expect you will be dealing more fully in your later talks with the points it raises?” Quite apart from elucidating the week-to-week business of managing a series, the editor’s groveling letter makes one thing plain, which is that Eliot knew throughout the thirties that he—and his listeners—could afford to think of his series on Tudor prose, metaphysical poetry, and the Church as evolving, vicarious dialogues—as conversations conducted, as it were, out of time, yet strung loosely together by the notion of engaging a web of interlocutors. While peppering his talks with plenty of the “personal touches” Siepmann had suggested in 1929, then, Eliot’s contributions to The Modern Dilemma also evince a playful attitude to effecting interaction, or to ghosting its possibility. “Many of those who have had the patience to hear me out must have been expecting me to produce some nice little recipe for setting things right. . . . I am not.”42 But for the interventions and

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advice of friends, Eliot stood little chance in these early days of gaining any sustained feedback, or of gleaning information as to how precisely people had “hear[d] [him] out.”43 Yet it was enough to know for the moment that he was getting the juices flowing. “I am delivering Tonic Talks on the Wireless from 2LO on Tuesday evenings,” he informed one correspondent, “which are supposed to foment the cause of Adult Edjjication.”44 Edjjication, edjjication, edjjication. It is hard not to detect in retrospect something Poundian in the complexion and timbre of that important word. Yet if Eliot’s status report in 1929 seems to crackle with the influence of his sometime collaborator, one thing can be said for certain: where Pound would go out of his way a little over a decade later to be divisive on air, and to lampoon the idea of effecting any kind of political or cultural “merger,” Eliot always stuck closely to the ethos of interweaving his listeners, young and old.45 For as well as stimulating them, Eliot also hoped (in one producer’s words) “to combine both audiences,” and so perhaps to blur the distinction between child and adult.46 Sometimes this would mean appealing to the child in his adult listeners, as when he agreed in 1943 to intersperse a selection of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor with the sort of puerile sound effects that might make an adult wince and a child snicker.47 On other occasions, however, Eliot found ways to embed effects of a more rhetorical kind in material that was intended, ostensibly, for grown-up sinners. His theme in 1931, in a piece intended for the Modern Dilemma series, was “the need of synthesis.”48 It is “comparatively easy” to live at a time of religious decline, the convert argues in one preliminary draft, since those who revel in the “work of destruction” and act on the iconoclastic impulse tend only to destroy that “part” of life that society feels it can do without, and which ought to be destroyed for the common good. Modernity, that ultimately “dissociative and analytic period,” is characterized for Eliot by the proliferation of such manageable but ruinous employment—a sort of DIY “enlightenment.” And yet there remains for him, as for anyone who remembers what it is to fritter away an afternoon in the nursery, something irremediable about all this “destructive work.” An infant is perfectly content to take “an old alarmclock to pieces,” Eliot speculates, but even a child will pause for thought, once playtime’s over, if the component parts fail to cohere. Pedantic and progressive in almost equal measure, the poet can be heard toying in the run-up to this timepiece analogy with the bits and pieces that finally give shape to it. Eliot wonders in his talk not only what it means to be part of “the whole” that constitutes “humanity,” but also what the consequences might be if you feel compelled to take something apart in “the name of enlightenment and progress.” One “part” follows another as Eliot attempts to string his listener along with the help of a familiar figure, polyptoton—“destruction . . . destroying . . . destroyed . . . destructive”—and with every twist of that verbal thread, he tightens the impression that his interest in “the ‘problems’ of the present time” is not only time-consuming but timely. Perhaps he imagined his listeners’ patience beginning to fray, or perhaps he himself had begun to wonder where his talk was going. Whatever the cause, Eliot clicks neatly into youth psychology, whereby the urge to fiddle seems to give rise (but doesn’t it always?) to a waste of “parts,” time, and energy. Eliot would return after the war, in speech as well as print, to the twinned subjects of culture and family, but rarely would he achieve what he does in this queer radio piece, which is a kind of dissociative thinking dressed up to look like child’s play.

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The aim of this chapter has been to suggest some new ways of framing Eliot’s growing interest in the wireless medium, particularly during his first decade of employment at the BBC. We know more and more about Old Possum, thanks to each volume of his letters that makes it into the public domain, and though we may find the idea of sifting his complete correspondence “boring beyond tears,” there may be a reason to take Eliot’s bored and boring ways seriously.49 In addition to the Corporation’s written archive in Caversham, whose boxes of folders and folders of memos bespeak a culture of meticulous, often mind-numbing communication, we are now fortunate to have the BBC Genome Project at our fingertips, an online repository of the listings that accrued between 1923 and 2009 in the form of the Radio Times.50 Such a resource has already done much to brighten the prospect of locating Eliot in the ether, and of working out precisely where he sat in the BBC’s burgeoning ecology. George Orwell was among the first to indicate the need for such an assessment when he mentioned Eliot in an essay of 1943, “Poetry and the Microphone.” Having name-checked him in his opening sentence, Orwell settles halfway through his piece for a more sustained meditation on his new colleague’s proclivities in the BBC’s Indian Section: T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored. Sweeney Agonistes was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet.51 And so we come full circle, back to pantomime, and back to the music hall, via the waves of radio. It is nice to think that Eliot might have approved this circling back— “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started”—and perhaps he would have smiled, with Little Gidding in mind, to hear Orwell bringing back the idea that poetry might itself be “brought back” in another “medium.”52 It is not at all clear here, when Orwell inclines to “the poet,” whether he means Eliot in particular, or poets in general. Either way, there is something oddly anachronistic about Orwell’s conviction that the poet still treasures the likes of Marie Lloyd, as though deaf to the “technical advantages” of the music hall’s more ephemeral descendant. Eliot, as we have seen, had come by this time to consider the radio “a more hopeful medium” too, and one that promised—even in the small hours—to pique “the consciousness of ordinary people.”

Notes My thanks to Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern for their patience and support; also to Fiona Green, Charlotte Lee, and Flora Willson for their advice on matters of vocabulary. 1. Susan Kattwinkel, Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), ix. Gareth White accounts for recent immersive practices in Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 2. See Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), especially Chapter 2. 3. Eliot, “In Memoriam: Marie Lloyd” (originally published as “ ‘London Letter’: November 1922”), Criterion 2 (January 1923) in Complete Prose 2, 420.

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4. See Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox’s special issue on “The Long 1930s”: “Introduction,” Critical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2015): 1–9. 5. David Chinitz, “The Problem of Dullness: T. S. Eliot and the ‘Lively Arts’ in the 1920s,” in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 127–28. 6. It is the typist in “The Fire Sermon” who feels “bored and tired” (CPP, 68). Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks review the latest evidence of Eliot’s collaborative working habits at this time in “Masterpiece in the Making,” Times Literary Supplement (October 7, 2015): 15–17. 7. The word crops up twice in a letter dated March 12, 1922, each time in relation to Pound’s possible involvement with The Criterion (L1, 642–43). 8. Eliot to H. J. Massingham, June 11, 1929, in L4, 518–19. Harold Massingham gave a series of six lectures on the “habits” and “haunts” of birds, beginning with “Birds of the South” on April 30, 1929. Eliot tuned in in time to the fifth and sixth broadcasts, on “Sea Birds” (May 28) and “Shore Birds” (June 4). He did so knowing that he would soon be airing his own series of talks, on “Tudor Prose,” the syllabus of which he had assembled in February 1929. 9. “ ‘We Speak to India’: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture,” in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 178–79. Until quite recently, Eliot’s radio affinities had passed largely uninspected, but the critical literature has grown since 2001. See, for example: Michael Coyle, “T. S. Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenges of Mass Communication,” in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, 141–54; Coyle, “Radio,” in T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 145–53; Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Steven Matthews, “T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word,’ ” in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 97–111. 10. Eliot’s decision to broadcast his own poetry during the war is striking. For a full chronology of his talks and readings, see Michael Coyle, “T. S. Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts, 1929–63: A Chronological Checklist,” in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, 205–13. 11. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 137. Among the best recent studies of radio’s place in critical theory is John Mowitt, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 12. Rebecca Ratcliffe, “Children can swipe a screen but can’t use toy building blocks, teachers warn,” The Guardian, April 15, 2014. 13. Asa Briggs’s study The BBC: The First Fifty Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) remains the best historical account of these years. It is worth stressing that poetic interest in the radio antedates its rise as a popular medium on both sides of the Atlantic, for which see: Jane Lewty, “Word Electric, So Finite: Radio, Poetry and the Séance in World War I,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, ed. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 413–26; and Edward Allen, “‘One long, unbroken, constant sound’: Wireless Thinking and Lyric Tinkering in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium,” Modernism / Modernity 21, no. 4 (2014): 919–36. 14. “A Dutch Concert Heard in an English Home: Music by Wireless at a Range of 500 Miles,” The Illustrated London News (April 29, 1922): 632–33; illustration by W. R. S. Stott. 15. The Prince of Wales’s address was reported in The Wireless World and Radio Review (October 21, 1922): 94. 16. “I Wish There Was a Wireless to Heaven (The Radio Song),” words by Joe Manuel and Harry White, music by Willy White (Victor B14358).

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17. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 289. 18. Among the few to do so recently is David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8–9. 19. Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2. Many of Benjamin’s talks in the years 1929–33 were broadcast on Radio Berlin during its so-called Youth Hour. The talks are reprinted in Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal, trans. Jonathan Lutes, with Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana K. Reese (London: Verso, 2014). 20. The first broadcast of Practical Cats went out on the Regional service at 2:30 p.m. on Christmas Day 1937. A repeat followed on January 29, 1938. A new selection, Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats, was aired on April 7, 1938 during the interval of a concert from Queen’s Hall, London; repeats of this broadcast followed too. Both selections were performed by Geoffrey Tandy, the father of one of the godchildren to whom Eliot dedicated the first printed volume, along with a string of other “friends.” The story of Eliot’s animal poems—from their probable inception in 1933, to their selected publication as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in 1939—is recounted by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume II, Practical Cats and Further Verses (London: Faber, 2015), 37–53. 21. Alan Rawsthorne’s early, quirky setting for orchestra and reader, Practical Cats (1954), has been eclipsed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981). For more on Lloyd Webber’s “adaptation,” see Sarah Bay-Cheng, “ ‘Away we go’: Poetry and Play in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats,” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David E. Chinitz (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 228–38; especially 235–37. 22. Ricks and McCue observe that Eliot was “reluctant” to read the poems himself, which is quite right, but not for the reason they imply, which is that Eliot felt the BBC had grown disenchanted with his voice: “I have been given to understand that they do not like it. In any case I am not going to undergo another voice test.” This is the way Eliot put it in a letter to George Barnes on August 14, 1936 (quoted in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume II, 44), but there is evidence to suggest that the poet cooled off somewhat in the following twelve months. A memo in the BBC archives reveals that Eliot, Tandy, and Ian Cox met to discuss the Practical Cats project (“a question we have reviewed several times before”) on November 19, 1937. The same memo makes plain that the reason Eliot refused to perform the poems himself was not because he did not want to on principle, or because he felt the BBC did not like his voice, but because he knew he did not have the time to rehearse properly: “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1929–37),” BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (hereafter, Caversham). 23. Ian Cox to Eliot, April 8, 1938, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 2 (1938–43),” Caversham. 24. “The Naming of Cats,” “Old Deuteronomy,” “Mr. Mistoffelees,” “Gus: The Theatre Cat,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume II, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 5, 17, 21, and 25. 25. See Bay-Cheng, “ ‘Away we go,’ ” 233. 26. “Gus: The Theatre Cat,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume II, 25. 27. Radio Times 757 (April 1, 1938): 58. 28. One positive review, it is worth noting, appeared after Christmas by George Stonier, who considered Practical Cats a cut above the rest of the season’s offerings: “1937: Poor Vintage,” The New Statesman and Nation (January 8, 1938): 56. 29. Z. A. Bokhari, “Internal Circulating Memo,” May 27, 1941, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 2 (1938–43),” Caversham. Bokhari, in fact, would become firm acquaintances with Eliot when the men became colleagues in the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service. 30. “Internal Circulating Memo,” May 29, 1941, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 2 (1938–43),” Caversham.

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31. The program does not appear in Coyle’s “Chronological Checklist,” but the Caversham archive and Radio Times reveal that Eliot had something to do with a program about The Waste Land between the first and second airings of Practical Cats. See “Experimental Hour, No. 4: The Waste Land,” Radio Times 745 (January 7, 1938): 34. 32. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” The Dial 73 (December 1922), in Complete Prose 2, 420 (my italics). 33. William Haley, quoted in Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years, 244. See also Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 34. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in CPP, 13. 35. C. A. Siepmann to Eliot, May 27, 1929, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1929–37),” Caversham. 36. “T. S. Eliot Answers Questions,” with Ranjee Shahani, John O’London’s Weekly 58, no. 1369 (August 19, 1949): 497; Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), 180–81. 37. Eliot, “Preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism,” in Complete Prose 3, 413. 38. Eliot to his mother, July 28, 1929, in L4, 554. 39. N. G. Luker to Eliot, October 27, 1936; and F. A. Iremonger to Eliot, December 18, 1936, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1929–37),” Caversham. 40. Most of Eliot’s contracts in this period granted the BBC twenty-eight days’ leave to publish any given material, either in pamphlet form or in the Corporation’s print organ, The Listener. An important exception is Practical Cats, which Eliot refused the BBC the right to publish immediately. For more on the curious status of the weekly periodical, see Debra Rae Cohen, “Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener,” Modernism / Modernity 19, no. 3 (2012): 569–92. 41. J. A. S. to Eliot, March 8, 1932, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1929–37),” Caversham. 42. Eliot, “Building Up the Christian World,” The Listener 7 (April 6, 1932), in Complete Prose 4, 470. For a slightly different take on The Modern Dilemma, see Matthews, “T. S. Eliot on the Radio,” 104–7. 43. This was not always to be the case. Correspondence in the BBC archives shows that Eliot made a point of chasing up listener surveys in the 1950s, so as to generate for himself an “appreciation index.” See Coyle, “Radio,” 149. 44. Eliot to Bonamy Dobrée, July 4, 1929, in L4, 534. “2LO” refers to the transmitting equipment that was run at this time by the BBC, and which would shortly be decommissioned when the Corporation’s output was split into Regional and National Programmes. 45. Ezra Pound, “Last Ditch of Democracy,” broadcast on Radio Roma, October 2, 1941; reprinted in “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), 3. 46. Ian Cox to Eliot, April 8, 1938, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1938–43),” Caversham. 47. A script of the spoken performance, which accompanied Eliot’s commentary, is preserved in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center. A sound cue, “RACK—GROANS,” is penned in three times in the course of the script, so as to leave the listener in no doubt that the Christian Priest wants to squeeze his victims to the point of confession. T. S. Eliot Collection, Box 2, Folder 21, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 48. The following quotations come from an untitled draft that Eliot enclosed in a letter to Siepmann on August 6, 1931, “T. S. Eliot. Talks: File 1 (1929–37),” Caversham. The typescript, Eliot explains, represents “a new outline” for The Modern Dilemma. 49. Jeremy Noel-Tod, “A Deadening Epic of Polite Notes,” review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, The Telegraph, December 5, 2014. 50. Visit the BBC Genome Project at http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/. 51. George Orwell, “Poetry and the Microphone” (written in 1943, published in 1945), reprinted in Essays (London: Penguin, 2000), 243. 52. CPP, 197.

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Notes on Contributors

Edward Allen is a Research Fellow in English at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He has written articles on early radio and lyric poetics, and on the mechanics of typewriting. Forthcoming publications include two edited collections: one on Reading Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh University Press) and the other on Forms of Late Modernist Lyric (Liverpool University Press). Michael Coyle is Professor of English at Colgate University. He is founding President of the Modernist Studies Association and served as President of the T. S. Eliot Society from 2013–15. His interest in Eliot frames his monograph, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (1995), and he has published essays on Eliot in no fewer than seven collections, including his own coedited volume, Broadcasting Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2009). Anthony Cuda is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and coeditor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume II: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). He is the Secretary of the T. S. Eliot Society. Frances Dickey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. She is the author of The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (University of Virginia Press, 2012) and coeditor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume III (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). She is President of the T. S. Eliot Society. Barry J. Faulk is Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Music Hall and Modernity (Ohio University Press, 2004) and British Rock Modernism (Ashgate, 2010), as well as a contributor to A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David Chinitz (Blackwell, 2009) and A Companion to Modernist Poetry, eds. David Chinitz and Gail McDonald (Blackwell, 2014). T. Austin Graham is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University. His scholarly work is concerned with American literature and its relationship to other arts and disciplines. He has previously written on Eliot in The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Nancy D. Hargrove, William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita at Mississippi State University, is the author of Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (Mississippi, 1978), The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1956–1959 (Lund, 1994), and most recently, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Florida, 2009). Katherine Hobbs is pursuing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research interests include the intersections between modernist poetry and music as well as the historical relationship between women’s rights reform and popular literature in Victorian England. Susan Jones is a Fellow of St. Hilda’s College and Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on Joseph Conrad and modernism, including Conrad and Women (Oxford University Press, 1999). Formerly a soloist with Scottish Ballet for fifteen years, she is also the author of Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013). Joshua Mabie received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, where he teaches courses in American literature, environmental literature, and ecocriticism. He is currently at work on a field guide to the buildings and designed spaces that T. S. Eliot inhabited and encountered in St. Louis, in Massachusetts, and in England. John D. Morgenstern is a Lecturer in English at Clemson University. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has published articles and book chapters on modernist literature. His current research focuses on modernist poetry and the visual arts. He is the General Editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual and the Historian of the T. S. Eliot Society. Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A graduate of Worcester College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin, he is the author of Words for Music: W. B. Yeats and Musical Sense and completed an Irish Research Council fellowship at the Moore Institute at NUI Galway titled Perfect Pitch: Music in Irish Poetry from Moore to Muldoon. He writes with particular interest in the artistic interactions of modernism and the fin de siècle. Malobika Sarkar is Associate Professor of English at Basanti Devi College in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She has published articles and book chapters on auditory responses to Romantic and modernist poetry. Ronald Schuchard is Goodrich C. White Professor of English Emeritus at Emory University. He is the author of Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford University Press, 2008). He edited T. S. Eliot’s Clark and Turnbull Lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (Faber and Faber, 1993), volumes 3 and 4 of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, and he is currently the General Editor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot (Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber). Anne Stillman is Lecturer in English at Clare College, Cambridge. She has published articles and book chapters on T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Frank O’Hara.

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Steven Tracy is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has authored, edited, coedited, or introduced nearly thirty books. Most recently, he is the author of Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A singer-harmonica player, he has opened for B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, among others. David Trotter is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has published widely on British and American literature, and on the relation between literature and other media, notably cinema. Publications in this area include Cinema and Modernism (2007), The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (2010), and Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (2013). Aakanksha Virkar-Yates is a Lecturer at the University of Brighton. She has published articles in journals including Philosophy and Literature, Literature and Theology, Victorian Poetry, and Notes and Queries. Michelle Witen is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in English Literature at the University of Basel. A graduate of the University of Oxford, she has published articles in Genetic Joyce Studies, Variations, European Joyce Studies, and Time Present.

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 239n absolute music, 98, 179–86 ĀchĀrya, Śrî Ānanda, 30, 33 Ackroyd, Peter, 158n acting, 202–21, 234, 252–55, 257 Addison, Julia de Wolfe, 16, 18, 20, 22n, 23n Adelaide House, 83, 85, 91n Adorno, Theodor W., 277 advertising, 251–53, 258 Aestheticism, 4, 43–46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 63–65, 77–79, 88, 90n, 104, 111, 130, 139, 144n, 183, 240n aesthetics, 51–66, 104, 108–9, 111, 114, 173–76, 179, 181, 190, 228, 238 African American music, 161–69, 239n African art, 5, 25, 28–30 Aiken, Conrad, 38, 71–72 Albright, Daniel, 126 Aldington, Richard, 48n, 216 Allan, Maud, 228, 240n Allen, Wade, 206–7 Allinson, Adrian, 126 Alphonse-Picard (publisher), 28 Anacreon, 52, 60 Anderson, Margaret, xiv Anesaki, Masaharu, 32 Angelico (Fra), xi, xii, 71, 75n Baptism, 71 Antheil, George Airplane Sonata, 153 Ballet Mécanique, 153 anti-Semitism, 125, 132n, 144n Antoine, André, 205 Appleton’s Magazine, 264 Archer, William, 100, 204, 208, 209, 215–16, 223n The Old Drama and the New, 215 architecture, 6, 61–62, 76–89, 153, 229; see also Adelaide House; Bank Station; City churches; churches; historic preservation

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Aristotle, 27 Armory Show, xviin Armstrong, Louis, 97, 161–69 “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” 163 “Colored Waifs’ Home,” 161 “Cornet Chop Suey,” 162–63 “Gully Low Blues,” 163 “I’m in the Mood for Love,” 163–64 “King of the Zulus,” 163 “Mighty River,” 164 “Oriental Strut,” 163 “Son of the South,” 164 “Symphonic Raps,” 164 “Twelfth Street Rag,” 164, 166 “West End Blues,” 168 “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?,” 164 Arnold, Edwin, “The Light of Asia,” 25 Arnold, Matthew, xv Art and Letters, xiii, 208 Asian art, xii, 5, 6, 9–21, 25–33, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42–47 Athenaeum, xiii, 203–4, 208, 209 Atherstone, Edwin, “Fall of Nineveh,” 43 Atkins, Hazel, 79, 90n Auden, W. H., 242n Austen, Jane, 263 avant-garde, xiii, 30, 97, 99, 151, 190, 206, 210, 225, 232, 248 Axen, Gertrude von, 240n Ayler, Albert, 161 Aymonier, Étienne, 30 Babbitt, Irving, 51, 52–54, 55–56, 64, 95, 103, 108, 111, 114, 119n, 181, 182 New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, 52–54, 55–56, 108, 114, 181, 182 Babe Connor’s nightclub, 95 Bach, Carl Philip Emanuel, 182

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index Bach, Johann Sebastian, 33, 105, 106, 112, 115, 116, 117, 152, 182, 187n Baedeker guidebooks, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 71, 77 Bakst, Léon, 229 Balanchine, George, 100, 238 Orpheus, 238 “Transcendence,” 238 ballet, 148, 149, 153, 154, 225–39 Ballets Russes, xiv, 33, 100, 146, 151, 194, 221, 225, 232–36 Bank Station (London), 80–81 Barfe, Louis, 264 Barnes, George, 285n baroque, 63, 85, 117, 182, 212 Barthes, Roland, 264 Bartók, Béla, 188 Basilica see churches Baudelaire, Charles, 40–41, 47, 53, 99, 109, 122, 123, 189, 192–93, 194, 195, 196, 269, 274n “À une passante,” 40–41 “Correspondances,” 53 “On the Essence of Laughter,” 192 “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” 123 BBC, 33, 246, 276–83, 286n BBC Genome Project, 283 Children’s Hour, 278 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, 73, 211 Beckett, Samuel, 239n Beecham, Thomas, 126, 127 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 53, 95, 98, 105, 152, 172–73, 177n, 180, 184 Late string quartets, 98, 172, 177n, 179, 182, 188n Symphony no. 5, 180 Behn, Aphra, 206 Belford, Kevin, 162 Bellamy, Edward, 263 Bell, Clive, xiii, 97, 165 Bell, George (Dean of Canterbury and Bishop of Chichester), xvii, 76, 89n Bellini, Vincenzo, 152 Bell, Vanessa, xiii Beltrán-Massés, Federico, xv Benjamin, Walter, 99, 190, 197–99, 201n, 278 Arcades Project, 197 “Chaplin in Retrospect,” 198 “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” 197 Bennett, Arnold, 218, 224n Bentley, Joseph, 63 Berenson, Bernard, xi Bergson, Henri, 4, 30, 31, 51, 53–61, 99, 103, 111, 119n, 164, 189, 190–91, 192, 241n, 255–57 Creative Evolution, 55 Laughter, 190–91 Matter and Memory, 55–56, 255 Time and Free Will, 55–56, 119n, 241n

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Berlin Philharmonic, 104 Berliner, Emile, 273 Bernays, Edward, 251 Berrett, Joshua, 170n Bhagavad Gīta, 27 Bigelow, William Sturgis, 9, 22n; see also Museums, Bigelow Collection Binyon, Laurence, 130 Black Arts Movement, 165 Blake, William, 44, 72 BLAST, xii, xiii, xviiin, 152 Blissett, William, 143 Bloomsbury, xiii Blue Devils (band), 164 blues, 97, 162, 165 bluestockings, 36, 38, 39, 46–47 Boase, Alan, xvi Boas, Franz, 249 Bock-Weiss, Catherine, 57 Boethius, 267 Bohr, Niels, 164 Bokhari, Zulfiqar, 279–80, 285n Bolender, Todd, 238 Bomberg, David, xii Bonaparte, Josephine, 32 Bong, Joon-Soo, 21n Booth, Allyson, 66 Boston Globe, 14, 105, 228 Boston Herald, 229–30 Boston Opera Company, 105, 228 Boston Pops, 107 Boston Symphony, 104, 105, 107 Botticelli, Sandro, xi, xii Bottomley, Gordon, 242n Bouwens der Boijen, William, 27 Bowdich, Thomas, 31 Bowen, Charles Christopher, “Stat Nominis Umbra: Lines Suggested by Layard’s Discovery of the Ruins of Nineveh,” 43, 50n Bradley, Simon, 80 Bradley, F. H., 156 Brahms, Johannes, 105 Brahmanism, 30–31 Braque, Georges, 4, 30, 241n Breaux, Zelia, 164 Breton, André, 34n Brett, Dorothy, xiii Breughel, Pieter, 5 British Library, 46 British Museum see Museums, British Broadway, 251 Brooke, J. M. S., 81 Brooker, Jewel Spears, 63, 271 Brown, Sterling, 165 Browning, Robert, 264 Buck, Gene, 167 Buddhism, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32 Burgess, Henry, 49n

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292

index

Burne-Jones, Edward, Philomela and Her Tapestry, 65 Burney, Charles, 182, 187n Busoni, Ferruccio, Fantasia contrappuntistica, 182 Byford, Roy, 211, 219 Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron) “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” 43 “Sardanapalus,” 49n Byzantine art, 55–57, 61 Ca’ d’Oro (Venice), 62 Cambridge Ritualists, 46, 194, 215, 223n, 249 Canaletto, 73 Canterbury Cathedral see churches caricature, 193, 194, 196, 210, 211, 219 Carracci, Annibale, 61 Carré, Louis, 29 Carrington, Dora, xiii Carroll, Lewis, 114 Carter, Hubert, 219 Castagno, Andrea del, xi Catullus, 157 censorship, xi, xiv, xv–xvi, xviiin, 205–6 Cernuschi, Henri, 27 Chabrier, Emmanuel, Rhapsodies, 105 Chapbook, 214 Chaplin, Charlie, 99, 190, 197–98, 201n, 211, 241n The Circus, 197 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 112 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 65, 267 The Legends of Good Women, 65 Chekhov, Anton, 210 Chen, Constance J. S., 23n Chesterton, G. K., 196 Chichester Cathedral, Friends of, 76 Chichester Diocesan Gazette, 85, 91n Chickering piano, 104, 118n Chinitz, David, xi, 97, 165–66, 167, 189, 225, 276 Chopin, Frédéric, 104, 112, 117 Preludes, 103, 105, 113, 116 choreography, 100, 149, 153, 225–39 Christian, Ewan, 78 churches (including basilicas, cathedrals, chapels, and other religious buildings) All Hallows (Lombard St., London), 89n All Hallows on the Wall (London), 77, 89n Arena Chapel (Padua), 61 Basilica of St. Anthony (Padua), 61 Basilica of St. Apollinaire (Ravenna), 62 Canterbury Cathedral, xvii, 89 Chiesa degli Eremitani (Padua), 77 San Fermo (Verona), 77 Santi Maria e Donato (Murano), 61, 62, 65 San Zeno Maggiore (Verona), 61 St. Bartholomew the Great (London), 6, 77, 89n St. Botolph without Aldersgate (London), 89n St. Dunstan’s in the East (London), 89n St. Dunstan in the West (London), 89n

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St. Etheldreda (London), 6 St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice), 61, 77 St. Mary Aldermanbury (London), 89n St. Mary at the Hill (London), 89n St. Helens (London), 6, 77 St. Magnus Martyr (London), 6, 77, 79, 80, 82–85, 89, 89n St. Mary Aldermary (London), 89n St. Mary Woolnoth (London), 77, 79, 80–82, 89, 89n St. Michael Paternoster Royal (London), 77 St. Nicholas Cole Abbey (London), 89n St. Sepulchre (London), 6, 77 St. Stephens (London), 6, 77 St. Vedast’s (London), 89n Westminster Abbey (London), 77, 79 Zeno Maggiore (Verona), 6 see also City churches (preservation of) cinema, xvi, 189, 195, 197–99, 211, 230, 241n, 245–46, 248–59, 262, 275–76; see also Hollywood City churches (preservation of), xiv, 3, 6, 76–85, 89, 90n Civil Rights Movement, 165 Civil War (English), 86 Clark, T. J., 73 class distinctions, 39, 41, 47 Clements, Patricia, 192 Coburn, Frederick, 11 Cocteau, Jean, 148, 153, 214, 232, 235 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 264 collage, 4 Collège de France, 54 Columbia Company (record label), 264 comedy, 99, 189–99, 211, 217–18 commedia dell’arte, 151, 190, 214 communication technology, 245–46, 248–59, 262–72, 275–8; see also cinema, gramophone, media, radio concertgoing, xvi, 95, 105–11, 132n, 159n Congreve, William, Love for Love, 210–15 Cook, A. B., 215, 223n Cooper, John Xiros, 101n, 117, 117n Corbett, David Peters, 191 Cornford, F. M., 194, 215, 223n Costello, Harry, 172 Cowper, William, The Task, 208 Cox, Ian, 285n Coyle, Michael, 276, 284n Craig, Gordon, 26, 109, 214, 241n The Art of the Theater, 214 “Puppets and Poets,” 214 Socratic Dialogues, 109 Cram, Ralph Adams, 11–12, 16, 22n Crawford, Robert, 60, 62, 107, 118n, 162 Criterion, The see under Eliot, T. S., Works of Cruickshank, A. H., 193 Cubism, xiii, xviin, 3, 4, 7, 29, 30, 34n, 58, 226, 232, 241n

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index Cunard, Nancy, 220 Curtis, Francis Gardner, 22n Dahlhaus, Carl, 180, 184 Dai Butsu, Amida, 18 Daily Express, xv Daily News, 204 Dalí, Salvador, 241n Dana, Margaret, 142n, 143n dance, xiv, 33, 53, 95, 100, 114, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 166, 176, 194, 221, 225–39, 263; see also ballet, Ballets Russes D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, 229, 242n Dante, Alighieri, 74, 82, 128, 130, 237, 238 Davidson, John, 191–92, 194 “In a Music Hall,” 191 Debussy, Claude, 10, 105, 123, 182, 229 Nocturnes, 182 Pelléas et Mélisande, 105 Decadent Movement, 108, 138–39, 206–7 decoration, xvi–xvii, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23n, 26, 27, 30, 52, 55–57, 61, 63–66, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89, 229 Degas, Edgar, 4 De Kleen, Tyra, 33 Delafosse, Maurice, 30 Delaporte, Louis, 30 Delaunay, Robert, 30 DeMille, Cecil B., 245, 246, 248, 251–55, 257, 258 Don’t Change Your Husband, 251 Golden Bed, 251 Male and Female, 246, 254 Old Wives for New, 246, 251–52 Why Change Your Wife?, 251 Derain, André, 241n Desai, Anita In Custody, 272 Voices in the City, 272 Descartes, René, 60 Diaghilev, Serge, 225, 232–33, 234, 241n, 232, 234, 235, 241n Boutique Fantasque, 232, 234, 241n Good-humored Ladies, 232, 234, 241n Three-Cornered Hat, 232, 241n Dial, xiv, 3, 76, 77, 99, 146, 189, 209, 232, 249, 276 Dickens, Charles, 194, 196, 199 Dickerson, Carroll, 164 Dismorr, Jessica, xii Dobbin, Beci, 49n Dolmetsch, Arnold, 95, 105 Donatello, xi Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 263 drama see theater; see also early modern drama, Greek drama, Noh drama, poetic drama, Restoration drama Driere, Angele la, “Dressing Tables,” 257

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293

Dryden, John, 193–94, 209, 282 The Indian Emperor, 282 Marriage à la Mode, 209 Duchamp, Marcel, xviin Dujardin, Édouard, 123, 129 Dukes, Ashley, 242n Duncan, Isadora, 100, 105, 227, 229 Duret, Théodore, 27 Duthuit, Georges, 56, 57 Dvořák, Antonín, 105, 161 Humoresque, 105 “New World Symphony,” 161 Dyck, Anthony van, xii, xiii early modern drama, xiii, xvi, 46, 64, 69, 70, 74, 80, 99, 100, 166–67, 168, 173, 189, 193, 194, 196, 203, 204–16, 218, 219–20, 234, 245, 248, 255–58, 264, 269–70 East India Company, 42 Edison (record label), 167 Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, 263–65, 269, 272–73n Edison, Thomas A., 262, 263–65 Egoist, xiii, 255 Einstein, Albert, 164 ekphrasis, 15, 17, 36n, 52, 53, 60, 63–66, 69–74 Ekstein, Modris, 153 El Greco, 56 Eliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns, “Musical Reverie,” 118n Eliott, Andrew, 86 Eliot, T. S., Life and characteristics allusive practice, 69–74, 161–69, 269–71 Anglo-Catholicism, 76, 79 anti-Semitism, 125 auditory imagination, 271 banker, 77 in Boston, 96, 100, 103–8, 143n broadcaster, 278–83, 286n Buddhism, 26–27 in Cambridge, MA, 96, 103–6, 228 conservatism, 76 family heritage, 25 Harvard coursework, xi, xii, xviin, 3, 9, 25, 26, 27–28, 32, 33, 53, 61, 69, 76–77, 89n, 108, 145, 161, 171–72, 214, 249, 250, 255 lecturer, 208, 224n in London, 87, 202–21, 232, 270 Nobel laureate, 76 Parisian year, xi, xii, xvi, 3, 4, 6, 9, 25–33, 36, 51, 54, 58–59, 77, 100, 119n, 123, 135, 225 progressiveness, 76 as reviewer, 32–33, 95, 109, 126, 146–58, 172, 193, 205, 208–10, 232, 235, 262–63 St. Louis upbringing, 87, 91n, 95, 162

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294

index

Eliot, T. S., Works of (individual entries for The Criterion, Four Quartets and The Waste Land; other works listed under “poetic drama,” “poetry,” or “prose”) Criterion, The, xiii, xviiin, 130, 193, 212, 216, 219–20, 232, 234, 238, 256, 259, 284n “Commentaries,” xiv, 30, 33, 76, 78–79, 83, 85, 90n, 189, 217, 219, 220, 232 Four Quartets, 26–27, 32, 86–87, 89, 95, 98, 100, 114, 117, 117n, 171–76, 179–86, 227, 230, 235, 236–37, 238, 239n, 271, 283 “Burnt Norton,” 27, 28, 86, 100, 174–75, 184, 185–86, 230, 236–37, 238 The Dry Salvages, 27, 73, 176, 185 East Coker, 86–87, 89, 98, 173, 180, 184, 185–86, 237 Little Gidding, 86, 98, 114, 179, 185, 186, 237, 238, 283 poetic drama Choruses from The Rock, 30, 99, 271; The Confidential Clerk, 217, 224n; Murder in the Cathedral, xvii, 89n, 239n; The Rock, xvi; Sweeney Agonistes, 3, 99–100, 189, 205, 210, 218–19, 224, 270–71, 283 poetry “Afternoon,” 5, 36–48; “Airs of Palestine, No 2,” 182; Ara Vus Prec, 208; Ash-Wednesday, 26–27, 74; “Bacchus and Ariadne: 2nd Debate Between the Body and Soul,” 4, 52, 60–61, 62; “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” 62, 72–73; “The Burnt Dancer,” 100, 227, 229; “Caprices,” 19, 20, 111, 116; “Circe’s Palace,” 4, 53; “Conversation Galante,” 190; “Convictions (Curtain Raiser),” ixx, 17, 95, 190; Coriolan I. Triumphal March, 242n; “Cousin Nancy,” 38; “The Death of St. Narcissus,” 70; “Easter: Sensations of April,” 116; “La Figlia che Piange,” 3, 227, 230–31, 234; “First Caprice in North Cambridge,” 181; Four Quartets, see separate entry above; “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” 181; “Gerontion,” xii, 3, 48, 50n, 69; “Goldfish,” 3, 116; “The Hollow Men,” 159n; “Humoresque,” 191; “Hysteria,” 279; “Interlude in a Bar,” 181; “Interlude in London,” 106, 181; Inventions of the March Hare, ixx, 17, 37, 39 51, 54, 71, 95, 103–17, 192, 267; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” xii, xiii, 3, 4, 37, 39, 48n, 61, 103, 113, 117, 182, 245, 268, 280; “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” 3, 4, 62 72, 227, 229, 240n; “Lune de Miel,” 3, 62; “Mandarins,” 5, 6, 9–21, 36, 46, 54, 116; “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” 62, 70–72; “Nocturne,” 182; Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, 246, 278–80, 285n, 286n; “On a Portrait,” 3, 4, 5, 15, 19, 53, 60; “Opera,” 53–54, 96, 104, 106–11, 114, 181; “Paysage Triste,” 39–41; Poems (1920),

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4; “Portrait of a Lady,” 17, 37, 38, 39, 72, 101n, 105, 106, 111, 113, 117, 117n, 120n, 192, 267; “Prelude in Roxbury,” 98; “Preludes,” xiii, 19, 20, 116, 120n, 245; Prufrock and Other Observations, xiii, 129; “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” 113–14; “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” xiii, 182; “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” 51, 53, 181; “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks,” 4, 52, 61, 62, 103, 106; “Song: ‘If space and time as sages say,’ ” 182; “Song: ‘The moonflower opens to the moth,’ ” 182; “Song: ‘When we came home across the hill,’ ” 182; “Spleen,” 37; “Suite Clownesque,” 20, 98, 103, 116, 181, 190; “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” 69; “Sweeney Erect,” 60, 73; The Waste Land, see separate entry below prose “Andrew Marvell,” 157, 193–94; “Ben Jonson,” 210, 245, 248, 255, 257; “The Borderline of Prose,” 22n; A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 98, 120n; “Christianity and Communism,” 281; Clark Lectures, 107; “Commentaries,” see Criterion entry above; “The Defects of Kipling,” 33; “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” 107, 131, 234–35, 237; “Dramatis Personae” (quoted), 194, 212, 214, 234, 256; “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,” 208, 216, 223n; “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” 71, 263; “Euripides and Professor Murray,” 223n; “Ezra Pound: His Metric and His Poetry,” 268; Fireside, 95, 97; “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” 100, 215–16, 224n, 234; “Gentlemen and Seamen,” 14, 33n; “Hamlet and His Problems,” xiii; “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” 249; “Introduction” to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, 115, 256; “Introduction” to Valéry’s The Art of Poetry, 183; “London Letters,” xiv, 3, 6, 77, 78, 85, 97, 99, 146–47, 189, 192, 194, 209–10, 232, 277; “The Man Who Was King,” 25; “Marie Lloyd,” 194, 246, 262, 275–77, 280, 283; “Milton I,” 271; “Milton II,” 271; The Modern Dilemma, 281, 286n; “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” 228; “The Music of Poetry,” 98, 106, 114, 157, 179, 183–84, 268; “The Need for Poetic Drama,” 179, 182; “A Note on the Verse of John Milton,” 271; “Notes on Italy,” 61–62, 77; Notes towards the Definition of Culture, 26, 249; “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” 189; “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism,” 196, 198; “Rudyard Kipling,” 267; Selected Essays, 280; To Criticize the Critic, xviiin; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 172, 174, 196, 230, 255–57; “The Value and Use

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index Eliot, T. S., Works of (Cont.) of Cathedrals in England To-Day,” 6, 76, 78, 87–89; and “What India Is Thinking About To-Day,” 32–33 The Waste Land, xiii, 3, 4, 26–27, 30, 32, 38, 41, 47, 48, 52, 62, 63–66, 71, 76–78, 79, 80, 83–85 86, 89, 96–99, 101n, 106, 112, 117n, 121–31, 134–42, 144n, 146–47, 155–58, 159n, 161, 166–69, 172, 177n, 181, 192, 197, 205, 211–12, 223n, 230, 232, 237, 245–46, 248, 249, 250–52, 256, 257–59, 262, 268–72, 279, 268, 269, 276, 279, 280, 284, 286n “The Burial of the Dead,” 138, 250 “Death by Water,” 41, 140, 141, 144n, 279 “The Death of the Duchess,” 211, 223n “The Fire Sermon,” 38, 71, 121, 129, 130, 138, 140, 141, 144n, 156, 258, 284 “A Game of Chess,” 4, 47, 52, 62, 63–66, 97, 140, 141, 155, 166, 168–69, 212, 246, 250, 257 – 59, 270 “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” 122, 245, 257, 272 “Notes” to The Waste Land, 269 “What the Thunder Said,” 101n, 130, 139, 141, 156, 168 Eliot, Valerie, xi, 159n, 241n Eliot, Vivien, 202–3, 225, 233, 239n, 259 “Letters of the Moment,” 259 Eliot, William Greenleaf, 162 Elizabethan drama see early modern drama Ellison, Ralph, 97, 161–69 Invisible Man, 165, 168 Ellis, William Ashton, 132n Elman, Mischa, 105 Elyot, Thomas, The Boke Named the Governour, 237 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 108 English Heritage, 78, 87–88, 92n English preservation movement, 77 Enlart, Camille, 28 Epstein, Jacob, xiii Ernst, Max, 34n Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 125, 134, 136, 137 Esquire, 163 Etchells, Frederick, xii Étournaud, Charles, 30 Expressionism, 4 Eyck, Jan van, xiii, 5 Faber and Faber (publisher), 33, 278 Faber, Geoffrey, 278 Falla, Manuel de, Le Tricorne, 151 Farquhar, George, The Recruiting Officer, 206 Farquharson, Robert, 204 Faulk, Barry, 191, 225 Faulkner, H. K., 29 Faulkner, W. E., 29 Fauvism, 4, 30, 51–66

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295

feminist critique, 39, 138–42 Fenollosa, Ernest, xii, 9, 33, 214; see also Museums, Fenollosa-Weld Collection Fenway Court, xi–xiii, 105 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 177n film see cinema First World War see World War I Flaubert, Gustave, 33, 109, 193 Fletcher, John Gould, 211, 267 The Chances, 211 Fogg Museum (Harvard) see Museums, Fogg Fokine, Michel, 229–30 Folies Bergère, 228, 229 Forbes, Edward Waldo, xi, xii, xiv, 14, 23n, 27–28, 89n Ford, Ford Maddox, 126 Ford, John, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 126, 212, 214, 219 Forney, Kristine, 180 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, The Swing, 63 Francesca, Pierro della, xii Franchetti, Giorgio, 62 Franck, César, 123 Frankfurt School, 99, 190, 197–99, 201n, 277, 278 Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough, 147, 238 Freud, Sigmund, 190 Fry, Roger, xiii Fuller, Loïe, 100, 105, 227–31, 231, 240n Futurism, 4, 147, 151–52, 153, 154, 156 Fynes-Clinton, Henry Joy, 85 galleries Bernheim-Jeune’s (gallery, Paris), 5 Goupil Gallery (London), xiii, xviin Mansard Gallery (London), 3 Stieglitz Gallery (New York), 34n Garafola, Lynn, 151 Gardner, Helen, 39, 242n Gardner, Isabella Stewart, xi–xiii, xiv, xviin, xviiin, 11, 14, 22n, 105, 118n Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, xiii, 126–27 Gauguin, Paul, 3 Gautier, Théophile, 52, 72–73 “Sur les lagunes,” 72 Variations sur le Carnival de Venise, 72 Gelatt, Roland, 264, 272, 272n Gertler, Mark, xiii Ghéon, Henri, 229, 237 Gide, André, Peresephone, 238 Gilbert Scott, George, 77–78 Giles, Richard, 88 Gillen, Francis James, xviiin Gladstone, William, 264 Gleizes, Albert, 30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 197 Goldsmith, Oliver, 270 Goosens, Eugene, xiii, 149 Gordon, Lyndall, 223n

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296 Gouk, Penelope, 267 Gouraud, George E., 264 Graham, T. Austin, 106, 167 Graham, Martha, 100, 238 grail legend, 96, 121, 124–25, 134–42, 142n, 143n, 144n, 145n, 157 gramophone, 196, 216, 245–46, 262–67, 272n, 275 Grant, Duncan, xiii Granville-Barker, Harley, 206–7 Greek drama, 109, 194, 210, 215 Greenblatt, Stephen, 42–43 Greene, E. J. H., 192 Grieg, Edvard, Suites, 105 Griffiths, Eric, 74 Guercino, 61 Guillory, John, 248–49 Guimet, Émile, 26 Hall, Donald, 33n Hall, Radclyffe, xv Hammerstein, Oscar, 105 Handel, George Frideric, 106 Hanslick, Eduard, 181 Hardin, Lil, 162, 163–64 Hargrove, Nancy D., xi, 23n, 86, 229, 240n Harker, Brian, 162 Harries, Karsten, 81–82 Harris, Marion, 167 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 46, 215, 223n, 249 Harvard Advocate, 14, 15, 25, 37, 109, 116 Harvard Crimson, 105, 106 Harvard Philosophical Club, 255 Harvard University see Eliot, T. S., Harvard coursework; Museums, Fogg; Museums, Peabody; Pierian Sodality; Signet Society; Stylus Society; theaters, Sanders Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 80, 82 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 255–56 Haydn, Joseph, 180 Hayward, John, 183 H. D., 48n, 126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 176, 178n, 249 Heinemann (publisher), 127 Henley, W. E., 104 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 124–25 Hewett, Edgar Lee, xviii Heywood, Thomas, The Fair Maid of the West, 209 highbrow, 167–68, 264, 280 Hind, C. Lewis, 58 Hinduism, 27–28, 30, 32 Hines, Earl, 164 Hinkley, Eleanor, 25, 31, 77, 262 Hisada, P. K., 23n historic preservation, 76–89; see also, English preservation movement, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, English Heritage

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index Hobsbawm, Eric, 5 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 180 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Elektra, 228–9 Hogarth, William, 193 Hokusai, Katsushika, 17 Hollander, John, 246, 269 Hollins, A. C., 31 Hollywood, 248, 251–55 Holst, Gustav, 126 Homer, 52 Hope, John Francis, 203 Horkheimer, Max, 277 Horowitz, Joseph, 108 Hosley, Imogene, 184 Hot Five, 162–63 hot music, 95, 161–69 Howard, Skiles, 237 Hughes, Kathryn, 48n Hughes, Langston, 165, 167–68 “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 167–68 Hulme, T. E., xiii Humphrey, Doris, 100 Huneker, James, 103, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119n Egoists: A Book of Supermen, 109–10, 112 Melomaniacs, 112–13 Hunting, Russell, 264 Hutchinson, Mary, 33, 209, 233, 239n, 263 Huxley, Aldous, xiii, xviin, 98, 182 “Busoni, Dr. Burney and Others,” 182 Point Counterpoint, 182 hypnosis, 53, 59, 65, 111–14, 119n Ibsen, Henrik, 210, 212 Illustrated London News, 44, 263, 277 Imagism, 126 Imperialism, 26 American (in Asia), 9–10 British, 31, 38, 42, 43, 46 French, 23, 31, 42 Impressionism, 4, 10, 19, 53, 181, 182, 191 Incorporated Stage Society, 205–6 International Journal of Ethics, 126 International Studio, 11 Irving, Henry, 264 Isherwood, Christopher, 242n Jacobs, Lea, 251, 254 Jaini, Jagmanderlal, 33 Jainism, 31 Jakobson, Roman, 258–59 James, Henry, 72, 255–56 James, Nora, xv James, William, 255 James, Willis Laurence, 162 Japanese prints see ukiyo-e prints Japonisme, 9–10, 16, 25 jazz, 95, 97, 99, 114, 161–69, 189, 219, 225, 265, 270, 271

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index Jazz Age, 166, 253 Jeans, Isabel, 217, 224n Jenkins, Ian, 42–43 Jepson, Edgar, 129 Johnson, George W., 264 Jolson, Al, 167 Jonson, Ben, 193, 194, 209–10, 211, 218, 245, 248, 255, 257, 258 Catiline, 257 Volpone, 209–10, 211 Joyce, James, 71, 98, 122–23, 127, 147, 149, 155, 158n, 179, 186n, 193, 239n, 263 Finnegans Wake, 263 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 239n Ulysses, xiv, xv, 98, 122, 147, 149, 155, 158n, 179 Joynson-Hicks, William, xv Kakuzō, Okakura, xii, xiii, 11, 16, 22n, 26, 55 Kant, Immanuel, 177n Karatïgin, V. G., 154 Kattwinkel, Susan, 275 Katz, Mark, 265, 267, 270 Kaufman, Irving, 278 Keats, John, 44, 47, 48, 265 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 44 Kennedy, W. S., 220 Kenner, Hugh, 39 Kermode, Frank, 225, 231 Kipling, Rudyard, 33, 43, 120n, 191 Many Inventions, 120n “Recessional,” 43 Kirstein, Lincoln, 238 Kreisler, Fritz, 105 Kreymborg, Alfred, 214 Laforgue, Jules, 37, 99, 107, 109, 124, 166, 189, 190, 192, 214 Dimanches, 37 Lanman, C. R., 26, 32 Lapokova, Lydia, xiv Lasky, Jesse L., 251 Laurencin, Marie, 232 Lawrence, D. H., xv, xviiin, 268 “Dog Tired,” 268 Layard, Austin Henry, 42, 43, 44 Leavis, F. R., 122, 131n Lee, Vernon, 112 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 30 Léger, Fernand, 30 Lehár, Franz, The Merry Widow, 103, 105 Leonardo da Vinci, 3, 27, 62 The Last Supper, 62 Lessing, Gotthold, 52, 55, 58 Levenson, Michael, 38 Levey, Ethel, 194, 195, 210 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 34n Lewes House (Sussex), 55

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297

Lewis, Wyndham, xii, xiii, xiv, 99, 152, 191, 193–94, 195, 196, 211, 242n, 252 The Apes of God, 193 The Childermass, 193 Tarr, 193 Tyro, 196, 211 linguistics, 249–50, 258 Lippi, Filippo, xi, 69–71 Listener, 223n, 281, 286n Liszt, Franz, 105, 112, 123, 162 Liebestraum, 162 Rhapsodies, 105 Little Review, xiv, 255 Little Tich, 194, 195 Lloyd, Marie, 95, 99, 189, 194, 195–97, 198, 210, 217–18, 246, 262, 275–77, 279 Lloyd’s Bank, 77 Longenbach, James, 155 London Bridge, 82–83 London Coliseum see theaters London Mercury, 216 London Tower, 77 Long, Haniel, 108 Louvre see Museums, Louvre lowbrow, 167–68 Lucretius, 157 Lyall, Sarah, 39 Lyric Theatre (London) see theaters, Lyric MacCarthy, Desmond, 210, 212 MacCarthy, Molly, xiii MacGreevy, Thomas, Crón Tráth na nDéithe, 129 Machaut, Guillaume de, 184 Machlis, Joseph, 180, MacNeice, Louis, 247n Madame Tussaud’s, 77 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 10, 124, 190, 210, 214 Malatestiano, Tempio, 38 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 250 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 53, 124, 176, 178n, 227–31, 228, 231, 234, 236 L’Après-midi d’un faune, 231 “Ballets,” 228 Hérodiade, 231 “Hommage (à Richard Wagner),” 124 Mama Lou, 95, 162 “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” 95 Manet, Édouard, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 19, 53 Emile Zola, 19 Jeune Dame en 1866, 15, 19, 53 Nana, 253 Olympia, 19, 253 Manganaro, Marc, 249 Manning, Cardinal, 264 Manon, Marcia, 252 Mantegna, Andrea, xii, 7, 62, 65, 72–73 Saint Sebastian, 62, 65, 72–73 Manuel, Joe, 284n Marchal, Bertrand, Hérodiade, 228

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298

index

Marinetti, F. T., 152 Marlowe, Christopher, 70, 194 The Jew of Malta, 70 Marsden, Dora, 255 Marshall, Norman, 207 Martin, Stoddard, 122 Martin, Timothy, 122 Marvell, Andrew, 157, 193 Mascagni, Pietro, Cavalleria rusticana, 162 Massine, Léonide, xiv, 95, 100, 194, 225, 232–36, 241n Massinger, Philip, 269–70 Masson, André, 226 material culture, 5–6, 9–21, 25–33, 36–48, 55, 56, 106, 126 Matisse, Henri, xii, 3, 4, 30, 51–66, 241n Dance, 52, 57–61 Music, 57–61 Matthews, Steven, 223n, 224n McCue, Jim, 284n, 285n McElderry, B. R., 167 McLean, Fiona, 47–48 media, 245–46, 248–59, 262–72, 275–83; see also cinema, communication technology, gramophone, radio medial limitations see aesthetics mediation, 230, 245, 248–59 melomania, 96, 103–4, 111–14 Memling, Hans, 5 Meredith, George, 190 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 112 Messina, Antonello de, 5 Mester, Terri, 241n Metropolitan Museum (New York) see Museums, Metropolitan Metropolitan Opera (New York), 143n Metzinger, Jean, 30 Michelangelo, xi, xii, 3, 39, 173 Middleton Murry, John, xiii, 208 Milhaud, Darius, 232, 241n Milton, John, 140, 271 Paradise Lost, 140 “Samson Agonistes,” 271 mimesis, 69, 152–54, 214–16, 231, 232, 252–55, 262–67; see also caricature, parody, pastiche, portraiture, satire minstrelsy, 162, 166 Miré, Georges de, 29 Miró, Juan, 241n Modernism, 95–100, 101n, 165–66, 179–80, 182, 191–99, 205, 212, 245–46, 247n, 257–59, 265–67, 271–72 in dance, 225, 228–29, 232–34, 238, 239n, 241n and generic mixture, 52–58, 64–66, 108–109 and museums, 38, 41–8 in music, 97, 101n, 146–58, 180, 182 and non-Western art, 30–31, 33 in theater, 99, 189–90, 192–94, 210, 214–15, 218

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in the visual arts, 3–4, 19, 30–31, 55–58 and Wagner, 106–8, 122, 130–31, 135–42, 144n see also avant-garde, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism modernity, 138, 195, 199, 228, 282 and barbarism / archaism, 146, 153 in criticism, 109 heard in music, xiv, 153, 232 and technology, 245, 248–51, 262–65 and culture / tradition, 38, 41, 85, 249 transatlantic, 193 urban, 148, 153 Monet, Claude, 10 Monroe, Harriet, 265 Money, Leo Chiozza, 204, 208, 209 Moore, George, 129 Moore, Marianne, “Is Your Town Nineveh?,” 43 Moore, T. Sturge, “The Story of Tristan & Isolt in Modern Poetry,” 130 Morgenstern, Dan, 164, 170n Morrell, Lady Ottoline, xiii, xiv, 209 Morris, William, 77–79, 88, 90n “Manifesto,” 78, 90n Morse, Anne Nishimura, 22n Morse, Edward S., 9, 10, 18, 22n; see also Museums, Morse Collection Morse, Samuel, 250 Moser, Stephanie, 42 Moszkowski, Moritz, Suites, 105 Moving Picture World, 251 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 33, 180 Munch, Edvard, 7 Murry, John Middleton, 203 museological sublime, 37–38, 41, 44–47 museums, xi–xiii, 5–6, 9–21, 25–33, 36–48, 55, 56, 71, 106, 107, 126 Bigelow Collection (MFA, Boston), 11 British Museum, 5, 6, 31, 36–48, 126 Fenollosa-Weld Collection (MFA, Boston), 11, 19, 20 Fogg Museum (Harvard), xi, 5, 14, 106 Lady Brassey Museum (London), 32 Louvre, 5, 29, 30, 31, 34n Metropolitan Museum (New York), 5, 107 Montagu House (London), 42 Morse Collection (MFA, Boston), 11 Musée cambodgien (Paris), 23n, 27–31 Musée Cernuschi (Paris), 27, 32 Musée d’éthnographie (Paris), 23n, 27–31, 34n Musée du quai Branly (Paris), 30 Musée Guimet (Paris), 26–27, 31, 34n Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, xii, 3, 5, 9–21, 22n, 23n, 26, 55 National Gallery, 5, 60, 71 Peabody Essex Museum (Salem), 9, 14 Peabody Museum (Harvard), 26, 29 South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert), 10–11, 31, 32 Trocadéro (Paris), 5, 27–28, 31, 34n

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index museums (Cont.) Uffizzi (Florence), 71 see also Fenway Court, galleries museum display, 5–6, 11–16, 18–19, 26, 42–43, 47–48, 55 museumgoing, xi, xii, xvi, 3, 5–6, 9, 13–21, 22n, 25–33, 36–48 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston see Museums Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, 11, 16 music, xi, xiv, xvi, 4, 12, 19, 32, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 95–98, 103–17, 121–31, 134–42, 153, 146–58, 161–69, 171–76, 179–86, 225, 262, 267, 269–71, 272, 275; see also absolute music, African American music, hot music, jazz, musical listening, music hall, opera, popular music, program music, quartet form, singing musical listening, 56, 103–17, 146–58, 180, 246, 262–63, 267, 270 musical theater, 206, 251 music hall, xiv, 95, 99, 114, 166, 189–99, 208, 210–11, 217, 219, 221, 225, 238, 275, 277, 283 Mussorgsky, Modest, 182 Pictures at an Exhibition, 181 Nagra, Daljit, 33 Narita, Tatsushi, 25 National Conservatory of Music, 161 National Gallery see Museums, National Gallery Native American music, 161 NBC, 165 Neilson, Brett, 197 Nerval, Gérard de, 124, 128 Nesbitt, Cathleen, 203 New Age, 203–4 New Negro Renaissance, 167 New Statesman, 210, 211 Newton, Charles, 46 New York City Ballet, 238 New York Philharmonic, 104 New York Times, 39 Nicolosi, Robert, 101n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96, 103, 109–11, 112, 119n, 122, 126, 132n, 181 Apollonian impulse, 109, 114 The Birth of Tragedy, 109–11 Case of Wagner, 112, 181 Dionysian impulse, 96, 109, 114 “On Music and Words,” 181 Nightingale, Florence, 264 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 100, 232, 233, 234 Nikisch, Arthur, 123 Nineveh, poems about, 38, 43, 49n Noguchi, Isamu, 238 Noh drama, 126–27, 127, 214 nonsense poetry, 278–70 Nordau, Max, 112 North American Review, 265

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North, Michael, 161–62, 201n, 248 Nouvelle Revue Française, 229 nursery rhymes, 97, 165 Observer, 154 O’Donnell, May, 100, 238 Odum, Howard W., 168 Ograff, H. A. H. von, 263–64 Omega Club, xiii Ong, Walter, 264, 270, 271–72, 273n opera, 40, 41, 53, 96, 114, 117n, 121–31, 134–42, 181, 182, 208 operagoing, 122–23, 137, 142n Orwell, George, “Poetry and the Microphone,” 283 Ostende, xiii Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserv’d, 209 Outamaro, Kitagawa, 22n Overaa, Roderick, 21n, 25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 65, 155 Paderewski, Ignacy, 105 Paganini, Niccolò, 105 painting, xi, xii, xiii, xviin, 3, 4–5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 27, 30, 31, 34n, 48, 50n, 51–66, 65, 69–75, 75n, 88, 182, 191, 241n, 251–53, 272; see also Aestheticism, Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism Paine, John Knowles, 115 Palazzo Sampieri (Bologna), 61 Paris-Journal, 55, 58 parody, 139, 144n, 152, 194 pastiche, 151, 155, 258 Pater, Walter, 51, 54, 60, 104, 183 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 51, 183 Patterson, Anita, 24n, 25 performance arts, 95–100, 103–17, 121–31, 134–42, 146–58, 161–69, 171–76, 179–86, 189–99, 202–21, 225–39; see also acting, African American music, choreography, cinema, dance, hot music, jazz, music, music hall, opera, poetic drama, popular music, singing, theater Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 151 Perloff, Marjorie, 197 Perry, Matthew (Commodore Perry), 9 Peters, Harold, 14 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 80 Philips, Stephen, 242n Phoenix Society, xiii, xiv, 99–100, 202–21, 222n, 224n, 234 phonograph see gramophone photography, 148, 216, 230, 256, 260n, 272 Photoplay, 251–52, 257 Picasso, Pablo, xiii, xviin, 3, 4, 7, 29, 30, 34n, 58, 226, 232, 241n Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 30 Pierian Sodality, 106 Piero della Francesco, 70–71, 74 Baptism, 70–71

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300

index

Pierson, Leroy, 165 Platonic Ideas, 171, 173 Playfair, Nigel, 207–8 Plutarch, 46 Poe, Alexander, “The Raven,” 212 poetic drama, xiii, 202–21, 225, 233–35, 239, 256–57 Poetry, xiii, 265 Poitiers, 6, 77 Pope, Alexander, 194, 254, 258 The Rape of the Lock, 254 popular music, 103, 104, 117n, 161–69, 182, 189–99, 225, 263 portraiture in painting, xii, 19, 74 in poetry, 3, 5, 15, 19, 39, 40, 53, 63–66, 72–74, 213, 137, 212, 214 Potter, Rachel, 39 Pound, Dorothy, 126, 202–3 Pound, Ezra, xii, xiii, 4, 33, 38, 48, 48n, 96, 105, 115, 122, 126, 126–28, 152, 155, 161, 179, 186n, 202–3, 214, 233, 241n, 256, 258, 265–66, 268, 271, 276, 282, 284n “And Thus in Nineveh,” 38 “Arnault Daniel,” 266 “Canto VIII,” 48 Cantos, 38, 48, 179, 186n “Cavalcanti,” 266, 268 Guide to Kulchur, 38, 48 “Noh” or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan, 33 Tristan, 96, 126–27 “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions,” 266 Poussin, Nicolas, 58 Preston, Raymond, 86 Prichard, Matthew Stewart, 4, 11, 18, 22n, 24n, 5, 54–62 primitivism, xviiin, 25, 30, 31, 58, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 215, 221, 225, 233, 237, 238, 250 program music, 98, 153, 180–86 Prokofiev, Sergei, Chout, 151 Puccini, Giacomo, Madame Butterfly, 162 Quinn, John, 127 quartet form, 179, 184 race, 161–69 radio, 153, 245–46, 257, 271, 275–83, 284n Radio Times, 279–80, 283 ragtime, 95, 97, 162, 163, 165, 167, 239n Rainey, Lawrence, 159n, 223n Rambert, Marie, 234 Rampersad, Arnold, 165 Ransom, John Crowe, 39 Raphael, xii Ravel, Maurice, 182

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Rawsthorne, Alan, 285n Rea, William, 204 Read, Herbert, 59 Realism film (as realistic medium), 256 in theater, 193, 202–21, 216, 235, 241n Reform Club, 218 Reith, John, 276 Rembrandt, xii, 251 Renaissance drama see early modern drama Restoration drama, 99, 204, 206, 210–15, 216–18, 219 Revue wagnérienne, 96, 123, 124, 135 Rich, Claudius James, 42 Ricks, Christopher, 37, 39, 107, 119n, 128, 173, 223n, 229, 240n, 284n, 285n Riesensthal, Greta, 229 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Capriccio Espagnol, 105 Rivière, Jacques, 148 Roberts, “Lucky,” 162 Roberts, William, xii, xviiin Robeson, Paul, 161 Rococo, 63 Rodin, Auguste, 53 Roerich, Nicholas, 232 Romanticism, 53, 108–10, 111–12, 115, 117, 117n, 122, 171, 180, 264, 265–66, 271 Romer, Steven, 37 Rosenberg, Isaac, 212 Rosenberg, Ruth, 223n Ross, Alex, 153 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 4, 43–46, 47, 52, 53, 63–65 “Body’s Beauty,” 63–64 “The Burden of Nineveh,” 43–46 Lady Lilith, 63–64 Rossini, Gioachino, 162 Rostand, Edmond, Cyrano de Bergerac, 162 Rothermere, Lady, xiii, 232 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 52 Rowlandson, Thomas, 193 Royce, Josiah, xviin, 172, 177n, 249 Rubens, Peter Paul, xii, xiii, 5, 252 Rubenstein, Arthur, xiii Rubinstein, Ida, 100, 227, 229–30, 237, 241n Ruby, Herman, 167 Runciman, John F., 143n Ruskin, John, 77, 88 Russell, Bertrand, xiii, 126 Russolo, Luigi, 154, 156 Salaman, Linda, 237 Salon des indépendants (1911), 30 Sanger, Dora, xiii Santayana, George, xii, 190 Santi Maria e Donato (Murano) see churches Sapir, Edward, 249–50, 252, 258 Sarasate, Pablo de, 105

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index Sargent, John Singer, xiii Sassoon, Siegfried, “Concert-Interpretation (Le Sacre du Printemps),” 152 Satie, Erik, 181, 187n, 232, 241n Embryons desséchés, 181 satire, 72, 99, 167, 189, 193–94, 210, 211, 216, 254–55, 257, 258, 278 Saunders, Helen, xii Schiff, Sidney, xiii, 208 Schoeck, R. J., 184 Schoenberg, Arnold, 101n Schofield, Paul, 142 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 98, 107, 125–26, 129, 139, 171–76, 177n, 190 The World as Will and Representation, 171–76 Schuchard, Ronald, 37, 189, 191 Schumann, Clara, 116 Schuwer, Camille, 57 Scientific American, 262, 263 sculpture, 3, 12, 26, 28, 30, 46, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 66, 272; see also statuary Secession exhibition (Munich), 126 Second World War see World War II Seldes, Gilbert, 165 Seyler, Athene, 217, 219 Shakespeare, William, 46, 64, 69, 70, 74, 80, 166–67, 168, 173, 194, 196, 203, 204, 208, 209, 219–20, 256, 264, 269–70 Antony and Cleopatra, 64, 65, 166 King Lear, 219–20 Richard III, 264 Shannon, Claude, 258 Shaw, George Bernard, 155–56, 210 Back to Methuselah, 155–56 Shaw, Walter Hanks, 232 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 44, 265, 271 “Ozymandias,” 44 Shepp, Archie, 161 Sherbrooke, Michael, 212–15, 223n Sicker, Philip, 137 Sickert, Walter, The Music Hall, or The P. S. Wings in the O. P. Minor, 191 Siepmann, C. A., 281 Sigg, Eric, 162 Signet Society, 14, 22n, 118n, 228 singing, 53, 74, 95, 103, 113–14, 117, 124, 125, 128, 138, 139, 141, 167, 168, 246, 263, 265–69, Sloane, Hans, 42 Smith, Grover, 39 Smith, Matthew W., 139, 140, 144n Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 78 Socrates, 110 Soirée de Paris, 232 Sokolova, Lydia, xiv Soupault, Philippe, 195–99 Sousa, Philip, 264 Southam, B. C., 71

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South Kensington Museum see Museums, South Kensington South London Railway, 80 Spectator, 209, 264 Spencer, Len, 264 Spencer, Walter Baldwin, xviiin Spender, Stephen, 27 Spenser, Edmund, 80, 269–70 Prothalamion, 269–70 spirituals, 161 Squire, J. C., 216, 224n Stage Society, 222n statuary, 3, 18, 19, 30, 32, 38, 85, 229, 240n, 255, 266, 272; see also sculpture St. Louis Philharmonic and Choral Society (later St. Louis Symphony), 95 St. Mary Woolnoth see churches Steinberg, Michael, 138 Stein, Michael, 57, 89n Stein, Sarah, 57 Steinway piano, 118n Stendhal, 255 Sterne, Jonathan, 278 St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice) see churches Stieglitz, Alfred, 34n; see also galleries, Stieglitz St. John the Baptist, 139 St. Julian of Norwich, 86 St. Magnus Martyr (London) see churches St. Mary Woolnoth (London) see churches Stocking, George, 249 Stone Cottage, 214 Stonier, George, 285n Stott, W. R. S., 277 Strachey, James, 204, 233 Strachey, Lytton, xiii Straus, Oskar, Chocolate Soldier, 103, 105, 106 Strauss, Richard, 112, 144n, 182 Stravinsky, Igor, xiv, 95, 96, 97, 107, 129, 133n, 146–58, 151, 165, 232, 235, 238, 241n Introitus in Memoriam T. S. Eliot, 129, 133n Petrushka, 151, 153, 159n, 232, 241n Pulcinella, 151 Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), xiv, 97, 101n, 146–58, 232 Strindberg, August, 210 Stuart, Mary, 184 Stylus Society, 14, 118n, 228 Sullivan, J. W. N., 173 Summers, Montague, 206–8, 220, 222n, 224n Suppé, Franz von, 162 Surrealism, 99, 190, 197, 198, 199 Swanson, Gloria, 252, 254, 258 Swift, Jonathan, 194, 258 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 130 Swinley, Ion, 204, 212–15, 218, 219 Symbolism, 4, 10, 53, 96, 100, 135, 173, 192, 210, 225, 230–31, 232, 237, 238, 241n

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302 Symons, Arthur, 4, 37, 98, 103, 104, 109, 117n, 119n, 122, 123–24, 127, 129, 132n, 171, 173, 191, 192, 194, 195, 214, 265 Amoris Victima, 117 “The Barrel-Organ,” 104 “Beethoven,” 173 “Caprice,” 104 “Chopin,” 104 “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 265 Fool of the World, 117n “The Ideas of Richard Wagner,” 124 Images of Good and Evil, 117n London Nights, 117n “Parsifal,” 104 Poems, 117n “Prelude,” 104 “Prologue” to London Nights, 191–92 “The Silence,” 104 Silhouettes, 117n “Songs,” 104 Studies in Seven Arts, 108, 119n, 173 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 104, 119n, 123–24, 173, 192 Tristan and Iseult, 127 Tagore, Rabindranath, Gitanjali, 265–66 Talbot, P. Amaury, 31 Tandy, Geoffrey, 278–80, 285n Tarbell, Edmund, 10 Taruskin, Richard, 150 Tate, Erskine, 162 Tatum, Art, 161 Taylor, Billy, 165 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 122, 180, 181 The Nutcracker, 181 Swan Lake, 181 Telegraph, 89 telegraph, 250, 263, 272 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 130, 256, 264 The Princess, 256 Thayer, Scofield, 20, 209 theater, 95, 99–100, 196, 202–21, 229, 232, 256–57, 262, 275; see also Greek drama, early modern drama, Noh drama, poetic drama, Restoration drama theatergoing, xiii–iv, 202–21 theaters / performance venues Aldwych Theatre (London), 126 Everyman Theatre (London), xiv Haymarket Theatre (London), 222n London Coliseum, 232 Lyric Theatre (London), xiii, 202, 207–9, 212, 224n Mercury Theatre (London), 239n Sanders Theater (Harvard), 105–6 Shaftesbury Theatre (London), 223n Théâtre-Libre, 205 Thomas Mosher (publisher), 126 Times, 81, 203, 204, 212

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index Times Literary Supplement, xiii, 37, 203, 208, 210, 245, 248 Tinckom-Fernandez, George, 5, 107 Tin Pan Alley, 162 Titian, xii, 3, 48, 50n, 56, 58, 60, 62, 69, 251–53 Bacchus and Ariadne, 60 Venus of Urbino, 253 Torday, Émile, 31 Toscanini, Arturo, 105, 107 transhistoricism, 146–58 Travers, Martin, 85 Trell, Michael, 130 Trocadéro (Paris) see Museums Trotter, David, 245 Tucker, Sophie “Shelton Brooks,” 167 “Some of these Days,” 167 Tudor, Anthony, The Lilac Garden, 239n Tyro, 196, 211 Tzara, Tristan, 232 Uccello, Paolo, xi ukiyo-e prints, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 26, 54, 71 Underground (London), 80–82; see also Bank Station Untermeyer, Louis, 97, 127, 165 Upanishads, 27, 128 Varèse, Edgard, Amériques, 153 vaudeville, 97, 99, 165, 167 Velázquez, Diego, 252 Veneziano, Gabriele, xi Verdenal, Jean, 58, 96, 97, 106, 122, 123, 125–26, 129 Verdi, Giuseppe, Rigoletto, 264 Verlaine, Paul, 53, 128, 265 “Parsifal,” 96, 121, 124, 138, 141 Vermeer, Johannes, xii Veronese, Paolo, xii verse drama see poetic drama Victor (record label), 278 Victoria and Albert Museum see Museums, South Kensington Vienna Philharmonic, 104 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel, 78 Virgil, Aeneid, 52, 64 visual arts, 3–6, 9–21, 25–33, 36–48, 51–66, 69–74, 76–89, 95, 191, 251–53, 272; see also architecture, cinema, museums, painting, photography, portraiture, sculpture, statuary vocal music see singing Vogue, 252 Vorticism, xii–xiii, xviin–xviiin, 4, 152 Wadsworth, Edward xii, xiii Wagner, Richard, xiv, 53–54, 95, 96–97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106–11, 112, 121–31, 131n, 134–42, 131n, 132n, 138, 143n, 144n, 145n, 148, 152, 162, 171–76, 177n, 180, 181, 182, 187n, 269, 274n

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index Wagner, Richard (Cont.) and Bayreuth, 112, 122, 124–25, 134, 135, 136, 143n “Beethoven,” 172 Götterdämmerung, 96, 103, 112, 121, 122, 123, 128, 137, 144n Das Judenthum in der Musik, 125 Kundry, 96, 134–42, 143n Lohengrin, 110 Parsifal, 95, 96–97, 121, 134–42, 138, 143n Siegfried, 137 Tannhäuser, 162 Tristan and Isolde, 53–54, 96, 103, 105, 106–11, 121, 123, 125, 130, 131n, 144n, 172, 181 Waldron, Philip, 144n Walker, Harry Rowan, 24n, 67n Wallace Collection, 5, 32 Wallace, Nellie, 193, 194, 195, 210, 217 Walsh, Mary Ellen Williams, 168 Walsh, Stephen, 151 Warren, Edward Perry, 55 Warthin, Aldred, 112 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 3 Waugh, Evelyn, 201n Webber, Andrew Lloyd, Cats, 285n Weber, Carl Maria von, 184 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, 202–5, 208–9, 211–12, 223n, 234 Weinfield, Henry, 231 Wesendonck, Mathilde, 125 West End (London), 206 Weston, Jessie, 96, 125, 136, 142n, 143n, 145n, 238 From Ritual to Romance, 96, 238 The Quest of the Holy Grail, 125 Wheatstraw, Peetie, 165 Whistler, James McNeill, 10, 17, 19, 182 The Golden Screen, 19 La Princesse du pays de la porcelain, 19 Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony, 17

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White, Harry, 284n White, Willy, 284n Whiting, Arthur, 106, 115 Whitman, Walt, 108 Whitney Studio Club, 34n Widow Twankey, 194 Wilde, Oscar, Salomé, 139, 144n, 240n Wilkinson, Norman, 207 Williams, Bert, 167 Williams, Charles, 242 Winckelmann, Johann, 52, 55, 58 Wolfram see Eschenbach Woods, James H., 32 Woolf, Leonard, xii Woolf, Virginia, xiii, 99, 179, 193, 210–11, 219, 236, 239n, 263 “The String Quartet,” 179 The Voyage Out, 239n Wordsworth, William, 264 World’s Fair (Paris, 1878), 26 World’s Fair (St. Louis, 1904), 22n, 25 World War I, 96, 165, 204, 206, 232, 264 World War II, 256, 280, 282 Wren, Christopher, 77, 78, 80, 83 Wright, Alastair, 58 Wycherley, William, The Country Wife, 216–18 Yaffe, David, 168 Yeats, W. B., 44, 124, 126, 127, 131, 203, 206, 210, 214, 225, 228, 231, 242n, 256 At the Hawk’s Well, 126, 214 “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” 214 “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” 228 “Three Songs to the One Burden,” 44 Yelton, Michael, 85 Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, 32 Ziegfeld Follies, “That Shakespearian Rag,” 97, 148, 167

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Plate 1 Bishamonten, Guardian of the North, with his Retinue. Japanese, Kamakura period, late 12th to early 13th century; purchased by Okakura Kakuzō in 1905. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Plate 2 Suit of Armor. Japanese, Edo period, 18th–19th century; purchased by Charles Goddard Weld and entrusted to the Museum of Fine Arts before 1890; permanently donated in 1911. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Plate 3 James McNeill Whistler, Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony (1864–79). Freer Gallery, Washington, D. C.

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Plate 4 Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light. Japanese, late Heian period, 12th century. Given by Denman Waldo Rossin 1909. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Plate 5 Head of Buddha. From Northern India, Uttar Pradesh, Mathura. Gupta period, circa 430–435 ce. Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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Plate 6 The Hall of the British Museum, 1920. Courtesy of the British Museum Central Archives.

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Plate 7 Henri Matisse, Music, 1910. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2016. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Plate 8 Henri Matisse, Dance, 1909–10. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2016. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Plate 9 Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian (1490), Ca’ d’Oro, Venice.

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Plate 10 Walter Richard Sickert, The Music Hall, or The P. S. Wings in the O. P. Mirror, 1889. Musée des Beaux Arts Rouen. Photo Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

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Plate 11 Connected by wires © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library

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Plate 12 “I Wish There Was a Wireless to Heaven,” Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

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