The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual : Volume 1 9781942954286, 9781942954293

Citation preview

THE

T. S. Eliot Studies

Annual VOLUME I

Advisory Board Ronald Bush David Chinitz Robert Crawford Anthony Cuda Frances Dickey John Haffenden Benjamin Lockerd Gail McDonald Gabrielle McIntire Jahan Ramazani Christopher Ricks Ronald Schuchard Vincent Sherry

THE

T. S. Eliot Studies

Annual

VOLUME I

General Editor, John D. Morgenstern Editorial Assistant, Joseph Litts

© 2017 Clemson University Press All rights reserved First Edition, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-942954-28-6 (print) eISBN: 978-1-942954-29-3 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press. Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.

Contents Contents

Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot General Editor’s Note John D. Morgenstern

vii 1

Articles The Short and Surprisingly Private Life of King Bolo: Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences Jayme Stayer Dull Tom-Tom’s Absurd Prelude: Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot Michael Opest Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911 Nancy D. Hargrove

3

31 57

Special Forum: “Prufrock” at 100 The American Legacy of “Prufrock” Anita Patterson

67

Poetry (June 1915) Christopher Ricks

73

v

vi

Contents The Stale Dregs of Revolt Frances Dickey

85

Prufrock, Belated Anthony Cuda

89

Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock” Ronald Schuchard

93

Special Forum: Eliot’s Marginalia Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry Jamie Callison T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist April Pierce Astride the Dark Horse: T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department Matt Seybold

99 114

131

Aristophanic Structures in Sweeney Agonistes, “The Hollow Men,” and Murder in the Cathedral 157 Joshua Richards Eliot and Virgil in Love and War Nancy K. Gish

177

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014 Elisabeth Däumer

197

Notes on Contributors

207

Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot ASG After Strange Gods (London: Faber & Faber, 1934) AVP Ara Vos Prec (London: The Ovid Press, 1920) 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 Faber & 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 Faber & 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 Faber & 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 Faber & Faber, 2015) CPP The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969) Criterion The Criterion. Collected edition, 18 vols., ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1967 EAM Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936) EE Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1934) FLA For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928) HJD Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: The Hogarth Press, 1924)

vii

viii

Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot

ICS IMH KE L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 NDC OPP Poems 1 Poems 2 SE SW TCC UPUC VMP WLF

The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939) Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber & Faber, 1996) Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber & Faber, 1964) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922, revised edition, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber & Faber, 2009) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber & Faber, 2009) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3: 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2012) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: 1928–1929, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2013) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2014) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 6: 1932–1933, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2016) Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948) On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957) T. S. Eliot: The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) T. S. Eliot: The Poems, Vol. 2, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1951) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920) To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1965) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber 1964) The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber & Faber, 1993; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994) The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1971; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971)

General Editor’s Note John D. Morgenstern

I

n 1975, a contributor to the short-lived T. S. Eliot Review characterized the state of Eliot scholarship as an incomplete mosaic, with “the primary materials for research . . . either in jumbled disarray or missing entirely.” While a glut of memoirs “written by men Eliot assiduously avoided” flooded the literary marketplace, serious scholars lacked the “fundamental research tools” to fill in the gaps in the fragmentary tableau: “No Complete Works of Eliot . . . no critical edition of Eliot’s poems (save The Waste Land Facsimile) . . . and no Complete Letters of Eliot” had appeared in the decade following the poet’s death. Nearly a half century later, richly annotated and comprehensive critical editions of his letters, poetry, and prose have at last permitted scholars to see Eliot whole. These landmark editions have prompted a renewed appreciation for Eliot as a man of his time, as a discerning critic of both literature and the twentieth century, and as a poet whose art and ideas cross cultural, medial, and linguistic barriers. The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual sets out to be the leading venue for this ongoing critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work, and essays in this volume draw on newly available primary materials to revise longstanding critical narratives, to place

1

2

John D. Morgenstern

Eliot’s work in fuller historical contexts, and to ensure his enduring presence in modernist studies. I am grateful to the many peer reviewers who gave their time enthusiastically and tirelessly to ensure that the essays included in this inaugural volume met the highest scholarly benchmark. I am also indebted to the T. S. Eliot Society and to its Board of Directors, who have promoted the Annual and allowed me to reprint Christopher Ricks’s “Poetry (1915)” and Elisabeth Däumer’s bibliography of Eliot scholarship, which were originally published in the summer 2015 issue of Time Present, the Society’s newsletter. I also wish to thank the Estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber & Faber, who offered encouragement and gave permission to reproduce excerpts from unpublished correspondence. Full acknowledgement has been made in endnotes in each instance. Most of all, I wish to thanks the Annual’s advisory board for championing a fledgling publication and raising it to their high standard: Ronald Bush, David Chinitz, Robert Crawford, Anthony Cuda, Frances Dickey, John Haffenden, Benjamin Lockerd, Gail McDonald, Gabrielle McIntire, Jahan Ramazani, Christopher Ricks, Ronald Schuchard, and Vincent Sherry.

The Short and Surprisingly Private Life of King Bolo: Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences Jayme Stayer

I

ntimations of Eliot’s bawdy verses started to leak out during the author’s lifetime. Confidants of the poet teased the public about their existence, and Eliot himself joked with interviewers about a character named King Bolo. In the 1980s, biographies and a volume of letters offered the first idea of the scope of the obscene verse. And then, in 1996, Inventions of the March Hare was published. In an appendix judiciously labeled “Poems excised from the Notebook,” the editor reproduced several pages of obscene verse—including the Columbo and Bolo poems—that Eliot had torn out before selling the notebook to John Quinn. Reviewed in the popular press and dissected in scholarly journals, these poems became notorious for their scatological and pornographic content, and more troublingly, for the violence, racism, misogyny, and homophobia of such lines as: “The only doctor in his town / Was a bastard jew named Benny” and “‘Up from Possum Stew!’ / Or ‘How I set the nigger free!’” and the jolly tinker whose “whanger” “ripped up my belly from my cunt to my navel.”1 Commentators have alternately shrugged at these poems, explained them, explained

3

4

Jayme Stayer

them away, or expressed astonishment or outrage at their content.2 Most recently, with the 2015 publication of the magisterial Poems of T. S. Eliot, the scattered appearances of the Bolo sequence have been sewn together in a composite to which the editors have given the title “The Columbiad,” and where all forty-nine stanzas are finally on view, awaiting the judgment of the future.3 By way of entering this debate, I want to consider three questions that scholars have not yet thought to ask about these poems: (1) Did Eliot really try to publish his obscene verses in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast? (2) Was the elderly Eliot still composing Bolo verses? (3) And if so, were they written in the same racist and misogynist vein as in his youth? Without sufficient proof, and without looking carefully at the available evidence, scholars have assumed that the answer to these questions is “yes.” I would like to offer multiple reasons for responding with a qualified “no” on all three counts.4 Though these three questions seem to address narrow issues of historical fact, their answers open onto the contested spaces of what these poems mean and why they have provoked such disapproval. The first question, whether Eliot really intended to place bawdy lyrics in Blast, is not only one of historical accuracy; it is also one of audience, and thus of understanding the poems’ rhetoric. For whom did Eliot write these poems, where did he imagine they would appear as he was composing them, and what public and private venues did he, in point of fact, seek for their readership? The belief that Eliot tried to publish obscene poems in Blast has led some to think, erroneously, that Eliot took these verses more seriously than he actually did, that he had the poor taste to believe that their circulation outside his immediate circle of friends was appropriate, and that he was foolish enough not to realize that they would damage his reputation. Correcting the historical record on this matter, while a salutary task in its own right, has another consequence: it restores to Eliot his consciousness that these verses were extremely transgressive. The second and third questions—how late was Eliot writing Bolo poems, and what is their content?—are likewise not just concerns

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

5

about chronology or accurate paraphrase. Both questions touch on Eliot’s bigotry in light of his later conversion: what are we to think of an elder statesman and Christian convert who wrote poems of spiritual humility for public consumption while supposedly scribbling away at racist and misogynist poems in private? The belief that Eliot continued to compose these obscene poems throughout his life has led some to claim, erroneously, that these verses should not be viewed as juvenilia, but as an abiding interest of his middle and late periods.5 As a result, they see the poems as reflecting an ongoing sexual dysfunction, a lifelong immaturity, and a committed misogyny, whereas the poems are more understandable, and less scandalous, as expressions of youthful sexual frustration and facilitators of juvenile masculine bonding.

Eliot’s Alleged Intention to Publish His Blue Verse That Eliot seriously intended to publish “The Triumph of Bullshit” and “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” in Blast is a commonplace that no one has yet questioned.6 Although this interpretation precedes Christopher Ricks’s edition of Inventions of the March Hare (1996), critical agreement regarding Eliot’s intentions seemed to be cemented by a skewed reading of two quotations that appear in that volume. On the title page of the appendix, Ricks offers, without commentary, the following excerpts, passages that have been repeated in nearly every critical discussion of these verses: [Eliot] to Pound, 2 Feb. 1915: I have corresponded with Lewis, but his puritanical principles seem to bar my way to Publicity. I fear that King Bolo and his Big Black Kween will never burst into print. I understand that Priapism, Narcissism etc. are not approved of, and even so innocent a rhyme as      . . . pulled her stockings off With a frightful cry of “Hauptbahnhof!!” is considered decadent.

6

Jayme Stayer Wyndham Lewis to Pound, before July 1915: Eliot has sent me Bullshit & the Ballad for Big Louise. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry. I am longing to print them in Blast; but stick to my naif determination to have no “Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger.”7

The reigning interpretation of this episode is that sometime in early 1915, Eliot sent “The Triumph of Bullshit” and “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” to Lewis, hoping that he would publish them in Blast. Lewis considered the possibility (so the story goes) but ultimately demurred, explaining his decision both to Pound and to Eliot, with the latter humorously complaining about the rejection. In spite of the unanimity of this interpretation, however, this narrative seems hard to credit. I would like to construct a more probable scenario for the correspondence among Eliot, Pound, and Lewis—one that attends carefully to what these letters are saying and not saying, and one that takes into account a number of important contexts that have so far been ignored. To understand one of these contexts, it will be helpful to look back five months to September 30, 1914. The war only a few weeks old, Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken, offering a Bolo verse turned in the service of a patriotic war poem: British heroes sink a German warship, and all are drowned except for the German cabin boy, who “was sav’d alive / And bugger’d, in the sphincter.” Ironically commenting on the prospects for the poem’s publication, Eliot continues: The poem was declined by several musical publishers on the ground that it paid too great a tribute to the charms of German youth to be acceptable to the English public. I acknowledg’d the force of the objection, but replied that it was only to be regarded as a punitive measure, and to show the readiness and devotion to duty of the British seaman.8

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

7

This letter to Aiken shows that Eliot was, without question, joking about publishing these Bolo verses. Five months later, writing to Pound, Eliot would adopt this same pose of an unfairly rejected author. The repartee among Eliot, Lewis, and Pound was only the continuation of a motif that Eliot had sounded previously and would extend for some time: namely, pretending to lament that his Bolo sequence would never “burst into print.” To return to the February 1915 exchange, why Pound was involved at all seems to be that Eliot and Lewis had not yet met one another. Pound had probably encouraged Eliot to send some poems to Lewis for editorial consideration; Eliot’s introductory gesture—“I have corresponded with Lewis”—elides but implies “as you told me to.” Subsequently, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” were published by Lewis in Blast in July 1915. Whether Eliot sent obscene verses to Lewis in the same letter as “Rhapsody” and “Preludes” is of less consequence than why Eliot sent him such verses. Eliot often sent blue verse, such as installments of the Bolo sequence, to literary friends and editors with no intention of their being broadcast further. That Eliot sent such poems to Lewis is, in itself, no proof that he wanted them published. If we look closely at what the letters actually say, Lewis nowhere attributes the idea of printing the poems to Eliot. Lewis writes: “Eliot has sent me Bullshit & the Ballad for Big Louise,” which indicates Eliot’s action, but not its intention. Further, Lewis writes: “I am longing to print them,” which, read as ironic or not, ascribes the intention to publish to himself rather than to Eliot. Another often missed cue in this correspondence is that Eliot does not bemoan Lewis’s rejection of “Bullshit” or “Ballade,” the only poems of which Lewis acknowledges receipt. Eliot instead refers to the wider corpus of obscene verse: “I fear that King Bolo and his Big Black Kween will never burst into print.” While it strains credulity to imagine Eliot seeking publication for “Bullshit” or “Ballade,” vulgar as they are, it is frankly impossible to imagine Bolo’s pornography getting into print with Eliot’s imprimatur: “a pair of great big hairy balls / And a big black knotty penis.”9 The clues to the tongue-in-cheek tone are unmistakable: Eliot accuses

8

Jayme Stayer

Lewis of holding “puritanical principles” (an absurd claim), he sulks histrionically over the imagined rejection, and “decadent” rhyming is given as a primary reason for the refusal. Likewise, when Lewis pretends to be torn between his ban on vulgarity and his “longing” to print the poems, he is not reporting an editorial dilemma but working up a comedic bit for Pound’s amusement. Whether or not Pound was joking is a different matter. In response to Lewis’s feigned reluctance, Pound suggests: “I dare say Eliot will consent to leaving blanks for the offending words.”10 If Pound is in on the joke, then this riposte simply belabors it. But it is possible that Pound was not quite attuned to the prank; his irony was more heavyhanded than his correspondents’.11 In any event, Eliot has nothing to do with the intention to publish: that Pound would “dare say” what Eliot would agree to demonstrates that Eliot was not included in this side conversation about making the offensive poems more palatable. At the same time that Eliot and Lewis were joking for Pound’s amusement, Pound himself was engaged in the serious business of getting as many of Eliot’s poems into print as he could. Indefatigable and generous, Pound was in the midst of a long battle with Harriet Monroe to speed up her publication of “Prufrock” in Poetry. After trying unsuccessfully at The Smart Set, Pound was able to place “Portrait of a Lady” in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others, and he directed Eliot to Lewis’s Blast, where two poems were placed. Pound himself republished several of Eliot’s poems in Catholic Anthology, later claiming that the whole purpose of publishing the volume in London was “in order to get 16 pages of Eliot printed in that damned city.”12 In the four years preceding his arrival in London, Eliot had published nothing. In 1915, by contrast, Eliot scored twelve publications or reprints, and Pound’s intervention was directly responsible for all of them. And so, when Lewis and Eliot kidded to him about publishing “Bullshit,” Pound smelled blood in the water. What happened next in the correspondence between Pound and Lewis is telling.13 Pound sent Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” to Lewis for Blast, ending with the warning: “if you want to use this Portrait you’ll

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

9

have to get his permission. =or I will have to.”14 In the midst of his tireless crusade to get Eliot published, why does Pound suddenly recall the niceties of permission? Did Eliot, appalled, get wind of Pound’s suggestion that “Bullshit” be published with blanks? In response, perhaps Eliot made it clear to Pound that nothing was to be published without his permission. I am conjecturing about such a rebuke, of course, but it would explain Pound’s uncharacteristic submissiveness. The explanation that Eliot might have offered the poems as potentially anonymous contributions falters on the hazards of British obscenity laws. As brash as Pound was, he knew that something like blanks would be needed, and not even a newly arrived foreigner such as Eliot could have believed that the censors, especially vigilant during wartime, would overlook such obscenity. Government censors were on the lookout, and a variety of social purity organizations pressured government agencies to act. As Celia Marshik has explained, the consequences for writers included “visits and surveillance, public proclamations and warnings, and threatening letters as well as trials for obscene libel.”15 As an editor, Lewis was keenly aware of the pressures of censorship. In June 1914, in a dust-up regarding the first edition of Blast, Lewis’s publisher, John Lane, had required that three lines from Pound’s poem “Fratres Minores” be blacked out. Chastising Lewis for letting the poem make it so far into press, Lane recalled their earlier agreement “that there would be no sexual disagreeableness or anything which could possibly be construed into libel in it.”16 The release of Blast, dated June 20, 1914, was delayed until July while two women at the Rebel Art Centre crossed out the lines by hand. For Pound as author and Lewis as editor, it was an irritating, humiliating episode. The offending poem by Pound—with its use of the word “testicles” and an oblique description of orgasm—had markedly less “sexual disagreeableness” in it than Eliot’s obscene verse. Several months later, the second edition of Blast was due to be published, again by Lane. With the memory of their mutual tussle with Lane fresh in his mind, Lewis expresses to Pound his “naif determination

10

Jayme Stayer

to have no ‘Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger.’” With this context restored, it is not only obvious that Lewis is joking about Eliot’s verse presenting him with an editorial dilemma, it seems that he is still licking his wounds. A number of factors have contributed to our misunderstanding of the correspondence among Eliot, Lewis, and Pound. The misreadings of the letters themselves are part of the problem, and these forgotten contexts are another part: (1) Eliot’s unmistakable joking about publishing Bolo, joking that both precedes and follows the 1915 episode; (2) the atmosphere of blustery friendship and literary ambition among the three men; and (3) the widely known realities of British censorship, and Lewis’s particular history with Lane. In the scenario I am sketching, it was Pound’s ambition for Eliot and his bullying manner that came up against an in-joke between two men who were playing to Pound’s audience and who were modeling the kind of virile one-upmanship that Pound encouraged. In the static that ensued, Pound missed the tone of the joke and barged ahead with his own plans for Eliot’s future. So far as we know, at no other time in his life did Eliot attempt to publish his obscene verse.17 A scenario in which all three men were kidding (or at least Eliot and Lewis were) seems more likely than one in which Eliot momentarily took leave of his senses.

Eliot’s Alleged Composition of Bolo Verses Late in Life Only one critic has contested the scholarly consensus regarding how late Eliot was writing Bolo verses. Valerie Eliot was in a position to know the most about the composition history of the Bolo poems, but she wrote only two sentences about the matter, and her terse claim has been ignored by critics. Responding to a discussion in the Times Literary Supplement, the poet’s widow contested the idea of Bolo’s late composition: “It is not true, as William Baker asserts . . . , that T. S. Eliot was still writing his ‘King Bolo’ limericks ‘in the late 1950s.’ Almost all were written during his Harvard days and none later than 1916.”18

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

11

That Eliot kept composing such racist and misogynist poems up to the day he died is another canard abetted partly by misreadings of the archival evidence and partly by the tantalizing presence of the letters up to 1922 (published in 1988) combined with the gaping absence of the later letters (those from 1923 to 1933 have been published between 2011 and 2016). Many scholars have described the existence, dating, and content of Eliot’s later Bolo stanzas without offering convincing evidence to substantiate their claims. For example, Bryan Cheyette confidently dates the last Bolo poem to 1964 and gives a blanket description to cover the fifty-year span: “These [Bolo verses] are a long cycle of bawdy, racist, and astonishingly vulgar doggerel which Eliot began writing for a few friends while a student at Harvard and was still writing a year before his death in 1965.”19 Cheyette’s claim is influenced by the work of Gabrielle McIntire, and both Cheyette and McIntire have written important, illuminating chapters on Eliot’s Bolo poems. However, for this essay, I want to focus on some of the factual claims they make about the poems’ dating and content. McIntire and Cheyette certainly have good reason to suspect that Eliot was composing installments of the Bolo sequence later in life. Eliot himself seemed to confess the deed in a 1959 interview for The Paris Review. Donald Hall asks: “Do you write anything now in the vein of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats or King Bolo?” Eliot’s initial response seems to refer to both types: “Those things do come from time to time!” After mentioning some incomplete cat poems, he concludes the discussion with an arch reversion to “one”: “Oh, yes, one wants to keep one’s hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill.”20 Note that this admission—if that is what it is—offers no proof of misogyny, racism, or anything offensive. Once we have examined more recent evidence and identified the important shift that Bolo undergoes in the late 1920s, we will be more likely to see this interchange as a complicitous wink to an interviewer looking to debunk Eliot’s saintly authority.

12

Jayme Stayer

McIntire claims that the Bolo poems “form part of an extensive cycle that Eliot continued to write throughout his life.”21 She offers as evidence for this claim numerous references to the Bolo sequence in Eliot’s letters: In the John Davy Hayward Bequest at Cambridge University, for instance, Bolo emerges in a letter to Clive Bell in 1941, nearly fifteen years after an intense correspondence on the subject with Bonamy Dobrée reaches its peak in 1927—astonishingly, the year of Eliot’s conversion—and roughly thirty years after Bolo’s first incarnation. Furthermore, Conrad Aiken indicates in December 1964, less than a month before Eliot died on 4 January 1965, that Bolo was still a topic of interest. Writing to Eliot at the time, Aiken expresses regret that this year they would not have their usual exchange of Columbo and Bolo poems: “But o dear we shall miss our annual meeting in New York and the exchange of Bolos and lime rickeys at the River Club or Vanderbilt.” . . . What perhaps is most astonishing about this body of work, then, is that Eliot continued to write and circulate the Columbo and Bolo verses through his whole life.22 For McIntire, what is presumably “astonishing” about this evidence is not merely that Eliot kept writing poems about Columbo and Bolo “through his whole life.” Rather, what is troublesome is left unstated: that any appearance of Columbo or Bolo is necessarily racist, misogynistic, or otherwise offensive. But once this same evidence is probed in more detail, such assumptions begin to fall apart. The 1941 letter to Clive Bell in which, as McIntire indicates, “Bolo emerges,” in point of fact contains no Bolo verses whatsoever. Eliot instead is thanking Bell for some bit of praise, then he remarks on his scheme to complete several long poems (Four Quartets), which prompts this single sentence: “I may even take in hand the long neglected task of putting in order the epical ballad on the life of Chris Columbo (the famous Portuguese

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

13

navigator) and his friends King Bolo and his Big Black Queen.”23 As Eliot ages, the old joke about publishing Bolo becomes a different, if still obvious joke about giving the sequence a scholarly treatment. That Bolo emerges in this letter to Bell is true enough; however, he does not emerge in his poetic guise—namely, as the hero of a poem trafficking in racist and misogynist tropes—but in his tamer, prosaic guise as the subject of a mock-editor’s scholarly project. The crucial error that critics make in discussing Bolo’s longevity is failing to distinguish between the Bolo poems and the Bolo prose, the former occasionally alarming, the latter mostly tedious. A typical passage of Bolo prose, describing the “behaviour of the primitive inhabitants of Bolovia,” notes that they are “A notoriously lazy race. They had two Gods, named respectively Wux and Wux. They observed that the carving of Idols out of ebony was hard work; therefore they carved only one Idol.”24 Such jokes about Bolovian theology or mock discussions of a scholarly edition are hardly “astonishing” at all. In drawing attention to the differences in tone, form, and content between the Bolo poems and the Bolo prose, I intend to offer clarity rather than plead for a full exoneration. For the Bolo prose has its own ethical problems. Even in these seemingly banal passages I have quoted, Eliot reworks an American prejudice about African-Americans as lazy, and he repeats an offensive epithet created years earlier: the “Big Black Queen.” Each of these three words creates problems of racial othering and sexual fetishizing. Similarly, even though the Bolo prose is tamer than the poetry, lampooning tribal customs still betrays condescension toward indigenous peoples. In spite of these qualms, I believe I can still press my point: I am not claiming that the Bolo prose is thoroughly innocent, only that the ethnic humor found therein pales in comparison to the starker prejudices of the Bolo poems. In the Bolo prose, the later Eliot has turned from a poetic corpus of colonialist expansion and sexual deviance toward a mock-sociological study of Bolo’s tribal customs. It blurs a useful distinction to place the mild Bolo prose, whatever its problems, in the same moral category as the Bolo verses that spew racial slurs and revel in sexual violence. In

14

Jayme Stayer

addition to urging historical and factual accuracy in this discussion, and to identifying the generic conventions and rhetorical aims of the Bolo verse and prose, I am also suggesting that we maintain a delicate ethical balance between distancing ourselves from troublesome prejudices and resisting the facile superiority that comes from scolding a dead person.25

“Putting in Order the Epical Ballad”: A Bolovian Chronology At this stage of discovery, what can be safely claimed about the dating and content of the Bolo poems and prose? The first thing to note is that Christopher Columbo—the oversexed hero of an epic sea journey—is not Eliot’s invention. Columbo first appears in a bawdy sea song that scholars variously date to 1876, after 1877, and 1893.26 Eliot’s use is therefore part of a long folk tradition of repetition and variation. Some of the Columbo stanzas that have been preserved in Eliot’s notebook are nearly word-for-word transcriptions of pre-existing stanzas, some are adaptations, and others are entirely his own inventions. For the purposes of chronology, I do not distinguish below between verses Eliot has transcribed and verses he has composed; both types are attributed to his hand. However, because a point of contention is whether Eliot kept writing new Bolo verses late in life, I note the difference between the first time a Bolo stanza appears and its subsequent repetition in correspondence. In their richly annotated edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015), editors Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue are able to date many of the Bolo and Columbo poems. But several Bolos contain no clear evidence for precise dating. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to place all of the Bolo poems into distinct chronological periods. The Bolo poems that were excised from the Inventions notebook can be roughly dated to the late aughts and early teens. The Bolos that appear within the letters are clearly datable, since Eliot almost always dated his correspondence. This leaves roughly twenty Bolos that have no chronological slot yet.

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

15

These remaining Bolo poems, housed at Yale, were not published in Inventions because they were not clearly linked with the notebook. These twenty-some stanzas were from a smaller pocketbook, of which only six pages remain. As I explain below, I date this pocketbook to the late teens.

Act I, Bolo Begun: Poems 1906–1914 Certainly the vast majority, and probably all, of the Bolo poems were composed at Harvard. Having examined the correspondence of Eliot’s Harvard friends, Robert Crawford concludes that the exchange of Bolo verses was part of their fellowship as undergraduates (1906–10).27 Conrad Aiken expands this timeframe, claiming that “hilariously naughty parerga” on the subject of King Bolo served as a “sort of cynical counterpoint to the study of Sanskrit and the treatise on epistemology,” extending the sharing of Bolo stanzas into Eliot’s graduate student days in America (1911–14).28 Given the contemporaneity of the Inventions notebook (begun 1909), some of those verses exchanged among Harvard friends most likely include the Bolo stanzas that were written on its leaves. It is also likely that these same Bolo verses are the ones that Pound saw a few years later in London. From the PoundLewis correspondence cited above, we know that “Bullshit,” “Ballade,” and other obscene poems predate 1915. This American period (1906–1914) saw the zenith of Eliot’s sexually violent and racially offensive Bolo stanzas. Sexual violence and racial slurs are likewise salient themes in other poems from this period such as “Fragments” and “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu.” The verses excised from the notebook were probably not penned after 1914, by which time the notebook had lost steam as a place of invention. This arc of Bolo poems, begun at Harvard, ends with his departure from America in 1914. Act II, Bolo Collected: Poems 1915–1923 With Eliot’s removal to London, a new and different stage in his life began. Almost all of the Bolos that are datable to this second period

16

Jayme Stayer

have been collected from his time in America and transcribed into a pocketbook rather than newly composed. As an artifact, the pocketbook probably dates to the late teens, even though its contents date from much earlier.29 My guess is that this smaller pocketbook was purchased later than the Inventions notebook as a way of “putting the epical ballad in order,” since these pages have generally neater handwriting, and only Bolo poems appear on them, as opposed to the Inventions notebook, where Bolos are interspersed with the other poems. Only two new Bolos appear during this period: a brief couplet in 1915 and two stanzas in 1923. But even as early as 1915 a shift in attitude is detectable: these Bolos are already starting to sound mockintellectual rather than shockingly ribald: “pulled her stockings off / With a frightful cry of ‘Hauptbahnhof!!’”30 Eliot has a new set of friends to entertain, more witty and learned than his drinking companions from Harvard. The shift from Harvard social clubs, with their regular dinners and occasions, to the London avant-garde, with its epistolary culture, is one possible reason Eliot started collecting Bolos more deliberately in this smaller pocketbook. Columbo, Bolo, and his queen make a crashing exit in a letter to Pound (September 3, 1923) and then disappear for a few years.

Act III, Bolo Transformed: The Bolo Poems and Prose, 1927–1932 The next datable appearance of Bolo is 1927, when a new arc begins. In this arc, Bolo begins his shift from a hero in a poetic sequence to a specimen in a prosaic study. The impetus for the revival is an extensive discussion of Bolovian customs, which Eliot had initiated with Bonamy Dobrée. The first appearance in this vein is May 10, 1927, where, as we have already seen, Eliot introduces Dobrée to “the primitive inhabitants of Bolovia” as a “notoriously lazy race.”31 In subsequent letters, he continues in this vein, explaining their cultural customs and liturgical rites. Along with the change from poetry to prose, a concomitant shift can be traced from the historical and sexual matters of the Bolo poems to the anthropological and theological matters of the Bolo prose. This shift in 1927—when Bolo becomes mostly an anthropological/

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

17

theological joke—exactly corresponds with Eliot’s conversion to Christianity. What is a sticking point for McIntire and others is an implied, distasteful hypocrisy: that Eliot, in their understanding, seems to be writing ethically suspect verse in the same year that he adopts a pose of spiritual humility. But now we can see that Eliot’s conversion carries with it a deepened commitment to theological discourse and a new interest in the sociological organization of Christian society: the two discourses that Eliot then playfully satirizes in his Bolo prose. The Bolovian banter with Dobrée continues through 1927, with a few more references in 1928 and 1932. This burst of activity coincides with the creation of the “London Bolovian Society,” which Eliot proudly announces to his old college friend, Howard Morris.32 Nevertheless, within this discussion very little new verse appears—just a pair of stray stanzas to Morris in late 1929 and two others to Theodore Spencer in 1932.33

Act IV, Bolo Mourned: 1940–1964 Aside from one recycled stanza that appears in 1934, Columbo/Bolo, whether dressed in verse or prose, seems to go underground again for a number of years.34 Columbo resurfaces in a letter to Hayward on August 29, 1940, but the stanza is recycled, having originally appeared in the Inventions notebook: “One day Columbo and the queen / They fell into a quarrel / Columbo showed his disrespect / By farting in a barrel.”35 A few months later, also to Hayward, Eliot quotes a Bolovian description he had sent to Dobrée years earlier: “as King Bolo said to the Queen in presenting Columbo, ‘he hunts with the Quorn and shoots over his own coverts.’”36 Appearing after a long gap, these mere repetitions point to a lethargy surrounding the topic of Bolo. In the midst of this timeframe, a third transformation materializes, legible in a letter to Hayward on November 25, 1940. No longer the sexual adventurer of the poems nor the object of anthropological study in the prose, now Bolo is hailed wistfully as a former way of life, Bolovian custom providing the pseudo-ancient salutation: “Well, as the Bolovians used to say (and often I feel nostalgia for that blessed isle)

18

Jayme Stayer

‘Wux-ho!’”37 Next year, the nostalgia endures, Eliot again signing off: “So meanwhile, as the Bolovians used to say (for their happy island has now disappeared): ‘wux-ho!’”38 Also in 1941, as we have already seen in Eliot’s letter to Clive Bell, he jokes about “putting in order the epical ballad”—the imagined scholarly treatment is a sure sign that Bolo is a fixed, dead canon.39 From early 1932 until his death—a thirty-three-year drought— Eliot seems to have composed no new Bolo stanzas. A previously unrecorded Bolo poem does appear in a 1956 letter, but it is almost certainly recycled. Writing to his Harvard friend Nick Brooks after a bout of illness, Eliot begins, “I’ve been slow getting round my friends for their letters of condolence on my approaching demise,” and he continues: So you see that I have some of the resilience of our epoch making heroine the Black Queen –   That vast voluptuous vestal Who, as you may have forgotten –     Was always Bright and Full of Beans As well (you may also have forgotten this) –    As well as Blandly Bestial.40 Even though the first recorded instance of this stanza comes from a 1956 letter, Eliot is writing to a Digamma Club friend with whom he had shared Bolos at Harvard.41 In the poem, Eliot twice reminds Brooks of what has been “forgotten.” Thus, the internal and external evidence of the poem suggests that this verse is recycled, one with which his correspondent has long been familiar. Note, also, the queen’s transformation: reshaped into a “vestal,” if ironic, innocent, she no longer indulges in violent sex, but the “Blandly Bestial” pastime of flatulence. As with this 1956 letter, occasional repetitions of previously composed Bolos appeared in the latter part of Eliot’s life. The last appearance of such is from late 1963 or 1964. We have already heard

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

19

Aiken’s lament in 1964 that there would be no “exchange of Bolos” in the coming year because of Eliot’s ill health. Like other tantalizing references to Bolo, it seemed to suggest the existence of newly composed stanzas. But the last Bolo that Eliot sent to Aiken is the same one that he had first shared with his friend fifty years earlier, in 1914: Now while Colombo + his men Were feasting at the Passover, King Bolo and his Big Black Queen Rolled in tea-kettle-arse-over. They all sat round the festive board And dined—on fried hyaenas. And the King said: “mine’s a piece of tail With a juicy bit of penis.”42 Similar to the variations that occur in oral tradition, the small divergences of this 1964 stanza from its earlier versions are largely inconsequential. To neglect one of these variations, however, would be to miss a significant shift, though to overlook it would be easy, since it is a change of omission. In a 1927 variant of this stanza, Eliot had jokingly insisted to Dobrée that the stanza was corrupt and that it “should read”: “Now the Jewboys of Columbo’s Fleet / Were feasting at the Passover.”43 By 1964 though, the anti-Semitic sneer has been deleted or forgotten. Previously scornful of “Jewboys,” and once maltreated by a “bastard jew” who had scorched his penis, the 1964 Columbo is now “feasting at the Passover” not only with King Bolo and his queen, but with all his men, joining with—and indistinguishable from—their brother Jews.44 David Chinitz was the first to discover that the Bolo stanza that has given the most offense—the one about the “bastard jew named Benny”—was not Eliot’s invention at all, but a stanza that appears in the Columbo folk ballad of popular tradition.45 Chinitz notes that finding a source does not exonerate this ugliness in Eliot, but the earlier reference does allow Chinitz to express some relief “that this instance of vulgar Jew-baiting originated in the imagination of another.”46

20

Jayme Stayer

Likewise, by pointing to the disappearance of “Jewboys” in the 1964 stanza, I am not exonerating Eliot, early or late, on the score of antiSemitism. But it is worth noting that this prejudice seemed to become less impulsive as he aged.

General Notes on Dating and Chronology It is probable that Valerie Eliot was exactly right: no new Bolos were written after 1916. Only a small handful of newly recorded Bolos date from 1916–32, and it is possible that their originals, predating 1916, have simply been lost. But even if those stanzas were newly composed, we can still trust Valerie Eliot’s general sense of where Bolo belongs: Eliot was mostly finished composing Bolo verses by the time he left America. The few stanzas that appear after this time—such as those offered for Dobrée’s instruction in the 1920s—are recycled rather than newly composed.47 Those rare Bolo poems that are perhaps written later have lost their vicious bite: the earlier sexual violence and racial prejudice having largely given way to puerile jokes about farting, buggery, and genitalia.48 The later Bolo prose is mostly a send-up of academic pedantry. Eliot continued with the Bolo prose somewhat beyond the verse, with a strong burst in the late 1920s, but he was mostly finished with that by 1930 as well. As many Eliot scholars have noted, the poet had a roving intelligence; he was always abandoning a style or concern once he had mastered it or used it up. So one reason Bolo resurfaces in the late 1920s is that Eliot can fit Bolo into a new form (prose explanation) and a new set of concerns (anthropology and theology). This production of Bolovian prose involves the repetition of old Bolo stanzas and, perhaps, the composition of a few new verses. In the early 1940s, he twice expressed nostalgia for Bolo as a figure of his youth, which shows where the whole business stood in his own mind. It is understandable that McIntire and others, coming across Bolo references in the letters, would assume that Eliot was still churning out such verses when he was in his seventies. To be sure, scattered Bolo references, in hard-to-reach archives, held just this intriguing possibility. However, with the bulk of the letters now becoming publicly

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

21

available, a more complete search does not bear out that conclusion. Given the shift in the 1920s when Bolo became a different kind of joke, and given Eliot’s valedictory tone regarding Bolo in the 1940s, it is unlikely that a hidden cache of Bolo poems, datable to the 1920s or later, will ever surface. If a few more Bolos pop up in unexpected places, I doubt that they would mar the broad picture I am sketching here: that a middle-aged and then elderly Eliot did not set himself to the task of composing Bolo verses as a way of expanding the already existing sequence.49

The Bolo Poems vs. The Columbiad The first complete edition of The Poems will no doubt become the standard reference for discussion of the Bolo sequence, as the two volumes finally publish the remaining stanzas from the Yale archive and the other scattered Bolos from as-yet-unpublished correspondence. The newly published Bolos in turn are brought together with the previously published stanzas, fixing some minor errors in the process. The luxurious detail, scholarly apparatus, and new format in which the Bolo poems are presented augur both opportunity and risk for critics. A potential hazard of the explanatory material is that the carefully dated sources may encourage the reader to mistake an appearance of a Bolo stanza for its date of composition, thus reinscribing the fallacy that Eliot spent his life composing the sequence. Another mild, if understandable problem concerns the textual history: the editors prudently decline to print every variant of the Bolo verses—a practice that would have further consecrated these lightweight poems.50 However, the absence of variants and their dates means that the new edition, while exhaustive in many respects, cannot guide a scholar in tracking conceptual and attitudinal shifts, nor can it help sort out when Eliot wrote a new Bolo and when he repeated it. It is worth recalling that even though Eliot collected a number of the Bolo stanzas in an early pocketbook, he did so for private reasons, not for publication. Eliot himself never collected the nearly fifty poems

22

Jayme Stayer

together, either for private or public usage, nor did he direct anyone else to do so. A danger of sprucing up and regularizing the poems is that it confers a seriousness of purpose that the originals did not intend to convey. Likewise, the editors’ imposition of a formal title, The Columbiad, and the format and numbering of stanzas confer a tangible literary authority: they are no longer improvised poems but a textually coherent epic, if a mock one. Another problem is that the settings of the poems pinball around the globe, but the editors soft-pedal this chaos, imposing a quasi-narrative by beginning the epic with Columbo’s dealings with Spanish royalty and ending with his “Regain[ing] the Spanish shores.”51 Relatedly, the editors frame the entire sequence with Eliot’s mock-Elizabethan stage directions from the Inventions appendix—the “Enter” and “Exeunt” of the king and queen. All of these editorial choices bestow a spurious wholeness on fragments whose narrative, geographical, and characterological unity was never intended by their author. The world of Bolo was an imaginarium from which Eliot drew for ad hoc purposes of entertaining close friends. Although it had distinct, if shifting, logical markers and recurring themes and names, the Bolo sequence was never a narrative with beginning and end. It scarcely had distinguishable characters. Columbo and Bolo are so indistinct that even Bolo’s queen is confused; accordingly, she names her unborn son “Boloumbo.”52 In their section of “Improper Rhymes” and their composite of the Bolo stanzas, Ricks and McCue have not made arbitrary or unwarranted decisions, but future commentators on the Bolo poems will need to distinguish what is editorially engineered from what is authorially intended.53

Conclusion As with Eliot’s serious literary ambitions in Inventions, the obscene verse is of a piece with the young artist’s experimentation and increasing mastery. The Bolo poems, like his literary inventions, are rhetorical constructs whose voice is aimed at a specific audience and pitched for certain effects. In the literary verse of Inventions, such as “Portrait of

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

23

a Lady” and “Prufrock,” Eliot’s critique of social convention and his exploration of poverty and alienation required him to cross mental borders that were strongly policed by his class and education. In the same way, the obscene poems enabled Eliot to cross heavily fortified borders. And perhaps the most difficult boundary to cross for someone of Eliot’s class and temperament was the erotic boundary. Because the obscene verses adopt a tone of hysterical buffoonery rather than squalid fear, they do not breathe the same atmosphere of anguished sexuality found in the literary poems. Nevertheless, the scabrous verse still pushes against the same sexual and erotic boundaries as other poems in Inventions. Even though the obscene poems can be seen as part of the same project as the notebook as a whole, they were detours from Eliot’s project in a noteworthy sense: normally categorized as bawdy verse, they are also occasional poems. Though not written to commemorate a public event, they are still occasional in the sense that they were written for a specific communal setting: the social clubs of Harvard. We, their tardy and unwelcome readers, cannot recreate through the texts the living atmosphere of Eliot’s exclusive, homosocial circle. That audience was wholly sympathetic because it would always be private and circumscribed. The poems speak to the already-known friends of the poet, and to those, like Lewis, who were introduced by known friends. The obscene verses do not seek to create a new readership, which is why they never seem to improve. The fumbling quality of the bawdy poems can be partly attributed to the audience for whom they were performed. The bawdy poems, to explain by analogy, might be compared to a composer’s études. They were concoctions thrown off to entertain, experiments in rhythm and rudeness with no need to worry about an audience’s potential rejection. Once Eliot moved from America to England, the class and profession of men with whom he shared such lyrics changed, but key identity markers remained the same: the maleness of the club, their youth and sexual anxiety, a view of women’s sexuality as passive, and an aggressive sense of themselves as shapers of their respective worlds.54 Compared

24

Jayme Stayer

to his new London coterie, Eliot was inexperienced, both sexually and literarily, and so he lead the charge with his Bolo poems. (None of his correspondents seemed to have written them, only received them.) Eagerly sharing via letters what had been sung at social clubs, he overcompensates with the bravado of the insecure, hoping to recreate in a new environment some of the atmosphere of Harvard. We are now in a position to understand how the historical sketch that opened the essay is related to the rhetoric of the poems—how, in other words, these three aspects of audience are interdependent: (1) why Eliot never sought a public venue for these poems, (2) why the thrill of writing them waned early, and (3) why their rhetoric is essentially private. The obscene verses—especially the Bolo sequence as it expanded in the early teens—project a circumscribed audience whose expectations were mere titillation and friendly bonding. These expectations were bound to disappear as Eliot’s relationships changed and as the cultural atmosphere in which he moved altered: Bloomsbury bohemians would not be so easily shocked as Boston Brahmins. With such a low bar of titillation, it is no surprise that the poems are dully repetitive and, for all their sexual and racial boundary crossing, artistically unadventurous. But perhaps this judgment is too severe. Even as a ten-year-old boy, in his Fireside compositions, Eliot clearly had a good ear for bad verse. That Eliot used such woeful doggerel as the vehicle for such ethically bad material is a way of satirizing the badness of both. Eliot might have been playing in ways that are too bad to be judged as merely bad.55 For the apprentice author of Inventions, the audience of the Bolo poems was private and real—the specific, nameable friends of the young Eliot—while the audience for the literary poems was imagined and aspirational. For a young artist who was struggling so mightily and alone to wrestle a new audience into shape, the freedom and ease of writing for a warmly accepting audience must have been a tremendous psychological relief. The audience for the bawdy verse kept him moving in the artistic direction toward which he was already oriented.

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

25

The literary poems in the notebook, both the successes and the failures, were what made Eliot famous, because they called into being a peculiarly modern audience that had never existed before. By contrast, the obscene poems, because they were written for several dozen people, might seem to be interesting only because they were composed by a poet who became famous. This seems to be the conclusion reached by many reviewers and scholars. But once placed back into the chronology of their making, the obscene poems reveal not a step-wise progression in rhetorical mastery, but a liberated sense of audience. Eliot would probably be exasperated to know that scholars were writing somber analyses of his bawdy poetry. One of his recurring jokes is that a pedant by the name of Prof. Dr. Krapp will take up the task of writing commentary on his Bolo poems.56 Exasperated Eliot might be, but he could not be surprised at this state of affairs, since he deliberately chose not to destroy the obscene verse. The influence of the obscene poems on his artistic project is perhaps the reason Eliot could never bring himself to destroy them, since they offered strangely occluded evidence of his expanding vision and his engagements with various audiences. As a young man tossing off such bawdy poems, he probably had little thought of what might become of them after they had been shared with their intended correspondents. Even so, once Eliot’s fame escalated, he could easily have gotten rid of the obscene poems still in his possession. Eliot was not averse to burning sensitive material. Instead, he cut them out of the notebook and sent them to Ezra Pound, who valued the poems and who Eliot knew would preserve them. And, sometime in the future, Prof. Dr. Krapp and his colleagues would set to work on them. Notes 1 IMH, 311 and 314–15. 2 Some of the important reviews of Inventions of the March Hare that address the ethical problems of the bawdy verse include Helen Vendler, “Writhing and Crawling and Leaping and Darting and Flattening and Stretching,” London Review of Books, (October 31, 1996), 8–9; Louis Menand, “How Eliot Became Eliot” New York Review of Books 44, no. 8

26

Jayme Stayer

(1997), 26–29; Anthony Lane, New Yorker 73 (March 10, 1997), 86–92 (reprinted as “T. S. Eliot” in Nobody’s Perfect, 438–48); Nicholas Jenkins “More American than We Knew,” New York Times Book Review (April 1997), 14–15; Richard Poirier, “The Waste Sad Time,” New Republic (April 28, 1997), 36–45; Stephen Romer, “The Hand of Laforgue’s Shadow,” TLS (April 3, 1998), 20; and Robert B. Shaw, “Prufrock redivivus,” Poetry 171, no. 2 (1997), 162–68. Pace Loretta Johnson’s claim (“T. S. Eliot’s Bawdy Verse,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1–2 [2003], 14–25) that such material has not raised hackles is contested by some of the more lurid headlines including J. Bottum, “Pre-Prufrock: The Embarrassing T. S. Eliot,” Weekly Standard 2, no. 31 (1997), 35; Michele Field’s “Desanctification of Tomcat Eliot,” Sydney Morning Herald (September 1996); Giles Foden, “‘Lost’ Poems Explode Eliot Myth,” The Guardian (August 23, 1996); and Bob Hoover, “Eliot’s Poems Still Stirring Controversy” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (April 27, 1997). Subsequent scholarship on the Bolo poems is cited in the course of the essay, where I engage various claims in detail. 3 Poems 1 and Poems 2. 4 David Chinitz was the first to raise my suspicions on these matters, and this discussion is indebted to several conversations with him. With his permission, I have reworked some of our correspondence. Anthony Cuda and Jim McCue have helped me think through issues of dating and have directed me to pertinent sources, though I take responsibility for the conclusions reached herein. I am also grateful to Chris Buttram and Ellen Kriz for their critical feedback on early drafts, and to Emma Cheshire and Clare Reihill for permission to quote unpublished material. 5 “Given Eliot’s desire to publish these poems, the protracted period of their composition, and the range of issues they invoke, we cannot, though, dismiss them as ‘mere’ juvenilia.” Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 13. 6 The theory that Eliot intended to publish these poems in Blast is common among Lewis scholars as well (see Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge, Kegan, and Paul, 1982), 76; Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000), 168). For Eliot scholars who have repeated some form of this narrative, almost any critic writing on Inventions will serve, but see especially Robert Crawford, Young Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Loretta Johnson, “T. S. Eliot’s Bawdy Verse,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1–2 (2003), 14–25; and McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire. I know of no critic who has disputed this narrative, one that I have unfortunately repeated in my own earlier criticism. 7 IMH, 305. Eliot’s letter to Pound was first published in 1988, and Lewis’s letter to Pound was published in 1985. Both letters were available to

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

27

scholars for a few years before Ricks’s volume appeared. But as evidenced by how widely Inventions of the March Hare was reviewed in the popular press, that volume reached a much broader audience than just literary scholars. By excerpting the Pound-Eliot-Lewis correspondence without any other context, Ricks’s volume made it easy for reviewers and critics to draw inaccurate conclusions about the newly published Bolo poems and what seemed to be biographical evidence that Eliot had wanted them published. 8 L1, 64. 9 Poems 2, 272. 10 Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Edited by Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 9. 11 For this 1922 exchange, see L1, 768n1 and 735. Years later, Pound seems entirely sincere in suggesting that Eliot place Bolo, perhaps anonymously, in a collection of “Bawdy Ballads”—a suggestion that Eliot would sensibly ignore. Pound could never quite let the idea go, suggesting in 1935 to Arnold Gingrich that he should publish some Bolos by “father Eliot” (Ezra Pound, Selected Letters: 1907–1941. Edited by D. D. Paige. (New York: New Directions, 1971), 266). 12 Ezra Pound, “T. S. Eliot,” in We Moderns: Gotham Book Mart, 1920–1940 (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1940), 24–25. 13 The exact chronology of these undated letters is unclear. I have relied on Materer’s order in Pound/Lewis, where he organizes the letters, as best he can, in chronological order. 14 Pound/Lewis, ed. Materer, 13. 15 Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 3. 16 O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, 155. 17 It might be argued that Eliot’s contributions to Noctes Binanianae (1939) vitiates my point that he never sought to publish his scabrous verse. But the circumstances of that multi-authored collection prove rather than refute Eliot’s extreme caution in this regard. Another elaborate in-joke among literary friends (Eliot, Geoffrey Faber, F. V. Morley, John Hayward), this volume of occasional verse commemorated the nights spent at Hayward’s flat at Bina Gardens. The poems that had been circulating entre eux-mêmes were privately printed in an extremely limited edition of twenty-five copies, not for sale, with coded, semi-anonymous attributions. The assemblage of such verses into a book format does not constitute publication in the normal sense of that word—a work prepared for public sale; rather, it constitutes a memorialization of their friendship, a private keepsake of their homosocial bonds. Putting aside such secrecy and caution, with the poems of Noctes Binanianae finally on view (see Poems 2, 205–38), it turns out that yet

28

Jayme Stayer

another critical consensus about Eliot’s bawdy poems can be exploded. The verses that Eliot contributed to Noctes—long suspected of transgressive content—are so inoffensive that they might have been proclaimed from the pulpit of St. Stephen’s without raising an eyebrow. Only in “Vers pour la Foulque” does a single, non-sexual reference to “nos culs” (our asses) bring these poems to the brink of bawdy (Poems 2, 230). And, as the editors describe in their commentary, this very poem was so harmless that Eliot considered publishing it in Pierre Leyris’s edition of French translations of Eliot’s poems (Poems 2, 230). 18 Valerie Eliot, “Letter” Times Literary Supplement (February 17, 1984). 19 Bryan Cheyette, “Eliot and ‘Race’: Jews, Irish, and Blacks,” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Edited by David E. Chinitz (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 335–49. 20 Donald Hall, “T. S. Eliot: The Art of Poetry,” The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1 (New York: Picador, 2006), 62–85. 21 McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire, 11. 22 McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire, 15. 23 Eliot to Clive Bell, January 3, 1941. Though the entirety of this letter is as yet unpublished, this sentence appears in a footnote in L3, 509n2. 24 L3, 509. 25 I am indebted to Edward Mendelson for this nice phrase: “the moral urgency of scolding dead people.” “A Different T. S. Eliot,” New York Review of Books (February 22, 2016), 43–45. 26 See David Chinitz, “T. S. Eliot’s Blue Verses and their Sources in the Folk Tradition.” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 2 (1999–2000), 329–33. For an overview of the scholarship on the folk ballad “Christopher Columbo,” see Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs, 2nd ed. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999), 313–15. 27 Crawford, Young Eliot, 95–97 and 140–42. 28 Conrad Aiken, “King Bolo and Others,” in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Edited by Richard March and Tambimuttu. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 20–23. 29 Ricks and McCue seem to imply that the pocketbook is from 1915 (Poems 2, 269), but in my examination of these manuscripts and the related circumstantial evidence (especially the appearance of British spellings), I am led to conclude that the pocketbook dates to the late teens. 30 L1, 94. The two new stanzas from 1923 explore, with mock-prudishness, the queen’s pregnancy and the possible paternity of the “embryonic prince” (L2, 209 and Poems 2, 255). The mock-intellectual aspect that I identify can be traced as early as 1914, when Eliot imagines various scholars disputing philological niceties within the Bolo poems (L1, 46–47). Thus, the mock-intellectual and the shockingly ribald elements of the Bolo poems are not mutually exclusive. The point of the chronology

Eliot’s Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences

29

offered here is to show how one clearly predominates over the other in different periods. 31 L3, 509. 32 L4, 109. 33 The two Bolos addressed to Spencer have been published as stanzas 40 and 41 within The Columbiad (see headnote Poems 2, 270; for the poems, see Poems 2, 282 or L6, 514). 34 Eliot to Ezra Pound, December 28, 1934. 35 IMH, 318 and Poems 2, 274. 36 Eliot to Dobrée, August 10, 1930, in L5, 294. The similar quotation appears in the letter to Hayward, December 6, 1940. 37 Eliot to Hayward, November 25, 1940. 38 Eliot to Dobrée, August 6, 1941, in Poems 2, 249. Two seemingly related issues are ultimately red herrings: (1) By 1945 Eliot seems to have acquired a friend, whose last name is Coker and whose nickname was Bolo. It is unclear if Eliot is the one who has bestowed this nickname, but the conjunction of Bolo and Coker in the same personage is truly odd. (2) One word that had originated in Bolovian mythology but that later floated free of Bolovian contexts was the malleable term “Wux” (mainly in “Wux-Ho” and “wuxo”). Used as a farewell, it underwent a resurrection in the early 1940s. 39 L3, 509n. 40 Eliot to Winthrop Sprague (“Nick”) Brooks, July 18, 1956. 41 See Crawford, Young Eliot, 95. 42 Huntington Library, Aiken Collection. On November 21, 1963, Eliot wrote to Aiken in a postscript: “Do you remember what happened when the Columbian crew were feasting at the Passover? If not, I will rehearse it to you.” (Poems 2, 283n). This stanza, sent in late 1963 or 1964, is the promised rehearsal. These lines had appeared, in a different arrangement, in a letter (September 29, 1927) to Dobrée (see L3, 718–19), and the 1964 version as reproduced here appears in a slightly different arrangement in Poems 2, 283. 43 L3, 719. 44 “Jewboys,” L3, 718; “bastard jew,” IMH, 315 and Poems 2, 271; “feasting at the Passover,” L3, 719 and in Eliot to Aiken, 1964, Poems 2, 283. 45 IMH, 315 and Poems 2, 271. 46 Chinitz, “T. S. Eliot’s Blue Verses,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 2 (Winter 1999–2000), 333. 47 Among Eliot’s later correspondents, with the exception of Dobrée and Valerie Eliot, the recipients of recycled Bolo stanzas are his Harvard comrades and the friends he made in London circa 1914–15: Morris, Nick Brooks, Aiken, Pound, Lewis, and Spencer. (Although they did not matriculate at the same time, Eliot related to Spencer as a Harvard man.)

30

Jayme Stayer

48 The mildness of Eliot’s verse in Noctes Binanianae confirms this pattern as well. Though one sonnet in that volume speaks of “crooning like a Harlem coon,” the editors are correct in identifying the reference to what were widely described as “coon songs” (Poems 2, 225–26). The affectionate evocation of jazz culture in the Noctes sonnets contrasts with the racial ugliness of “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu.” There are two descriptions of rape—in the Bolos sent to Spencer in 1932 (Poems 2, 282, stanza 41) and in an obscene poem sent to Pound on January 3, 1934—but I am arguing for a shift in emphasis, not a complete change. 49 The Bolo poems that I discuss herein are found in the published poetry, the published letters, and the unpublished letters. I have also relied on Ricks and McCue for their study of Valerie’s Own Book, where several Bolo stanzas were copied by Eliot. 50 See Poems 2, 249 and 271, headnote. 51 Poems 2, 271 and 284. 52 Poems 2, 255. 53 A few decisions do seem inexplicable. Why is the sexually violent “Fragments” shamed as an “Improper Rhyme” (Poems 2, 285), while the offensively racist “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” and obscene “Triumph of Bullshit” are classified neutrally as “Uncollected Poems” (Poems 1, 260 and 252), even though all three had been excised from the notebook by Eliot? 54 For more on the sociology of the bawdy tradition, see Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs, 2nd ed. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999). 55 On the topic of form and doggerel, the reader may wish to compare the three bawdy limericks that Eliot wrote out for others: “There was a young lady named Ransome,” “There was a young girl of Siberia,” and “The Blameless Sister of Publicola” (Poems 2, 286, 287, and 290). As would be expected of the oral tradition from which they come, these limericks involve some elements of repetition and variation. What matters, then, is not whether they are wholly original to Eliot, but to what extent the tight rhythmic and formal constraints of the limerick contrast with the looser, open-ended ballad form in which the Bolo poems were written. The last limerick plays on lines from Coriolanus and Valerie’s name, and is more likely original than the first. All three limericks are free of racist or misogynist content and are, in my estimation, more witty and delightfully obscene than all of the Bolo poems and Bolo prose combined. 56 He first appears as “Prof. Dr Krapp (Jena)” in a 1914 letter to Aiken (L1, 47 and subsequently in L3, 820 and L5, 45). He is styled “Herr Dr Krapp of Wien” by Aiken (“King Bolo,” 22).

Dull Tom-Tom’s Absurd Prelude: Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot Michael Opest

I

n a 1949 appreciation of T. S. Eliot, Clive Bell recalls receiving a postcard from his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf, sometime in the 1920s. “Come to lunch on Sunday,” it read, “Tom is coming, and, what is more, is coming in a four-piece suit.”1 Woolf ’s portrait of a farcically fastidious Eliot—which might sketch equally well a character in fiction—has become a stock image to biographers and critics alike, an easy tool to swell a progress or start a scene. These few deft strokes alternately pass for a portrait of the poet and stand as a metonym for a fading view of modernist levity. Yet as with all stock images, the cliché sharpens lines that are actually rather blurred, effacing a paradox behind the primness.2 In the same volume where Bell records Woolf ’s quip, Eliot’s Harvard friend Conrad Aiken publicizes and palliates the then-obscure King Bolo as “a sort of cynical counterpoint to the study of Sanskrit and the treatise on epistemology.”3 Today, it is clear that more than a little crass schoolboy fun seeped through Eliot’s studious demeanor, and that his mien and its lapses alike were theatrical. As Aiken writes elsewhere, “There was some of the actor in Tom and some of the clown, too. For all his liturgical appearance (he only lacked a turned-around collar, it sometimes seemed) he was capable of real buffoonery.”4 A clown in a

31

32

Michael Opest

four-piece suit: that seemingly paradoxical figure is the subject of this article. Next to our consensual sense of a dour, buttoned-up young Eliot writing searchingly urbane, serious poetry, we have the poetry itself— which saw him at play, toying with marionettes.5 The longstanding vocabulary for understanding Eliot’s marionette-play proceeds from his own prompting. Generations of critics have cited the influence of Jules Laforgue, whose ironic masks Eliot discovered in December 1908.6 Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature quoted the “travesty” of Laforgue’s colloquialisms, neologisms, and unexpected allusions, with which “one can play, very seriously.”7 Laforgue played seriously by embracing Pierrot, the clown of the commedia dell’arte. In their history of the commedia, Martin Green and John Swan find Pierrot-figures most often evoked by artists who “rebelled against social norms and norm-subordinated art.”8 This fundamentally oppositional form was also a popular one, and so a provocative “vulgarity” accompanied its “nonserious dissent” as a complement to colloquialism.9 Although Eliot’s attraction to Laforgue’s commedia is an established critical narrative, this article contends that there is more to the story of Eliot’s clowning rebellion. Without challenging the strong Symbolist-commedia undercurrents of Eliot’s early poetry, I follow the parenthetical subtitle of a 1909 poem to ask what comes “After J. Laforgue” to trace the precise nature of Eliot’s play in all of its serious frivolity.10 In the poems of 1909–12, Eliot begins to qualify the ironic detachment of symbolisme as but one type of play, whose postures he situates within a subtle, superficially paradoxical, and distinctly modernist understanding of the ludic. For Eliot, the “ludic” encompasses not only the intellectual play of poetry, but also the arbitrary cultural forms and conventions that constrain his expression. In this, he presages Johan Huizinga’s famous claim that “all poetry is born of play,” while highlighting the essentially ludic nature of “civilization,” which Huizinga claims has lost its ludic associations, becoming “more serious” through a “process of dissociation.”11 I argue that Eliot anticipates the compelling account of the more recent theorist Mihai Spariosu, who argues for a bifurcated definition of play as either

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

33

“rational” or “prerational.”12 Whereas the Pierrot tradition traffics in rational play, the present article traces Eliot’s dawning acknowledgment of its prerational counterpart, signaled most clearly in “Portrait of a Lady.” The exploration and strategic use of their interplay marks Eliot as a practitioner of what I call “ludic modernism,” which becomes a crucial—yet seldom-acknowledged—ground for the radical poetics of The Waste Land. I ask what comes after Laforgue, not to question Eliot’s biographical character, nor to question the French connection, but rather, to offer a fuller account of what it might mean for a primbut-playful poet to wear his frivolity on his pin-striped sleeve.

Playing Within Reason Before turning to Spariosu, I would like to examine some of the poetry Eliot produced sous la signe de Laforgue to grasp the specific tenor of its play. Robert Crawford suggests—mostly recently, among others—that Symbolism attracted Eliot for fusing “self-conscious rebellion against tired conventions with a sense of renewed religious mission.”13 Symbolism’s vision and vocabulary were well-suited to describing the sordid materialism of urban modernity, which was a task Eliot took up eagerly in the manuscripts of Inventions of the March Hare. A pervasive theme of the early poems is that social conventions stifle personal expression. There is a fundamental tension between the controlled and controlling habits of bourgeois normativity and the aleatory immediacy of experience. Eliot’s speakers don Laforguian masks of ironic remove in their attempts to qualify and to escape from the mediation of social convention. Life, here, is a series of scripts, played out upon a stage by actors with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Affecting French flânerie with his dandysme, Eliot settled into the detached stance of an urban anthropologist studying the stultifying rituals of the bourgeois tribe. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a burgeoning student of philosophy, he often explores such social playacting in philosophical terms. There are numerous moments where the conventions that mediate experience and stifle emotion are equated with rationality itself. Even as he

34

Michael Opest

implies that reason is a kind of play, Eliot entwines this theme with a correlative yearning for emotional and experiential immediacy. In “Humouresque (After J. Laforgue),” he writes of a marionette whose “common face / (The kind of face that we forget),” is ultimately admired for its “mask bizarre.” He imagines the marionette in Limbo with “other useless things / Haranguing spectres,” discussing fashion, style, the latest trends from New York, and the comparative romance of gaslight and moonlight. The Marionette’s trivial conversation is imputed to his flawed philosophical reasoning, “Logic a marionette’s, all wrong / Of premises”—hence the conflation of mind into body, his being “weak in body and in head.”14 Eliot was still preoccupied with philosopher-marionettes two months later in “Convictions (Curtain Raiser),” the January 1910 poem that opens Inventions of the March Hare.15 The narrator plays with his peers as a child might manipulate puppets from behind a screen, insisting that “They see the outlines of their stage / Conceived upon a scale immense.” A pair “in a garden scene / go picking tissue paper roses” while another, “a lady with a fan,” cries out for an idealized lover before whom she might prostrate herself. Parenthetical asides let Eliot’s sardonic commentary waft in from the wings. The narrator notes their playacting at such ephemeral, cliché routines, casting aspersions on their expectation of “an audience open-mouthed / At climax and suspense.”16 There is certainly a gendered aspect to Eliot’s scorn for feminine convention, but he pulls no punches for his “Paladins,” who Are talking of effect and cause, With “learn to live by nature’s laws!” And “strive for social happiness And contact with your fellow-men In Reason: nothing to excess!” As one leaves off the next begins.17 These Paladins are equally wrong of premise, spouting trite formulations of a rationalistic materialism that, in the face of the poet’s

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

35

metaphorical transformation, threatens to strip them of any individual agency and leave them the literal marionettes of a mechanistic natural order. “Reason,” they claim, must mediate all sociality and interpersonal contact, but the sanctimoniousness of such pieties suggests a shallow philosophy. The Delphic “nothing to excess” comes to sound like an advertiser’s slogan for the via media—as if they had lifted the phrase from a carton of mild cigarettes, confusing modern marketing for thought. While “Reason” might seem to offer fertile ground for cultivating social relations, the garden of Enlightenment only bears “tissue paper roses” under propriety’s care. It cannot offer tangible connection, but only the insipid gossamer of proto-Prufrockian “promises and compliments / And guesses and supposes.”18 Lee Oser argues that the poet in “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” is “liberated only in mind” from musty convention: “Trapped by the same formalities of meter and manner, the poet and his marionettes bear a family resemblance. They dramatize his dilemma of what to say and do.”19 The “dilemma of what to say and do” is an overriding theme of Eliot’s early work, and his study of “family resemblances” between himself and his marionettes was sometimes just so, as with “Aunt Helen” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” Although “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the central testament to scripted and anxious social relations, the earlier “Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)” also explores the mire of routine in which Eliot felt trapped. The poem’s four parts lament the oppression of social gatherings, when “Always the August evenings come / With preparation for the waltz.”20 Sanctioned social rituals cloud the understanding and restrict physical, intellectual, and emotional experience. The detour of convention stifles contact by rendering the body enigmatic: the waltzes turn, return; The Chocolate Solider assaults The tired Sphinx of the physical. What answer? We cannot discern.21

36

Michael Opest

Such conventions reduce emotion to mere decoration, the filigree of fine taste: “why should we not proceed . . . To porcelain land, what avatar / where blue-delft-romance is the law.”22 The repetitious “white flannel ceremonial” limits the intellect to “guesses at eternal truths / Sounding the depths with a silver spoon.”23 Philosophy is only admitted “through a paper straw,” and remains “Inconsequent, intolerable,” like “the cigarettes / Of our marionettes.”24 Propriety pulls the strings, and polite society has written the script that Eliot, like Prufrock with his face carefully prepared, must perform. Straying from the script would invite social ostracism, which remains a fate worse than willful ironic remove. Eliot chafes not only at the limits of what he may say and do, but also at the limited liberation won through poetic posturing, finding himself too often yet another marionette. In “Entretien dans un parc,” written in Paris in February 1911, he describes a springtime walk under “April trees” with an unidentified girl. He seizes her hand boldly and uncharacteristically, but she interprets the gesture as a stage direction, part of the script. At her mildly bemused smile, he thinks, “It is not that life has taken a new decision— / It has simply happened so to her and me.” The deflation of his agency at the moment he finally asserts it causes an outburst: “It becomes at last a bit ridiculous / And irritating. All the scene’s absurd!”25 His exasperation boils over “upon the fire of ridicule.”26 The final stanza wonders whether their relationship will flower with future physical and emotional connections, but tosses hope aside to end on an ambiguously ironic note. Eliot reflects, “if we could have given ourselves the slip / What explanations might have been escaped.”27 There is no escape, however, as there is no apparent way to give oneself the slip, both because the couple merely mimes the conventional scene and because Laforguian irony is already an attempt to do so. Eliot expresses a similar inevitability and inextricability in the first stanza of another February 1911 poem, “The smoke that gathers blue and sinks.” The poem struggles to life in the morass of a dinner that reeks of fin de siècle decadence: torpid cigar smoke, stifling and “glutinous liqueurs,” the “After dinner insolence / Of matter ‘going by itself.’”

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

37

As in the park, the scene simply happens. Eliot underscores this inexorable script as prototypically modern by equating it with industrial technology: “hardly a sensation stirs / The overoiled machinery . . .”28 The second stanza of the poem, however, immediately and abruptly shifts into a newer register. Eliot projects a different voice through the veneer: assertive, aggressive even, its language wretches free of the torpor preceding it to confront the reader directly: What, you want action? Some attraction? Now begins The piano and the flute and two violins Someone sings A lady of almost any age But chiefly breast and rings “Throw your arms around me—Aint you glad you found me.”29 Given this unexpected eruption, David E. Chinitz reads “The smoke” as “jazz poetry avant la lettre,” asserting that it “depicts proto-jazz performance and dance, quotes an actual lyric, includes appropriate slang (‘action,’ ‘the stuff ’), and strikingly replicates the angular rhythms and sudden, unpredictable rhymes of popular ragtime lyrics of the period.”30 I would further highlight the overt sexuality of both the singer—shades of Grishkin’s “pneumatic bliss”—and the complex, yet transgressive, specter of miscegenation: “Here’s a negro (teeth and smile) / Has a dance that’s quite worth the while.” The speaker’s gin cocktail in the penultimate line is a bracingly clear improvement over the glutinous liqueurs of the dinner.31 To Chinitz, the ellipsis that closes the first stanza enacts the “confluence of Laforgue’s modernity with [Eliot’s] experience of jazz.”32 Laforgue “showed Eliot how to adapt his voice to the popular material around him,” a process that Chinitz traces to ragtime music, but which also reflects the “vulgarity” of the commedia.33 My contention is that the ellipsis between the two stanzas indicates Eliot’s dawning realization

38

Michael Opest

that Laforguian marionette-play is unable to emend convention’s scripts or to bring about anything more than merely mental liberation from the dilemma of what to say and do. “The smoke” is not just the confluence of poetic and musical modernism in dialect and jazz. It is also an instance of Eliot formulating and comparing two conceptions of what it might mean to play: one circumscribed and mediated by reason and convention, the other immediate and unconstrained. I do not mean to imply that “The smoke” signals Eliot’s new understanding in a strictly chronological sense, since he continues to toy with Symbolism for years to come.34 Eliot, however, offsets the development typographically: the first stanza follows “Convictions,” “Humoresque,” “Goldfish,” and “Entretien,” to pit the nonserious dissent of ironic remove against the mediating power of convention—again, interrogating the complicity of “reason” in such mediation.35 In turn, the second stanza of “The smoke” meditates on immediate experience. Its meditation is thematic, considering the titillation of the singer’s décolletage and seductive lyrics, and that the impropriety of partnering with a black man further vivifies the physical joy of dancing. Through its diction and cadence, moreover, its words ask to be felt as much as they are rationalized. The reader enacts the syncopations in the moment of reading, engendering the experience of being in the club more directly than would a simple description of ordering a cocktail to jazz accompaniment. There is thus a nascent performativity to this proto-jazz poetry, although I do not want to make too much of this formal distinction just yet, as it is likewise the case that the first stanza’s languid sibilance transmits the torpor it represents. The difference in the “performativity” between the stanzas is one of degree and of the self-consciousness with which the exuberant syncopations advertise themselves as just as fresh and anti-conventional as the scene they evoke. The thematic and formal specter of turpitude answers the first stanza’s torpitude, as it were, suggesting another register of seriousness driving its play. I have suggested that “The smoke” juxtaposes mediation and immediacy, broadly understood, as two key themes of Eliot’s early

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

39

career, typographically signaling their separation through the use of a sudden ellipsis. The presence of “reason” undergirding social convention is more pronounced in the other poems I have cited, although the remainder of Eliot’s early work bears out the comparison, with music often cutting through its mediation. Next to the titularly-philosophical “First” and “2nd” “Debate[s] between the Body and Soul,” we have the titularly musical “Nocturne,” “Suite Clownesque,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Preludes,” and the various “Caprices” and “Interludes,” among others.36 Amid J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” his thoughts turn inexorably to the “music from a farther room.”37 A mysterious omission hides behind that ellipsis in “The smoke,” especially as the tactic is sparsely employed in the manuscript poems.38 Eliot’s sense of the relationship between mediating convention and immediate experience as two types of play can be clarified by turning to the work of Mihai Spariosu. As we will see in the subsequent discussion of “Portrait of a Lady,” engaging in such bifurcated play will become an aesthetic strategy that marks a decisive step beyond symbolisme, carrying Eliot’s poetry into what I call “ludic modernism.”

Rational and Prerational Play In his several works of intellectual history, Spariosu descries and traces two conceptions of play manifest across a wide range of cultural production and philosophical thought: one rational and one prerational. Despite the prefix, the prerational is neither originary, nor metaphysically given, nor prior to the rational, nor do they fully negate each other. Rather, Western thought has “always fluctuated between various rational and prerational values” engaged in an agon or competition for primacy over long spans of time.39 Neither mentality is wholly absent in the face of the other’s ascendance. Spariosu sees the prerational mentality of Heraclitus superseded by the rational Plato. Where Cartesian thought had deemphasized any form of play, modern thought has seen the rise of a rational play

40

Michael Opest

mentality with Kant and Schiller, answered in turn by the prerational play mentality of Nietzsche and his inheritors. Although Spariosu refers to the Nietzschean return to prerational values as the “other” of Western metaphysics, the more recently popularized term “postfoundational philosophy” also captures the tenor of the distinction.40 Against various metaphysical and rational appeals to purportedly “immutable” truths (for example, Platonic Idealism) the twentieth century has seen a range of thinkers assert the contingency of oncestable categories. Varied elements of a prerational mentality are thus evident in such differing strands of thought as Wittgensteinian philosophies of language, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism. Spariosu offers six categories in which play pervades the two mentalities, including power, Being, chance, mimesis, as-if, and freedom.41 In each case, the distinction recalls the framework I have begun to elucidate in Eliot’s poetry: the difference between mentalities turns on the mediation of the prerational by the dictates of what is called “reason.” Put another way, whether in terms of epistemology, ontology, or aesthetics, the prerational mentality admits immediate experience with less interference from abstract thought and discourse. Spariosu situates his argument within the history of philosophy, annotating the ludic therein. If any polemic inheres in his work, it is for a view of play as essentially bifurcated, rather than advocacy for one mentality over the other.42 With regard to poetry, Spariosu’s schema recalls the common distinction in modernist studies between representational and performative aesthetics. He examines the shifting etymology of the Greek “mimesis” from its expansive prerational form in Homer and Hesiod—“mimesis-play”—to the more familiar, rational “mimesisimitation” in Plato. With a prerational mentality, mimesis is best understood “in a ritualistic-dramatic context, designating a performative function that we associate with play.”43 One can readily sense how Eliot thought of social conventions in terms of ritual (taking “toast and tea”) and drama (the Laforguian mask).44 Whereas prerational mimesis-play encompassed ideas of “‘miming,’ ‘simulating,’ or

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

41

even ‘presencing’ (invoking, calling something forth),” Plato would come to insist on mimesis as imitation, in the sense of “representation or reproduction of an original or model.”45 Spariosu exemplifies this rational-mentality redefinition with reference to Plato’s Ion, where Socrates disparages the “mimetic frenzy” that spreads from the rhapsode to the audience: “The archaic audience totally identifies with the performer through mimetic participation (methexis), which is a kind of hypnotic trance eventually leading to catharsis or a pleasurable relief of pent-up emotions.”46 In his later book on play in ancient Greece, Spariosu traces various moments of methexis across Hesiod, the Illiad, and the Odyssey, writing, “Because it combines the auditory-visual with emotion-action and collective participation, mimesis-play gives the bard considerable power over his audience, which he can move at will to laughter or tears, to pleasurable composure or violent emotion.”47 It is precisely the methetic, experiential power inherent to poetry as mimesis-play that Plato famously subordinates to philosophy. For Spariosu, the Platonic redefinition of mimesis as imitation “‘modernizes’ poetry, turning it into ‘literature’ and assigning it a new function: to aid philosophy in supporting the new rational values.”48 The rational play mentality comes to prominence in its agon with the prerational in the Republic, where Socrates excludes from the ideal state “any stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another, for they aren’t true.”49 Instead, poetry is put to use in education, where it must obey the law that “a god isn’t the cause of all things but only of good ones.”50 The rationale for these restrictions is clarified in the Laws, when the Athenian character contends, “man . . . has been created as a toy for God,” and should thus “spend his whole life at ‘play’—sacrificing, singing, dancing—so that he can win the favor of the gods.”51 Plato only acknowledges a limited sense of “play,” one that works across various socio-cultural forms and rituals, including poetry, which must likewise produce “a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled as justice demands.”52 In this way, rational play produces “correctly disciplined pleasures,” turning reason itself into

42

Michael Opest

a sieve, straining out traces of the prerational like so much pith that might otherwise clog the well-oiled machinery of cultural discourse and social harmony, leaving “matter ‘going by itself.’”53 Spariosu’s usage of the term “agon” to describe the relationship between the rational and prerational pointedly recalls contest and struggle, which are explicitly prerational forms of play. Socrates’ appeal to rational play as a method of compelling “correctly disciplined pleasures” is precisely what Eliot’s early poetry resists— tentatively at first, but with increasing precision. When he finds his marionettes’ reasoning “all wrong / Of premises,” the premises he intuitively attacks are the vestiges of Socratic discipline that actively mediate pleasure and experience.54 When Eliot’s “Paladins” begin preaching, “strive for social happiness / And contact with your fellow-men / In Reason: nothing to excess!,” they invoke “nature’s laws.”55 Eliot’s irony shudders with the suspicion that there is nothing “natural” about such laws, rightly suggesting in this case that they are arbitrary, mere convention. If philosophy only ever comes “through a paper straw,” its taste will always be tinged with the mediating values and conventions that even poetry is forced to support.56 Rational mimesis-imitation demands the reproduction of an original, and the first stanza of “The smoke” behaves appropriately, with a re-presentation of the dinner scene that is tainted from the first line with the odor of torpid smoke. The second stanza, with its more overtly engaging language, refuses to be so easily disciplined, and toys with the “presencing” and “calling forth” of methexis. In a pithy encapsulation of Nietzsche’s early endorsement of the prerational, Spariosu essentially summarizes the juxtaposition of the two play mentalities across the ellipsis of “The smoke,” writing, “the play of the senses and the imagination gains priority over the play of understanding and reason.”57 Eliot would explore this agon more fully in “Portrait of a Lady,” making the struggle between play mentalities a distinctive feature of modernism after J. Laforgue.

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

43

Playing With Reason The challenge that a prerational play mentality presents to a rational one is articulated as a contest in “Portrait of a Lady,” the second part of which Eliot began early in 1910, shortly after completing “Humoresque” and “Convictions.” Part one followed in November of that year, just after “Goldfish.” Eliot finished the poem a whole year later, completing the third section in November 1911, after “Entretien” and “The smoke.” This chronology suggests that the view of bifurcated play that coalesces in “Portrait of a Lady” belongs to a longer development. Although Eliot stages the agon between rational and prerational play, he does not pick a winner: the outcome of this contest is equivocal, and while Eliot vacillates between play mentalities—hewing closer to the prerational—the lady is a concatenation of the rationalmentality marionettes that populate the early poems. We move from an encounter in a park to an entretien dans un salon. Like the earlier marionettes who believed that they could “see the outlines of their stage,” the lady expects Eliot to play a flirtatious game, one whose rules they have been disciplined to follow.58 She arranges her room like a still life or stage set, “as it will seem to do,” pretending that its “atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb” is somehow natural and not yet another example of a scripted scene.59 Her public life seems to be just as “composed” as the bric-a-brac in her private apartment, and the tautology of defining a friend based upon the “qualities upon which friendship lives” recalls the Paladins’ uncritical acceptance of “natural” laws.60 The structures provided by habit and convention—serving tea, corresponding with friends abroad—are of primary importance, not least because they lead to a modicum of mutual understanding. She laments, “I have been wondering frequently of late . . . Why we have not developed into friends,” and the fact that “I myself can hardly understand” seems to bother her more than the lack of connection.61 As Socrates knew, even as conventions discipline pleasures, they provide useful epistemological clarity. Eliot’s irony adds the caveat that one must remain either willfully or naively ignorant of their contingency.

44

Michael Opest

Music provides a metaphorical connection between the two characters, becoming the field upon which the agon plays out. As in numerous other early poems, it has the potential to unsettle the outcome. The lady displays a philistine relationship to music and is more interested in superficial context than in its emotional power. She says: So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.62 That bloom mediates the experience of the performance and stifles the intimacy of friendship like a tissue-paper rose. Her desire to leave it intact echoes in the “velleities and carefully caught regrets” of their conversation, which comes to be heard through “attenuated tones of violins / Mingled with remote cornets.”63 As time and their meetings pass, her voice becomes the “insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin on an August afternoon,” simultaneously grating and stultifying to the senses. Her discordant reflections betray that their relationship strains through the sieve of the rational intellect and its social categories: “I am always sure that you understand / My feelings, always sure that you feel, / Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.”64 She subtly conflates the knowledge of emotion with the experience of emotion, substituting reason for prerational experience. Despite her surety, his hand is only proffered metaphorically, and her understanding precedes and precludes any emotional or physical connection. Throughout the poem, Eliot largely plays the role that the lady has assigned him. In the notebook manuscript, he was explicit about their performing a script. Between the lady’s reminiscence of her youthful “buried life” and the last stanza I quoted, Eliot reflects: Oh, spare these reminiscences! How you prolong the pose!

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

45

These emotional concupiscences Tinctured attar of rose. (The need for self-expression Will pardon this digression).65 If Eliot had included these lines in the published version, the ambiguous paradox of an emotional concupiscence—carnal lust that is merely emotive, unaccompanied by a physical reaction—would have framed more concretely the lady’s conflation of understanding and sensation. Likewise at stake in their playacting is Eliot’s self-expression. Although he asserts himself with the Laforgian parenthetical in the manuscript, the excision of these lines suggests a departure from the strategy of nonserious dissent and ironic remove. Eliot leaves the weight of selfexpression to be carried by three moments where the prerational surges up in its agon with the rational. These three moments allow not only poetic release, but also hint at a potential freedom for selfdefinition and a potential alternative to taking up roles in sanctioned compositions. First, while the lady’s voice drones on in the first section, Eliot responds, “Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins / Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own, / Capricious monotone.”66 The tom-tom’s music is a “definite ‘false note,’” insofar as its monotony is literal: this is a unique sensation to the parlor. It is capricious for being nascent and new, and thus Eliot is unsure if he can trust it, how it may fit with his sense of self, or whether it belongs in this stage production. In the manuscript the tom-tom is “droll,” another link to Laforgue’s commedia humor elided in the published poem.67 The pun on Eliot’s name sharpens the banality of the “true” Tom Eliot’s emotionally dulled dumb show. As “absurd” (ab-surdus), the tom-tom—like Tom— is etymologically out of tune, uncivilized, ridiculous, and intimating of the irrational. Whereas he decried the whole scene in “Entretien dans un parc” as “ridiculous / And irritating . . . absurd!,” here he questions that earlier judgment, as now the nascent prerational play of the tomtom’s absurd prelude is precisely what Tom Eliot needs to hear.68

46

Michael Opest

In the second part of the poem, Eliot imagines another scene in a park, where he reads the lighter fare in the morning paper: “the comics and the sporting page. / Particularly I remark / An English countess goes upon the stage.”69 This last line puns again on the marionettes onstage in “Convictions.”70 Eliot, too, keeps his countenance and sees the outlines of his stage, Except when a street piano,       mechanical and tired reiterates some worn-out common song With the smell of hyacinths across the garden Recalling things that other people have desired.71 The eruption of the street-piano’s music is as out of place and vulgar as a tom-tom might be in a sitting-room recital of Chopin. Although it is “mechanical and tired,” it still shakes Eliot’s self-possession, and so it carries with it not only the possibility of expression—on other stages, for other audiences, and with other interlocutors than the lady—but also the desire and intimacy rendered dim and indiscernible by the arc of footlights cast upon him by the lady’s insistence that he act according to convention. The third eruption of the prerational music, in the third section, finally comes close to capturing the ontological dimensions of the agon between play mentalities. In the penultimate stanza, after the lady’s last quoted lines in the poem, Eliot asserts:     And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression . . . dance, dance Like a dancing bear, Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance — 72 Here, the music is neither a dim drumbeat in the back of the mind, nor a melody carried on a breeze, but something that Eliot must embody

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

47

and become, making himself a dancer indistinguishable from his dance. A year earlier within the poem’s diegetic timeline, the tom-tom was capricious and singular, but now Eliot hears many tunes through which he might “find expression.” Borrowing “every changing shape” suggests a more active, empowered, and strategic usage of social masks than Prufrock’s resignation at preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet.”73 It recalls the distinction between mimesis-imitation and mimesis-play. When Eliot donned the mask of Laforgian irony, he essentially reproduced an original model. Irony can only mark—and thereby enforce—his distance from the crowd and his intellectual remove from modernity’s sordid materialism. It can scoff and chafe at convention and at reason’s disciplining of pleasure, but it cannot rewrite the rules.74 The protean dance is instead a vision of the methetic power of mimesis-play: transformative, participatory, and performative. Critics have read these three moments as precursors to Eliot’s later adoption of the vocabulary of primitivism, and not least because the tom-tom, dancing bear, and chattering ape cry for such a reading. I will not parrot them here, beyond noting that David Spurr has argued that the “animal mimesis” and tom-tom recall “certain forms of primitive ritual; the poem draws on this ritual to effect a kind of emotional release from the stultifying sentimentalities of the speaker’s hostess.”75 Although Spariosu insists that the prerational play mentality does not precede the rational as a “primitive” or developmental stage, Eliot’s invocation of the “primitive” stands broadly in opposition to the lady’s rational categories. Spurr’s recognition of “a kind of emotional release” further suggests methexis. While I cited Spariosu’s reading of Nietzsche to suggest that the play of the senses and of self-expression were integral to Eliot’s understanding of the prerational mentality, Spurr goes farther to claim, “Eliot’s early poems often struggle to contain a barely controlled atavism that threatens to shatter the fragile veneer of civilization.”76 Eliot certainly sees the fragility of civilization’s veneer: regrets must be caught ever so carefully and desire lurks behind a veil of velleities. In my view, however, “Portrait of a Lady” does not find Eliot crouched and defensive against an encroaching atavism as much

48

Michael Opest

as it sees him clearing the ground to show the proximity of the rational and prerational. Spariosu can again clarify the essential dichotomy: “If in the Kantian hierarchy of the arts music occupies the last place because it is too far from rational language, and too close to the play of Becoming, in Nietzsche it occupies the first place for precisely the same reason.”77 Eliot’s need to “borrow every changing shape” through music endorses the prerational play of Becoming over the static ideals of a rational mentality. Crucially, however, in each instance where the prerational wells up to meet convention in “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot falls back on the habitual epistemological safety of rational play. The first time, there is the ritual of taking “the air, in a tobacco trance” to engage in appropriate small-talk of public monuments and “late events.” What could be more rational than correcting “our watches by the public clocks” of Greenwich Mean Time?78 The second moment begins to question the consequences of leaving behind rational ritual. The scent of the hyacinths prompts Eliot to wonder, “Are these ideas right or wrong?”79 His concerns are validated in their final meeting, where the two are bereft of reason’s guiding light: “My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.”80 After the vision of dancing like a dancing bear to find expression, he does not start tapping his toe, but returns to the ritual of the tobacco trance. The conclusion of the poem again raises the specter of being left in the dark. If the lady “should die some afternoon,” Eliot would not know “what to feel or if I understand,” playing again with the conflation of reason and emotion. On the one hand, the prerational might seem to win the day with the assertion that “This music is successful with a ‘dying fall’”—that is, in the change of cadence from rational to prerational play. But on the other hand, the closing line, in which Eliot asks “And should I have the right to smile?,” can be read not only as darkly sardonic, but also as a straightforward question: if the prerational wins the day outright, how indeed can he know how to behave, what to think, or how to define and relate to his emotions without the useful (if suspiciously contingent) dictates of reason?81 Undermining the epistemological clarity of rational play simply to dodge its disciplining of pleasure would leave Eliot in

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

49

a thoroughly Nietzschean world beyond good and evil, bereft of his habitual categories and routines. Although he is beginning to move away from Laforgue’s rational play to explore the potential of the prerational, in this poem, at least, he is watching his step. The continued ambivalence toward the outcome of the struggle between rational and prerational play suggests an agon in a broad sense, leaving neither side with a clear victory even as it insists on their simultaneous presence. Despite the burial of its flirtatious foundations under sedimented teatime ritual, “Portrait of a Lady” remains a primal scene of seduction. Its play is simultaneously immediate and physical as well as removed and abstracted through convention. Eliot’s vacillation and willingness to let the contest stand as such is thus an example of what I call “ludic modernism.” At this stage of his career, he was taken with the commedia, and another of Green and Swan’s descriptions of its rational play might précis “Prufrock”: “all commedia moods are characterized by a readiness for reversal, an insecurity about their source, a moral self-doubt—by a sense of the artifice of emotion.”82 My reading has shown how Eliot pushes this commedia mood so far as to reverse the polarity of its play. Just as he excised some of the overtly Laforguian play and commentary from “Portrait of a Lady,” his subsequent career will see him ever more willing to turn from ironic mimesis-imitation to methetic mimesis-play. Although I can only suggest the connection here, we need look no further than the form of The Waste Land for an example of overtly performative aesthetics in which the poet enjoins his audience in methetic participation.83 My reading of Eliot’s developing ludic modernism gives us a renewed sense of how, in Ezra Pound’s comment about “Prufrock,” he “modernized himself on his own.”84 The specific type of modernization I have described emphasizes the continuity of play; play that presents the two faces it has prepared, Janus-like. The god of transitions is appropriate to Eliot’s straying from symbolisme. Although he remained buttoned up in his four-piece suit, shod in spats, bowler and brolly in hand, he kept clowning around in eminent seriousness, sauntering into a new conception of the ludic, one better suited for jazz and cocktails than absinthe in gaslight.

50

Michael Opest Notes

Clive Bell, “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Eliot,” in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Edited by Richard March and Tambimuttu (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 16. I would like to thank the anonymous reader for The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual for a careful engagement with, and helpful comments on, the manuscript of this article. I am also grateful to Richard Begam and Christopher McVey, for their patient and probing insights on earlier versions of the argument. 2 Analyzing Eliot’s “ambivalent” relationship to popular culture, David E. Chinitz warns against uncritical views of the poet as a stuffed effigy of elitism, noting, “What ‘we know, of course’ stands, as always, in the way of what we see.” T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 7. See his “Introduction” for a summary of criticism that established, displaced, and lamented Eliot as the exemplar of “‘high art’ in all its exquisite seriousness, distinction, and aesthetic purity” (4). 3 Conrad Aiken, “King Bolo and Others,” in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, 22. 4 Conrad Aiken, “T. S. Eliot,” Life (January 15, 1965), 92. 5 The biographies sound similar notes. Peter Ackroyd borrows a description of Jules Laforgue: “reticent, scrupulous, correct both in dress and manner, confronting the world with a posed demeanour that he never abandoned,” finding Eliot a “somewhat paradoxical character . . . partly a ‘sport’ and partly a ‘grind.’” T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 34–32. For Lyndall Gordon, J. Alfred Prufrock exemplifies Eliot’s own roles as “prophet and groomed conformist.” T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 2000), 44. Robert Crawford frames his new and fascinating Young Eliot in kind. The first two paragraphs begin: “T. S. Eliot was never young . . . Yet Eliot knew what it meant to be young.” Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 1. Crawford suggests that our sense of Eliot’s undergraduate studiousness is more mythical than factual (79). 6 Crawford, Young Eliot, 107. 7 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1958), 56. 8 Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination, rev. ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993), 7. Robert F. Storey argues that, whereas Laforgue used Pierrot as a mere mask, for Eliot the mask was an identity: “pose and temperament were so nearly one that Laforgue’s voice, once discovered, must have seemed . . . more properly his own than Laforgue’s.” Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978), 159. 9 Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, xiv. 10 CPP, 602.

1

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

51

11 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949), 129 and 134. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque” offers an alternative orientation. For Bakhtin, the “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” and was “opposed all that was readymade and completed, to all pretense at immutability.” Ludic modernism shares the underlying drive toward renewal, but rather than settling for temporary liberation, it confronts the implications of the “gay relativity of prevailing truths,” introducing new freedoms as new, openly contingent forms of living. Put differently, Eliot’s ludic modernism will become a way of harnessing the power of the carnivalesque for a modernity in which “playing the fool” is inadequate to fundamental change. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984), 10–11. 12 The distinction grounds Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989); while God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991) calls the same values “archaic” and “median.” 13 Crawford, Young Eliot, 108. 14 CPP, 602. 15 All dates are from Christopher Ricks’s invaluable chronology (IMH, xxxvii–xlii). 16 IMH, 11. 17 IMH, 11. 18 IMH, 11. 19 Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 44. 20 IMH, 26. 21 IMH, 26. 22 IMH, 27. 23 IMH, 28. 24 IMH, 26–27. 25 Regarding the society-as-acting theme, Ricks notes the echo of “All the world’s a stage . . .” from As You Like It (IMH, 193 and 19–20n). 26 IMH, 48. 27 IMH, 49. 28 IMH, 70. 29 IMH, 70. 30 Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 36–37. 31 IMH, 70. 32 Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 36.

52

Michael Opest

33 Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 36 and Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, xiv. 34 Green and Swan rightly compare Sweeney to the commedia’s Harlequin and detect a Pierrotesque note in “The Hollow Men” (246–48). 35 These poems demonstrate what Theodor Adorno calls the “lightheartedness” of art: “A priori, prior to its works, art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings. Art imagines that by naming this fateful state of affairs it is loosening its hold. That is what is lighthearted in it; as a change in the existing mode of consciousness, that is also, to be sure, its seriousness.” “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 248. The Laforguian ironist, slouching back into a pose of studious detachment, imagines he might loosen the hold of convention simply by identifying the state of affairs. The prerational play toward which I claim Eliot is moving is a more active and overtly serious ludic strategy. 36 Dancing, to which I will return, is another trope that Eliot uses similarly. See also “Suite Clownesque IV” (IMH, 38), “Suppressed Complex” (IMH, 54), “The Burnt Dancer” (IMH, 62), “The Death of St. Narcissus” (CPP, 605–06), and again, “The smoke” (IMH, 70). 37 CPP, 14. 38 Excluding “Prufrock” and his “Pervigilium,” Eliot uses ellipses in only six of the remaining manuscript poems, generally to indicate the ineffable. The instance in “First Caprice in North Cambridge” includes five dots, but the sense remains (IMH, 13). Curiously, the ellipsis is not used for the ineffable in the untitled “Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?” but only to mark the passage of time (IMH, 80). 39 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, ix. 40 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, x and 3. 41 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 12. 42 This distinguishes him from more canonical accounts, like those of Huizinga and Roger Caillois, both of whom concentrate on what Spariosu calls rational play. Caillois, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2001). 43 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 17. 44 CPP, 14. 45 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 17. 46 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 19. Socrates claims “a poet is an airy thing, winged, and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy.” Plato, Ion. Translated by

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

53

Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 534b. 47 Spariosu, God of Many Names, 19. 48 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 18. Jacques Derrida’s influence is evident here, revealing the strong link between prerational play and post-foundational philosophy. Jeffrey M. Perl makes the same point about the Ion in starker terms: “Philosophy began as a hostile metapoetry—Plato’s Ion is the classic document.” Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), 80. 49 Plato, Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C.  Reeve, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), III.378c; emphasis in original. 50 Plato, Republic, II.380c and Spariosu, God of Many Names, 148. 51 Plato, Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), VII.803c–e. 52 Plato, Laws, I.644a. 53 Plato, Laws II.653e and IMH 70. Rational-play discipline again recalls Bakhtin, but where the carnivalesque offers only temporary respite from rational hierarchies and where its protest is soon assimilated, ludic modernism’s emphasis on prerational play seeks to make the carnivalesque “second life”—or at least aspects of it—primary (11). 54 CPP, 602. 55 IMH, 11. 56 IMH, 27. 57 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 75. 58 IMH, 11. 59 CPP, 19. 60 CPP, 19 and IMH, 11. 61 CPP, 20–21. 62 CPP, 18. 63 CPP, 18. 64 CPP, 19. 65 IMH, 328–29. 66 CPP, 19. 67 The manuscript reads: “Inside my brain a droll tom-tom begins / Hammering a prelude of its own / Capricious monotone . . . ” IMH, 328. 68 IMH, 48. 69 CPP, 20. 70 IMH, 11. 71 CPP, 20. 72 CPP, 21.

54

Michael Opest

73 CPP, 14. 74 Storey claims Eliot abandoned Pierrot “because of the insoluble, solipsistic dilemma that he seemed to pose” (Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask,166). Spariosu reads the character Prufrock as a Pierrot and a Shakespearean Fool simultaneously, writing, “Prufrock derives a great deal of rhetorical delight from seeing himself as playing second fiddle, but he still has the vanity to cast himself in the [venerable] role of the jester. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.” “The Games of Consciousness in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Auctor Ludens: Essays on Play and Literature. Edited by Gerald Guinness and Andrew Hurley (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1986), 165. For Spariosu, “Prufrock” demonstrates the inability of a Fool-Pierrot to either change or break free from social convention. 75 David Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology: Eliot, Joyce, Lévy-Bruhl,” PMLA 109, no. 2 (March 1994), 271. 76 Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology,” 271. Chinitz more convincingly argues for the “primitive” in the early poems by first linking primitivism to jazz; see especially chapter 1. Marc Manganaro notes that, for Eliot, “the poet is meant to appropriate the ‘savage’ . . . for use in the contemporary artistic program. The ethnocentrism of Eliot’s position is undeniable and is reinforced in numerous reviews and essays that emphasize the evolutionary use that the modern artist can make of the ‘savage.’” “‘Beating a Drum in a Jungle’: T. S. Eliot on the Artist as ‘Primitive.’” Modern Language Quarterly 47 (1986), 394. In his view, Eliot uses the primitive mystical mindset to refresh his “decaying world” by introducing “deliberately illogical”—i.e. prerational—formal structures into poetry, since “a change in sensibility can mean a change of direction for a culture.” Marc Manganaro, “Dissociation in ‘Dead Land’: The Primitive Mind in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot,” Journal of Modern Literature 13, no. 1 (March 1986), 105. 77 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 78. 78 CPP, 19. 79 CPP, 20. 80 CPP, 21. 81 CPP, 21. 82 Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, xi–xii. 83 The many approaches to performativity in The Waste Land often discuss literary cubism. For an overview, see Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990). See also: Nancy Duvall Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2009); David Tomlinson, “T. S. Eliot and the Cubists,” Twentieth Century Literature 26, no. 1 (Spring 1980), 64–81; and Jacob Korg, “Modern Art

Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

55

Techniques in The Waste Land,” in A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Edited by Jay Martin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968). Marjorie Perloff emphasizes Pound’s editing, calling il miglior fabbro “the great master in English of collage form.” The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986), 72. The present article derives from a larger project that traces the confluence of Eliot’s early ludic modernism with his study of anthropology. I presented a reading of ludic modernism in The Waste Land on a T. S. Eliot Society panel at the 2014 American Literature Association conference. 84 Pound’s comment to Harriet Monroe reads in full: “He is the only American I know of who has made what I can call adequate preparation for writing. He has actually trained and modernized himself on his own.” Emphasis in original. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Edited by D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950), 40. Where Spariosu claims that Plato “modernized” poetry by limiting it to rational mimesis-imitation, in a characteristically ironic reversal, Eliot “modernizes” his poetry by reemphasizing prerational methexis (Dionysus Reborn, 18).

Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911 Nancy D. Hargrove

I

n the Eliot Collection of Harvard’s Houghton Library is a small notebook containing surviving notes for Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, which Eliot attended during his 1910–1911 sojourn in Paris.1 On the cover of the light green notebook imprinted with the word “Odéon” and a photo of the famous theater surrounded by curling ribbon and the mask of tragedy, Eliot wrote in black ink in capital letters in the top left corner “BERGSON” and “VENDREDI” (FRIDAY), the day on which Bergson taught his course on personality. Inside are detailed notes, in Eliot’s tall, elongated Paris handwriting largely in French. The first three and a half pages are undated and are clearly the last part of a previous lecture which would have taken place on December 23, 1910, the last class before the three-week Christmas holiday, when the topics were psychology in the nineteenth century and then the philosopher David Hume, with long quotes from Hume in French on page two and some quotes in English on the following page. This portion of the notes suggests that a previous notebook, which has not survived, contained his notes for the first three class meetings on December 9, 16, and 23, 1910,2 in the last of which he took notes for the first part of the lecture and then continued in a new notebook, the one preserved in the Houghton. His notes for Friday, January 13, 1911,

57

58

Nancy D. Hargrove

Figure 1.  Le Collège de France. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the first class meeting after the holidays,3 begin on page 4, followed by notes for five successive Fridays (January 20 and 27, February 3, 10, and 17, beside the last of which he mistakenly writes “Mercredi” (Wednesday). So the notes cover half of a previous lecture (presumably on December 23) and six class meetings in January and February 1911. These undated opening three and a half pages testify to the very legitimate probability that Eliot began attending on the first day of the lectures, December 9, 1910; indeed, as I suggested in T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Eliot may well have proposed attending Bergson’s riveting lectures to his parents as the major reason for his Parisian stay with the argument that it would bolster his future profession as a professor of philosophy. In addition, the professor’s charisma and popularity were legend, excitement about his upcoming lectures was reverberating throughout the city, and Eliot had already read some of his books.4 As an honorable son, as well as an enthusiastic pupil, it seems to me that he would have been front and center for the great man’s lectures from the first one in early December to the last on May 20, 1911. While it is simply impossible to prove when Eliot began attending Bergson’s lectures and for how long he continued to do so, several Eliot

Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911

59

Figure 2. Henri Bergson, circa 1900, glass negative, The Bain Collection, Library of Congress. Acc. no. LC-B2- 6402-10.

scholars argue that the notes preserved in the Houghton indicate that he attended only the lectures included therein and that he stopped going entirely after February 17 without considering the significance of the truncated notes that open the notebook. For example, in Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and in T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998), Lyndall Gordon states that Eliot attended only seven of Bergson’s lectures— from January to mid-February 1911—based on these class notes. Her statement that “By February 1911 Eliot was already disillusioned with Paris,”5 which follows only a few lines later in The Early Years and after one intervening paragraph in An Imperfect Life, is interpolated from several poems with no other evidence given. More recently, Jewel Spears Brooker, in her introduction to The Complete Prose 1, The Apprentice Years, 1905–1918 (2014), states, “Eliot attended five (possibly more) of Bergson’s weekly lectures . . . in January and February 1911,” noting that he was “soon to reject Bergsonism,”6 but leaving the meaning of “soon” ambiguous. Although here

60

Nancy D. Hargrove

she allows for the possibility of Eliot’s attending more of the lectures, in her essay “Seduction and Disenchantment: Eliot in the Bergsonian World” (2015) she argues that his disillusionment with Bergson began “well before the end of Bergson’s lectures in May 1911,” citing as proof only “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and that, as a result, “he ceased taking notes on February 17.”7 However, we do not know that he stopped taking notes then, but only that no other notes have survived. Furthermore, even had he begun to be disillusioned with Bergson’s philosophy then (a belief to which I do not ascribe), I suspect that, being an honorable son, he would have continued to attend to fulfill his likely proposal to his parents in the spring of 1910 that a year in Paris at Bergson’s lectures would prepare him for a career as a professor of philosophy.8 Robert Crawford writes in Young Eliot (2015) that Eliot’s notes cover “every Friday in January and February,”9 but adds “and perhaps later too, though only these jottings survive” with no evidence to support that possibility.10 He does not, however, consider that Eliot may have begun attending in December. The idea thus persists that the limited lecture notes “prove” Eliot attended Bergson’s lectures only for part of January and February, having become disillusioned with Bergson by February and henceforth ceasing to attend the lectures. Indeed, a review of the lectures themselves, as well as the excited response (one might legitimately say frenzy) that they engendered, suggests that there are many reasons why Eliot would have been present for most if not all of them. Bergson gave two courses during the 1910–1911 academic year, lecturing on personality on Fridays at 5 p.m. and on Spinoza’s Treatise on the Reform of Understanding on Saturdays at 4:15 p.m., beginning on December 9, 1910 and ending on May 20, 1911. According to Bergson’s course descriptions, the one on personality consisted of three parts: a review of other philosophical views of the subject, the principal maladies of the personality, and its origin and raison d’être. The course on Spinoza’s work examined his concepts of intuition and “the true idea.”11 So great was la ferveur bergsonienne, as Eliot himself termed it in his essay “What France Means to You,”12 that the philosopher’s courses

Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911

61

Figure 3. Bergson ‘Attrac’cheun. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

in the Grand Amphithéâtre (on the front corner immediately to the right of the entrance gate at the Collège de France) were always packed with a wide variety of enthusiastic audience members. A period cartoon titled Bergson ‘Attrac’cheun depicts a crowd, one of whom seems to be using an umbrella as a weapon, pushing and shoving to get into the hall; the caption notes that one can be “nearly crushed by the throng” at his courses.13 Indeed, some who could not get into the hall itself climbed onto the windowsills of the Grand Amphithéâtre to listen to the lecture while clinging precariously to their perches.14 Eliot’s own description of that lecture hall in “What France Means to You” supports the contention that he attended for a substantial period of time. He states that “to have truly experienced la ferveur bergsonnienne one had to have gone, regularly, every week, to that lecture hall filled to bursting where [Bergson] gave his courses at the Collège de France,” noting that one had to arrive more than an hour ahead of time to get a seat.15 The words “regularly, every week” imply that he went for much longer than just a few weeks. The charisma and appeal of Bergson have been well documented by others who attended. For example, Henri Massis, a contemporary

62

Nancy D. Hargrove

of Eliot, in his memoir Évocations describes in some detail the crowds when “Bergson was . . . at the height of his glory”: Well before the hour when the lecture was to begin, an extraordinary crowd invaded the hall . . . [,] a curious mixture of students from the École Normale Supérieure . . . ; poets and artists rubbed shoulders with those who regularly frequented the Collège de France; old men wearing their military medals, ancient spinsters, and very young women with eager, harsh faces, Russian female students; society women wearing immense hats; and footmen who retained seats for those of the upper class attracted by curiosity more than metaphysics. At 5 p.m., the Master appeared, evoking an air of reverent meditation and total silence.16 Further attesting to Bergson’s astounding appeal as a lecturer are descriptions with a plethora of superlatives. Massis conveys the kind of excitement that Eliot must have felt, describing how Bergson’s philosophy introduced him and his fellow students to “intoxicating novelties” and “incomparable exaltation” during “our twentieth year. . . . For an hour, every Friday, at the Collège de France, a man was thinking, was creating in front of us. . . . Bergson introduced liberty into our prison of materialism—O intoxicating moment! . . . It is an unforgettable thing, and one which we doubtless will never see again.”17 And Evelyn Underhill, the author of Mysticism, wrote to a friend, “I’m still drunk with Bergson, who sharpened one’s mind and swept one off one’s feet both at once.”18 In addition, there are other plausible explanations—besides sudden disillusionment with Bergson’s philosophy while in the midst of the charismatic professor’s lectures—for the limited number of notes. Indeed, despite Brooker’s reading of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” there is no proof that Eliot’s disillusionment with Bergson began while he was in Paris, but rather some time after his return to Harvard, and not until December 1913 is there clear evidence of it (his

Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911

63

address to the Harvard Philosophical Club titled “Inconsistencies in Bergson’s Idealism”). One explanation for the limited notes is that the earlier and later notes for this course and, quite possibly, all of those for the course on Spinoza (which Eliot would have likely attended, given the popularity of Bergson and his self-proclaimed conversion to Bergsonism at the time) were lost in the process of moving back to the United States in September or during later moves. Eliot, in fact, was quite prone to losing notes. For example, in his notes for Philosophy 10 at Harvard in 1912–1913, he indicated that on March 13 he lost the notes for three lectures; in his course on Eastern Philosophy the next year, he lost lecture notes in February and March; and in a course on logic at Oxford in 1914–1915, he wrote at the top of the page for his May 27 class that his notes for one lecture had been lost.19 Indeed, we are quite fortunate to have even this small portion of his notes on Bergson’s lectures as very few documents from Eliot’s Parisian year survive. That only these notes have survived is not conclusive proof that he attended just these classes. Furthermore, I would argue that his taking trips both at Christmas and at Easter during the prescribed holiday periods is additional proof that he was attending Bergson’s lectures before and after the December–January break and the Easter break. Otherwise, he would have been free to travel at any time. During the former holiday, he went to the Dordogne region in southwest France, perhaps visiting Verdenal’s family in Pau on the way.20 He toured Périgueux, the capital of the Dordogne, as indicated in a letter of September 3, 1919 to his mother, describing a current trip to the city and noting that he was last there in January 1911.21 He returned to Paris in time to attend the resumption of Bergson’s lectures on January 13, 1911. During the latter holiday, which occurred from April 9 to 28, Eliot visited London, reporting his activities in some detail to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in a letter written on April 26, the day after his return to Paris.22 Indeed, he got back three days before the first lecture following the break so as not to risk missing the next compelling lecture by Bergson. If Eliot were

64

Nancy D. Hargrove

no longer attending, as some have claimed, he would not have had to confine his visit to this holiday period. In addition, he likely attended Bergson’s course(s) until the last meeting(s) on May 19–20, since he did not leave Paris for his summer trip to Germany and Italy until mid- to late June.23 Finally, Eliot later referred more than once to Bergson’s powerful influence on him during the entire academic year 1910–1911, a further indication that he was not disillusioned by mid-February. In a letter of April 19, 1945 to Eudo A. Mason, he wrote that “at the time, or at least before [‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’] was finished [summer 1911], [I] was entirely a Bergsonian.”24 In his introduction to Josef Pieper’s 1952 book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Eliot expressed “a longing for the appearance of a philosopher whose writings, lectures and personality will arouse the imagination as Bergson, for instance, aroused it forty years ago,” clearly reflecting his own response to the great philosopher during his Paris year.25 And in a letter of January 21, 1953 to Shiv K. Kumar, he acknowledged, “I was certainly very much under [Bergson’s] influence during the year 1910–11, when I both attended his lectures and gave close study to the books he had then written.”26 Finally, as I suggest in my book T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, in his well-known statement, “my only conversion by the deliberate influence of any individual, was a temporary conversion to Bergsonism,” the word “temporary” has typically been emphasized by scholars; however, his choice of the religious term “conversion,” used not once but twice, reveals just how powerful and all-encompassing that influence was in Paris.27 A lengthy and detailed account of the class on personality was written by a student named Jules Grivet, whose admiration for Bergson is clear, and it reflects both the atmosphere of the class as well as feelings that were likely to have been those of Eliot and the other students as well: This year, more even than in the past, [Grivet notes] much has been made of the name of this philosopher; the eagerness to

Eliot at Bergson’s Lectures, 1910–1911

65

follow him surpassed the norm. Each Friday, the hall began to fill an hour before the course began; then the few remaining seats were stormed, after which you only got a seat by pressing or squeezing. Those crushed protested, so that every day there were incidents. As in the greatest days of philosophy, everyone fought to better hear Bergson’s lecture. This eager fidelity and the bond which, during the entire course, united the professor and his audience assured the creator of the theory of personality that his work was alive.28 Grivet movingly describes both at the beginning of his account and again at the end Bergson’s farewell to the packed hall on the last day of class on May 19, 1911. He records that at the end of that final lecture, Bergson, who appeared to be moved, asserted that the greatest joy of all was the joy of creating something that would live on. Following thunderous and prolonged applause, he left the hall, and the crowd regretfully began to depart, turning many times to look at the door through which Bergson had disappeared.29 That Eliot was among them should be considered a very real possibility.30 Notes 1 2

All translations from French are mine. Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 846. 3 Bergson, Mélanges, 846. 4 See Nancy Duvall Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009), 2. 5 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 38, and T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 55–56. 6 Jewel Spears Brooker, “The Apprentice Years: Introduction,” Complete Prose 1, xxxii. 7 Jewel Spears Brooker, “Seduction and Disenchantment: Eliot in the Bergsonian World,” T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe. Edited by Jayme Stayer (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 28. 8 Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, 2.

66

Nancy D. Hargrove

9 This comment is inaccurate as the Houghton notes cover only three Fridays in January and three in February, plus the first undated three and a half pages, presumably taken on December 23, 1910. 10 Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 149–50. 11 Bergson, Mélanges, 846. 12 Eliot, “What France Means to You,” La France Libre 8.44 (15 June 1944): 94. 13 This cartoon is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 14 Thank you to William Marx for bringing to my attention photographs from this era documenting this fact. These photographs have been preserved in the Bergson archives at the Collège de France. 15 Eliot, “What France Means to You,” 94. Italics added. 16 Henri Massis, Évocations: Souvenirs, 1905–1911 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1931), 90–91. 17 Massis, Évocations, 89–90. 18 Quoted in Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986), 11. 19 Eliot, [Notes on] Philosophy 10, October 1911–1927 and May 1912, Eliot Collection, MS Am 1691.14, MS (9), Houghton Library, Harvard, Cambridge, Mass. 20 See this suggestion in Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, 47. 21 L1, 393. 22 L1, 16. 23 See Hargrove, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, 56. 24 Quoted in IMH, 411. 25 Quoted in IMH, 411. 26 Quoted in IMH, 412. Italics added. 27 Eliot, A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 5. 28 Jules Grivet, “La Théorie de la Personne d’après Henri Bergson,” in Bergson, Mélanges, 847. 29 Grivet, “La Théorie de la Personne d’après Henri Bergson,” 875. 30 An earlier version of this essay was read at the conference of the American Literature Association in Boston on May 23, 2015. The University Press of Florida has given permission for the use of some material from my book T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year.

Special Forum: “Prufrock” at 100 The American Legacy of “Prufrock” Anita Patterson

T

he Americanness of “Prufrock,” which we now tend to overlook, shaped the poem’s reception as revolutionary and helps to explain Eliot’s departure from the poetic conventions that were familiar to his readers. “Prufrock” was first published in the June 1915 issue of the Chicago-based Poetry, which had awarded prizes to Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost, and in Pound’s Catholic Anthology (1915), which was reviewed by Edgar Jepson in a May 1918 issue of The English Review. Jepson emphasized the American origins of Eliot’s poem: “Western-born of Eastern stock, Mr. T. S. Eliot is United States of the United States; and his poetry is securely rooted in its native soil; it has a new poetic diction. . . . It is new in form, as all genuine poetry is new in form; it is musical with a new music, and that without any straining after newness. . . . Never has the shrinking of the modern spirit from life been expressed so exquisitely and with such truth.”1 The new musical form praised by Jepson underscores Eliot’s adaptation of jazz-inflected popular song in “Prufrock,” resulting in a revolutionary new style more lasting and innovative than what Jepson called the “jingling verse” of Vachel Lindsay. David Chinitz has shown

67

68

Anita Patterson

how Eliot’s vers libre and use of song rhythms in “Prufrock” were, as Eliot acknowledged, indebted to Laforgue, who taught him to “adapt his voice to the popular material around him,” and this influence was complemented by the “nearly suppressed yet indispensable influence of American jazz.”2 And what about Edgar Lee Masters? Although Pound’s enthusiasm for “Lee Masterism” quickly abated, Eliot, examining Masters’s poems, may have been struck by uncanny similarities with his own writing. Indeed, in his October 1916 review of Masters’s Songs and Satires, Eliot seems to have learned and clarified, through Masters’s negative example, something about his own lyric practice, even going so far as to write in the idiom of “Prufrock.”3 Consider Eliot’s opening distinction between “you” and “I,” a device that complicates his soliloquy by raising the question of whether Prufrock is speaking to himself or to someone else, in light of Eliot’s remark: It is clear that Mr. Masters needs to set himself one particular problem in order to bring his gifts into focus. This problem is not necessarily the epitaph. But he must have a personage, and this personage must be detached from himself in order to give his particular meditative irony its opportunity. . . . Mr. 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 Five months later, in “Reflections on Vers Libre,” Eliot implicitly contrasted his own Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), with the Spoon River Anthology (1917) in this diagnosis of Masters’s shortcomings: “The Spoon River Anthology is not material of the first intensity; . . . its author is a moralist, not an observer.”5 The least we can say about these remarks is that they resonate with stylistic solutions Eliot himself arrived at in “Prufrock.” In 1959, Eliot complained that he had just as much a right to the title of New England poet as Frost, and this expressed interest in being

The American Legacy of “Prufrock”

69

regarded as American prompts us to ask whether there are American referents in the setting of “Prufrock.”6 According to Eliot, Baudelaire and Laforgue taught him the poetical possibilities of “the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis,” and his urban imagery in “Prufrock” was that of “St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed.”7 Hugh Kenner and Robert Crawford have found that the name “Prufrock” was taken from the Prufrock Furniture Company, a manufacturer of parlor furniture in St. Louis, and we know Eliot himself once said the “yellow fog” came from his industrial homeland.8 This deceptively simple, new technique of using what Eliot called “composite landscapes,” resulting in an international and intercultural montage, arguably anticipated the “global turn” in modernist studies, opening a new comparative space for previously neglected or marginalized traditions. What, finally, is the legacy of Eliot’s poem in the last hundred years? I believe we have yet to understand its full revolutionary significance, insofar as we still have much to learn about its effect on poetry in the United States and throughout the Americas. Here are just two examples. First, in the same issue of Commerce where St.-John Perse’s translation of Eliot’s fragment, “We are the hollow men,” appeared (winter 1924), Perse published a lyric that he eventually titled “Chanson du Présomptif.” Perse’s syntactical repetition in the second strophe, the very center of his poem, recalls Eliot’s “Prufrock,”9 a striking echo insofar as, in contrast to Prufrock’s pained question (“And how should I presume”), Perse’s “Présomptif ” speaks indirectly to women as a man of action and heir apparent, asking them to nourish grace, fragile as a thin thread of smoke, on the earth: J’honore les vivants, j’ai grâce parmi vous. Dites aux femmes qu’elles nourrissent, qu’elles nourrissent sur la terre ce filet mince de fumée . . . Et l’homme marche dans les songes et s’achemine vers la mer et la fumée s’élève au bout des promontoires.10

70

Anita Patterson

Taken together, Perse’s syntactical hesitation, combined with the imagery of smoke rising and the figure of a man dreaming as he walks upon the beach, recall Prufrock’s isolation and spiritual dread. The allusion makes sense, given that these two New World poets—one from the United States, the other from Guadeloupe—both contend for a place at the end of the Symbolist tradition as heirs who both completed and explained the experimental work of the preceding generation. Here is my second example. In 1933, the sixteen-year-old Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote to James Weldon Johnson, asking him what he thought of her poems. He replied that she was gifted, and should read Eliot, in order to develop the highest standard of selfcritique. She did so, and was profoundly affected by “Prufrock” because, as D. H. Melhem has observed, “Eliot would improve us socially and spiritually. Brooks, no less concerned, probes social ills at their roots in poverty and discrimination.”11 Judith Saunders has examined the allusions to “Prufrock” that pervade Brooks’s “The Sundays of SatinLegs Smith.” She lucidly explains how Brooks’s memorable portrait of Smith’s “desertedness, intricate fear, . . . / Postponed resentments and . . . prim precautions,” and the poem’s salient critique of racial inequality in America, are enhanced through close comparisons with Eliot’s “Prufrock.”12 In 1959, Brooks wrote a review of Hugh Kenner’s The Invisible Poet for the Chicago Sun-Times. “You may ask,” she writes, “why another of these studies? Why another venture into the careful candors of Eliot-land? . . . The Invisible Poet discusses everything Eliotic, . . . and discloses influences that may surprise you.”13 Notes 1 Edgar Jepson, “Recent United States Poetry,” The English Review (May 1918), 426–27. 2 David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 35–36. 3 Jim McCue, “T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters and Glorious France,” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 1 (January 2014), 47–49 and 51. 4 “Mr. Lee Masters,” The Manchester Guardian, 906 (October 9, 1916) in Complete Prose 1, 488.

The American Legacy of “Prufrock” 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

71

“Reflections on Vers Libre,” The New Statesman, 8 (March 3, 1917) in The Complete Prose 1, 515. Eliot, “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,” Daedalus 89, no. 2 (spring, 1960), 421. Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me” (1950) and “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,” in TCC, 126 and 422. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 3 and Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 37 and 44. Sophie Levie, Commerce, 1924–1932: une revue internationale moderniste (Rome: Fondazione Camillo Caetani, 1989), 170. St.-John Perse, “Chanson du Présomptif,” Collected Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), 92. D. H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington, KY: U P of Kentucky, 1987), 34. Judith P. Saunders, “The Love Song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks Revisits Prufrock’s Hell,” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 3–18 and Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” A Street in Bronzeville (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 24. Gwendolyn Brooks, “Scholar Sheds Further Light On T. S. Eliot,” Chicago Sun-Times (August 16, 1959).

Cover of Poetry (June 1915) courtesy of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Poetry (June 1915) Christopher Ricks

T

he cover of Poetry (June 1915) named eight contributors. Their names took markedly different forms. In order of appearance: Ajan Syrian, Arthur Davison Ficke, Bliss Carman, Dorothy Dudley, Georgia Wood Pangborn, William Griffith, Skipwith Cannéll, and T. S. Eliot. The last of these namings is more than distinctive, it is unique. It is distinguished, first, from the five who muster two names. (Dorothy Dudley, we hear in the notes to contributors, might have featured—à la Mrs. Henry Wood—as Mrs. Henry B. Harvey.) It is distinguished, second, from the couple of contributors who sport three names: a man, whether married or not—Arthur Davison Ficke—and a married woman, Georgia Pangborn, née Wood. True, there are other unique forms of namery here: Ajan Syrian is not exactly his name (the notes on contributors have him as “Ajan Syrian” in inverted commas), and Skipwith Cannéll has an accent. But it is T. S. Eliot, upon his initial appearance in a literary world beyond that of school or college, who stands out. Stands there, complete. He went by many names. During 1915–16 he signed himself not only “T. S. Eliot” but “T. Stearns Eliot,” “Thomas S. Eliot,” and “Thomas Stearns Eliot.”

73

74

Christopher Ricks

Of the other names that figure on the cover, two come twice. The first is that of a woman: “Edited by Harriet Monroe,” “Copyright 1915 by Harriet Monroe.” The second is that of a man, a contributor not to this number of “A Magazine of Verse” but to the tragedy of the Great War: there is a sequence of five poems “To Rupert Brooke,” Died before the Dardanelles, April, 1915 (shades of Jean Verdenal, “mort aux Dardanelles”). And there are three pages of elegiac ecstasy, “The Death of Rupert Brooke.” The names of a few of the contributors are not on the cover. Of these, two who are commentators will append solely their initials to their contributions. By convention, these are at once more modest and more proud than names, since initials may represent either subordination or ordination. The pages on the Death of Rupert Brooke, which are announced on the cover, will be initialed “H. M.,” with editorial authority, while those on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, which are not announced on the cover, will duly be initialed “A. C. H.,” combining authority, though less of it, with assistance, more of it: Alice Corbin Henderson, editorial assistant. Relatedly, there will be (not specified on the cover) “H. M.” on Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology, and (likewise) a triple review by “A. C. H.” on Antwerp by Ford Madox Hueffer (whose name is not yet Ford Madox Ford), Poems by John Rodker, and Sing-Songs of the War by Maurice Hewlett. So it turns out to be not only all the named contributors—with the notable exception of the last on the cover— who bear first names and surnames. This includes the author of “To Poetry: On Reading the April number in Exile,” which appears under “Correspondence”: Eunice Tietjens, a name that when paraded in the immediate neighborhood of Ford Madox Ford does make one wonder Who Goes There. (Christopher? Sylvia?) But she is Tietjens née Hammond. Apart from T. S. Eliot, who stands apart, no one—whether writing here, or here written of—comes forward as initials-plus-surname. Granted, there are special cases. Named on the cover is a poet who is written of: “Hark to Sturge Moore.” And there are three appearances

Poetry (June 1915)

75

by a contributor whose name did not make the cover. To this Jack of Hearts (the only person on the scene missing), we shall return. The name T. S. Eliot then, and there on the cover, is signal. So, unforgettably, is the title of his poem, given the intriguing name that is its climax and its anti-climax: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As with its author, albeit differently, no name in the vicinity takes any such form as this one. The name Ajan Syrian may prompt a recollection. Eliot in 1959 opened with delectable dryness: “I once wrote a poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I am convinced that it would never have been called Love Song but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head, The Love Song of Har Dyal.” The title of Eliot’s poem prepares a face, and proceeds immediately to set it against the plangent propitiations of poesy, that easeful thing. Poetry (June 1915) mounted the supremely new—there in Eliot’s inaugurative concluding poem—alongside the good old assurances that poetry can be relied on to supply the poetical. This is clear from all the illuminating discrepancies between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the company that it found itself keeping a century ago. Clear, and all the clearer if we expand the titles from their summary version on the cover to those they actually bear within the magazine. Not “I Sing of My Life,” but “I Sing of My Life While I Live It.” Here there arrives what both is and is not a coincidence: is, because there had been no particular editorial placing of Eliot’s poem in the vicinity of Ajan Syrian’s; is not, because some such sugared “I Sing” was sure to be somewhere there to please current taste, being the poeticality that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was up against. I sing of my life while I live it. Do you, now? I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. A happy accident, the link that I have forged, happy to be a screen on which a pattern may be cast.

76

Christopher Ricks

Take the direct though specious appeal, not quite (as the cover has it) of “The Syrian Lover in Exile,” but of the poem fully titled, “The Syrian Lover in Exile Remembers Thee, Light of My Land.” Eliot was and was not remembering the light of his land, was and was not in exile. He registered his suspicions of the poetical register that goes in for remembering Thee—he was leaving behind his Harvard “Ode” (1910) at commencement, “For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee.” He must have pored over the June 1915 number of Poetry, given what such publication had to mean to him; it was already four years since he had completed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “Mr. T. S. Eliot is a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country.” The note on this contributor has its filaments to the immediately preceding note, that on “Ajan Syrian,” likewise making his “first appearance,” likewise someone who “has published nowhere else as yet,” one “who, born twenty-eight years ago on the Syrian desert, has studied at Columbia University, and is now the adopted son and employé of Mr. Gajor M. Berugjian, of Brooklyn.” (Eliot was in his twenty-eighth year.) Ajan Syrian’s third poem, “Alma Mater,” lacked its subtitle on the cover: “The Immigrant at Columbia.” Eliot’s Alma Mater had been Harvard; since then, he had been an immigrant, a Yank at Oxford. Conventionalities rule. “Lord of Morning.” “Noon.” “The Walk on the Moor.” “Morning on the Beach.” But turn enough pages and you will reach the unsentimental placing of all such sentiments, there for instance in Eliot’s bizarre sequence “I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,” or in a man’s recourse to fashion in the interests of at once eluding and embracing passion: I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. Ah, singing, repeatedly summoned in the titles that are on Poetry’s cover but very seldom attuned to the kinds of singing that

Poetry (June 1915)

77

might be desperately needed in order to keep courage up or fear down. Rather, the usual throb. “I Sing of My Life.” “Little Songs of the Forest,” the titles under this head then including the usual insufficiently suspect properties, “Spring Song” and “Autumn Song.” And “Songs of Hunger” (Skipwith Cannéll), which although they do possess something more than the usual toothlessness, remain—the distinction is one that Eliot would often make—sketches or notes for poems rather than poems. Among the books reviewed is Sing-Songs of the War, which could find no way to realize imaginatively the incongruity within its undisconcerted title; set this against the fertile cross-currents in the title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a warrant of authentic resistance to the sing-songs of the peace that are so much less than the disturbance of the peace that is art, the truly new. It may be that Eliot’s fellow-contributors were not moved exactly to fellow-feeling by his work alongside theirs, but one of them, at least, rose to the challenge that his art presented to theirs. Six months later, Arthur Davison Ficke was to write roundly and squarely in defense of Eliot’s allusion in “Cousin Nancy” to a line of George Meredith’s “The army of unalterable law.” “Plagiarism is the corrupt attempt to pass off as one’s own the work of another writer; there is no possible relation between it and Mr. Eliot’s employment of a great and world-famous phrase in a position where the reader’s recognition of it as a quotation is precisely the effect aimed at.”1 These contributors were presumably enjoying, or perhaps not exactly enjoying, their first acquaintance with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But the editors, H. M. and A. C. H., were in a different position, and their contributions to the number may have been tinged with an anxious sense of Eliot’s nearby poem and its provocations, its silent but telling disrespect for what Poetry mostly had to offer, at any rate in this particular number. But even if there is no such tingeing and we are imagining things, the collocation of their words with those of Eliot’s poem may be illuminating, as coincidences can well be.

78

Christopher Ricks

H. M., of Rupert Brooke: That he died of sunstroke is perhaps the more symbolic. J. Alfred Prufrock: I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. Fortinbras:        Let four captains Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally. H. M.: And so on his fair young brow let us place the ancient laurel, and bear him, “like a soldier,” to his tomb. J. Alfred Prufrock: No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. Or there is A. C. H., establishing for herself a contrast between an American poet and some unnamed Europeans: I can not help but feel relieved by the general sense of tragedy that pervades Mr. Masters’ book. There is nothing unhealthy or morbid or hopeless about it as there often is about that of European writers. It is simply the sense of the tragedy of broken and wasted lives—of unnecessarily wasted lives.

Poetry (June 1915)

79

Aware as she has to have been of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and its appearing earlier in the number, did A. C. H. think, or half-think, of Eliot as among the Americans or the Europeans? “Mr. T. S. Eliot is a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country.” He never published “Opera” (1909) and A. C. H. could not have known of it, but it makes clear—as does the poem that she did already know, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”— that Eliot was vigilantly skeptical of “the general sense of tragedy.” We have the tragic? oh no! Life departs with a feeble smile Into the indifferent. “There is nothing unhealthy or morbid or hopeless about it as there often is about that of European writers”: Eliot would have found something to agree with there, but he would not have been as confident that “hopeless” quite fitted “unhealthy” and “morbid.” Time to turn back and descend the stair Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? A. C. H. opened her round-up review: When the inteligencia of London are hit with a new fashion in art, they are hit hard. They live with it—they think it, dress it, eat it; one may almost imagine the Nude Descending the Stair in ice-cream. There remains the multiple contributor, unnamed on the cover, for whom a relation to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is not a matter of coincidence at all: Ezra Pound. He makes three contributions, very different and entirely characteristic. Two of them have no particular application to Eliot’s poem.

80

Christopher Ricks

One takes the form of “A Rejoinder”: “I am boring my little hole in the adamantine stupidity of England, America, New Zealand and a few places elsewhere. I even enjoy the job.” The other is an endearing effrontery: “Mr. Pound has just discovered a misprint in his second Renaissance article in the March number. Page 284, line 10, most dependent should read least dependent.” Publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had proved to be not mostly but entirely dependent upon Pound. Only Pound’s pertinacity made Harriet Monroe yield. Pound to Monroe, October 1914: “Here is the Eliot poem. The most interesting contribution I’ve yet had from an American. Yrs E.P. Hope you will get it in soon.” January 31, 1915: “Now as to Eliot: ‘Mr. Prufrock’ does not ‘go off at the end.’” April 10, 1915: “Do get on with that Eliot.” December 1, 1915: “As to TSE the Prufrock IS more individual and unusual than the Portrait of a Lady. I chose it of the two as I wanted his first poem to be published to be a poem that would at once differentiate him from everyone else, in the public mind.” Subsequently, Eliot to John Quinn, March 4, 1918: “Personally, I cannot forget the length of time that elapsed before Pound succeeded in persuading Miss Monroe to print Prufrock for me.” Was there a further way in which Pound could be of service to the poem? I believe that his “Hark to Sturge Moore” is alive with and to the greatness of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Whether or not Pound was conscious of it, his appreciation of Sturge Moore constituted an intimation of Eliot’s, not Sturge Moore’s, immortality. Pound chose

Poetry (June 1915)

81

to begin the final paragraph of his review essay with the adjuration “Let us then close” (in play with an opening that said “Let us go then”?), and he chose to end with lines that could not but invite comparison: Pound: Row till the sea-nymphs rise To ask you why Rowing you tarry not To hear them sigh. Eliot: 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 sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. Pound had begun by saying that this wasn’t actually going to be a review. Mr. Sturge Moore’s last book, a triologue between three nice men in tweed suits concerning the nature of style and the beautiful, is, so far as I am concerned, a mere annoyance, and I will therefore refrain from reviewing it. (Hark to These Three, by T. Sturge Moore —Elkin Mathews.) The name T. Sturge Moore has a smack of J. Alfred Prufrock about it, and those nice men in tweed suits might be played against not only “men in shirt-sleeves” but the sartor resartus himself: My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

82

Christopher Ricks I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

Sturge Moore’s men were talking about the usual aestheticisms, the nature of style and the beautiful; Prufrock, and those whom he imagines, are not, although the poem itself is a masterpiece of style and of the beautiful. There is a cumulative plausibility about such moments in Pound’s piece as might reflect handsomely on nearby Eliot’s poem. Juxtapositions may be the economical way of trying to show so. Pound: discovering each week a “new Shelley” or a “new Keats” or a “new Whistler.” (I even remember one lady who said her husband was known as “the American Whistler.”) Eliot: In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo Pound: I have been reasonably meticulous Eliot: Politic, cautious, and meticulous Pound: The essential thing in a poet is that he build us his world. It may be Prospero’s island, it may be the tavern with Falstaff, or

Poetry (June 1915)

83

the stripped world of Candide, or Florence which has spread its futile reputation into the nether reaches of hell. Prospero’s island would have to wait for The Waste Land, but Falstaff is already built into the world of Eliot’s poem: I grow old . . . I grow old Shakespeare: and one of them is fat, and grows old (I Henry IV) I am old, I am old (II Henry IV) And Florence and hell are there in the epigraph from the Inferno that is borne by “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This, with “futile” having for Pound an apposite reach. To Monroe, January 31, 1915: “a portrait satire on futility can’t end by turning that quintessence of futility Mr P. into a reformed character breathing out fire and ozone.” Hell fire is something else. Many of Pound’s observations here as to Sturge Moore may be, more deeply, observations as to Eliot. “Good poets are too few and the exacerbations of life are too many.” “The charm of first books” (of any first publication, such as this very one of Eliot’s?) is that “the young are for the most part without an audience; they write for their own ears, they are not spoiled by knowing there will be an audience.” Pound’s eloquence as to cadence is brimming over with Eliot’s poem no less than with Sturge Moore. “Sturge Moore is more master of cadence than any of his English contemporaries.” (But not than a certain young American?) Compared with Yeats, Sturge Moore “has the greater variety of cadences,” and excels Yeats “in varying and fitting the cadence to its subject emotion.” One caveat, though, which would not have been needed à propos of Eliot: “He has not escaped rhythmic monotony in these seven lines.”

84

Christopher Ricks “Hark to Sturge Moore.” Hark to These Three. Hark, last and most, to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that was sticking obstinately and fecundly in Pound’s head.

The end of all Eliot’s exploring was a return to his beginnings. Poetry (June 1915) was with his art to the very end: Eyes that have too much seen, too much confessed (“The Syrian Lover in Exile Remembers Thee, Light of My Land”) And I pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain (Ash-Wednesday) In flame and anguish; proving how we lie Who dreamed a nobler banner now unfurled Over mankind—while bitter smoke-wreaths curled Up from the Moloch-lips we had denied! But you not as this age’s sacrifice Should have gone down [. . .] (“To Rupert Brooke,” II) Water and fire deride The sacrifice that we denied. Water and fire shall rot The marred foundations we forgot (Little Gidding) Eliot, whose family crest was the Elephant, never forgot. Notes 1

Poems 1, 430.

The Stale Dregs of Revolt Frances Dickey

S

hortly after receiving the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine, Louis Untermeyer wrote to Harriet Monroe, in a letter she did not publish, to complain about Eliot’s poem:

I confess that his “Love Song” is the first piece of the English language that utterly stumped me. As a post-impression, the effect was that of the Muse in a psychopathic ward—drinking the stale dregs of revolt.1

The first piece of criticism to arrive from readers of “Prufrock” already registered the cognitive dissonance that persists in our assessments of this poem, one hundred years out. It is part of the lore of modernism that it “stumped” its readers, that seeing it caused Pound to exclaim, “Eliot has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN.”2 Our understanding of “Prufrock” as a literary revolt continues, for example, in Christopher Ricks’s contribution to this forum, first given as a lecture under the title “The Muse in the Psychopathic Ward.” Examining the contents of the June 1915 issue of Poetry, Ricks points out the many ways that Eliot’s poem diverged from the other contributions. Untermeyer’s phrase “muse in the psychopathic ward” implies

85

86

Frances Dickey

that a kind of divine or demonic creative frenzy must have been necessary to produce a work so far from the beaten path. Indeed the theme of strangeness and altered consciousness (as in Arthur Waugh’s account of Eliot as a “drunken slave”) runs through the contemporary reviews.3 Yet Eliot’s poem is not simply a “revolt” for Untermeyer; it is the “stale dregs” thereof, a “post impression.” William Carlos Williams famously called it “rehash and repetition,” complaining: “Eliot is a subtle conformist. . . . [“Prufrock”] is the latest touch from the literary cuisine, it adds to the pleasant outlook from the club window. If to do this, if to be a Whistler at best, in the art of poetry, is to reach the height of poetic expression, then Ezra and Eliot have approached it and tant pis for the rest of us.”4 Marianne Moore also compares Prufrock and Other Observations to Whistler’s studies, and Babette Deutsch titled her review “Another Impressionist.”5 A decade after Whistler’s death and in the aftermath of the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910 and the Armory Show of 1913, Impressionism was hardly avant-garde. Moore and Williams discerned something familiar in Eliot’s poem. To us, “Prufrock” has been familiar for so long that it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t; perhaps it never was as unfamiliar as we think it was. One hundred years of patient exegesis have shown that the poem derives much of its power, and its “stale dregs” quality, from subtle and pervasive literary allusions. Despite the respectable presence of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, the vast majority of Eliot’s sources are Victorian and 1890s-ish: Tennyson, Pater, Gilbert and Sullivan, Henley, Swinburne, Wilde, Symons, Kipling, and James Thomson, as well as a French contingent of the same era including Laforgue, Bergson, and Charles-Louis Philippe, author of Bubu de Montparnasse.6 Much of what we now find revolutionary, such as the opening reference to anesthesia, turns out to be lifted from these folks. William Henley’s 1875 lyric sequence “In Hospital” offers much the same scene as Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table”: Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife. A little while, and at a leap I storm

The Stale Dregs of Revolt

87

The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life. . . . You are carried in a basket, Like a carcase from the shambles, To the theatre, a cockpit Where they stretch you on a table.7 To this Eliot adds Bergson’s claim that consciousness and time are “spread out” in space, thus arriving at his surprising analogy between a surgical patient and “the evening . . . spread out against the sky.”8 Williams rightly identifies Eliot’s genius as a form of cookery: “Upon the Jepson filet Eliot balances his mushroom. It is the latest touch from the literary cuisine.” Eliot’s contemporaries recognized a potent brew in the poem’s combination of familiar ingredients (May Sinclair wrote, “Mr. Eliot is dangerous”).9 For us, of course, Eliot’s ingredients have become unfamiliar, while his concoction runs in our veins and is inseparable from our language. Even as Eliot’s lines have lost some (but not all of) their strangeness to us through frequent repetition, a belief in their revolutionary newness sustains their appeal. Nowhere is the truth of Untermeyer’s criticism more visible today than in the popularity of one particular line from “Prufrock”: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Wall art, coffee mugs, T-shirts, pillows, jewelry, advertisements, and yes, tattoos proclaim Prufrock’s disheartened assessment of his life. As the mantra of a coffee-addicted nation, this line somehow promises to dignify our caffeine habit with a degree of self-consciousness and elevate it by association with our greatest modern poet. We are willing to be the stale dregs of Eliot’s revolt. When “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” is ready to become an advertising slogan, hasn’t it lost its power to repel us from the tedium of our own lives? What person tattoos this line on her back thinking she is announcing her life as a series of meaningless trivialities? One might view the modest industry that has grown up out of this line as the victory of caffeine and capitalism over poetry’s

88

Frances Dickey

disorienting power to make us see ourselves in a new light. Yet perhaps the success of the line actually testifies to Eliot’s canny positioning of his poem on the border of familiarity and strangeness. His mermaid song continues to enchant and lull us into forgetfulness. Notes Quoted in Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters. Edited by Joseph Parisi, Stephen Young (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 170. 2 Letter to Harriet Monroe, September 30, 1914, in Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Edited by D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 80. 3 Arthur Waugh, “The New Poetry,” Quarterly Review 226 (October 1916), 386. Collected in T. S. Eliot, The Contemporary Reviews. Edited by Jewel Spears Brooker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 4. 4 William Carlos Williams, “Prologue,” Little Review vi (May 1919), 76–78. Later included in Kora in Hell, 1920. 5 Moore, “A Note on T. S. Eliot’s Book,” Poetry xii (April 1918), 36–37; and Deutsch, “Another Impressionist,” New Republic xiv (February 16, 1918), 89. 6 See the twenty-five pages of notes to this poem in Poems 1. 7 William Ernest Henley, A Book of Verses, 4th ed. (London: David Nutt, 1893), 7–8. 8 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. Translated by F. L. Pogson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1910), 99, 136, 163, and 204. 9 May Sinclair, “Prufrock and Other Observations: A Criticism,” Little Review iv (December 1917), 8–14. Collected in T. S. Eliot, The Contemporary Reviews. Edited by Jewel Spears Brooker, 10–13. 1

Prufrock, Belated Anthony Cuda

P

rufrock” is justly celebrated as a revolutionary poem. But as I was rereading John Berryman’s claim—in “Prufrock’s Dilemma” (1960)—that modern poetry begins with its famously jarring third line, I found myself wondering: What about the first couplet? Did the revolution in modern poetry arrive two lines late?1 Though it was mostly facetious, this question did get me thinking about the surprising number of ways in which “Prufrock” is, in fact, a late poem—in terms of antecedents, biography, and publication—as well as a poem that is obsessed with lateness. First, there is the question of antecedents: “Prufrock” is a revolutionary modernist poem, but it is also uncontestably a late decadent poem, filled with the themes, mood, and imagery of fin de siècle works by W. E. Henley, Swinburne, Wilde, Davidson, Symons, and others. And of course, a defining feature of decadence is its intensely selfconscious lateness. Then, there is the question of publication. Pound was famously relieved in 1914 at finding Eliot so far ahead of his contemporaries, but his evidence for this estimation was a poem that had been written four years before. It’s worth noting that Pound had just barely ceased to compose his own (self-described) “stale cream-puffs” in the

“

89

90

Anthony Cuda

Pre-Raphaelite manner.2 Harriet Monroe wasn’t exactly struck blind by the manuscript’s novelty either; she received it in October 1914 but didn’t publish it until June of the following year, and even then with reluctance in several regards. Eliot himself sensed the poem’s lateness. He believed that it was his swan song; he feared that he was already late in his own career and would never compose anything to match it.3 By 1915, his imagination was closer to F. H. Bradley than to J. Alfred Prufrock, and there is much in Eliot’s graduate work on Bradley’s philosophy to suggest that “lateness” is not accidental but rather an essential part of being conscious. We encounter everything, Bradley suggests, in the non-relational state of immediate experience, which necessarily breaks up into relations and points of view; it’s part of the nature of consciousness, in Bradley’s sense, to be late, to have missed the moment.4 And most of our lives are spent in the attempt to recapture that moment in a later state of transcendent unity. Eliot’s work on Bradley postdates “Prufrock,” of course, but it informs how he regarded the poem when it was published. Frankly, most of these observations are simply a prelude to a way of reading “Prufrock” that regards lateness as one of its most urgent and pervasive concerns. Much in the poem insists upon being early, clinging desperately to the time remaining, in which decisions and revisions can be reversed. But a stubborn irony undercuts this possibility at every step; Eliot deliberately refuses to imagine a present tense to which one has not arrived late. The poem begins late in the day: the patient has already been etherized, and the streets are already halfdeserted. The conversations about Michelangelo have already begun. Prufrock’s first imperative seems full of possibility, as if it were early in the journey and there were plenty of time to navigate and avoid failure. But the poem is always late to its own departures, and even to its own failures. For instance, Prufrock does not imagine himself ascending the stair toward his beloved, only descending it after his determination has faltered: “there will be time / . . . / Time to turn back and descend the stair.” He does not imagine what he has said or done before being fixed

Prufrock, Belated

91

and formulated, what earlier actions precipitated this fate: “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” He is late to his own entomological crucifixion. By the time he even begins his explanation, he will have missed (what he calls in “Portrait”) the pleasurable “tobacco trance” of his days; only the butt-ends will remain. Similarly Laforgue’s speaker in “La cigarette” daydreams about choirs of mosquitos and celestial elephants, only to wake and find that the smoldering butt-end of his cigarette has burned his thumb. Prufrock is late, as well, to his own biblical beheading: “I have seen my head . . . brought in upon a platter.” This means that he enjoys none of the prophetic wildness of the Baptist, nor the lure and eroticism of Salomé (via Wilde), nor even the decapitation itself—only the macabre presentation of the severed head upon a platter. As for the potential pleasure he might have derived from that martyr’s tableau, the lateness of his balding head robs him of even that. For much of Eliot’s career, his imagination is wholly given over to what happens after, to the consequences of an action against which he could not have defended, because he was not even present. As early as 1909, in “Opera,” he writes, “I feel like the ghost of youth / At the undertakers’ ball.” In “Eeldrop and Appleplex” (1917), he imagines the man in Gopsum Street who has murdered his mistress: “for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. . . . something is done which cannot be undone.”5 The same nightmare scenario is later reenacted in Sweeney Agonistes, of course, and in The Family Reunion. The present tense of the murder itself is never imagined or dramatized; only the aftermath is important. When Eliot was older, he formulated the predicament again, in terms slightly less haunting in The Dry Salvages: “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form.” Some scholars have made a case for the underestimated importance of “late modernism” and the writers of the thirties and forties, focusing particularly upon the consciousness (in Auden and others)

92

Anthony Cuda

of decline and belatedness. And others have demonstrated just how firmly the characteristically decadent themes of lateness, decay, and decline were embedded in modernist consciousness. What “Prufrock” implies is that modernism was already “late” by 1910–11, that “lateness” may be a characteristic of modernism just as definitive as “experiment” or “avant-garde.” I recall, for instance, Virginia Woolf ’s refrain in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which appears early in the novel and in the final paragraphs: “it was over.” Or Thomas Mann’s protagonist in Death in Venice (1912), who lingers in the cholera-infected city until it is too late, and whose physical illness is merely a belated sign of his internal corruption. Gustav von Aschenbach arrives late to his own moral death. Or the sixty-seven-year-old W. B. Yeats himself, who reflects upon the parallel between his earliest book and his most recent one: “My first denunciation of old age I made . . . before I was twenty and the same denunciation comes on the last pages of the book.”6 And I would be remiss to conclude without mentioning the Mystery Cat, the Napoleon of Crime, who keeps the baffled Scotland Yard and the despairing Flying Squad in a state of permanent belatedness: “You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air— / But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there”!7 Notes 1 John Berryman, “Prufrock’s Dilemma,” The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1960), 270–78. 2 Ezra Pound, A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems (New York: New Directions, 1965), 7. 3 L1, 165. 4 F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914), 159–60. 5 “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” The Little Review 4 (May 1917) in Complete Prose 1, 527. 6 The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 798. 7 CPP, 163.

Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock” Ronald Schuchard

T

o me, the “revolution” and legacy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lies in its unique use of the allusive method and the relative obscurity that purposefully accompanies them. It is the method that accompanies Eliot’s theory of impersonality, a distancing and masking technique that begins in 1911 when the twenty-twoyear-old poet projected himself into a persona nearly twice his age for his dramatic monologue. When he was later asked whether Prufrock represented the modern age or if he was a character from The Waste Land, Eliot replied, “It was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40 I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim imaginary figure.”1 That distancing of the personal voice or “expression of feeling” continues into “Gerontion,” an older persona than Prufrock, and into the despondent narrator of allusive voices in The Waste Land, where the allusions are more plentiful, disconnected, and intentionally obscure, leading many readers to discern no personal voice and to read the poems as impersonal reflections on the modern age, its disillusioned sensibility, spiritual bankruptcy, and so on. But each allusion is selected not only for economy of poetic expression; each has some personal association and context for the poet who

93

94

Ronald Schuchard

embeds something of his personal voice within; it is muted, but it is discernible to the scrutinizing reader through the pattern of allusions in the poem. Eliot said in various ways that the personal power of a poem can be felt before it is understood: I know that when I first encountered “Prufrock” as a sophomore it struck in me a previously unheard chord or unknown substrata of my immature being, and I have been trying to understand the poem and its effect ever since. Though Eliot upheld an impersonal theory for the poet in the creative process, as a critic, he was, ironically, always in search of the ways in which a poet’s sensibility or vision of reality are evident in the allusive texture of the poem. Though there may be some concern with “the modern age” in “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and The Waste Land, I believe that they are deeply personal poems, deeply obscured. We have let the policing principles of the New Criticism keep us from such perceptions too long. When Eliot returned to America as Norton Professor at Harvard for the 1932–33 academic year, he gave numerous readings and lectures at American colleges and universities; inevitably, the great poet whom no one understood was always asked about the difficult allusions and consequent obscurity of his poetry. When asked about his use of unquoted allusions, he replied: “It is always unwise to claim originality,” prompting observers to conclude that “[a]ccusations of plagiarism seem to [Eliot] ridiculous, since often the whole meaning of a part of his poem hinges on the context of a passage from which he has borrowed phrases or lines.” And in much modern poetry, including his own, he said, “obscurity is largely due, deliberately or not, to the suppression of one or more elements in order to emphasize the more essential poetical elements.”2 “All ‘obscure’ poets such as those of today isolate some element.”3 One of his clearest expressions about poetic obscurity appeared in his introduction to his translation of St.-John Perse’s poem, Anabasis (1930): any obscurity . . . on first readings, is due to the suppression of “links in the chain” of explanatory and connecting matter,

Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock”

95

and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. . . . The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced. . . . Such a selection of images and ideas [and allusions] has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. . . . And if . . . such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of [a modern] poem should take at least as much trouble as a [lawyer] reading an important decision on a complicated case.4 So how do we bring all this back to “Prufrock” to ask: What pressing dilemma has the young poet created for his disturbed if not despairing persona, a man caught up in a self-argument tediously rehearsed, paralyzed with indecisiveness, consumed by his consciousness of aging, abandoned by sensual desire, depressed at finding the “butt-ends” of his days and ways meaningless, all self-esteem gone, terrified by horrific visions of his eventual demise? What is at stake? Surely more than the psychological angst of a Polonius or a Mr. Milquetoast of the modern age caught up in a midlife crisis fueled by sexual anxieties. What is the pressing, twice-repeated “overwhelming question”? Some of the allusions in the drafts and final poem are permanently personal, so much so that they move through the poems from “Prufrock” to The Waste Land and beyond: those to Dante, Nerval’s “El Desdichado,” the Pervigilium Veneris, and of course the Hamlet and the biblical allusions to John the Baptist and Lazarus, the contexts of which must be examined at least as closely as would a lawyer. But the allusion that my interpretation hinges on is that to Lazarus—not the Lazarus of John 11, as most anthology editors err in noting, but Luke 16, the parable of Dives, the rich man, and the beggar, Lazarus, who in death is lifted into Abraham’s bosom, while Dives, in hell, cries out to Abraham for mercy and to send Lazarus to cool his tongue, “for I am tormented in

96

Ronald Schuchard

this flame.” Abraham answers with the impassability of the “great gulf fixed” between them, leaving Dives to beg of Abraham that he send Lazarus to his five brothers, “that he may testify” of the gulf, “lest they also come into this place of torment.” That reality of that terrible gulf and the surrender of will required to cross it is at the center of all Eliot’s work: “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” In my view, young Eliot projected his own overwhelming question into the mind of a persona in the gradual grip of spiritual fear, desolation, terror, looking into the abyss: to be or not to be, to cross or not to cross the gulf (“the awful daring of a moment’s surrender” in The Waste Land), the overwhelming question answered in subsequent poems and prose: “la sua voluntate è nostra pace” (“In His will is our peace”), “Shantih shantih shantih” (“The Peace which passeth understanding”). Let me close by saying that the new editions of Eliot’s poems, prose, and letters will do much to indicate his early spiritual development, including a letter of September 12, 1935 from his brother, Henry, who found the set of the 1909–10 Temple editions of the Divine Comedy that Eliot had in college and copied out for him all his markings and underlinings. Among the most revealing of Eliot’s annotations, for Henry, was the underscore of “la sua volontate è nostra pace,” further marked in the margins on both sides. Henry noted this and several other passages that had persuaded him, at least, that belief and not just poetry had moved his brother as far back as “Prufrock.” Stating that only his brother could respond to how the passages moved him at that early time, Henry reiterated his personal perception that they reflected a definite pattern of religious feeling.

Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock”

97

Notes 1 2 3

4

Eliot, interview in Granite Review 24.3 (1962), 17. “The Tendency of Some Modern Poetry” (lecture, given at the University of Minnesota, Northrop, Minneapolis, MN, January 19, 1933) compiled in Complete Prose 4, 840–42. “Edward Lear and Modern Poetry” (lecture, first given at Scripps College, Claremont, CA, January 5, 1933, later reported as “Noted Modern Poet and Critic Addresses Audience in Balch” in The Scripture, 3 (January 9, 1933)); report reproduced by William Baker in English Studies, 64 (December 1983), in Complete Prose 4, 829. Eliot, Preface to Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse, with a Translation into English by T. S. Eliot, (London: Faber & Faber, 1930) in Complete Prose 4, 132–33.

Special Forum: Eliot’s Marginalia Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry Jamie Callison

I

n his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot famously glossed lines at the climax of the poem with a quotation from F. H. Bradley that ends, “In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.”1 For a number of critics, the Bradleian text serves as a hermeneutic key not only to the concerns of the poem, but also to Eliot’s wider relationship with the philosopher—both having been seen as reflections on a struggle with solipsism.2 Nevertheless, the quotation itself is taken from an argument that Bradley reviews and ultimately rejects; Eliot’s inclusion of a text that Bradley repudiates raises immediate questions about the relationship between the two figures. The fact that Eliot latched on to an argument that Bradley rejected suggests a degree of antagonism between the two writers. Eliot’s allusion to Bradley in The Waste Land thus raises more questions than it answers. The complicated relationship between literary and philosophical work was one of Eliot’s great critical themes, informing his various and varied accounts of Dante, metaphysical poetry, and Shakespeare. It was an interest that doubtlessly had roots in the accidents and

99

100

Jamie Callison

nature of his education, having been, at Harvard, an aspiring poet and philosopher and having studied under the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, author of Three Philosophical Poets (1910). In keeping with a category that Eliot himself outlined, the appearance of Bradley in The Waste Land might be seen as an example of a poet making poetic “use” of a philosophical idea whether or not he believes in it—a practice that Eliot saw exemplified in the work of Donne and Shakespeare.3 While Eliot’s interpretation of Bradley’s philosophy—what Eliot took from Bradley and where disagreements between the two are to be found—has been a focal point for Eliot scholars, my own account uses archival sources to take a snapshot of Eliot reading Bradley. I draw on H. J. Jackson’s account of the active, engaged, and often confrontational nature of reading as outlined in Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), and focus on aspects of Bradley’s text that niggled at Eliot and encouraged the graduate student to counter the older man’s positions in the margins of the printed text.4 I draw on a number of newly available materials produced under the auspices of the T. S. Eliot Editorial Project: the voluminous correspondence; the four published volumes of Eliot’s complete prose, the first of which provides a chronology for Eliot’s early philosophical essays; and on Eliot’s annotated copy of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893), made available through Valerie Eliot’s bequest to Magdalene College, Cambridge.5 In particular, I argue that Eliot’s philosophical writing exemplifies a change in his approach to Bradley over the course of his year (1914–15) at Merton College, Oxford. This shift, as I demonstrate in the second section of my essay, is visible in the annotated and marked margins of Eliot’s copy of Appearance and Reality, used for his dissertation and for his philosophical journalism. Finally, I suggest that the particular antagonism between Eliot and Bradley, evident in the aforementioned volume, provides a window on the gestation of the theory of poetry Eliot promulgated throughout his career.

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

101

“Enjoyment in Criticism”: Oxford and Life after the Bradleian Metaphysic In a 1929 lecture titled “Poetry and Propaganda,” Eliot characterized philosophic study as “the exercise in assumption or entertaining ideas; for the enlargement and exercise of mind we get by trying to penetrate a man’s thought and think it after him, and then passing out of that experience to another.”6 Eliot’s rather positive account may owe something to the popular audience he addressed and also, perhaps more importantly, to his having left behind the infighting and the fashions of the discipline more than a decade previously.7 The attention conferred on philosophy herein is not on the history of the discipline itself, but is rather on the experience of and reasons for reading particular texts and this opens the way for the interactions between philosophy and literature that I explore in this essay. If the mature Eliot could extol the process of engaging with a philosophical text, the young philosopher Eliot was more dogmatic. In January 1915, he found it necessary to explain to both a peer and a tutor that he no longer espoused Bradleian metaphysics.8 Given the canonical place conferred upon Eliot’s piece on Bradley in Selected Essays and the copious literature on the relationship between the two, it comes as no surprise to the reader today that the philosopher was and remained a significant figure for Eliot. It did not have to be that way. Eliot’s attitude to Bradley shifted in late 1914, and the influence the philosopher would come to exert on the younger man was the result of a renegotiated relationship: exemplified by passages of Eliot’s doctoral thesis and by his early published essays on philosophical topics in 1916. This shift in perspective happened after Eliot’s first term at Oxford. Eliot had traveled to Europe in the summer of 1914, funded by a Sheldon traveling fellowship from Harvard: first to Germany (a stay that was cut short by Germany’s declaration of war upon Russia in August) and then to England, where he enrolled for the year as a visiting student at Merton College, Oxford. Over Michaelmas term 1914, he drafted

102

Jamie Callison

six papers on the theme of his dissertation—which, according to the prospectus he submitted, explored “The Nature of Experience”—for Harold Joachim, a disciple of Bradley’s. Then, in January 1915, he wrote first to his friend Norbert Wiener and then to his Harvard supervisor and supporter, James Woods, to inform both that he had written a draft of the thesis and that he was unhappy with it. In his first term at Oxford, Eliot attended three lecture courses—on logic, on Aristotle’s De anima, and on Nicomachean Ethics—and two seminars on Aristotle in addition to his weekly essays. Presumably, then, the unhappy draft to which he refers was substantially or even wholly constituted by the term papers he produced during Michaelmas.9 The Christmas holidays in 1914 had offered little respite: he spent them in London, working on Aristotle at the British Museum and wandering around the city.10 Absorbed in the study of Greek philosophy over Hilary and Trinity terms, Eliot took up the dissertation again following his marriage to Vivienne in the summer of 1915.11 He completed it while employed as a schoolmaster at Highgate and submitted the work in April 1916; he thereafter returned to Bradley in June and July 1916 when writing “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres,” an article commissioned through Bertrand Russell’s connections and published in the Monist in October 1916.12 Eliot’s comments on the first draft of his thesis are instructive. He explained to Norbert Wiener: “I took a piece of fairly technical philosophy for my thesis, and my relativism made me see so many sides to questions that I became hopelessly involved, and wrote a thesis perfectly unintelligible to anyone but myself; and so I wished to rewrite it.”13 Moreover, Eliot indicated that he would thereafter take a “destructive” approach to philosophy. Later that month, he protested to Woods that he took “enjoyment in criticism” rather than “construction” in philosophy (the “destructive” impulse he described to Wiener) and went on to say “I find satisfaction only in the historical aspect of philosophy,” a preference he reiterated in a further letter to Woods dated March 2, 1915.14 Eliot’s penchant for philosophical history would be echoed in a 1916 letter to Bertrand Russell, where he asked: “Do you know of any

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

103

books—chiefly historical—dealing with Leibniz other than those I am acquainted with, which I could get anything out of?”15 Eliot foregrounded this newfound philosophical vocabulary— “destructive,” “historical,” “criticism”—in “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres” (1916), derived largely from a paper wrote in Michaelmas 1914, “Finite Centres and Points of View.” In the earlier essay, Eliot maintained that finite centers are independent, isolated entities; for these entities, the whole world is constituted by an act of intension, separate from the world independently intended by each of the other finite centers.16 Eliot’s essay avoids becoming an exposition of an element of Appearance and Reality by virtue of his attempt to provide a unifying structure—a resolution to the question of the one and the many—that does not invoke Bradley’s Absolute or rely upon his monism, an effort that is replicated in the final draft of his thesis.17 In “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres,” by contrast, Eliot ascribes to Bradley the view that “[e]ach finite centre is, ‘while it lasts,’ the whole world” and identifies it as an “extreme” form of idealism grounded, along with Leibniz’s monads, on the “impenetrability” of the centers.18 Rather than developing an aspect of Bradley that he found attractive (the notion of independent entities and their enclosed worldviews) while eliminating that which he found less attractive (his Absolute), Eliot, by 1916, was treating Bradley as already outdated, firmly enmeshed in historical problems that had affected various philosophers over time. Likewise, when Eliot took up Bradley again in 1927, it was to evaluate the comparative strength of Bradley’s grasp of the problems facing Victorian England when compared to what he considered Matthew Arnold’s relative shortcomings.19 The approach to philosophy Eliot described as “critical” not only recalls Kant’s fascination with the conditions of knowledge, but also another great interpretative tradition with German roots: the historical-critical. Eliot is more concerned with contextualizing the limitations of Bradley’s view than in what he himself termed “construction.” Eliot’s dissertation unevenly reflects this shift from one style of philosophy to another. His commitment to a peculiar kind of “critical”

104

Jamie Callison

philosophy is evident in the array of names, philosophies, and psychologies that he addresses and counters: a “He do the PhD in different voices” approach to the ideas he had considered during Michaelmas 1914 at Oxford. This refraction of Eliot’s response to Bradley accounts for much of the difficulty readers have encountered in reading the dissertation.20 As his letters to Wiener and Woods demonstrate, Eliot’s year at Oxford prompted the inclusion and criticism of contemporary philosophers and psychologists into the central plan for his dissertation. In particular, the willingness to quibble with the minutiae of Bradley’s argument—the willingness “to penetrate a man’s thought and think it after him,” to use a phrase from “Poetry and Propaganda”— implies that there was life in Bradley for Eliot even after he ceased to be Bradleian.21 This shifting focus is captured in the changing project titles from “The Nature of Experience” (where Bradley’s role is unattributed), to “The Nature of Objects, with reference to the philosophy of F. H. Bradley” (where Bradley is acknowledged as a principle point of departure), and finally to “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley” (where Bradley’s work is its focus).22 As Eliot read Bradley more closely—and as I show in the next section—he became increasingly frustrated both with language that claimed what he perceived to be an unwarranted impartiality and with Bradley’s account of transcendence.

“Destructive” Reading: Annotations to Appearance and Reality The shift in Eliot’s approach to Bradley and to philosophical study in general is made clear in a relic from his dissertation work: the copy of Appearance and Reality that he used during the preparation of his dissertation, which is now held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Marginal markings in pencil, in a variety of colors, are scattered throughout the book and one particular chapter, titled “Degrees of Truth and Reality,” bears thirteen substantial marginal annotations.23 The majority of these notes are “critical,” in the sense discussed above,

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

105

or even “destructive,” with Eliot noting what he deemed questionable turns of phrase. The annotations reveal that two particular mannerisms came under severe scrutiny. Eliot was concerned about Bradley’s discussion of what was “more” or “less” real. The following text from Bradley prompted a stern marginal note: “The more an appearance, in being corrected, is transmuted and destroyed, the less reality can such an appearance contain.”24 Eliot’s annotation asks what the alternative to reality could be: If an appearance is not real, then what is it? Perspective can result in one thing appearing more real than another, but absolutely? Ultimately, he dismisses Bradley’s claim as baseless. To be clear, Eliot’s concern is not so much with Bradley’s use of the terms “more” or “less,” but rather the lack of additional qualification that would make it clear that such reality was only more or less real from a particular point of view. More broadly it reveals Eliot’s qualms with Bradley’s version of a degrees-of-reality theory, which leads the British philosopher to insist upon the non-reality of error, error being in Bradley’s view no more than a blinkered view of reality.25 Making an error—a special subcategory of what Bradley more generally calls “appearance”—is like being quoted out of context. Error can be transformed into truth by broadening the reference of the apparently erroneous statement, just as one might argue that a perceived slight offers no cause for concern so long as it is properly situated in the nature of the conversation and with respect to the relationship. If, as in the comment Eliot seized upon, an apparent error requires a lot of contextualization, it is deemed to have “less” reality; if it does not require quite so much, it is thought to have “more” reality. There is good reason to believe that Eliot held a theory of the degrees of reality, and his consideration of perspective as to what is “more or less real” registers his own particular construction of the problem. He would continue to think in these terms for years to come; he would, somewhat surprisingly, invoke a degrees-of-reality theory as a way of mediating the theological and pastoral problems facing Anglican

106

Jamie Callison

Eucharistic theology in 1930.26 Nevertheless, it is untrue that, as Manju Jain has claimed, Eliot adhered to Bradley’s particular formulation of the theory without reservation; the annotated chapter of Appearance and Reality provides ample evidence to the contrary.27 Another of Eliot’s lines of scrutiny picks up on the process Bradley describes above whereby appearance is “transmuted” into reality. “Transmute,” as Eliot points out in his dissertation, is part of Bradley’s mechanism of transformation, which enables him to find a place for error and which informs his conception of the Absolute.28 Eliot was uncomfortable with both of these aspects of Bradley’s philosophy. For instance, Eliot picked up on the following passage in Appearance and Reality: An error can be total only in this sense that, when it is turned into truth, its particular nature will have vanished, and its actual self be destroyed. But this we must allow again, to happen with the lower kinds of truth. There cannot for metaphysics be, in short, any hard and absolute distinction between truths and falsehoods. With each assertion the question is, how much will be left of that assertion, if we suppose it to have been converted into ultimate truth? Out of everything that makes its special nature as the predication of this adjective, how much, if anything, will survive? And the amount of survival in each case, as we have already seen, gives the degree of reality and truth.29 Eliot responded in the margin by suggesting that, in this case, reality is transmuted by the language of internal relations.30 Although the word “transmuted” is nowhere in this particular passage, Eliot is conducting an ongoing quarrel with Bradley’s usage of the word throughout his annotations. But what does Eliot mean by the language of internal relations? Broadly speaking, the concern here—for which “transmuted” is a cipher—is that the so-called error becomes something different in the process of broadening its reference. Thus, for Eliot, who was interested

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

107

in the effects of particular points of view and thus considered partiality to be a necessary condition of philosophic thought, takes issue with Bradley’s failure to account for partiality. In short, Eliot felt Bradley had failed to appreciate the complexity of the problem, accusing him of using the language of internal relations to suggest that the so-called error and the transformed statement are related.31 The concern, particularly around “internal relations,” is brought into relief in Eliot’s comment on the following passage: And, as we proceed further, a social system, conscious in its personal members of a will carried out, submits itself naturally to our test. We must notice here the higher development of concrete internal unity. For we find an individuality, subordinating to itself outward fact, though not, as such, properly visible within it.32 Eliot responded with the proposition that if “the reals” must be transmuted to be real, they have been irrecoverably altered.33 Once again, Eliot is skeptical of Bradley’s “higher development of concrete internal unity,” dismissing it as no more than a verbal ploy for suggesting that two very different ideas are the same idea. In fact, Eliot suggests that so-called reals, on the basis of this theory, are not “real” prior to the process of transmutation. Reality is conferred only after the process of “transmutation,” during which what seemed real from a particular point of view is discarded for what was already real from a different point of view. In his dissertation, Eliot deals with this concern in his famous and much discussed example of the child who thinks he saw a bear.34 The parent may know that that there is no bear and explain this position to the child, but this perspective is completely separate from the child’s fear upon facing the perceived bear. Transmutation, from this perspective, might best be thought of as a process of substitution. More widely, the argument is in keeping with the well-known emphasis on Eliot’s relativism, but my focus is on the ways in which the annotations reveal Eliot to be wrestling with Bradley’s terminology.35

108

Jamie Callison

Eliot did not dispassionately select and reject doctrines from Bradley at will, but rather worked out his approach through close reading. For Eliot, something did not feel quite right about Bradley’s transmutation. More and more, Eliot’s philosophical work involved “trying to penetrate . . . [Bradley’s] thought and think it after him” in a way that substantiates Eliot’s later claim that it was Bradley’s “style” that exerted a lasting influence upon his own writing, evident in the way he takes Bradley to task for his modifiers (or lack of them) with regard to the “more” or “less” real and in his registering of the verbal tic of “transmutation.”36 Eliot’s wrestling with the idea of “transmutation” would exert a long-term and unexpected effect on his writing about poetry.

Catalysts and Alchemy: Impersonalizing Bradley in Eliot’s Theory of Poetry Following Bradley’s death in 1924, Eliot offered the following eulogy in The Criterion: Few will ever take the pains to study the consummate art of Bradley’s style. . . . But upon these few, both living and unborn, his writings perform that mysterious and complete operation which transmutes not one department of thought only, but the whole intellectual and emotional tone of their being.37 This eulogy not only looks forward to a central contention of Eliot’s 1927 canonical essay on Bradley, which also cites the significance of “style,” but also thinks back to his graduate work. Appearance and Reality— and particularly the chapter Eliot annotated—concerns itself with the process of transmutation; according to Eliot, Bradley’s writing not only discusses transmutation, but also “transmutes” an unsuspecting reader’s entire mental life, raising both its “intellectual and emotional tone.” The tonal change in Eliot’s account of transmutation—gone are the worries about particular points of view—is indicative of the role the term was to play within his mature critical vocabulary. From 1919

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

109

onward, the term in both its verbal and nominal forms became Eliot’s go-to word for praising a work of art or outlining the process of poetic activity. Eliot’s most famous use of the term is in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” following his comparison of a shred of platinum with the poet’s mind: “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”38 The scientific “catalyst” represented by the “shred of platinum” rubs up against “transmute” with its history in alchemy. Here, “transmute” at once describes the change artistic work institutes, turning various contradictory authorial “feelings” into something distinct and separate by engaging impersonal processes comparable to those of science. In a spring 1922 essay in Tyro, “The Three Provincialities,” Eliot claimed that “Mr. Joyce has used what is racial and national and transmuted it into something of international value.”39 Eliot drew on the formulation once again in 1927, in a description of Shakespeare’s work: “Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle—which alone constitutes life for a poet—to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.”40 Eliot returned to the term in an unsigned review in the January 26, 1928, issue of the TLS, observing that “Webster’s mind was of the reservoir type. He needed to accumulate for a long time before he could transmute into original poetry.”41 Finally, in the March 1930 Listener, Eliot evokes the word to articulate the disassociation of sensibility in Donne: “feeling is transmuted by being thought about . . . and it is feeling transformed by thought, and thought transformed by feeling, that interests Donne.”42 The critical weight Eliot came to apply to “transmute” is surprising given his history with the term. Why did Eliot concern himself with the word at such lengths as a graduate only to adopt it wholeheartedly later? While different contexts informed his philosophical and literarycritical work, in both cases, “transmute” helps mediate between the one and the many. Both Bradley’s and Eliot’s philosophical work was concerned with bringing together disparate elements into a form of

110

Jamie Callison

community, and they managed this process in different ways. One can, of course, argue about their degrees of success in doing so, but it would be misleading to say that Bradley was single-minded in his focus on the one, his Absolute, and that Eliot was only concerned with his many particular points of view. These philosophical accounts can instead be thought of as representing different ends of a scale. “Transmuted,” in Eliot’s reading of Bradley, is a sign of over-emphasis; Bradley has gone too far in the direction of the one, according to the poet. Eliot was later to point out the political dangers inherent in Bradley’s formulation— the suppression of the many by the strong impersonal state—dangers that became all the more apparent in Europe between the wars.43 In contrast, Eliot’s theory of poetry based on the idea of “transmutation” endeavored to unseat accounts of art as the effusion of particular personalities and deep sensibilities; Eliot had explained a few weeks prior to writing “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves.”44 Faced with this short-circuiting of the self, transmutation became useful to Eliot simply because the problem he faced was at the other end of the one-many scale from that which he had negotiated on first encountering Bradley. Yet there is need for tact here, as there is a danger in suggesting that the two different usages of “transmute”—one in Appearance and Reality, the other in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—amount to the same idea. In “Poetry and Propaganda,” Eliot took the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to task for mistaking the persuasive power of poetry for philosophical thought. That is, for treating a poetic text as if it were undertaking the same work and responding to similar demands as that placed on philosophy.45 Given the philosophic resonance of “transmute” for Eliot, it would be misleading to suggest he took the idea informing his theory of poetry directly from Bradley. A better way of formulating the issue is to say that Eliot’s early struggles with Bradley started a set of ruminations about the possibilities of “transmutation” that seemed peculiarly apt to Eliot, the literary reviewer. The elements marshaled by Eliot in

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

111

his theory of poetry are infused with Bradleian ideas and draw upon the philosopher’s terminology, but are not themselves Bradley’s arguments. The two pieces were not doing the same work, for one thing. Eliot was essaying an emotionally satisfying, aesthetically convincing and creatively suggestive account of poetry, whereas Bradley was struggling to construct a system that was not only emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, but also logically and intellectually coherent. Nevertheless, Eliot’s worrying of Bradley’s “transmute,” newly visible to us in the margins of his copy of Appearance and Reality, certainly did not end with the conclusion to his dissertation. The seed planted by Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s phrasing grew into one of the most-discussed aspects of the poet-critic’s own critical work. There is more than one way a philosophical text can influence a literary one. In the case of Eliot, archival resources serve as the basis for not a radically new account of the poet-critic, but rather a reassessment of the relationships between existing landmarks in his oeuvre: a process of enrichment and development rather than transmutation. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Poems 1, 77n. For a summary of the discussion of “solipsism” in criticism on Eliot and Bradley see: Donald J. Childs, From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience (London: Athlone, 2001), 10–11. Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” in The Bookman 70 (February 1930) in Complete Prose 4, 20–35. Childs reviews the first fifty years of this literature: Childs, From Philosophy to Poetry, 1–48; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 82–87. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2nd ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1908), M.12.323, T. S. & Valerie Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, Old Library, Cambridge. The lecture was subsequently published: Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” The Bookman (New York), 70 (February 1930): 595–602 in Complete Prose 4, 30. Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” in Complete Prose 4, 30n. Letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener, January 6, 1915, in L1, 86–89. Letter from Eliot to J. H. Woods, January 28, 1915, in L1, 91–92.

112

Jamie Callison

9 There is a chronology in L1, xxv–xvii; events are rehearsed in more detail in Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 191–221; Eliot, “Objects: Content, Objectivity, and Existence” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 165n. 10 For Eliot’s wandering see his letter to Conrad Aiken, December 31, 1914, in L1, 80–82. 11 Eliot attended three lecture courses, a reading group, and continued his tutorials with Joachim. The subject of these tutorials changed: “[they] now focused on Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s Post-Analytics.” Eliot, “Εἶδος in the Early Socratic and Late Platonic Dialogues” (manuscript, 1915) in Complete Prose 1, 193–96, 193n. For restarting his dissertation work see Crawford, Young Eliot, 238. 12 Eliot, “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley” in Complete Prose 1, 238–388. For Russell’s connections see letter from Eliot to Russell, January 16, 1916, in L1, 142–43. Eliot, “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres” The Monist 26 (October 1916) in Complete Prose 1, 462–70. 13 Letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener, January 6, 1915, in L1, 89. 14 Letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener, January 6, 1915, in L1, 89; Letter from Eliot to J. H. Woods, January 28, 1915, in L1, 91–92; Letter from Eliot to J. H. Woods, March 2, 1915, in L1, 97–98. 15 Letter from Eliot to Russell, June 7, 1916, in L1, 155–56. 16 “The different finite centres have identities of meaning; but the one world is not this bare identity, stripped of content; it is the identity with a supposititious complete content; and some seem to approach this ideal more closely than others. We do not get a world at all without the act of meaning, and we cannot mean our world, i.e., we cannot mean it as our world, unless we have first meant it simpliciter.” Eliot, “Finite Centres and Points of View” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 175. 17 “It is impossible that two centres should mean the world and yet be utterly different in structure. One has only to think what this would mean: a bare identity and a complete diversity, and nothing in the world to weld the two into one. If one centre took notice of the other, it could do so only as an object in its own world; it would have not the ghost of a reason for guessing that a centre was there.” Eliot, “Finite Centres and Points of View” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 175. 18 Eliot, “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres” in Complete Prose 1, 466 and 463. 19 Eliot, “Francis Herbert Bradley” in SE, 445–54. 20 Speculative elements do reappear. Eliot’s account of hallucination—one of the aspects of the dissertation that has drawn the most critical attention—is largely recycled from the earlier Harvard paper “Degrees of Reality,” albeit placed in the later work in the context of Bradley, Holt,

T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

113

Meinong, and Russell. Eliot is led to posit a number of different kinds of object: half-objects, double-objects, objects of reference to counter some of the technical problems that such cases occasioned. 21 Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” in Complete Prose 1, 30. 22 Eliot, “Knowledge and Experience” in Complete Prose 1, 241n and 382n. 23 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 359–400. 24 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 376. 25 W. J. Mander, An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 135–56. At Harvard, Eliot attended Charles Montague Bakewell’s “Seminary in Metaphysics: The Nature of Reality” (Philosophy 20c), where various formulations of a “degrees of reality” theory were doubtless discussed. 26 Letter from Eliot to William Temple, December 19, 1930, in L5, 441–44. 27 Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 208. 28 Eliot, “Knowledge and Experience” in Complete Prose 1, 338. 29 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 365. 30 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 365. 31 Mander, An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics, 100–01. 32 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 376. 33 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Eliot Bequest, Magdalene College, 376. 34 Eliot, “Knowledge and Experience” in Complete Prose 1, 332–40. 35 For Eliot’s relativism see Childs, From Philosophy to Poetry, 26–31. 36 Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” in Complete Prose 4, 30 and Eliot, “Francis Herbert Bradley” in SE, 445. 37 Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 3 (October 1924) in Complete Prose 2, 539–45. 38 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in Complete Prose 2, 109. 39 Eliot, “The Three Provincialities,” The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Design, 2 (Spring 1922) in Complete Prose 2, 390. 40 Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” in SE, 117. 41 Eliot, “John Webster,” The Times Literary Supplement 1356 (January 26, 1928) in Complete Prose 3, 330. 42 Eliot, “Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne,” The Listener 3 (March 19, 1930) in Complete Prose 4, 57. 43 Eliot, “Francis Herbert Bradley” in SE, 452. 44 Eliot, “A Romantic Aristocrat” in Complete Prose 2, 30. 45 Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda” in Complete Prose 4, 20–24.

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist April Pierce

Eliot’s Context In the middle of the twentieth century, British idealist philosophy was facing a slow but unmistakable decline in popularity. It would be replaced with a hard-nosed, literalist form of language philosophy. One could no longer take The Idea for granted; an analysis of form was required to defend metaphysical claims. Early twentieth-century philosophy had circumnavigated questions of form: How did language attach itself to the world? How did meaning work? The death of idealism at mid-century would signal the decline in popularity of absolutes and mark a shift toward logical analysis. C. S. Lewis describes the decline of idealism as the fall of a broader philosophical approach: Nor can a man of my age ever forget how suddenly and completely the idealist philosophy of his youth fell. McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley seemed enthroned for ever; they went down as suddenly as the Bastille. And the interesting thing is that while I lived under that dynasty I felt various difficulties and objections which I never dared to express. They were so frightfully obvious that I felt sure they must be

114

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

115

mere misunderstandings: the great men could not have made such very elementary mistakes as those which my objections implied.1 Not without reservation, T. S. Eliot greatly admired idealism, and allusions to his disappointment with its fall appear in papers he drafted as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard and, occasionally, in his retrospective late work. Lines from “East Coker,” for instance, recall a generational paradigm shift in terms that resonate with Lewis’s recollection of the decline of idealism: “And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us, / Or deceived themselves, the quietvoiced elders, / Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?”2 In an unsigned New Statesman review titled “A Contemporary Thomist” (1917), Eliot wrote of “[Bertrand] Russell who has insisted that philosophy must proceed from the simple, if it can be found, to the complex; and [of F. H.] Bradley, who has insisted that the simple cannot be found. These two writers between them have nearly laid metaphysics in the grave.”3 Although Eliot took inspiration from both, he was not a disciple of either, and he was skeptical at times of both idealism and realism. This is particularly true concerning Eliot’s early philosophy of language and meaning, which, as we will see, maintained that conscious experience was at the center of meaningmaking projects, however metaphysical or formally rigorous those projects might be. Tracing Eliot’s philosophical positions is a difficult task and one not without disagreement within the field of Eliot and modernist scholarship. But on the whole, Eliot scholars have emphasized F. H. Bradley’s influence at the expense of other thinkers, such as Edmund Husserl, whose thoughts about language were formative for Eliot. In 1912, while Eliot was studying philosophy as a doctoral candidate at Harvard, a group of obscure American authors published a book intended to launch a transnational philosophical movement. Inspired by Bertrand Russell and following directly from the work of Gottlob Frege, a band of philosophers, including Alfred North Whitehead,

116

April Pierce

G. E. Moore, and others wrote The New Realism, staking a claim for a new school of philosophy rooted in the view that the world is external and indifferent to the subjectivity engendered by idealism.4 Their core definition of realism was straightforward: [Realism as] a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it. . . . Realism is opposed to subjectivism or epistemological idealism which denies that things can exist apart from an experience of them, or independently of the cognitive relation.5 Put differently, the world exists “out there” and is indifferent to human consciousness and interpretation. New realism was trenchantly “anti-subjectivist.” In its simplest formulation, new realism holds that language “mirrors” or “represents” facts in the world, and that one understands reality better through more literal languages. Vagueness, ambiguity, and indefiniteness were undesirable aspects of language, leading to muddied, unscientific thinking. Only recently made available by means of the Valerie Eliot bequest to Magdalene College, Cambridge, Eliot’s private copy of The New Realism bears revealing annotations made while working on his dissertation in philosophy, which he completed in 1916.6 His annotations indicate that he was deeply suspicious of the anti-subjectivism found in new realism, and suggest that one of his primary philosophical motivations was to defend the “un-realities” of sense against the tyranny of literalist reference.7 For example, the authors of The New Realism argue that a proposition’s veracity does not rely on “a background of feeling . . . an apperceiving mass, or . . . the activity of a self or responding organism. . . . [T]he proposition is sufficiently determined, without reference to knowledge, by the logical and mathematical system to which it belongs.”8 Eliot responds with exasperation in the margin, lamenting what he perceives to be a misdirected lust for producing a logical series.9

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

117

In Eliot’s private copy of Bernard Bosanquet’s Logic: or the Morphology of Knowledge (1911), nearly all of the marginalia likewise deals with the status of signification as it pertains to the mind, in its present situation, which Eliot, in his philosophical writing, calls a “point of view.” Eliot puts a question mark next to the word “objective” in Bosanquet’s description of an “objective world” and circles “for us” in the sentence: “the real world or world of fact thus seems for us to fall within and be included in the objective world or world of meanings, as if all that is fact were meaning.” To Eliot, a point of view is a real experience: when Bosanquet speaks of impressions that are “merely in the mind,” Eliot underlines and questions the word “merely.”10 Eliot’s own philosophical and critical prose likewise underscores the significance of point of view and “unrealities.” In an essay he drafted for Royce’s seminar titled “Cause as Ideal Construction,” Eliot asserts: “As we substitute for entities in whose being we participate, such as must denote, we distort causality.”11 “Denotation” is the literal meaning of a specific reference and in Eliot’s work is secondary to other modes of language—such as the evocative, the occasional, or the allusive, for instance—that help give voice to time-contingent experiences and perceptions. He later argued in his Clark Lectures that “we must assume that every term is susceptible of definition.”12 Theories such as Russell’s failed, in Eliot’s opinion, because you consider the judgment in a strictly typical form. But for the theory of knowledge, this restriction will not stand for a moment. Unless you formulate a definition so that it will be a purely verbal one, from which the meaning of judgment has wholly evaporated, you cannot formulate it so as to exclude perception.13 Words and phenomena were constantly negotiating with one another. Eliot and Husserl held remarkably similar views on definition and meaning. In his marginalia to Husserl’s Logical Investigations (first published 1900–1901), Eliot highlights many of these shared views.

118

April Pierce

Eliot underlines Husserl’s insight that inner thoughts have an indicative mode; they suggest meaning that may or may not be shared.14 Likewise, Eliot highlights Husserl’s statement that “all expressions in communicative speech function as indications.”15 Husserl privileges the gestural dynamics of expression as part of the function of language. In his edition of the Logical Investigations, Eliot repeatedly underlines Husserl’s statements concerning the role of communication and meaning, particularly where emphasizing inner life or intuition.16 Husserl notes that logic operates “not on induction, but by apodeictic inner evidence.”17 Eliot’s emphasis on point of view explicitly positioned him against Russell and, at least implicitly, in support of Husserl. For instance, in an essay on objects titled “Suggestions Toward a Theory of Objects” (1914), Eliot argued: I repeat, then, that we do not begin in knowledge with sensedata, but that sense-data are derivative from things . . . it is meaningless to say that this or that is what is “immediately given” without stating the field of objectivity with which one is concerned. Putting data together to make a chair involves an interpretation, a translation from one type to another, and is from the point of view here taken illegitimate.18 In another essay, “Objects: Content, Objectivity, and Existence” (1914), Eliot demanded that philosophy acknowledge how every individual’s perception of the world is grounded in their point of view: We are not to say that there is one real world to which the system corresponds [as would Bertrand Russell], for so far as the system is complete and exact, it is the real world. But it is not the same world as that of the plowboy or the jellyfish, except for the metaphysician who is inside of his own system. This is the case because the systemiser takes into account every point of view except his own, and this does not form part of his metaphysic; it is lived and not apprehended.19

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

119

Throughout Eliot’s work in the field of philosophy, he repeatedly implies that point of view alters the world, bringing him very close to Husserl’s theory of “worldhood” or worldview. Conrad Aiken discusses Eliot using “the shape of a conscious and articulated Weltanschauung, a consistent view.”20 Husserl used the term “Weltvorstellung” in Logical Investigations, meaning “world conception” or “world-presentation,” while Aiken uses “Weltanschauung,” or a “worldview, ideology.” The terms are synonymous in German.21 More recently, Jūratė Levina has articulated the significance of Eliot’s use of worldview from a phenomenological perspective.22 Perhaps, as Levina argues, his attention to point of view aligned Eliot with Husserl’s theory outright via a “nonderivative affinity.”23 The “unreal” aspects introduced by subjectivity are not the threat to Eliot’s philosophy that they are to new realism. Allusions to shades of meaning and consciousness, and to the unreal itself, are found in his poetry (for instance in The Waste Land’s “unreal city”), but they are evidenced more explicitly in his philosophical essays. To return to his dissertation: “Both real object and unreal object are, qua objects, equally real; when, both, so to speak, are at the fovea.”24 Eliot’s unpublished notes from philosophical lectures also show his keen awareness of and concern for the literalist trend in philosophy of language. While he appreciated rigorous clarity, he was skeptical of language philosophy’s eradication of metaphysical questions. This skepticism may explain his interest in Bradley, the great metaphysician, and his turn to phenomenology, with its emphasis on contexts of use and interpretation.

Philosophical Influences Logic, in Eliot’s view, defers to contexts of use and point of view, thus bringing his early thinking very close to that of the later Wittgenstein. But it is in poetic technique, not philosophical discourse, that Eliot finds it possible to explore the implications of meaning that are contingent on point of view.25 Poetry, as it were, enacts point of view. In

120

April Pierce

his later writing, Eliot retains an interest in “the pre-logical mentality . . . available only to or through the poet” (a notion shared between Eliot and Lévy-Bruhl).26 Poetic thinking is a kind of fermentation or translation of complex experiences of meaning that expresses an underlying unity between subject and object, rather than an alienation of consciousness from context and lived experience. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work [Eliot wrote], it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.27 An underlying unity of consciousness, as it exists in the present, makes new meaning possible. Eliot’s interest in analyzing the unity of consciousness drove him, in part, to phenomenology. In an unpublished letter from Eliot to Montgomery Belgion, dated February 16, 1940, which reflects on his earlier work in philosophy, Eliot admits that his views on language are directly derived from phenomenology. He describes an acute awareness of subtleties ignored by the philosophy he practiced in his youth; refinements and qualifications always hovered in his mind. He goes on to surmise that if he could have focused these suspicions, he would have felt the need to qualify further even more peripheral considerations. This infinite regress prompted him to abandon philosophy for poetry. Poetry, he told Belgion, shares with philosophy the unknown and only partly knowable terrain of “conation”: the desire or will to perform an action. Had he pursued the same tract in philosophy, he speculates, he would have become a sort of minor Husserl or Heidegger.28 Eliot embraces the alignment between his practice as a poet and phenomenological approaches to language: he is intrigued by poetry’s ability to

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

121

evoke meaning and truth without defaulting to the purely descriptive or truth-functional statement. The “conation” is what interests Eliot about language, both philosophically and poetically. Rather than start with data-points, Eliot and Husserl both start with the mind itself, not as an object of psychological study but as an ongoing process, with many varying modalities and contexts of interpretation. Eliot followed the development of phenomenology closely, even after leaving philosophical study behind. In 1931, Eliot claims that he is still very much concerned with the future of phenomenology and explains that he has been reading Heidegger in a letter to Stephen Spender: “There is a philosopher named Martin Heidegger—a disciple of the great Husserl, who is really good, I think, though far from lucid—whom I have been agonising over.”29 Again in August of 1931, he writes to M. C. D’Arcy asking him to review Husserl’s Ideas for The Criterion, recalling his own studies: “In 1914 ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ provided me with distraction during some anxious weeks when I was immured in Marburg. I must say that it proved to be about the most difficult German that I have ever read, with occasional flashes of clarity. But I do think that he is a really important man.”30 This close attention to the development of phenomenology as a discipline appears throughout Eliot’s literary career, albeit not always explicitly.

Suspension of Reference in Eliot’s Poetry During what I call his “Husserl Period” (1913–1916), Eliot espouses phenomenological views in his essays, notes, and graduate work (see, for instance, Harry Costello’s notes on Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913– 1914).31 Eliot sided with Husserl against Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, which insisted that knowledge of the “what” (or reference of a proposition) was the crucial question for epistemologists. Knowing how to determine the “what” of the question “what is it?” would dominate analytic philosophy for decades to come. Eliot thought the question posed by Russell’s theory of definite descriptions was less important than an attempt to understand how something might be meant in context. As

122

April Pierce

he reportedly put it during Royce’s seminar: “‘The King of France is bald.’ This is true or false or meaningless according to its context and bearing. That the theory needs working out in great detail I cannot see. It would be tying knots in the east wind.”32 Eliot also leveraged phenomenology against new realism, with its denial of inner evidence. In his poetry, too, one finds an odd performance of his phenomenological views—a persistent toying with sense and reference within varying contexts of use. For instance, his poetry often suspends definite knowledge; Eliot tends to refuse his reader knowledge of the “what” or “who” involved in a poem. The thing to which the poem appears to refer is not definite, thereby forcing the reader into the poetry. In order to highlight the way somebody might mean something in any given phenomenological context of use, Eliot suspends reference in his poetry to highlight the occasional meanings or context-contingent worldview of his speakers. Consider first the titles of Eliot’s early poems and plays: “Morning at the Window” (which window?), “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (who are Burbank and Bleistein?), “What the Thunder Said,” (what did it say?), The Elder Statesman (who?), and so forth. These titles suggest something specific, but the referent itself is not given. The poem “Mr. Apollinax,” to take another example, is known to refer to Bertrand Russell, but only because scholarship has uncovered this reference. Who, to pose a familiar question, is J. Alfred Prufrock? The poem itself merely suggests a personage of a specific character and personality. By alluding to, rather than ideally defining, somebody specific, the reader experiences the presence of the personality through the appearances of phenomena (likewise with Eliot’s use of “Sweeney” and other sobriquets). The other way Eliot suspends reference in his poetry is by suggesting a referent without giving it a name, such as his reference in “Preludes” to “Some infinitely gentle, / Infinitely suffering thing.” Eliot’s consistent refusal to be singular, literalist, or overtly referential is one of the reasons his work has inspired scholarship that naturally seeks to pin down the vast array of characters and situations he evokes.

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

123

Occasional expression is another of Eliot’s preferred devices. Eliot encountered Husserl’s notion of occasional expression in lectures on logic at Harvard, as evidenced by his notes on logic from a course, Philosophy 8a, taken under H. T. Costello. On November 26, 1913, he made a note of Husserl’s understanding of “occasional expression,” observing that words such as “I,” “this,” “now,” “here” constantly change their meaning and can always be restated in nonoccasional form.33 The occasional aspect of language appealed to the young Eliot’s philosophical instincts, and appears frequently in his poetic writing. He depicts, for instance, bells, songs, cries, gestures, states of consciousness, nicknames, and symbols whose ideal meaning or universal significance might be interpreted broadly. As with the French Symbolists, his poetry leans heavily on the evocative mode. Rebecca Beasley has pointed out that “the particular importance of the symbol to [the French Symbolist poets] becomes clear: if language cannot adequately describe a thing or feeling or thought, a symbol may be able to evoke it obliquely.”34 The occasional expression evokes an experience—it gestures, as it were, inward.35 Without an ideal referent, the reader is thrown into the process of active interpretation. Without definite reference, words come to life, alerting the reader to a range of possibilities. In Eliot’s poetry and plays, occasional expressions appear repeatedly. For example, who is the “our” of “our lot” that “crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm” in “Whispers of Immortality,” when “even the Abstract Entities / Circumambulate her charm”? What is “The Word” that so obsesses Eliot throughout his poetry (especially Four Quartets)?36 These expressions require interpretation, but perhaps the point is precisely that they do not refer to something singular, specific, or universal. For instance, “The Word” is Christ incarnate; “Prufrock” is Eliot, and so on. The point is to let these nicknames and occasional expressions (like “this,” “here,” “now” or the use of names that do not appear to correspond to a particular person) echo in our living consciousness, creating a kind of dialogue between our own associations and Eliot’s own experiences. The occasional expression

124

April Pierce

often appears alongside suggestions of an active mind: “The waking echo of confusing strife.”37 Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in Four Quartets, though it is found throughout Eliot’s work, and with increasing frequency in the twenties and thirties, when he was privately reengaging with his philosophical interests, prominently with phenomenology. Husserl’s impress is most readily apparent from Eliot’s later reabsorption in phenomenology. “Coriolan” (1931) addresses the trauma of war using historical allegory, and steals a line from Husserl’s philosophy: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is perceiving.”38 The line comes from the general introduction to pure phenomenology in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a continuous perceiving, actual or potential. The world of things and our body within it are continuously present to our perception.”39 The line expresses one of the defining questions of Husserl’s philosophical enterprise and succinctly summarizes Eliot’s point of interest. Husserl’s focus here (echoed by Eliot in his poem) is the way perception continually changes with a body’s located awareness. The occasional mode is found throughout the poem, not only in its literary devices but also in its theme. The dictator is sought as a symbol but is not understood in an absolute way. He is, in a sense, the unrealized, desired, aimed-at category or symbol of absolute meaning—and meaning is a process: unfixed, fluid. When Husserl considered fluctuating or occasional expressions, he used the following example: when one says “There are cakes” in a certain context, “we do not mean that cakes exist absolutely and in general, but that there are cakes here and now—for coffee” to which Eliot responded in the margin of the Investigations that there should (absolutely/generally) be cake.40 In “Prufrock,” we find: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”41 The poet searches for meaning, anxious about being misunderstood, and continually refers back to the occasional rather than the definite. Prufrock’s crisis was at least in part a crisis of language: a concern for what can be said to be true, what can be meant, and what

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

125

remains unexpressed and on the horizons of understanding (perhaps even in the realm of the unreal, or at least the not-yet real). Fixity, in the context of Eliot’s language philosophy, as in his poetry, was seen as a threat to meaning (“and do not call it fixity”).42 If we assume that a reference is already fixed by a word, there is no longer room for interpretation. To unfix references, the poet has many possible tools in his arsenal: the use of violent contrasts, nicknames, locations untethered from time, voices abstracted from place, dialects and languages blended together, rhythms and rhymes that follow an internal logic or mood (rather than a formal rule), lived experiences (memories, projections, hopes, and fears) thrown together using instinct and not formulae, and the blending of verse and prose. Eliot would later employ all of these literary devices. In the original typescript of his thesis, but later excised, Eliot puts his interest this way: “Now my difficulty as I have already said, is in understanding what is left (the White Queen would say ‘the dog’s temper!’) when you abstract from a mental state its reference.”43 Eliot’s poetry reverses attention from a focus on reference to a focus on sense. By “suspending” the thing we think we know, Eliot’s poetry reveals a drama of consciousness. There is a difference between vagueness and allusion. There is a difference between precision and literalism. Eliot’s poetry has a kind of precision to it, but it is not a precision of reference. He uses allusions, but this does not make his poetry vague. It makes his poetry difficult. Language biases us toward the assumption of a single referent. The subject predicate form, which “attaches” adjectives to nouns, gives us the sense that language is circling around some central “thing”: the “what” or reference point of a statement. This is why, perhaps, Gottlob Frege’s sense-reference distinction (that the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung is between a term’s reference or object and the sense or way a term refers to that object) was such a pivotal moment in the history of philosophy.44 This distinction was majestic in its simplicity. A term, word, or name, does not always do the same thing. Eliot’s poetry plays with the question of reference by suspending the “thing” or label to invite a play of feeling, association, and interpretation— that is, to highlight the “how” of language. In this sense, Eliot is a phenomenologist.

126

April Pierce

The question of how language “attaches” to the world is not an incidental one for Eliot, nor is it a minor note in the leitmotifs of canonical modernist poetry; it is one of the most significant philosophical problems of the twentieth century. The theme of the relationship between time-contingent consciousness and meaning formation is found in a great deal of modernist poetry. Further connections between philosophy of language of the early twentieth century and modernist poetry are easily found, for instance, in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, H. D., I. A. Richards, and others, and it is my hope that a wider interdisciplinary conversation about the question of meaning might take place. Phenomenological readings of modernist poetic practice would lead to new modes of literary critical interpretation: a reprieve from the familiar pitfalls of structural and post-structural analyses. Notes 1

C. S. Lewis, “Fern-Seed and Elephants,” speech originally titled “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” and given at Wescott House, Cambridge, on May 11, 1959. Transcribed at “Fern-Seed and Elephants,” Orthodoxy, http://orthodox-web.tripod.com/papers/fern_seed.html. 2 CPP, 179. 3 Eliot, “A Contemporary Thomist,” The New Statesman 10 (December 29, 1917) in Complete Prose 1, 624 and “The Perfect Critic: To the Editor of The Athenaeum,” The Athenaeum, 4710 (August 6, 1920) in Complete Prose 2, 273. 4 E. B. Holt et al., The New Realism: Coöperative Studies in Philosophy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912), 36. Eliot’s treatment of New Realism is extensive, and has been treated elsewhere. Of immediate interest are two pieces that Eliot wrote, rather sarcastically, on the New Realism while surveying the state of philosophy during his student years: “New Philosophers,” The New Statesman 11, no. 275 (July 13, 1918) in Complete Prose 1, 728–32 and “Views and Reviews,” New English Weekly 7, no. 8 (June 6, 1935), 151–52. 5 Holt, The New Realism, 474. 6 The librarians at the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, have suggested this dating. 7 April Pierce, “Of Poems and Propositions: T. S. Eliot and the Linguistic Turn” (thesis, Oxford, 2015), http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6c67504e2158-48a9-ac4a-3ee1c792efcf.

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

127

8 Holt, The New Realism, 130. 9 Holt, The New Realism, 130. 10 B. Bosanquet, Logic: Or The Morphology Of Knowledge (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1911), 73. 11 Eliot, “Cause as ideal construction,” (manuscript, March 17, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 127. 12 Eliot, “Lecture I: Introduction: On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry” from The Clark Lectures: Lectures on Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley (manuscript, 1926) in Complete Prose 2, 621. 13 Eliot, “Lecture On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry” in Complete Prose 2, 621. 14 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2001), 188. 15 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 189. 16 For example: “expressions also play a great part in uncommunicated, interior mental life. . . . In a monologue words can perform no function of indicating the existence of mental acts, since such indication would there be quite purposeless. For the acts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment. . . . These acts we shall call the meaningconferring acts or the meaning-intentions . . . the object intended in our intention, and named by its means, etc.” Husserl, Logical Investigations, 190–93. 17 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 46–47. 18 Eliot, “Suggestions Toward a Theory of Objects” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 131. To this statement we might compare a statement made in Logical Investigations, next to which Eliot placed a checkmark, indicating approval: “The essentiality of the concept is then likewise spoken of as a possibility in a transferred sense” (151). 19 Eliot, “Objects: Content, Objectivity, and Existence” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 167. 20 Conrad Aiken, Ushant: An Essay (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 215–16. Hulme also uses the Weltanschauung (E. Svarny, “The Men of 1914”: T. S. Eliot and early Modernism, (Philadelphia and Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1989), 23). 21 For instance, in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Eliot highlights the following: “We are, in other words, not interested in the origins and changes of our world-presentation, but in the objective right which the world-presentation [Weltvorstellung] of science claims as against any other world-presentation [Weltvorstellung], which leads it to call its world the objectively true one” (131). 22 Jūratė Levina, “Language and Perception in Knowledge and Experience, The Waste Land and Four Quartets” (thesis, U of York, 2011).

128

April Pierce

23 Jūratė Levina, “Speaking the Unnamable: A Phenomenology of Sense in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” Journal of Modern Literature 36, no. 3 (2013), 194–211. 24 The fovea of the eye concentrates vision. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 131. 25 In an 1914 essay, for example, Eliot writes: “the ‘outside world’ and the individual’s world are constantly rearranging themselves in every new context. It is true that some of the elements seem much more stable than others, and the least stable are values, but values are not ultimately subjective, or more ‘dependent upon consciousness’ than anything else, and in the end the value judgment differs not at all from any other judgment. From the simple point of view, that is, the work of art simply is beautiful, and that tiger simply is terrible, and there are no ‘emotions’ present. I do not say that this attitude is either possible or proper in practice. It seems a frigid intellectualization of aesthetic experience, and certainly is no explanation of it; for in this reduction to physiology on the one hand and objective values on the other, the whole meaning and being of aesthetic experience seems to have vanished.” Eliot, “Finite Centres and Points of View” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 176–77. Eliot expresses the notion that the real and the ideal are intermingled, as it were, within a subject’s point of view: “I should like first to make another attempt to explain the ‘primacy’ of ‘points of view’ and the relation of object (point of view, system of terms and relations) to subject. All objects, I asserted before, are essentially public; but likewise each object exists only in relation to a subject, the development of sub. + ob. being pari passu. These two statements appear at first inconsistent. The difficulty arises, I think, from the ambiguity of the word knowledge.” (Eliot, “The Privacy of Point of View” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 178). In a later essay, Eliot asks: “For in the sense in which judgment is an activity, how can it be knowledge? . . . we actively unite an idea to reality.” (Eliot, “Definition and Judgment in Bradley and his Critics” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 185). The important point is that experience is a mixture of the abstract or ideal and the real or concrete: “What I have illustrated as occurring to the name is really a feature of all experience: there is something given, and there is always an ideal construction. Experience is through and through practical, and experience is through and through theoretical” (Eliot, “The Validity of Artificial Distinctions” (manuscript, 1914) in Complete Prose 1, 187). In his marginalia, Eliot highlights Husserl’s notion that “we need grounded validations in order to pass beyond what, in knowledge, is immediately and therefore trivially evident [this] . . . makes the sciences possible and necessary.” (Husserl, Logical Investigations, 19). All this directly contradicts criticism such as that of Richard Shusterman, who initially assumed that the early Eliot

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

129

was “zealously objectivist,” and only in the 1930s, alongside a religious conversion, embraced subjectivity as central to meaning-making. See Richard Shusterman “Objectivity and Subjectivity in Eliot’s Critical Theory” Orbis Litterarum 37, no. 3 (1988), 218 and 221. 26 Eliot, UPUC, 148. 27 Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Times Literary Supplement, 1031 (October 20 1921) in Complete Prose 2, 380. 28 Letter from Eliot to Montgomery Belgion, February 16, 1940. Churchill Archive, Churchill College, Cambridge University. It is important, for our purposes, that Eliot never paid much attention to later deconstructionist philosophies. As he says in the first sentence of his essay “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”: “It is proverbially easier to destroy than to construct” (SE, 383). There are important distinctions between deconstructionist or anti-metaphysical philosophies and earlier phenomenology—differences that would be relevant to Eliot’s own philosophical views (which were often categorically unswerving, even as they were skeptical of descriptivism and essentialism). A broader discussion of these distinctions falls somewhat outside the scope of this essay, but scholastic interest in Eliot’s phenomenological inheritance would need to consider the difference between Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida, before making any overreaching claims about inheritance or even relevance. 29 L5, 529. 30 L5, 228. 31 H. T. Costello, Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914: as Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello. Edited by Grover Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1963). 32 Costello, Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 138. “The present King of France is bald” is the favorite example used in Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. 33 Eliot, “Notes on Logic” November–December 1913. Series II.A.11. T. S. Eliot Additional Papers, 1903–1963 (MS Am 1691.14). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Eliot also underlines portions of Husserl’s work dealing with “occasional expressions” in the Logical Investigations, suggesting perhaps that this is a strong interest for him, or that it was a motivating topical inquiry which led him to read the Investigations in the first place. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, 218. This section (in Eliot’s German edition) has Eliot’s underlining throughout, suggesting close attention. 34 R. Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 26. 35 Occasional expression implies the present tense. See M. H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). “To say ‘now’ or ‘then,’ ‘here’ or ‘there,’ ‘these,’ or ‘those’ is to imply a first person

130

April Pierce

speaker; to use the perfect tense is to imply a present moment in relation to which the narrated events are past” (156). 36 Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” CPP, 13; “Conversation Galante,” CPP, 33; and “Whispers of Immortality,” CPP, 52. 37 Eliot, “The Wind sprang up at four o’clock,” CPP, 134. 38 Eliot, “Coriolan,” CPP, 127. 39 E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 74. 40 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 221. 41 Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” CPP, 15. 42 Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 392. In this, his doctoral thesis, Eliot insists: “The fixity of the reference is not the character of fixity of meaning which the words have in language, nor is its fixity due to a composition of fixities. It is not as if I took a number of sentence elements which have each an identity of reference and compounded them into a whole which has an identity by virtue of the ingredient identities. . . . The idea, though largely dependent for its existence upon the forms of its expression, must yet not be confused with these forms. The idea is the reality which I intend, and the identity is only the assumption of one world” (390). 43 Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 393. 44 It is evident, from the marginalia left in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, as well as the notes he took in his courses on logic at Harvard, treated in my dissertation, that Eliot was explicitly aware of and interested in this distinction. Many of the sections wherein Husserl addresses this distinction contain highlighting and notations from the young Eliot.

Astride the Dark Horse: T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department Matt Seybold

I

n March 1922, Ezra Pound began circulating the Bel Esprit notice, soliciting pledges “in order that T. S. Eliot may leave his work in Lloyds Bank and devote his whole time to literature.”1 The Bel Esprit campaign was inspired by The Waste Land, which Pound was concurrently propelling through its lengthy revision process. Pound promised potential donors that it was “possibly the finest [series of poems] the modern movement in English has produced.” Because Eliot produced portions of The Waste Land while on a leave of absence from the bank in late 1921, Pound cited it as proof “that [Eliot’s] bank work has diminished his output of poetry.” Twentieth-century critics leaned heavily on Pound’s account in Bel Espirit, as well as other suspect anecdotal evidence, to characterize Eliot’s career at Lloyds. If mentioned at all, Eliot’s banking has most often been treated as either a trivial biographical detail or a tragic waste of the poet’s productive prime. More recently, scholars have recognized, as Michael Levenson puts it, “we certainly misread both Eliot’s modernity and his urbanity if we ignore his role as a practitioner of economics, working amid various subtle currencies.”2 Levenson, Paul Delany, Adam Trexler, and Lawrence Rainey have made important investigations into Eliot’s

131

132

Matt Seybold

education in political economy, his publishing contracts, and his personal finances.3 Each acknowledges that Eliot’s economic opinions likely derived, at least in part, from his experiences as a banker, but as yet no scholar has offered a serious analysis of the various occupations Eliot held during his nearly eight years of employment at Lloyds, including, from at least 1922 onward, daily engagement in writing, editing, and publishing on the bank’s behalf. Nor has there been any acknowledgement of the peculiar culture of Lloyds itself, an international trailblazer in interbellum banking. Lloyds actively fostered the intellectual and aesthetic pursuits of its employees in a fashion antithetical to the dispassionate bureaucratic automation of contemporary finance. Contrary to the myth propounded by Bel Esprit, in this essay I argue that Eliot did not conceive and compose The Waste Land and the other celebrated works of this period in spite of the bank, but, to the contrary, the peculiar perspective gained via such employment was essential to literature he produced contemporaneously. Though he may have led literary friends, especially Pound, to believe otherwise, the record of poetry and prose from 1917 to 1925 clearly suggests that, however exhausting, writing and banking were mutually beneficial pursuits for Eliot. While one can trace the development of Eliot’s rhetorical economics through various stages of his career at Lloyds and use it to elucidate contemporaneous works, that is not the method of this essay. I do not offer any sustained readings of Eliot’s poetry, but instead focus on his correspondence and an overview of Lloyds Bank’s internal publications. My speculation about the effects of banking on Eliot’s literature begins with the corpus of literature he helped the bank produce. I will allude to some of Eliot’s early impressions of the bank and to his analysis of the German reparations, which precipitated his leave of absence, but the focus of this essay is on the last position he held at Lloyds, as Head of Intelligence. The job was created specifically for him in late 1922 and he officially held it until his resignation in November 1925, though he was largely absent from the post beginning in January of that year. Nonetheless,

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

133

he spent most of three years organizing, managing, and defending the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department. From its inception, Eliot took ownership of the department and felt deeply responsible for the handful of employees who worked for him. He feared that leaving the bank would mean “the destruction of the rudimentary section” which he had fought for. He told his superiors as much, concluding his resignation letter by saying, “I know that it is, and I fear always will be, very painful to me to have severed my connection with Lloyds Bank in this way—a way which could justly be qualified as desertion rather than resignation.”4 Eliot’s vested interest in the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department directly demonstrates the extent to which he recognized the revolutionary print culture of the 1920s had the potential, and perhaps even the responsibility, to mold the increasingly monolithic institutions of international finance. Moreover, Lloyds’s repeated decisions not only to retain, but actively empower Eliot, making him a centerpiece of the institutional culture, evidence a corporate ethos that is highly unfamiliar in the twenty-first century. The internal publications Eliot was involved with and, at least for a time, in charge of, show Lloyds Bank to be self-consciously invested in the modernist aesthetic, treating it, at least within the bank’s bureaucracy, as deeply compatible with global financial capitalism.

The Big Picture “The place is not a trap,” Eliot promised his mother and reminded himself, ominously, two days after beginning his clerkship at Lloyds Bank in 1917.5 Six years later, he would tell Hugh Walpole, I sometimes think that it would be better if I had never gone into the bank at all, for I have advanced very rapidly, and my prospects are, I suppose, from a banking point of view, almost “brilliant,” and the income is absolutely secure—it would go on till doomsday, with a pension at the end, and a widow’s pension, and all the inducements that enslave one.6

134

Matt Seybold

Perhaps the place was a trap after all, as his friends had been warning him. Walpole, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, I. A. Richards, Herbert Read, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and, most famously, Ezra Pound, all tried, by methods both pecuniary and persuasive, to compel Eliot to quit his day job. They dreamed, as Richards put it, of “somehow winkling Eliot out of the bank and annexing him to Cambridge.”7 Even the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had in Eliot an influential ally imbedded in one of the world’s most progressive banks, agreed, against his better interests, to offer Eliot the literary editorship at The Nation in 1923. But every time he was on the verge of resigning, Lloyds lured him back in, further frustrating his friends, particularly Pound, whose obscene rants on the subject are perhaps the best evidence that Eliot’s loyalty to Lloyds was genuine. He was prepared to aggravate and alienate all manner of peers and patrons on the bank’s behalf. It is possible to read Eliot’s carefully worded rejection letters as a single, darkly comical text, filled with ambivalence, regret, and more than a little false humility. To Keynes, after outlining a set of conditions he admits are “obviously impossible for you or any paper to accept,” Eliot turns down the position at The Nation with this creative valediction: “Realising perfectly that my behavior in this matter will always be incomprehensible to those of my friends who have worked so hard on my behalf, and that it can have no other effect than to forfeit your good will and that of many others, I am, yours faithfully, T. S. Eliot.”8 By 1923, Eliot was so accustomed to writing such letters that he felt his name had become synonymous with disappointment. The contradictory attitudes toward banking displayed in the above letters are characteristic of Eliot throughout his tenure at Lloyds. I operate under the assumption that both his compliments and his complaints were sincere, and that he felt genuinely obliged to both Lloyds and to the modern movement. However, it is worth noting that Eliot reserves the prideful descriptions of his banking career mostly for his family, while his expressions of disgruntlement are almost exclusively posted to Pound and patrons of The Criterion, of whom

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

135

Eliot told Harold Munro, “they simply think me mercenary for staying in a bank instead of giving all my time to it. The whole thing is enough to make me laugh, if any Eliot ever could laugh.”9 Eliot may have been pragmatically dissembling when he told Pound, in 1922, “Of course I want to leave the Bank, and of course the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me. It ought not be necessary to say this.”10 While Eliot’s satisfaction with his banking career varies over time and according to audience, it can be stated definitively that he chose, for whatever reason, to occupy his time with banking for eight formative years and that the occupation influenced his political and aesthetic perspectives. The primary excuse Eliot gave for remaining at Lloyds was poverty. He feared that without his sizable salary he would not be able to bear his wife’s medical bills or sustain their accustomed standard of living. But, as Paul Delany points out in his account of Eliot’s personal finances, between entitlements, investments, publishing contracts, and potential editorial wages, Eliot could have easily out-earned Pound, the Woolfs, and several of the other would-be benefactors who conspired unsuccessfully to subsidize his unemployment. The Eliots were never as poor as they led their literary friends to believe. Tom and Vivien had an effete misconception of financial insecurity. Eliot was not blind to this. His desire to keep the Bel Esprit scheme out of the papers, especially the American papers, originates from his recognition that there was something vulgar and hypocritical about a campaign to raise money so the son of a CEO, the grandson of the founder of Washington University, and the son-in-law of an English real estate mogul, could more avidly pursue his poetic career. But while the Eliots were never as insolvent as they claimed, Tom’s position at Lloyds did make him more likely than most to anticipate the volatility of international markets in the coming years, best exemplified by the Crash of 1929. We might attribute to him, rather than simple fiscal conservatism, an abnormal prescience, as he foresaw that even his substantial personal and familial holdings in American securities and real estate were no guarantee of permanent prosperity.

136

Matt Seybold

That said, if Lloyds were truly nothing more than “stop-gap” employment, as Eliot described it to the Harvard professor who directed his dissertation in 1917, by 1922 it had served its purpose.11 Only the most extraordinary circumstances could ruin the Eliots. Tom had multiple streams of income and an ever-growing cache of alternative job offers. He had become one of the most famous writers of his generation, perhaps the greatest generation of literary celebrities. As early as 1919, Eliot bragged to his mother, “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me.”12 Eliot was no longer the young lecturer unsure of his talents, seduced by the security of the corporation. Still, he did not quit his day job, outraging Pound and Aldington, who declared “Eliot has funked his responsibilities to us since 1921.”13 It was reasonable for Eliot’s patrons to conclude, as Lady Rothermere did, that Eliot actually liked banking. Most scholars prefer the perspective Pound proffered in “Credit and the Fine Arts” (1922), that The Waste Land was “clear proof of restriction of output, due to enforced waste of his time and energy in banking.”14 Pound does not acknowledge that much of The Waste Land was written before Eliot’s leave of absence, in tandem with his analysis of German reparations. What was overlooked by Eliot’s contemporaries and the subsequent century of scholarship is that nestled in the seeming obscurity of Lloyds’s Lombard Street offices, Eliot found a seat of cultural influence that was equal to any editorship. Eliot believed, at least as early as 1919, that he could influence bank policy. During the reparation debates of 1921, he did. In 1923, in an effort to retain Eliot, Lloyds preliminarily established a new department, with the ascendant poet at its head. While editing a high-profile periodical like The Nation would likely have yielded to Eliot a disperse but substantial cultural power (as The Criterion eventually proved), Eliot did not underestimate the possibility that via a massive financial institution like Lloyds he might exert more direct influence on interbellum politics, in which he admitted being “violently interested.”15 Lloyds was the second

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

137

largest and the fastest growing bank in Britain. During Eliot’s tenure, it increasingly influenced British economic policy and was an active participant in international political economy. At least until early 1925, Eliot continued to believe that what he did “was not ordinary bank work at all, but economic work . . . of a very interesting and important kind.”16 Lloyds Bank offered him more than just a steady paycheck. It offered him intellectual challenges. From the moment he was hired, in 1917, Eliot saw the bank expressly as a portal through which he might better appreciate the modern world he found both “fascinating” and “a complete nightmare.”17 Eliot was a Bakhtinian reader, constantly craving greater omniscience and greater agency within the bank. He told his father, “One can from time to time see very big things happening in which one plays a small part without really knowing what is going on.”18 So long as the Great War continued, there were few employees with either the desire or the wherewithal to appreciate the scope and scale of the bank’s interests. Those who did, especially if they happened to be WASP-y men, enjoyed rapid promotion and expansive access to the bank’s wide-ranging operations. Eliot received his first promotion after only two months, telling his mother, “The bank is so shorthanded now that there is a good chance of moving about the office and learning several branches of the business.”19 During the first two years of his employment, Eliot never spent more than a few months in one position and often wore several hats simultaneously. The bank’s shorthanded-ness was only partially attributable to World War I enlistments. During the period of Eliot’s employment, extending into the post-war years, Lloyds Bank undertook an unprecedented program of amalgamation, expansion, and diversification, which would remain without parallel until late in the twentieth century.20 Lloyds acquired either outright or in part dozens of smaller banks from both England and mainland Europe. Its purchase of Capital and Counties Bank in 1918 was the biggest merger of its kind to that date and a direct response to large acquisitions by Barclays and Midland Bank (now HSBC) in the preceding weeks. From this competitive

138

Matt Seybold

conglomeration emerged what would come to be known as the “Big Five”: the clearing-house banks that would define the industry for the remainder of the century. The rapidity and magnitude of this series of mergers naturally met with wariness. This “vast change in British banking organization, accomplished with very startling rapidity,” as a London Times editorial put it, provoked the characteristic cultural anxiety of the interbellum period. A series of parliamentary inquiries begun in response would set the tone for ongoing hostilities between a transitional government and a financial community suspected both of profiteering during the War and opportunistically preying upon the confusion of the Peace. Lloyds executives, led by Sir Richard Vassar-Smith, saw amalgamation as necessary to survival, yet no company could be fully prepared for such a profound expansion of infrastructure, especially when human capital was scarce. Eliot felt fortunate to be gainfully employed, but soon realized that Lloyds’s desperation mimicked his own. Eliot told his sister, “The business is so huge that I don’t suppose more than half a dozen men in the bank know more than their own little corner of it.”21 Employees with innate intelligence and curiosity were rare assets. Beginning with his promotion to the Information Department in March 1919, Eliot was given uncommon access to the bank’s increasingly diverse assets, operations, and strategic ambitions, so that he might more accurately evaluate outstanding debts, overseas exposures, trade imbalances, and currency rates. For at least two years, his time was largely occupied with testing macroeconomic theories— especially those that Keynes espoused in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)—against the microeconomic evidence of Lloyds’s ledgers. At every stage of his employment, Eliot was characteristically attentive to minutiae. He enjoyed aspects of this work that many found tedious because he treated every transcription and transaction as part of a global macroeconomic narrative in which Lloyds was a somewhat unreliable protagonist whom Eliot might ultimately badger into greater omniscience. Throughout his time at Lloyds, Eliot continued to see the bank as an apparatus for perceiving and perhaps even influencing the

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

139

complex and disperse superstructures of the post-war world. Lloyds’s accelerated expansion gave him greater access to the global perspective he coveted, but it also made him constantly aware of the horizon of his understanding. Despite his talent, access, and ambition, even he could not comprehend the whole of either the bank or the global economy it was trying to navigate.

A Unique Service of Intelligence The standard account of Eliot’s career at Lloyds is the one given by Lawrence Rainey in his introduction to The Annotated Waste Land (2005). Eliot began in the Colonial and Foreign Department, was transferred to the Information Department in 1919, and returned to Colonial and Foreign in 1923. His primary responsibility was “track[ing] movements in exchange rates against the background of economic and political developments.”22 Neither Rainey, nor any other scholar to my knowledge, acknowledges that Eliot was promoted to head his own probationary department sometime in late 1922, perhaps because letters from this portion of his tenure were not published until 2009. Eliot first reported what would prove to be his final promotion on January 2, 1923, though descriptions in this and future letters suggest he had already been working in the position for several weeks and may have anticipated its creation soon after he returned from his leave of absence a year earlier. He described the job to his brother: “I am now head of an Intelligence Department with a number of clerks under me, and in sole charge. I have had to organise the department, and the orginisation is still far from complete. On the contrary, they are just on the point of enlarging the scope of the department much more.”23 As an avid reader of American Renaissance literature, Eliot no doubt found some irony in being responsible for a fledgling “intelligence office,” the ambitions of which were not entirely incongruous with what Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined.24 However, though he clearly influenced the department’s conception and took a personal stake in its

140

Matt Seybold

success, Eliot was not responsible for its christening. According to financial historian Richard Roberts, Intelligence Departments were increasingly common in large banking conglomerates like Lloyds. The Bank of England, renowned for bureaucratic symbiosis with the British Cabinet, was the first of the “Big Five” to establish one in 1918. They were followed closely by Barclays, which reported upon chartering their own that “many such departments are now in operation in leading banks both at home and abroad.”25 As Eliot had observed, presciently, during his early months at Lloyds, the assets and liabilities of such banking conglomerates were so numerous and diverse that it was increasingly difficult for branch managers, and even executives, to keep track of the positions of the corporation they worked for. The three years Eliot spent in the Information Department made him increasingly sensitive to the challenges of cataloging the operations of the vast bureaucracy and efficiently distributing relevant information to the parties who needed it most. In “Eliot Among the Typists,” Rainey describes the Information Department as representative of a “new office culture which had only recently taken form, an interlocking grid of new communication and storageand-retrieval technologies—typewriters, telephones, dictaphones, adding machines, duplicators, loose-leaf ledgers, card indexes, and vertical filing systems.”26 Information Departments remained repositories for bank records, while Intelligence Departments were tasked with contextualizing the information therein and distributing it where appropriate, keeping employees informed and “on message.” According to Roberts, Intelligence Departments were introduced “to answer enquiries on economic and financial matters from the branches and clients.”27 Eliot offers an observation that corroborates Roberts’s characterization: “The bank is getting bigger and bigger, with interests practically all over the world, and affiliated banks everywhere, and there is an opportunity to create a service of Intelligence which would be quite unique.”28 Among the foremost services of Intelligence Departments was the creation and distribution of what business schools now call “internal

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

141

communications,” publications designed specifically for employees and subsets of employees. These were also a relatively new innovation. The first British bank reviews began publication in 1914. Lloyds Bank Monthly began its run in 1917, the year Eliot was hired. Eliot would, beginning in 1923, be tasked with writing Monthly’s “Foreign Exchanges” columns.29 In 1918, Lloyds was the first of the “Big Five” banks to follow the recommendation of the Cunliffe Committee to make financial reports public.30 The bank remained an innovator in business publications throughout the interwar period. They recruited experienced financial journalists and published essays by experts unaffiliated with the bank, including Keynes. In 1919, Lloyds added a staff magazine named after the company logo, The Dark Horse. This was followed by Extracts From The Foreign Press in 1922, a daily compilation of relevant international news modeled after a newsletter published by the War Office from 1916 to 1919. Eliot was responsible for Extracts from its inauguration, which likely contributed to his being tabbed to head Intelligence. According to Eliot, “the heads of [Lloyds] [were] anxious to make a big thing of it” and “they had [him] in view from the inception of the idea.” Eliot assures his brother it “is not a boast” when he says “there is at present no one else in the bank but myself who can do it.”31 Considering the qualifications for the position included a cultivated understanding of the bank’s enormous infrastructure, a broad education in domestic and international finance, expansive editorial experience, multilingualism, and the ability to operate a printing press, Eliot probably was uniquely qualified. Intelligence became Eliot’s passion project. By February 1924, he reported having seven subordinates, as well as “much more responsibility and worry.” The Department had been downgraded to a Section and folded rather arbitrarily into the Colonial & Foreign Department, with which it developed an uneasy relationship. Eliot reported having to “fight other departments that interfere with mine.”32 When Eliot resigned from Lloyds, it was for the Intelligence Section he expressed the most regret. It had been enough to prolong his Lloyds employment

142

Matt Seybold

for nearly three years, but Lloyds’s failure to properly support it was the “final straw” which compelled him to quit. In his resignation letter, he wrote, “I should have liked to see the Intelligence Section a reality—it has never been more than the aspiration of a few persons, including myself.”33

A Kind of Writing The Intelligence Department subsumed many of the responsibilities Eliot had been engaged in since returning from his leave of absence. The promotion gave him greater autonomy and allowed for greater engagement in the kind of work he began with Extracts From the Foreign Press, the compilation of which remained the centerpiece of Eliot’s daily routine for the remaining years of his employment. To facilitate its publication, he read somewhere between ten and twenty daily newspapers from Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. As much as any duty he performed at Lloyds, including the analysis of the Peace Treaties, Eliot took ownership of Extracts. It was an ambitiously transnational geopolitical collage, a description, one might observe, no less befitting of The Waste Land. Richard Poirier describes the poem as “a medley of voices no one of which can be assigned to Eliot” and asserts that Eliot became “a poet of immediate contemporary significance” after The Waste Land because “he [chose] to devalue literature in the interests of the preeminent values of language.” I contend that what Poirier calls the “poignantly tough and very unacademic lesson” that “language must often be saved from what poetry has done to it,” Eliot learned not only from philosophy, lecturing, or editing, but also from banking, specifically from Extracts.34 Using the score of newspapers procured for him as both means and medium, Eliot composed daily reports on the entropic progress of modernity. He used the potentially cacophonous prose of journalists from five continents and the corresponding fluctuations of commodities and securities markets to present a captive audience of Lloyds

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

143

bankers with his vision of the Sturm und Drang of globalization: the myopia of American isolationism, the vengefulness of the Versailles creditors, the cruelty of German hyperinflation, the compensatory appeal of ideological fascism across Europe and Asia, the decay of imperial power in India and the Middle East, and the capitalist carpetbagging of Africa and South America. Extracts required Eliot to imagine and interpret, on a daily basis, all the chaotic forces of international commerce and all the disparate voices of global politics as both digestible lingua franca and factors in a grand equation. Every morning he was forced to anticipate whether the invisible hand would write the fortunes of Lloyds Bank in red or black ink. Extracts began as a blatant imitation of the publication with the same title produced by Britain’s Foreign Office during the War. In the aftermath, Prime Minister David Lloyd George quarreled with the department he had empowered to manage the commercial and media theaters of his “total war” initiative. Beginning in 1918, Lloyds, which was overtly opposed to George’s isolationist policies, hired numerous veterans of the embattled Foreign Office, who brought their deep familiarity with the financial landscape of mainland Europe directly into the departments Eliot worked for. They also brought with them the Foreign Office’s obsession with the “war of words,” a fastidious analysis of the public discourse of foreign nations for the purpose of exposing and debunking propaganda. Diplomats employed in this effort were ingrained with an aversion to isolationist regimes and partisan polemics, as well as a strong affinity for the fourth estate. A free, diversified, and subversive press they believed to be the antidote to authoritarianism. The formation of the Intelligence Department and the expansion of Lloyds’s stable of internal publications was likely supported, in large part, by refugees of the Foreign Office, where intelligence had long been a euphemism for “printing stuff ” and an intentional counterpoint to the “espionage” connotation frequently invoked by the Prime Minister.35 Veterans of the Foreign Office, many of whom sympathized with Keynes, would likely have been drawn to Eliot. The self-assured,

144

Matt Seybold

dispassionate cultural exegesis he demonstrated in The Sacred Wood (1920) was well-suited to the ethos of their former employer. Like them, he was socially connected within Lloyds and in London generally, but he possessed no party allegiance, despite his “violent interest” in politics, making him an unlikely propagandist. He had a cultivated understanding of the bank’s enormous infrastructure and proven expertise in domestic and international finance. Even the fact that he could at any time leave for a lucrative editorship might have been viewed as advantageous, because it made him an unlikely lackey. Those who wanted the company’s publications to present diverse perspectives unencumbered by the preferences of executives could take solace in the fact Eliot never seemed to care what other bankers thought of him. Eliot called Extracts “a kind of writing.”36 During his early months at Lloyds, he describes educating himself in political economy, international governance, and diplomacy in order to better understand the macroeconomic narratives encoded in the documents he was translating. Eliot’s peers and superiors were increasingly interested in what he was decoding. With the inception of Extracts, this exegesis, which began as a mechanism for coping with the job, became the job. As pressure to profit from this macroeconomic “figure in the carpet” mounted, Eliot became the kind of creative reader we conventionally associate with postmodernism. He was the Oedipa Maas of the foreign press. His attempts to interpret and predict the alphanumeric rhythms of the interbellum world left him distraught, paranoid, and exhausted. But to abandon his post likely meant shuttering the department he helped create, a department whose service he believed was essential not only to the stability of the bank, but to shaping economic debates in Britain and abroad. Resigning would also place a severe restriction on Eliot’s knowledge of the monetary, aesthetic, and rhetorical currencies which had been essential to the worldview of his most successful poetry, as well as renouncing his most direct and tangible access to political power. The Waste Land was moving, even

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

145

Keynes admitted that as he read it aloud to himself in the autumn of 1922. But a monolithic bank like Lloyds moved markets. Not just moved them—made them. In interbellum Europe there were few powers more important. Eliot had a keen awareness that dictating how bankers looked at and talked about the world could have profound ramifications.

Is Banking Soul Destroying? Eliot was so busy in the fall of 1922, his wife feared a recurrence of the exhaustion he suffered the previous year. Most famously, he was revising The Waste Land and negotiating its publication, as well as preparing the inaugural issue of The Criterion, which would go to press on the ides of October. But that was merely his “night work.” On weekdays, Eliot produced Extracts, more or less single-handedly, for distribution to approximately 1,500 Lloyds branches, so that the rapidly growing corporation might maintain a uniform vision of the volatile commercial landscape of the Interbellum. The production and distribution of Extracts brought Eliot into closer association with those responsible for Lloyds’s other internal publications, including George Boyle, the editor of Lloyds’s “staff magazine,” The Dark Horse. Boyle asked Eliot, who had likely recently become his boss, to judge a writing competition for Lloyds employees. Whether by civility or obligation, Eliot complied. The deadline for entering the contest was the day after The Criterion went to press. So, after months of bickering with Pound about The Waste Land and with Lady Rothermere about the relative merits of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse, Eliot immediately turned to analyzing a deluge of submissions from all the amateur writers amongst Lloyds 10,000 employees. Each afternoon, after he figured out how to condense Mussolini’s March on Rome, the rise of the Nazis, and the Lenin-Stalin feud into one disposable page of Extracts, Eliot read “satirical poems” on “The Fall in the Cost of Living” and “The Housing Problem.”

146

Matt Seybold

Figure 1. Detail of masthead for The Dark Horse. © The British Library Board, P.P.5793.nca.

Based on the quality of the prizewinners published three months later, we can safely assume this was painful reading for Eliot and his famously refined literary tastes. Describing the best short story, which climaxes by making a ham-handed homonym of lawyer and liar, Eliot offers this backhanded compliment: “the plot is admirably suited to the space prescribed.”37 The prizewinning poem is much, much worse. However, in my account of Eliot’s career as a banker, what is relevant about The Dark Horse prizes is not who won them, or even that Eliot was the judge, but merely that they existed at all. The contests, like many aspects of the magazine, encouraged employees to pursue extra-professional ambitions at Lloyds’s expense. Its eclectic content— including poems, essays, book and theater reviews, sports writing, acrostic puzzles, photography, and cartoons—enabled them to indulge diverse cultural affinities on company time. And, most shockingly, nearly every issue featured an invitation to think critically or even satirically about the company they worked for. Alongside the literary contests Eliot condescended to judge, Lloyds employees were invited to submit essays on the topic, “What would you consider the ideal bank magazine?”38 The contest indicates that the organization of the Intelligence Department was underway. Discussion of the “ideal bank magazine” continued to dominate the “Editorial Notes” and “Letters to the Editor” sections well into 1923.39

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

147

Figure 2. “The Fall in the Cost of Living.” Eliot chose not to comment on his selection for the “satirical poem” prize, authored by Mr. C. C. Sumsion. © The British Library Board, P.P.5793.nca.

148

Matt Seybold

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

149

150

Matt Seybold

The August issue also featured the first installment of what would become a permanent feature during Eliot’s tenure: an annotated bibliography of publications from other banks in the UK and mainland Europe. Eliot and the Lloyds executives who supported him were, quite literally, gathering intelligence. The Dark Horse archive is the archeological record of a species of corporation who did not survive the epoch of neoliberalism. In the context of Eliot scholarship, it answers two questions: why did he stay at Lloyds for at least three years longer than necessity demanded and, in the face of his burgeoning celebrity and constant rumors of his imminent resignation, why did Lloyds continue to promote him? Even among bank executives, there was a contingent expressly dedicated to promoting literary culture and humanist discourse among employees. Lloyds executives recognized that the extra-professional features of The Dark Horse were not anti-conformist distractions, but rather encouraged employees to more thoughtfully organize and interpret their inevitably incomplete impressions of the modern world. Like The Criterion and other modernist publications, Lloyds’s internal communications fostered a sense of shared identity for an increasingly vast and disparate readership. During the same week Eliot was reading submissions to The Dark Horse competitions, Vivien Eliot began the chain of furious correspondence with Pound, warning him that Lady Rothermere had sent “three offensive letters” expressing her dissatisfaction with The Criterion’s initial reception. Vivien is transparently prejudiced toward her husband’s patron. She attributes Eliot’s waning health foremost to these letters, not to other, more obviously taxing, activities. Boldly, she asks Pound to give Eliot the Bel Esprit funds “without the condition that he leaves the Bank immediately.” This “condition” was, of course, the very premise of the project. Vivien suggests they should instead use the money to buy The Criterion from Lady Rothermere, who, she speculates, “is just furious at having promised money for something she now hates and is bored with.”40

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

151

Pound did not object, as Vivien did, to Lady Rothermere’s recent Dionysian diversions such as dancing naked with Katherine Mansfield in a Parisian monastery. And it was hard for him to take seriously her exasperation with a meddling patron when the whole “run” of the disputed periodical amounted to a single two-week-old issue. He replied, “She hasn’t committed any greater crime than saying the review is dull. . . . I don’t see that the insult is very deadly. . . . Lady Rothermere is a natural force, to be exploited. . . . Is she paying the bills? . . . As long as she goes on doing that / Ask not for roses.”41 He mocks the idea of flushing Bel Esprit money into The Criterion, which he calls “a tube down which someone else’s funds flow toward YOU.”42 This would seem to put an end to the discussion, but another letter arrived the next day, which prominently featured a five-hundred word misogynist rant which Pound began by calling Lady Rothermere a “hot bitch.”43 Pound justifies the reversal of his opinion by including a relatively innocuous letter he received in the interim. In it, Lady Rothermere pledges continued support to The Criterion so long as it is a source of income for Eliot and an outlet for his work. At worst, she is guilty of politely chastising Pound and, vicariously, Vivien, for being intrusive busybodies. She wonders, justifiably, whether publishing one issue of a “slender quarterly” is really the most apparent impediment to Eliot’s health. She recommends “fresh air, exercise, and proper nourishment.” But the line Pound takes special offense to is this: “With regard to the suggestion that he should leave the bank I really do not think that it is anyone’s business but Eliot’s and my impression is that he likes the work even if it is exacting.”44 Pound protests too much. Evidently, despite having spent five months soliciting pledges to Bel Esprit, he suspects all his efforts might be for naught. Eliot might not want to leave Lloyds. Lady Rothermere’s words were likely still fresh in his mind a week later when the Liverpool Daily Post reported Eliot had accepted similar charity in 1920 by saying, “Thank you all very much; I shall make good use of the money, but I like the bank!”45 This Eliot vehemently denied, but he turned

152

Matt Seybold

Figure 3. Is Banking Soul Destroying? The Dark Horse frequently printed cartoons submitted by employees, including several by the artist of the above, Mr. M. F. Read. © The British Library Board, P.P.5793.nca.

down the Bel Esprit funds just the same, stipulating that the price of his retirement was £500 per annum for the rest of his and Vivien’s lives. Lady Rothermere’s innocuous comment offended Pound because it contradicted the very premise of his Bel Esprit scheme. She subtly posited that The Waste Land was evidence that, rather than retiring to the pursuit of pure poetry, for the sake of the “modern movement,” Eliot should keep doing exactly as he had been doing throughout the poem’s composition: working at Lloyds Bank. This counterargument has generally been ignored, as scholars tend to answer affirmatively to the question posed by the 1923 Dark Horse cartoon, “Is Banking Soul Destroying?”46 In the era of moral hazard, during which the bloated conglomeration descended from Eliot’s employer has been prosecuted for tax

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

153

evasion, labor exploitation, breaching international embargo, and money-laundering, among other sins, it is understandable that Eliot scholars have been reluctant to celebrate the contributions of Lloyds Bank to the moral imagination. But, as with the contests Eliot judged, the presence of this cartoon in a magazine bearing the bank’s logo testifies to an atmosphere antithetical to the antiseptic, brand-obsessed corporate culture of the twenty-first century. Eliot was increasingly involved in nurturing a permissive, self-critical, and overtly literary culture at Lloyds. The conception and publications of the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department expressly contradict Pound’s presumptions about Lloyds. Lloyds sought, at least for a brief time, to be “modern” in the very ways Pound did and, like Pound, they recognized Eliot’s talent. Like any astute brokerage, they were willing to outbid Bel Esprit, Lady Rothermere, and Keynes to retain his services. Most Eliot scholars have mourned what modernist poetry may have lost because Eliot waited so long to quit banking, but I can’t help wondering what kind of corporate modernism we might have, if he, and more like him, had been compelled to stay. Notes My quotes from the “for private circulation only” Bel Esprit come from the copy in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at University of Virginia. PS3531 .O82 B4 1922. 2 Michael Levenson, “Does The Waste Land Have a Politics?” Modernism/ Modernity 6, no. 3 (1999), 2. 3 Paul Delany, Literature, Money, & the Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005); Adam Trexler, “Economics,” in Eliot in Context. Edited by Jason Harding (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011). 4 L2, 770–71. 5 L1, 181. 6 L2, 284. 7 I. A. Richards, “On T. S. Eliot,” in T. S. Eliot: The Man & His Work. Edited by Allen Tate (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966), 4. 8 L2, 85–86. 9 L2, 393. 1

154 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

Matt Seybold L1, 788. L1, 188. L1, 331. L2, 86. Ezra Pound, “Credit and the Fine Arts,” The New Age (March 30, 1922), 285. L1, 182. L1, 330. L1, 182 and 189. L1, 203. L1, 200. By the time Eliot resigned in 1925, Lloyds managed nearly 21% of all British deposits. It would never eclipse this share of the market. The proportion of total wealth managed had increased by nearly 25% since 1917. The value of its shares was up by over 60%. In the United Kingdom alone, expansion provoked the hiring of more than 3,000 new employees, including an unprecedented number of women, and the opening of over 350 new branches. And, such figures do not even account for the 473 branches absorbed in the Capital & Counties merger alone. The above account is cribbed primarily from J. R. Winton, Lloyds Bank, 1918–1969 (New York: Oxford UP, 1982). L1, 185. T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Edited by Lawrence Rainey (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), 10. L2, 2. The trope was introduced in Emerson’s “The Young American” and Hawthorne’s “The Intelligence Office,” both published in the spring of 1844 and likely composed while the two were in frequent conversation with one another. Herman Melville also references the concept in The Confidence-Man (1857). Richard Roberts, “A Special Place in Contemporary Economic Literature: The Rise & Fall of the British Bank Review, 1914–1993,” Financial History Review 2, no. 1 (1995), n47. Lawrence Rainey, “Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land,” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 1 (2005), 65. Roberts, “A Special Place in Contemporary Economic Literature,” 47. L2, 2. These columns deserve more extensive treatment than they have thus far received or than I have space for here. It will have to suffice to say that in form and content they are a natural extension of the Intelligence Department publications discussed in this essay, each of which predated Eliot’s involvement with Lloyds Bank Monthly.

T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

155

30 The Cunliffe Committee, chaired by Governor of the Bank of England and staunch conservative, Walter Cunliffe, was comprised of economists and financiers, including Keynes (who quarreled with the Committee’s final recommendation). It was charged with planning monetary and fiscal policy for the transition to peace. The Committee’s desire to access the internal records of clearing-house banks may be an early indication of the mutually suspicious relationship between government and private commerce, which would grow overtly hostile in the 1920s. Though Lloyds was the first to comply with this recommendation, they did not do so until 1927. 31 L2, 2. 32 L2, 319. 33 L2, 770. 34 Richard Poirier, The Performing Self (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 47–48. 35 See G. H. Bennett, “Lloyd George, Curzon & the Control of British Foreign Policy, 1919–1922,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 45, no. 4 (1999), 467–82; Gaynor Johnson, The Foreign Office & British Diplomacy in the 20th-Century (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office & Foreign Policy, 1919–1926 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1994). 36 L2, 255. 37 “Result of our August Competition,” The Dark Horse 3, no. 12 (1922), 633. 38 “Prize Competitions,” The Dark Horse 3, no. 9 (1922), 474. 39 “Editorial Notes” & “The Editor’s Post Bag,” The Dark Horse 4, no. 3 (1923), 126–30; 169–73. 40 L1, 770–71. 41 L1, 779–80. 42 L1, 780. 43 L1, 782. 44 L1, 782–83. 45 L1, 790. 46 “Is Banking Soul Destroying?” The Dark Horse 5, no. 1 (1923), 34.

Aristophanic Structures in Sweeney Agonistes, “The Hollow Men,” and Murder in the Cathedral Joshua Richards

T

. S. Eliot subtitled Sweeney Agonistes, his first foray into drama, as “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” The nature of this descriptor has been occasionally explored, although more often with reference to Eliot’s five-page outline of the projected play (referred to as “The Superior Landlord” manuscript) than in relation to the technical material that may have informed his composition.1 For instance, examining the extant text of Sweeney Agonistes in light of Attic Old Comedy suggests that Doris, and not Sweeney, is the protagonist of the fragmentary play. Yet, Eliot’s deep interest in Aristophanic structures has implications for works other than Sweeney Agonistes. Two fragments, “Eyes that I last saw in tears” and “The wind sprang up,” were published together with what became “The Hollow Men” III under the collective title “Doris’s Dream Songs” in 1924.2 Even at this late stage, Sweeney Agonistes and “The Hollow Men” may not have been wholly distinct, and Aristophanic elements, such as antichoria (the division of the chorus into halves, performing antiphonally), seem to

157

158

Joshua Richards

remain in “The Hollow Men” as a residue of the two works’ unified origin.3 Additionally, by his own admission, Eliot was a tentative dramatist when he began his first complete play, Murder in the Cathedral.4 He returned to a ritual structure, that of Aristophanes, when he composed the play. E. Martin Browne, commenting on an early draft of Murder in the Cathedral, states that “[i]t will be noticed that there appear two historical characters, Herbert of Bosham and John, Dean of Salisbury. . . . They clearly have been sacrificed to the formal pattern.”5 What this formal pattern constituted Browne does not state. I hypothesize that it is the ritual structure of the Aristophanic play adapted to the religious pageant play. This ritual structure may not only explain some of the play’s more elusive features such as the sermon or the knight’s defense but also reveal hidden thematic resonances. Eliot was deeply engaged with Attic Old Comedy at the time when he wrote Sweeney Agonistes and “The Hollow Men.”6 One of the first apparent references to Sweeney Agonistes is in a 1923 letter to Ezra Pound, wherein Eliot comments cryptically, “Have mapt out Aristophanic comedy, but must devote study to phallic songs, also agons.”7 There are two matters of note here: The first is that Eliot conceived the play initially as a “comedy.” The second is that Eliot studied the Aristophanic form—the designation is not flippant. In an aside in his 1919 essay “Ben Jonson,” Eliot singles out Aristophanic drama for its prescribed form: [T]he classification of tragedy and comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic literature of more rigid form and treatment—it may distinguish Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of such variations as the Elizabethans.8 Even before writing Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot considered structure a defining characteristic of Aristophanes’s work. Buttram argues that Eliot was suspicious of the binary between comedy and tragedy. The

Aristophanic Structures

159

comment in “Ben Jonson” supports her claim with the caveat of Aristophanes, which complicates the application to Sweeney Agonistes. In other words, Eliot considered “rigid form and treatment” to be an intrinsic part of the plays of Aristophanes, and so it follows that they would feature in his own Aristophanic play.9 References to Aristophanes effloresce in Eliot’s critical prose and correspondence around the writing of Sweeney Agonistes; none seem to exist in his letters or prose before 1919, and there is only one reference to Aristophanes in the published letters after 1925: a response to a question about Sweeney Agonistes.10 Evidence of Eliot’s interest in Aristophanes, synonymous with Attic Old Comedy, appears first in references in both the aforementioned essay on Ben Jonson and in his influential essay “Philip Massinger.”11 Additionally, a letter dated 1920 from his mother lists Aristophanes’s Birds among his books, and Eliot attempted to attend a performance of the play in the original Greek in 1924.12 However, references to Aristophanes in Eliot’s writings appear most commonly in the context of his study of F. M. Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914). In fact, one of the very first contributors he sought for The Criterion was Cornford, of whom he asked “a contribution . . . on some subject which would be of interest to readers of your Origin of Attic Comedy.”13 Eliot had glowingly praised the book in his essay “Euripides and Professor Murray,” noting that “[f]ew 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.”14 Later in 1924, Eliot aligns Cornford with Jessie Weston, whom he credits in the notes to The Waste Land for providing “[n]ot only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem.”15 However meretricious this homage to Weston may be, he similarly implied that he relied on Cornford as an organizational frame at the time of Sweeney Agonistes and “The Hollow Men” in a 1933 letter addressed to Hallie Flanagan, the director of a production of Sweeney at Vassar College. After providing some additional stage directions (such as “Sweeney in the middle with a chafing dish scrambling eggs”), Eliot directed Flanagan to Cornford’s Origins

160

Joshua Richards

of Attic Comedy, remarking that it “is important to read before you do the play.”16 Eliot’s comment aligns with the critical consensus: the structure of Sweeney Agonistes is based on Cornford’s book.17 However, Eliot’s enthusiasm for this obscure work means that useful applications are to be found in the details of Cornford’s text, not merely the broad outlines previously considered by scholars. To recapitulate Cornford’s theory: all plays by Aristophanes, and presumptively all of Attic Old Comedy, follow a “canonical plotformula,” which “preserves the stereotyped action of a ritual or folk drama.”18 The first half of the play contains three parts: a Prologue, which consists of “exposition scenes”; the Parodos (πάροδος), which is the entrance of the chorus and their initial song; and then the Agon (ἀγών), “a fierce ‘contest’ between the representatives of two parties or principles, which are in effect the hero and villain of the whole piece.”19 After the Agon comes the Parabasis (παράβᾰσις), an idiosyncratic feature of Old Comedy, wherein the Chorus bids “farewell to the actors, who leave the stage clear till it is over, and then return to carry on the business of the piece to the end.”20 During the Parabasis, the Chorus comes forward “to address the audience directly.”21 After the return of the actors, there are scenes of “Sacrifice and a Feast” interrupted “by a series of unwelcome intruders,” generally stock characters labeled by Cornford collectively as Impostors, “who are successively put to derision by the protagonist and driven away with blows.”22 A second Parabasis may then be included, primarily in Aristophanes’s earliest plays. The play concludes with “a festal procession” called a Kômos (κῶμος) wherein the victorious party is celebrated in a scene that often resembles, distantly, a wedding; the chorus exits in a procession called an Exodos (ἔξοδος).23 In the case of Sweeney Agonistes, only two parts are extant: the Prologue and the Agon. Cornford’s plot-formula is not sufficiently rigid to extrapolate the whole from these remaining parts. Yet, an analysis of Cornford does allow us to identify Doris as the protagonist of the play. The tacit assumption by most readers that Sweeney is the protagonist seems based on his recurrence in Eliot’s other poetry and on

Aristophanic Structures

161

the inclusion of his name in the play’s title. However, Sweeney is not included in the Prologue, and all of Aristophanes’s extant plays open with their protagonist. Moreover, that Doris may be the protagonist of Sweeney Agonistes is corroborated by the play’s incomplete second section, “Fragment of an Agon.” According to Cornford, the Agon is to be understood as “a dramatized debate . . . in which the persons represent opposing principles.”24 Yet, it is also a tightly structured debate; regarding the Agon’s form, Cornford asserts: The structure of the regular Agon is antiphonal, in two balanced halves. First comes the Ode, in which half the Chorus, according as their sympathies incline, encourage one or both the adversaries to do their utmost. Then the Leader, in the Katakeleusmos, calls on the Antagonist to speak first. The party who will ultimately be defeated always begins. He opens his case in the Epirrheme, usually interrupted by objections and questions from the [protagonist]. The passage ends in a Pnigos. The second part is parallel in form and contents. . . . Finally, in the Sphragis, the leader of the Chorus pronounces a verdict in favor of the [protagonist].25 In other words, after an initial choral ode, the chorus leader invites the Antagonist to speak with interjections from the protagonist, building to a wild, shouting climax in the Pnigos (πνῖγος). There is another ode, and then the protagonist gives his or her own speech (also ending in a Pnigos). Finally, the chorus-leader declares victory for the protagonist. While the structure of the Agon can vary slightly in some instances it is consistent enough to determine, largely, what is missing from “Fragment of an Agon.”26 We have neither the initial Ode, nor the Katakeleusmos (κατακελευσμός), nor the Sphragis (σφρᾱγίς) of the Agon in Sweeney Agonistes.27 Sweeney’s final long speech (lines 131–53) may be the Pnigos, though this is far from certain as Doris receives an interjection and Sweeney speaks again. Thus, the only portion that we possess appears to be all (or most)

162

Joshua Richards

of Sweeney’s Epirrheme, interrupted by choral odes/songs, which Cornford allows in the genre, citing the example of the Thesmophoriazusae.28 Returning to the issue at hand, Cornford is unequivocal that “[t]he party who will ultimately be defeated always begins.”29 Thus, unless what remains is only the second half of the Agon (where this would be the rebuttal), Doris is the protagonist. However, Sweeney’s speeches are unlikely to have been conceived as the rebuttal given that rebuttals are invariably and significantly shorter—usually only forty lines; the lengths of the Epirrheme quoted in Cornford’s footnotes, by contrast, are between seventy and eighty lines.30 Finally, there is an established tradition of female protagonists in Aristophanes, a tradition that would be continued by Eliot’s taking Doris as his protagonist. Identifying Doris as Sweeney’s protagonist helps to account for one of the more puzzling passages in the “Fragment of an Agon”: Sweeney’s extended threat to cook Doris “[i]nto a stew.” This is not merely the normal assortment of threats and invective that accompany an Agon, nor is it a bizarre non sequitur to the discussion of the murder in the second portion of the Agon. One of the core aspects of Cornford’s thesis is the connection of the Agon to “ritual contests between the representatives of Summer and Winter, Life and Death.”31 Cornford goes on to connect this to the Mummer’s Plays and the myth of St. George, the forms of folk-drama with which his readers would have been familiar, with a distinct emphasis on the resurrection of the protagonist.32 An aside in “The Beating of a Drum” (1923), written around the same time as he began Sweeney Agonistes and “The Hollow Men,” confirms Eliot’s attention to this very passage: The prototype of the true Fool, according to my conjecture, is a character in that English version of the Perseus legend, the Mummers’ Play of St. George and the Dragon. The Doctor who restores St. George to life is, I understand, usually presented as a comic character. As Mr. Cornford suggests, in The Origin of Attic Comedy, this Doctor may be identical with the Doctor

Aristophanic Structures

163

who is called in to assist Punch after he has been thrown from his horse.33 Eliot concurs with Cornford, connecting Punch to the core action of the folk-dramas that underlie the Aristophanic play: “the hero’s simulated death and revival by the Doctor, and a fierce Agon with an adversary.”34 This theme was even more pronounced in “The Superior Landlord,” where Sweeney actually shoots Mrs. Porter, though she is later revived.35 It is not necessary to assume that such an event would have actually occurred in Sweeney Agonistes, though. Cornford states that in the Agon “a dramatic death and resurrection of either adversary would be either too serious or too silly.”36 Thus, Sweeney’s threat to cook Doris in a stew would have been sufficient, particularly in light of Cornford’s explicit connection between the figure of the cook in the Knights (who boils and restores the aged Demos to youth) with the resurrecting Doctor. A Cook [Cornford writes] who can perform such miraculous operations is manifestly a magician, and his profession coalesces with that of the Doctor in the primitive functions of the medicine-man—a figure who . . . stands out in the dim past behind the Doctor who revives the slain in the folk-plays.37 Finally, as noted by Robert Crawford, Sweeney’s assertion that “Life is death” seems to be, at least partially, an allusion to Aristophanes, centered on the death and resurrection theme.38 Yet, this is an even deeper allusion than Crawford suggests. At the end of the Agon in Frogs, as Cornford summarizes, Euripides complains that he is “left for dead” in the underworld. . . . Dionysus replies to this appeal with a quotation from a play of Euripides’ own, the Polyidos, which itself turned on a death and resurrection motive: “Who knows if to be living be not death?”39

164

Joshua Richards

The Greek text reveals that the relevant portion of the original line—“τὸ ζῆν μέν ἐστι κατθανεῖν”—is far closer to the simplicity of Eliot’s own version than Cornford’s rendering.40 Eliot appears not only to follow the basic plot Cornford prescribes for an Agon but also appropriates thematic elements from Cornford into his “Fragment.” The identification of Doris as the protagonist may also demystify one of the play’s most perplexing aspects: the epigraph from St. John of the Cross. Buttram asserts that “Sweeney is the only one to whom the epigraphs might even begin to apply unironically.”41 Yet, Sweeney’s speech seems only to support a brute, materialist existence driven by impulses to violence. The structure of the Agon is an argument between principles rather than people, so Sweeney as the antagonist is the representative of what the play is arguing against. Since the fragment does not include the Antepirrheme, we do not have a clear statement of what principle opposes and conquers Sweeney’s nihilism. With all of its world-denying implication, the epigraph from St. John of the Cross may well have been added to suggest what this principle would have been had Eliot completed the fragment. While Buttram’s arguments about Doris’s base nature are compelling, the Aristophanic structure is centered on the rejuvenation of the protagonist’s malaise, often in a very literal sense as in the aforementioned restoration of Demos by cooking.42 However, we do not know how Eliot may have intended Doris to divest herself of the love of created things or how this rejuvenation would have played out.43 Obviously, had it been accomplished, it would have rendered the play more religious than previously understood but probably not out of line with “The Hollow Men.” Given how deeply the Aristophanic structure runs in Sweeney Agonistes, it may well have seeped into “The Hollow Men.” The extant copy of Sweeney Agonistes contains a large portion of the first segment of an Aristophanic play, the prologue, and an early part of the third segment, the Agon. So what happened to the second section, the Parados? Eliot may have repurposed some of the Parados in “The Hollow Men,” combining it with the related fragments “Eyes that I Last Saw in Tears” and “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock.” The Parodos

Aristophanic Structures

165

would have featured the entrance of the chorus and the earliest of the choral songs, and its absence from Sweeney Agonistes is definitive; as Cornford states, “It is in the first half of the play, or wherever the Agon occurs, that the Chorus is wanted.”44 While only one poem from “Doris’s Dream Songs” was retained in the final version of “The Hollow Men” (Section III), its inclusion points once again to Aristophanic structure as outlined by Cornford: Antichoria—the division of the Chorus into two halves performing antiphonally—is, as Zielinski says, “the soul of epirrhematic composition.” In other words, the whole structure of the most important part of the play implies this opposition between two half-Choruses. The division explains the fact that the comic Chorus is twice the size of the tragic. It has twenty-four members, including its two Leaders.45 Two Aristophanic elements described in this passage may have found their way into “The Hollow Men”: a residual echo of a chorus leader and the division of choruses. Eliot was interested in both of these, as is clear in the aforementioned letter to Pound in which he indicates the need for further “study to phallic songs, also Agons.”46 While nothing resembling phallic songs appears in “The Hollow Men,” Cornford’s chapter on phallic songs heavily discusses both chorus leaders and divided choruses. Citing the example of Dikaiopolis in Aristophanes’s Acharnians, a play with marked antichoria and featuring the most notable extant example of a phallic song, Cornford states that “[s]ince [Dikaiopolis] is both priest and congregation, he has not only to perform the part of ‘Leader’ of this Phallic Song, but also to act as his own Chorus.”47 Thus, the presence of at least one specific leader is a key part of the phallic songs that Eliot studied. Additionally, the interaction between leaders and the chorus is highlighted as one of the “essential features” of the genre.48 Personally, I have always understood the singular speakers in Sections II and III of “The Hollow Men” to be representatives of the

166

Joshua Richards

collective chorus of hollow men who voice the rest of the poem, and Eliot’s study of Aristophanic structure lend credibility to this reading. The singular speakers are retained chorus leaders from when the poem was a choral ode as part of Sweeney Agonistes. Perhaps more contentious is the existence or form of antichoria in the poem, of which there seem to be two probable instances: between the poem’s sections (suggesting the poem is polyphonic instead of a disconnected monody) and the right-justification and italicization of lines in Section V of “The Hollow Men,” indicating the presence of a separate voice than the primary speaker who cannot, in the end, pronounce “For thine is the Kingdom.” Antichoria in “The Hollow Men” presents fascinating interpretive possibilities for the poem’s typography. For instance, the opening “Here we go round the prickly pear” and the final “This is the way the world ends” are italicized but left-justified. Are these two voices speaking in unison? Do left-justified lines in the middle part of Section V indicate one voice and the right-justified, italicized lines another? Finally, within the limits of its subject matter, Murder in the Cathedral likewise follows an Aristophanic structure.49 Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy was rereleased in a second edition in the early 1930s, which may have prompted Eliot’s return to an Aristophanic structure. Indeed, during this period, Aristophanic drama features regularly in Eliot’s correspondence. To name one instance, Eliot dismissed the idea of a church pageant based on one of Aristophanes’s plays, Peace, to the Dean of Chichester.50 Eliot’s prose reflections from this period on his own drama also demonstrate a return to the concerns of Greek drama: “[T]he vocabulary and style could not be exactly those of modern conversation—as in some modern French plays using the plot and personages of Greek drama.”51 Here Eliot might suggest that not just the personages, that is the chorus, but also the plot of Murder in the Cathedral stemmed from Greek drama. E. Martin Browne, in his account of his time as the producer for Eliot’s plays, also associates Greek drama with the genesis of Murder in the Cathedral. Unlike in the later plays, Browne was not privy to

Aristophanic Structures

167

Eliot’s earliest conceptions but concludes from the first draft that on the requirement of a chorus, “the play is to be cast in a formal mould like that of Greek tragedy.”52 Browne—no scholar—may be half-right: Eliot, a tentative dramatist by his own admission, returned to the same structure that he had attempted earlier in Sweeney Agonistes.53 The structure of Murder in the Cathedral is closely aligned with the Aristophanic structure established by Cornford and used previously by Eliot himself in the outline of “The Superior Landlord.” This structure may also explain some of the more curious aspects of the play, which have hitherto eluded explanation. Murder in the Cathedral follows the expected order of the Aristophanic play: Prologue, Parodos, Agon, Parabasis Sacrifice/Feast, a second Parabasis, the Kômos, and the Exodos. Murder in the Cathedral maps rather cleanly onto the plot-formula outlined by Cornford in his analysis of the plays of Aristophanes. Presence in Murder in the Cathedral

Aristophanic Element

Summary of Element

Prologue and Parodos

Opening scenes and choral Opening scenes and odes Thomas’s entrance

Agon

Dramatized Debate

Parabasis

Direct address to audience The Sermon at the play’s halfway point

Sacrifice/Feast

Interrupted attempts to sacrifice to the gods

Parabasis II

A second direct address to The Knights’ Defense the audience dividing the second act

Kômos and Exodos Departing chorus hailing victorious protagonist as the new divine ruler

The Tempters

Death of Thomas

Final odes celebrating Thomas as the new martyr and saint

The play opens with an atypical element, a choral ode, but otherwise follows the general pattern of the Aristophanic comedy, a

168

Joshua Richards

brief series of dialogues designed to set the scene and introduce the primary actors. Cornford is not much concerned with the Prologue; it is the only section to which he devotes no chapter, which may explain Eliot’s deviation. Yet, Cornford, in a digression, does contrast the Aristophanic and the tragic prologue: “Whereas the Euripidean prologue will foretell the whole general course of the action to the end, the prologue in Aristophanes only states the main idea.”54 Here, the comic structure is present; after all, “[t]he proper term for the comic plot is not mythos, but logos”—in other words, thematic conflict over narrative structure.55 Thus, instead of foreshadowing the web of events that will lead to Becket’s death as a tragic prologue would, the Chorus deals with the essence of the play’s themes with the cryptic suggestion: “We wait / [a]nd the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints.”56 In fact, the events leading up to this utterance are downplayed by the Chorus’s insistence that “Destiny waits in the hands of God, not in the hands of statesmen.”57 This particular theme will return in the discussion (below) of the play’s ending as an Exodos. The next portion of the play according to Aristophanic structure is the Parodos, the formal entry of the Chorus. Exigencies in the theatrical space (Canterbury Cathedral) may have required the Chorus to be on stage from the opening of Eliot’s play, as Browne recalls that “[t]he only door to the building was at the back of the auditorium, ninety feet from the stage. This meant that all entrances and exits [had to] be made through the narrow central aisle between the seats.”58 One important member of the Chorus does enter here, and that is Thomas, who doubles as the Chorus Leader.59 His narrative role as a spiritual leader of the women of Canterbury supports his structural identity within the play. Thus, the delayed entrance of Thomas serves as ­something of a Parodos. As in the Aristophanic play, only a brief interlude spaces the Parodos from the Agon, which in the case of Murder in the Cathedral is the long sequence with the Tempters.60 Cornford asserts that “[t]he Agon . . . occupies the first half of the play between Parodos

Aristophanic Structures

169

and Parabasis” and that “[i]t is more like a sort of trial, with a strict rule of procedure.”61 The most curious feature of the Aristophanic Agon is that its place in the play rather undermines the drama of the piece; “the Agon is often over and the victory proclaimed before the play is halfway through.”62 This is what occurs in Murder in the Cathedral.63 The audience might expect this “battle” with the Tempters and Thomas’s resolution to arrive at a more climactic moment, rather than so early in the play. Eliot’s return to Aristophanic structure helps to account for the unexpected pacing. The climactic scene follows the general outline of the Aristophanic Agon: the antagonist’s speech, the protagonist’s rebuttal, and the verdict. Operating with the theory that Thomas acts as both protagonist and chorus leader, this sequence evinces the Aristophanic pattern, with allowances for the multiple tempters. Although it does not begin with an ode of the full chorus (they have just spoken), there is a short poetic passage by Thomas, beginning “For a little time the hungry hawk,” that introduces the antagonists and serves as the chorus leader’s invitation to the adversary, which in Aristophanes is often similarly brief.64 Because of the multiple antagonists, the epirrheme and antepirrheme are each repeated four times. Each time, the tempter speaks first and gives the longest speech before being “interrupted by objections and questions from” the protagonist Thomas.65 Once again, the antagonist speaks first. Finally, Thomas gives a short rebuttal, the antepirrheme.66 No odes interject between the epirrhemes and antepirrhemes; however, after the fourth tempter, when the pattern shifts to the next element, the chorus delivers its requisite two odes. Additionally, the interchange between the chorus, the priests, and the tempters is what Cornford would call an “epirrhematic ‘syzygy,’ a closed system of balanced antiphonal parts.”67 Such an interchange with its rising energy, I believe, functions as a kind of Pnigos, which would be delivered with similar rapidity.68 As Thomas also acts as the Chorus Leader, his final speech takes the form of a Sphragis, wherein “the leader of the Chorus pronounces the verdict in favor of the [Protagonist].”69

170

Joshua Richards

After the Agon is the Parabasis, a feature of Old Comedy that was already dying out in the days of Aristophanes, which Cornford describes as “a long passage which cuts the play in two about half way through its course and completely suspends the action. This passage is almost wholly undramatic.”70 Cornford spends a good bit of time moderating contemporary scholarly dialogue on the Parabasis but concludes that its “essential character . . . . should, perhaps, be found, not in the nature of [its] contents, but rather in the practice of directly addressing the audience.”71 Thomas’s sermon between Sections I and II constitutes the Parabasis.72 According to Cornford, the scenes between the first Parabasis and the second are devoted to “a scene of Sacrifice and prayer,” which is the scene of the martyrdom in Eliot’s play.73 The presence of the “Impostors,” as Cornford calls them, further suggests an Aristophanic model. “The scene of sacrifice, cooking, or feasting has no sooner begun than” these Impostors “interrupt the proceedings.”74 In Murder in the Cathedral, the priests repeatedly intercede to keep the knights from Thomas and then abscond him to the cathedral. Like with the Impostors in the Aristophanic comedy, the priests’ attempt to interrupt or halt the sacrifice of Thomas is ultimately futile. A second Parabasis occurs between the sacrifice and the Exodos in the “seven earliest plays” by Aristophanes, including Birds, the play that most interested Eliot.75 Eliot also included a second Parabasis in “The Superior Landlord” outline. That he intended the knights’ defense to be a Parabasis is signaled by the stage directions: “The Knights, having completed the murder, advance to the front of the stage and address the audience.”76 Cornford insists in the Parabasis that the speakers “turn their backs on the scene of action and advance across the orchestra to address the audience directly—the movement from which the Parabasis takes its name.”77 Generalizing the results of the seven plays featuring a second Parabasis, Cornford asserts that the second Parabasis often takes the form of an appeal to the judges or to the audience, “practically a débat” between the opposing principles in the play that reconciles the divided halves of the chorus.78

Aristophanic Structures

171

Eliot seems to have merged these disparate elements: the knights speak in rounds.79 While there is an appeal to the audience, it is as the representative of the antagonist’s principle attempting to reconcile itself with the audience. The final movement of the Aristophanic play is the Exodos, wherein “the protagonist . . . is fêted in the torchlit Kômos”—the chorus’s song in praise of the victor.80 Appropriate staging facilitates the Exodos of Murder in the Cathedral. As Malamud notes, “after the murder, Becket’s body was carried out in a procession through the audience.”81 There was only one exit to the chapterhouse of Canterbury Cathedral, requiring the procession in Eliot’s play to pass through the audience. Yet, not merely the staging matches the Aristophanic structure. To accomplish his fertility-ritual scheme, Cornford’s plot-formula typically concludes in a sacred marriage, or, in a variation such as the ending of Birds, the inauguration of a new religious authority. In this light, the ending of Murder in the Cathedral would seem to fit the pattern of the Aristophanic Exodos: the second priest speaks of the unseen “glory of [Thomas’s] new state,” and the conclusion is that God “has given us another Saint in Canterbury.”82 Thomas the exile has become a saint, evincing God’s authority over all creation. Eliot’s interest in Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy was lasting and pervasive, extending beyond Sweeney Agonistes—the common touchstone in Eliot studies—to “The Hollow Men” and Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot found the Aristophanic structure both vital and vitalizing, employing it in deep, technical detail. For perhaps no reason other than their arrangement in the Collected Poems, “The Hollow Men” and Sweeney Agonistes are often treated as belonging to disparate phases of Eliot’s career, to say nothing of the placement of Murder in the Cathedral at the end of that standard volume alongside the completed dramatic works. However, Eliot returned to Cornford throughout his career, and Cornford provides a structure through which we can see many seemingly disparate aspects of Eliot’s work as a whole.

172

Joshua Richards Notes

1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Ronald Schuchard suggests more emphasis should be placed on Sweeney Agonistes as Aristophanic, although his focus is more on themes than on structure (Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 97). Robert Crawford also emphasizes the Aristophanic structure but almost exclusively from “The Superior Landlord” outline (The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 161). See also Richard Badenhausen, T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 123–34; Christine Buttram, “Sweeney Agonistes: A Sensational Snarl” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Edited by David Chinitz (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 180; and Carol H. Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice (New York: Gordian, 1977), 40–47. A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 120. David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 122–24. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” OPP, 86. E. Martin Browne, The Making of T.  S.  Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), 41–42. “The Superior Landlord” displays a relatively sophisticated engagement; however, the date of the outline remains uncertain on that manuscript (CPP, 790–91), and scholarly opinion is divided: Buttram, Crawford, and Schuchard believe it is a draft of Sweeney Agonistes; Chinitz treats it as a later attempt to revise the play. L2, 209. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” TLS 930 (November 13, 1919) in Complete Prose 2, 151. Buttram, “Sweeney Agonistes” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 181. L3, 782. Eliot, “Ben Jonson” in Collected Prose 2, 151 and Eliot, “Phillip Massinger” compilation in Complete Prose 2, 254. L1, 487 and L2, 307 and 23. L2, 162. It is equally obvious that Eliot thought very little of Cornford’s 1912 monograph. Disparaging remarks, seemingly centered on the perceived Bergsonian elements in Cornford and the early work of the other Cambridge Ritualists, dot the earliest essays. See, for example: “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” (manuscript, 1913–14) in Complete Prose 1, 114; “An unsigned first review of Group Theories of Religion and the Individual, by Clement C. J. Webb,” The New Statesman 7 (July, 29 1916) in Complete Prose 1, 417; “An unsigned first review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, by Émile Durkheim. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain,” Saturday Westminster Gazette 48

Aristophanic Structures

173

(August 19, 1916) in Complete Prose 1, 420; “Second review of Group Theories of Religion and the Individual, by Clement C. J. Webb,” The International Journal of Ethics 27 (October 1916) in Complete Prose 1, 430. This is an unexamined problem with David Ward’s application of Gilbert Murray to Murder in the Cathedral. David Ward, “The Pain of Purgatory” in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 71. 14 Eliot, “Euripides and Gilbert Murray: A Performance at the Holborn Empire,” Art & Letters 3 (Spring 1920) in Complete Prose 2, 197. 15 Eliot, “A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors: Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, are Likewise Masters of Art,” Vanity Fair 21 (February 1924) in Complete Prose 2, 514. Kristian Smidt, Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). 16 L6, 566. 17 Carol Smith in T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice (New York: Gordian, 1977) emphasizes the importance of Cornford and the other Cambridge Ritualists; however, her interpretation is focused on an extension of the mythical method delineated in “Ulysses, Myth, and Order” using all of the Cambridge Ritualists and diverges from the structural argument presented here (40–47). See also Buttram, “Sweeney Agonistes” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 180. 18 Francis Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (London: Edwin Arnold, 1914), 3. 19 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 2. Cornford’s transliteration of Greek terminology and names is rather idiosyncratic (including the capitalization and italicization), but it is followed here for internal consistency. The original Greek is supplied on the first instance. 20 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 3. 21 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 3. 22 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 3. 23 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 3. 24 Butcher, quoted in Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 73. 25 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72. 26 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72–73. 27 The repeated invocation to “let Mr. Sweeney continue his story” may serve as a sort of Katakeleusmos or at least the ghost of one (Eliot “Fragment of an Agon” 101–02, 116). 28 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 73. Buttram questions whether or not the last of these is the Sphragis, the pronouncement of the victor, and whether the last chorus “expresses [Sweeney’s] perspective” (Buttram 189). I would suggest this may be the ode that transitions to the protagonist’s Antepirrheme, if Sweeney’s final speech be the Pnigos.

174

Joshua Richards

29 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72. 30 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72–73. 31 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 74. 32 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 61–62. 33 Eliot, “The Beating of a Drum,” The Nation and the Athenaeum 34 (October 6, 1923) in Complete Prose 2, 472–73. 34 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 147. 35 cf. Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2008), 112–13 and Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, 87–100. 36 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 75. 37 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 90. 38 Crawford, The Savage and the City, 151. 39 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 82. 40 Aristophanes, Aristophanes IV: Frogs, Assemblywomen, Wealth. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), 1478. 41 Buttram, “Sweeney Agonistes” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 181. 42 Buttram, “Sweeney Agonistes” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 185. 43 If the title “The Superior Landlord” does refer to this iteration of the play, it could be understood to refer to the turn to a landlord better than the exploitive Pereira. 44 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 108. 45 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 109. 46 L2, 209. 47 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 38. 48 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 41. 49 In the rather idiosyncratic dialogue section of his work, Hugh Kenner touches, almost intuitively, on Murder in the Cathedral’s connection to Greek drama. However, he quickly drops the matter. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1959), 210. 50 Eliot, quoted in CPP, 787. 51 Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” OPP, 84–85. 52 Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, 40. 53 Buttram argues that “Eliot tiptoed diagonally away from his CornfordianAristophanic approach” after Sweeney Agonistes. “Sweeney Agonistes” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 181. 54 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 199. 55 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 199. 56 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 13. The Chorus’s emphasis upon witnessing is closely allied with this same theme—even a basic knowledge of Greek provides that the word for witness is μαρτύριον. The chiasm in the lines hints at the theme of crucifixion.

Aristophanic Structures

175

57 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 13. 58 Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, 56–57. 59 Such doubling is not unheard of in Aristophanes: consider the aforementioned passage where Dikaiopolis acts as his own Chorus and Chorus-leader during the phallic song in the Acharnians; the Chorus Leader also serves as the antagonist in the Agon of the Birds, the Aristophanes play that Eliot knew best. See Cornford The Origin of Attic Comedy, 38, 232. 60 Robin Grove touches on this, referring to the play as “Becket’s agon,” but this general usage glosses over the technical structure in Eliot’s work. Robin Grove, “Pereira and after: the cures of Eliot’s theater” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Edited by A. D. Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). 61 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 70–71. See also Stanley Sultan who, arguing for dédoublement with the tempters, interprets this passage as largely an internal debate. Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce, and Company (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 244. 62 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 71. 63 John Peter states as much, admitting that after this point “the play is (at least in one, not unimportant respect) virtually over.” John Peter, “Murder in the Cathedral” in T. S. Eliot. Edited by Hugh Kenner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), 165. 64 When Cornford does a line-by-line exposition of an Agon, the Katakeleusmos is given only two lines. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 73. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 23. 65 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72. 66 If the length for the protagonist’s antepirrheme quoted in Cornford is taken and divided by four, it leaves an average length of thirteen lines, and Thomas’s rebuttals, excluding the tempter’s objections, fall reasonably within this span. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 73. 67 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 125. 68 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 121. 69 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 72. 70 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 2. 71 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 123. 72 Browne has little to add on this front only noting that “[t]he sermon was an integral part of the original plan of the play.” Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, 46. 73 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 94. 74 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 132. 75 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 130. 76 Emphasis omitted. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 78. 77 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 2.

176

Joshua Richards

78 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 130–31. 79 This does provide an interesting modulation to Richard Badenhausen’s understanding of the two Parabasis segments as collaborative. Richard Badenhausen, T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 163. 80 Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 24. 81 Randy Malamud, “Eliot’s 1930s Plays” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Edited by David Chinitz (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 244. 82 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 85–86.

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War Nancy K. Gish

I

n his 1950 talk to the Italian Institute in London, “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot stated that “One test of the great masters” is that the appreciation of their poetry is a lifetime’s task, “because at every stage of maturing—and that should be one’s whole life—you are able to understand them better. Among these are Shakespeare, Dante, Homer and Virgil.”1 Although he had appreciated Virgil since boyhood, having read The Aeneid in Latin at Smith Academy2 and, according to his longtime friend Mary Hutchinson, usually carried a copy of either Dante or Virgil,3 he wrote little on Virgil before 1944. That year he wrote the first of two major essays on Virgil—“What is a Classic?”—which focuses on Virgil’s value in literary terms as “providing us with a criterion,” a “standard of the classic” as the culmination of a process of maturation in language, style, and manners. He adds to that what he calls “comprehensiveness.” The significance of this for Eliot could hardly be overstated because in Virgil, he claims, comprehensiveness “is due to the unique position in our history of the Roman Empire and the Latin language; a position which may be said to conform to its destiny.” He identifies this sense of destiny with that of Aeneas, whom he calls “the symbol of Rome,” one who is “at the centre of European

177

178

Nancy K. Gish

civilization.” For Europe, in what he considered his own developed understanding, is a whole, and only Roman literature could be universal. He concludes with an image he was to use again: Virgil as the “great ghost” who “as it was his function to lead Dante towards a vision he could never himself enjoy, led Europe towards the Christian culture which he could never know.”4 Eliot emphasizes, moreover, the wholeness of European literature premised on an idea of European culture that he encountered in Charles Maurras in the Paris year, and that he sustained and developed throughout his life. European culture was, in Kenneth Asher’s words, “for Maurras . . . synonymous with nothing less than the great tradition of Western culture itself that, originating in Greece, passed to ancient Rome and hence, via the Roman Catholic Church, to Latin Europe.” And according to Maurras, “We conceive of it as the regime of Order.”5 This connection, for Eliot, is explicit in a 1948 essay: “Maurras, for certain of us, represented a sort of Virgil who led us to the gates of the temple.”6 By the time of his 1951 essay on “Virgil and the Christian World,” Eliot defined Virgil’s importance as “among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity,” and “history had meaning.”7 Even as a boy, he said, he preferred the world of Virgil to that of Homer: in a sense, then, Virgil and The Aeneid frame Eliot’s sense of a meaningful world. But The Aeneid, and Aeneas as “a man of fate” who is “exiled for a purpose greater than he can know, but which he recognizes,”8 are present much earlier in the poetry. While Eliot’s overarching concept of a unified Latin Europe was only fully worked out in the post-conversion cultural criticism, it represents the lifetime’s understanding of an ideal already apparent in poetry up to and including The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, the presence of The Aeneid, and its historical implications, has a different resonance, less as a source of order and more as the journey defined in many recent studies in which Aeneas suffers as well as triumphs in love and war. If Eliot, by 1944, acknowledges that Aeneas’s own reward was “hardly more than a narrow beachhead and a political marriage in a weary middle age,”9 his interest is in the

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

179

Christian world to which Virgil was the guide; in The Waste Land it is still the journey itself with its sorrows, losses, and anguish of war. My thesis, then, is that The Waste Land is not only far more Virgilian than is still usually acknowledged, but that it reveals, long before the late prose, Eliot’s developing conception of a Latin Europe. For Eliot the many sorrows of The Aeneid partly shaped all the characters who felt, not triumphant but dead to hope and desire. It was a transformation Eliot himself knew and experienced during his early marriage and World War I: in 1914, still a virgin, he wrote to Conrad Aiken that “Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”10 Just over ten years later, in despair over his marriage, he wrote to Middleton Murray, “I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915.”11 And not only his ability to feel had changed: his political views were apparently not yet so firmly fixed in their later conservative form. In 1917 he wrote to J. H. Woods, “you see I am by way of being a Labourite in England, though a conservative at home.”12 And in 1919 he wrote to John Quinn, “My own views are Liberal and strongly opposed to the Government in almost everything; but I cannot regard this present expression of labour discontent without grave apprehension and distrust.”13 By 1923 he claimed to be an “old-fashioned Tory,” and to be “all for empires, especially the Austro-Hungarian empire,”14 and in 1924 he wrote to his mother that he was no longer very popular with the Nation people “because my political and social views are so reactionary and ultra-conservative.”15 Up to and perhaps through The Waste Land period, his political views seem less the total Maurrasian position Kenneth Asher argues is consistently present, and more a continuation of what Robert Crawford sees as a clash of values during his graduate years of very wide reading in conflicting ideas.16 The War and its immediate aftermath seem to have turned him away from his early hopes and also turned him toward the admiration for empire that led, in later years, to his celebration of Virgil from the position of a Christian adventist who cautiously acknowledged the possibility of “prophecy”—carefully

180

Nancy K. Gish

defined—in the Fourth Eclogue, and to an “Augustine reception” of The Aeneid as endorsing the aims and achievements of Caesar Augustus. That is not to say that Eliot was, by the time of his late essays, calling for or approving any new imperialism; rather, these discussions of Virgil emphasize that the Roman Empire of Augustus became the spiritual and cultural whole of Europe as a Christian culture. For Eliot the empire that matters for Europe is the Imperium Romanum, an empire eternal rather than transient, defined by the historical continuity of Rome and the Latin language. But this move toward a specific ideal of empire seems to have come later.17 While both prophecy and empire serve to define the Virgil of his later essays, the Virgil of The Waste Land seems to me closer to the darker reading of such scholars as Richard F. Thomas in Virgil and the Augustine Reception,18 in mixing sorrow and pity for so much death and for so much pain, though with the sense of destiny in both cases. By 1944, for example, Eliot could write of Dido as a deeply tragic figure, but not as one whose suffering was primary; what mattered, as Lyndall Gordon argues, are the feelings of Aeneas and, in a kind of identification with the figure of destiny, those of Eliot in his own experience and repeated representations of guilt without a sense of the other, or a sense of alternative choices. Of Aeneas’s encounter in the underworld with Dido, who committed suicide when he had abandoned her and who turns her face away when he tries to speak with her, Gordon points out that “Eliot’s account skirts the confrontation, to dwell on the hero’s burden of guilt, as though suffering were his exclusively.”19 Eliot’s “mature understanding,” however we evaluate its possible loss of empathy, was, indeed, fully reached after a lifetime and historically during and after WWII as well as long after Eliot’s conversion. The “maturing” sense in his long gap between boyhood comfort in “the world of Virgil” and the late overarching vision of Western culture as Roman and European, was not a single developing idea: in The Waste Land the Roman past and especially The Aeneid are more uncertain, ambiguous, and dark. It is the Aeneas who struggled with love, destiny, and pity, and his particular journey through all, who remains in brief

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

181

allusions and in recurrent echoes of Rome and Carthage. While these parallels remain in the published poem, in the Facsimile they are more explicit. In late November to December, 1921, for example, Eliot inserted these lines from Virgil’s The Aeneid in the original version of “The Fire Sermon”: “To Aeneas, in an unfamiliar place, / Appeared his mother, with an altered face, / He knew the goddess by her smooth celestial pace.”20 Though attributed in Valerie Eliot’s “Editorial Notes” to both the original text and Dryden’s translation,21 they are more evocative than Dryden’s version of Aeneas’s poignant desire for touch in his encounter with Venus in Book I. The place is Carthage, the scene of his love and abandonment of Dido, and of the gods’ message that he must leave both passion and the building of her city to fulfill his own destiny. It ends in Dido’s frenzied love, her wild weeping in the streets, her suicide and burning funeral pyre so intense that—in the Loeb translation—“the palace rings with lamentation, with sobbing and women’s shrieks, and heaven echoes with loud wails—even as though all Carthage or ancient Tyre were falling before the onrushing foe, and fierce flames were rolling on over the roofs.”22 The irony is profound, since her rage at Rome prophesies the Punic wars, which ended in just such a total destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. Aeneas, meanwhile, “his soul shaken by his mighty love, yet fulfils Heaven’s bidding,” returns to his ships and sails for Italy to found Rome, the destiny set for him by the gods.23 It is not, I think, accidental that Eliot drafted this passage following the previous summer’s visit from his mother, a visit he repeatedly wrote about longing for and hoping to repeat. In the same inserted, then removed, section, Fresca, whose initial opening scene was eventually cut entirely, is compared both to a mocked or degraded Venus Anadyomene and to a Minerva reduced from Rome’s goddess of poetry and war to a tawdry would-be poet scribbling trivia and ruling boxing peers. Yet the lines on Aeneas’s mother are different, not sardonic or mocking but, in contrast to Fresca, identified by the way that “rabble” in the cinema recognize a goddess or a star “in

182

Nancy K. Gish

silent rapture”: Venus herself presents a moment of longing and the mother’s love that has brought Aeneas and his ships safely to harbor, rest, and renewal, as Eliot seemed, in letters, to experience with his mother. Though these direct allusions to The Aeneid, along with others to the gates of ivory and horn and to Carthage in “The Death of St. Narcissus,” were removed from the published poem, many allusions and parallels to Roman and Carthaginian history and to Virgil’s epic remain. Publication of the Facsimile in 1971 revealed how closely Eliot followed The Aeneid in his conceptualization of the poem. In 1973, for example, Hugh Kenner attempted to date The Waste Land fragments; he concluded that Eliot “may well have had in mind at one time a kind of modern Aeneid.” Notably, Kenner points to The Aeneid’s sixth book, a “sequence” closely paralleling Eliot’s own geographic moves, with “the hero crossing seas to pursue his destiny, detained by one woman and prophesied to by another, and encountering visions of the past and the future, all culminated in a city both founded and yet to be founded, unreal and oppressively real, the Rome through whose past Dryden saw London’s future.”24 Kenner links Madame Sosostris with the Cumean Sibyl and her scattered leaves, and he notes the many “points of contact” in Carthage, the Punic Wars, the drowned sailor, the horn and ivory gates.25 Based on his conclusions about dating, Kenner dismissed this “modern Aeneid” as an early and discarded notion and decided that the poem became, instead, an “Urban Apocalypse,” a London poem with the rest planned around it; what we now know about the dating shows Kenner’s first idea was closer than he thought. For, as Lawrence Rainey’s convincing analysis shows, “The Fire Sermon” postdates both sections I and II, while the section with Aeneas’s mother was inserted with the last set of materials before Lausanne, and thus was still in Eliot’s conception of the poem before the final reshaping of the whole.26 I do not wish to suggest that Kenner’s “modern Aeneid” provides a “plan,” “narrative,” or “scaffold” replacing the long-claimed Grail quest of the “Notes”: as Kenner and others have convincingly argued, the poem has no final structure, though the broad sequence Kenner

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

183

outlines parallels Eliot’s own life of “displacement” and perhaps sense of “destiny.” But as Rainey also states, “The Waste Land doesn’t have a narrative; instead, it has the scent of a narrative, hovering in the air like a perfume after someone has left the room.”27 But if it has no single narrative, it has a world—a geography, a cast of characters, a sense of recurrent human experience. And, with only brief glimpses, that world is not really one of Medieval Romances, or the unified philosophy Eliot saw in Dante, or the most ancient fertility rituals; for all its complexity and multiple layers of time and space, it is framed by the wars and loves of Rome and Carthage: it is most like the world of Virgil, and even the far more frequent direct allusions to Dante do not go beyond Virgil’s boundary. There is no Paradiso in The Waste Land. Recognition of the poem’s Virgilian echoes by Grover Smith, and, more fully, by Eleanor Cook, Gareth Reeves, and Charles Martindale, followed Kenner’s, but all preceded Rainey’s 2005 dating, and they remain occasional interventions in a critical history that largely overlooks the influence of Virgil.28 Despite the persistent, if less overt, presence of Virgil long before the late essays, current books on Eliot seldom include more than a few comments or citations, and they are generally to the Virgil of Dante or to Eliot’s late essays. But those essays look back to Eliot’s earliest reading, in which Virgil takes a central place, as well as to his developed ideal of a Western culture defined and most fully expressed by Virgil’s epic of war, love, and destiny. Eliot’s statement of a lifetime’s maturing appreciation, I believe, led to a Virgil about whom he could write. At the time of The Waste Land, Virgil’s darker vision may have been too close and personal. I wish, thus, to make three main points: that The Waste Land begins and ends in the world of The Aeneid, that this world overlaps—geographically as well as personally—with the moving and disturbing elements of Eliot’s own world during World War I, and that the loves and wars of The Waste Land are not, in fact, all loves and wars but particular ones: they are not random representations of a universal. “The world of Virgil,” for example, is deeply imbedded in “The Fire Sermon,” with its many evocative Virgilian echoes: the river’s

184

Nancy K. Gish

tent Kenner associated with the shores of Acheron in Book VI, the Smyrna merchant, the horn and ivory gates, the Conradian images of the Thames in Roman times, “to Carthage then I came,” the burning there, and, inserted, the images of Venus, Minerva, and Aeneas. It was composed in late November 1921, six months after parts I and II, and after Eliot’s family’s visit, with the insertion added even later, to be cut along with all the Fresca section. Only sections IV and V remained then, and what was kept of IV, the Phlebas passage, had been written with little alteration in 1916 as the ending of “Dans le Restaurant,” while the cut opening of that section went back to the American Northeast coast and Eliot’s early memories.29 It was not, early or late, simply or primarily a London poem, though London is prominent in the center; it was and largely remained the Aeneas-like journey Kenner noted and dismissed, a new Rome or at least the place of Eliot’s destiny. With the American sections removed, it became a European and, especially, “a Mediterranean poem.”30 It is, in its prevailing background of Roman and Carthaginian history, a poem framed by the formation and disintegration of the West, with, at the end, an anxious look toward what may come, not the Augustine Peace and the Holy Roman Empire Eliot later affirmed but The Aeneid that ends in yet undetermined battle after so much loss, sorrow, and slaughter. As Gareth Reeves argues, Virgil’s influence on The Waste Land is “arguably at least as pervasive as Dante’s,”31 and Eliot’s later sense of Virgil as “adventist Christian” does not account for the direct use of Virgil rather than the Virgil of Dante. I agree and would go further: just as the poem has many voices, it has many potential narratives, no one of which is “the” plan—they shift, overlap, interconnect, and break up any whole. Yet The Waste Land begins and ends in wars directly alluding to both The Aeneid and World War I and to both Vivienne and abandoned women imagined as Dido, Cleopatra, perhaps even Venus herself as Eliot’s mother. The “ships at Mylae” refer to the first Punic War and Rome’s first great naval victory over Carthage in 260 BCE; the reference to a “broken Coriolanus,” though Shakespeare’s character, recalls the Volscians, whom Coriolanus

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

185

joined against Rome, and who fought against Aeneas in Latium in Book IX. The falling towers of “What the Thunder Said” recall the falling towers of Troy and Carthage as well as the list of cities Eliot names. And one thing all these cities have in common, even the last two—“Vienna, London,” both associated with World War I—is that all were at one time occupied by Rome. If one focuses on the Facsimile, then, direct allusions are frequent and overt: the Sybil of Cumae, of the late epigraph, is also the one who guided Aeneas in his journey to the underworld; Carthage, referred to explicitly in the first draft of “Narcissus”32 and in both versions of “The Fire Sermon,” turns up in “Burial of the Dead” in the strange address to Stetson (an American name) and reappears in “A Game of Chess” in the reference to laquearia in Dido’s palace; both Carthage and Smyrna are named in “The Fire Sermon,” and both are echoed by the “Phoenician” in “Death by Water”: Dido was Phoenician and “Punic” refers to the Phoenicians. And in the end of the poem the falling towers take us back to the towers of Carthage as well as Troy and all the later cities. But indirect echoes are even more prevalent. For example, Phlebas has less imagery and emotion in common with a drowned god figure than with Palinurus, Aeneas’s pilot, who fell overboard and ended without burial in a strange land, or the youth struck down by Aeneas in Book X to whom Aeneas, “pitiless,” says “To birds of prey shalt thou be left; or, sunk beneath the flood the wave shall bear thee on, and hungry fish shall suck thy wounds.”33 Lines, phrases, and images echo The Aeneid throughout: even the hyacinth girl, typically associated with Hyacinthus, apparently because of the name, not the event, is paralleled as much in Book XI when Aeneas, weeping over the beautiful, young, and dead Pallas, lays him on “his rustic bed, like to a flower culled by maiden’s finger, be it of tender violet or drooping hyacinth.”34 The juxtaposition of a dead youth with purple spring flowers and hyacinths is at least as evocative as Hyacinthus and in a much more comparable event—an event recalling, for anyone who studies Eliot’s life, the death of Verdenal and the recollection of his friend coming toward him in the Luxembourg Gardens, waving a sprig of lilac.

186

Nancy K. Gish

None of this establishes a “narrative,” but neither does it represent other narratives. My point is that echoes of Virgil’s characters, emotions, scenes, and language are constant and pervasive, and that the Virgil of this period is not the one of Eliot’s 1944 or 1951 essays but one who creates a world genuinely still “in-between,” filled with suffering as well as destiny, pity as well as victory, love as well as war, though a love already lost or futile or mourned. If, in The Waste Land, love seems absent, it nonetheless is present as loss, most notably in the hyacinth girl scene, but also in the allusions to Tristan and Isolde and all the couples whose initial desire ended in failure, violation, or emotional emptiness. It is worth noting that “In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot claimed that before he left for Europe in 1914 he told Emily Hale that he was in love with her”35 and that he renewed their relationship—whatever that meant for him—when she wrote to him from Florence in May of 1927. “It brought back something to me,” he said, “that I had not known for a long time.”36 They corresponded and visited from then until he married Valerie, though he never committed to a renewed or complete love. Like Aeneas, he left behind one whom he had joined, in some way, in love, but never married, and his journey was, for him, a move away from that world to his destiny—not as founder of an empire but as poet. In between he endured two wars (the first during his despairing marriage), the death of his young and close male friend, and what was at least seen as a fight to save a world he came to understand as derived from Rome and still, in an important sense, Roman. If we follow the journey Kenner speculates, he was detained emotionally by both Emily and the initial sense of love for Vivienne, then the terrible effects of the marriage on both, in a London taken up, for many during the War, with forms of the occult—séances, Tarot readings, and many forms of magic resorted to by desperate families longing for some contact with the hundreds of thousands of the dead. During the chaotic war years, and their aftermath when writing The Waste Land, both Aeneas’s story and the many images, phrases, and parallel memories must have recalled the earlier poem’s impact on his childhood

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

187

comfort in a world of order, and his intellectual attraction in Paris to the Maurrasian vision of a “regime of Order.”37 The journeys of Aeneas and Eliot have emotional parallels. But the wars they lived through have parallels also. While Eliot’s most direct link to actual combat knowledge was no doubt Maurice Haigh-Wood’s accounts of trench warfare on the Western Front and images of that devastated land with rats’ alley and dead men’s bones, another front recalls the beginning, in 1915, of Eliot’s “deliberate” killing of his senses and emotions, even self. For a map of the World War I campaign in the Mediterranean, and especially the horrific Gallipoli campaign in which Verdenal died, can almost overlap that of Aeneas’s journey, and, more significantly, the expansion of the Roman Empire. Aeneas’s voyage began in Troy, not far south of the Dardanelles. He sailed first to Carthage, where a Phoenician queen from Tyre (also not far south of the ancient site of Troy) was building a city—later to be conquered, sacked, and burned by Rome, hence the end of Rome’s one major competitor for control of the Mediterranian and, ironically, a “Carthaginian Peace.” From there he left for Italy, where his final battles occurred and ended in mid-fight when Virgil died without completing his epic. In the final scene, Aeneas, again without pity for the man who slew the young and beautiful Pallas, buries his sword in Turnus’s chest and sends him “indignant to the Shades below.”38 Appearing in “Burial of the Dead” in the Stetson scene, Mylae is generally mentioned briefly as a “trade war,” as if, in that sense, merely a kind of degraded conflict; it was, however, the site of a key battle in the development of Rome. And World War I was also, in part, about trade, especially in German arms and desire for greater resources. But both wars were also fought for political dominance as well as territory and resources. Mylae’s specific historic significance has been, to my knowledge, mainly passed over even in studies of sources: B. C. Southam, for example, notes that Donald Childs “takes it as an oblique reference to the Dardanelles,”39 though he adds that it was, in John Hayward’s words, “The great naval victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians

188

Nancy K. Gish

in the First Punic War.”40 It was also, more importantly, their first naval defeat of the Carthaginians. Even Grover Smith passes over it. Yet its importance as a major first in Rome’s expansion for dominance in the ancient world could hardly have been lost on Eliot, especially since Hayward pointed to its significance. Nor was the reference oblique: the Punic wars and World War I were fought on much of the same ground. Mylae, for example, was fought on the northern coast of Sicily, just north of Malta where the wounded were brought to hospital and ships brought doctors, nurses, and VADs, always at risk of being sunk, and some were.41 It is frequently claimed that in such references as Mylae and World War I (or, in “Gerontion,” which Eliot had considered as a prelude, Thermopylae, “the hot gates”), Eliot collapses all wars into one war. But these are not random wars: Mylae was the beginning of Rome’s defeat of Carthage and the first time they defeated Carthage at sea; the “Battle of Thermopylae” between Persians and Spartans in 480–79 BCE has been called the “Battle for the West,” and though the Persians won, they were defeated later; but in another battle in 191 BCE, the Romans, in this case “the West” as attacker, also won at Thermopylae against Antiochus III of Selucid Syria. According to at least one history of the earlier battle, the Romans won at the “hot gates” in the same way as the Persians,42 by circling around the narrow pass and attacking from the rear, thus again extending Roman power. Moreover, like the Punic Wars that defeated Carthage, World War I was also intended to achieve a final peace, one with a conclusion as ironic, ultimately, as the Augustine Peace that was achieved in part through a destruction of Carthage so total as to leave permanent enmity.43 In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book Eliot admired and recommended to his mother, John Maynard Keynes called the Treaty of Versailles a “Carthaginian Peace.”44 In the 1929 “Dante” essay, Eliot stated: “It is not particularly the Treaty of Versailles that has separated nation from nation; nationalism was born long before; and the process of disintegration which for our generation culminates in that treaty began soon after Dante’s time.”45 His linking of Versailles with his larger sense of

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

189

history was thus already defined as a peace that was destructive rather than creative. Nor are the ancient women in The Waste Land simply “all women” or random women. They include the abandoned or violated Dido, Cleopatra, Philomel, and Procne, and the goddesses Venus and Minerva. They parallel modern women during and after World War I—Fresca, Madame Sosostris (one of the charlatans promising esoteric knowledge in the midst of chaos), Lil and her mates, the typist, and pseudo-goddesses as film stars or theatergoers. Thus the women and goddesses from ancient texts are intimately connected also with Rome’s wars and triumphs, the conquests that led, finally, to the world Eliot could describe in 1951 as both past and present: What then does this destiny, which no Homeric hero shares with Aeneas, mean? For Virgil’s conscious mind, and for his contemporary readers, it means the imperium romanum. This in itself, as Virgil saw it, was a worthy justification of history. . . . I say that it was all the end of history that Virgil could be asked to find, and that it was a worthy end. And do you really think that Virgil was mistaken? You must remember that the Roman Empire was transformed into the Holy Roman Empire. What Virgil proposed to his contemporaries was the highest ideal even for an unholy Roman Empire, for any merely temporal empire. We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire.46 Thus by 1951 Virgil’s emotionally painful, triumphant but sorrowing and inconclusive text has been matured into the promise of a new order, at least as ideal. In The Waste Land that material is differently focused and emphasized: it is still the in-between of two worlds with all the horror and the glory that entails—worlds of war, death, lost and betrayed love, and a promise held out but not yet even certain. Keynes’s Versailles as a “Carthaginian Peace” takes on a greater irony in hindsight. For despite

190

Nancy K. Gish

Eliot’s ideal and post-World War II hope, in 1919 he praised Keynes’s book and ended The Waste Land in falling towers and a mad confusion of languages to cover murder. Even the implications of “Shantih,” long emphasized as reading the Biblical passage back into the poem as true and total peace at the end, was not clearly that. Although I have not yet found the exact first source, several sources state that the Treaty of Versailles was ironically called “the peace that passeth understanding.”47 Vera Brittain recalled hearing it used in that sardonic way in an Oxford debate, and Sir Edward Carson stated it to American students; in 1919 it was even the title of a play by John Reed that critiqued the Treaty. It is difficult to believe that a phrase so widely used in both England and America would not be known to Eliot; given its frequency, his use of it as the translation of “Shantih” retains the inconclusiveness of the entire poem: one may read it, like the end of The Aeneid, as promise or as destruction and irony. As I have argued both here and in an article on Eliot’s early aesthetics, he often wrote painful material, then removed or reshaped it in coded forms: he added “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” then cut it; in Inventions of the March Hare, he represented images of hysteria and dissociation and later suppressed the explicit terminology while retaining the suggestiveness.48 In similar ways he included, in the original “Fire Sermon,” direct images of Venus and the scene with Aeneas leading to the palace of Dido, then cut it, leaving only lacquearia, and he included Mylae and Coriolanus in new contexts without any foregrounding of their links to the wars of Aeneas and Roman expansion. Such images and coded allusions can be found throughout more consistently and suggestively than any from Weston. In his 1951 talk, Eliot had reached what he felt was a matured understanding of material that, in The Waste Land, may have been both ambiguous in its implications and deeply painful. Yet it is the intensity such material arouses that makes the poem, in Rainey’s quotation from John Peale Bishop, “IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE.”49 Roman and Carthaginian background, along with Eliot’s largely overlooked or dismissed use of Virgil, clearly suggests that one of the many potential stories—intersecting, overlapping, reframing

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

191

others—is the emergence of the Roman Empire and Virgil’s centrality to that, but a centrality only much later understood in a way that could be handled. One of these stories was Eliot’s own, as his several comments on putting his life into the poem imply. He hints at that even in “Virgil and the Christian World” when he uses words and phrases long associated with his own history. For example, he writes that A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a way of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. He is speaking here of Virgil and the potential of Virgil to be a prophet, yet the idea is much the same as his comment in a lecture at Harvard that “Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world. . . . To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.”50 His descriptions of Aeneas as “the original Displaced Person” echo his accounts of himself as “one [who] remains always a foreigner”51 or “never anything anywhere,”52 as one whose “end is only a new beginning.” He describes Aeneas as one who, in love “had to be united, and had to be separated,” an experience vividly in his own mind at the time of The Waste Land, and one with “a very heavy cross to bear”53 of responsibility for his treatment of Dido—a sense of guilt for behavior without, presumably, any alternative choice, a sense of guilt that runs through many of his own characters. Describing Dido’s “snub” in Hades, Eliot adds, “I have no doubt that Virgil, when he wrote these lines, was assuming the role of Aeneas and feeling very decidedly a worm.”54 In his own life and in his ideal of culture, then, Eliot saw in The Aeneid the anguish of love and war as well as, by the late essays, a value structure in which Christianity and the Roman Empire converge in a

192

Nancy K. Gish

world of order and dignity. By 1951 his life, like that of Aeneas in Eliot’s “mature understanding” had moved beyond the journeys through exile, love, war, and violence, to a sense of assurance about the destination or “End” as prophesied by Jupiter and Anchises. In The Waste Land we are left, like Aeneas himself, in the middle of the way, without conclusion. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me,” in TCC, 127. Charlotte C. Eliot to the Head Master of Milton Academy, April 4, 1905, L1, 5. Mary Hutchinson, in an unpublished memoir, cited in L2, 657n. Eliot, “What is a Classic?” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 128–29 and 131. Quoted in Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 23. Quoted in Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 130. According to Asher, “In the April 25, 1948, issue of Aspects de la France et du Monde, Eliot joined other European admirers of the imprisoned Maurras in a section entitled ‘L’Hommage de l’étranger.’ There he acknowledges the tremendous influence of Maurras on him and other like-minded young people.” Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” in OPP, 148. Eliot, “What is a Classic?” 128. Eliot, “What is a Classic?” 130–31. L1, 81. L2, 627. L1, 188. L1, 401. L2, 251. L2, 320. See Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) on the range of Eliot’s studies and readings while at Harvard and in Paris. Although Eliot’s support of empire may seem inconsistent, given his critiques of specific twentieth-century empires, he distinguished between those and the ideal he saw embodied in Virgil. In “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” for example, Eliot emphasizes “the damage that has been done to native cultures in the process of imperial expansion” while also insisting that such damage “is by no means an indictment of empire itself.” And though he rejects the Russian model for its “subordination

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

193

of culture to political theory” and its centralization of all real power in Moscow, he partially defends British rule of India. See “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 164–70. 18 Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustine Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). Thomas emphasizes shifts from the early twentieth-century readings of The Aeneid as validating the Augustine empire, with its end to internal Roman battles, to later studies in which the focus is on Aeneas’s own internal conflicts as well as the horror of war and the losses involved in empire. 19 Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1998), 408. 20 WLF, 29. 21 WLF, 127. 22 Virgil, “Aeneid IV,” in Virgil: I Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. Translated by H. R. Fairclough, rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935), 441. 23 Virgil, “Aeneid IV.” Translated by H. R. Fairclough, 423. 24 Hugh Kenner, “The Urban Apocalypse,” in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land. Edited by A. Walton Litz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973), 39–40. 25 Kenner, “The Urban Apocalypse, 38–39. 26 Lawrence Rainey, “Table 4. Waste Land Manuscripts,” in Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), 200–01. 27 Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land, 49. 28 In T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956), Grover Smith identifies many allusions to The Aeneid though he does not place them into a sequence or “narrative.” For an analysis of Roman material in The Waste Land, see Charles Martindale, “Ruins of Rome: T. S. Eliot and the Presence of the Past,” Arion 3, no. 2/3 (Fall 1995/Winter 1996), 102–40. See especially Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989) for a fully developed analysis of Eliot’s sources in Virgil and Eleanor Cook for a study of the geography of The Waste Land: “T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace,” ELH 46, no. 2 (Summer 1979). 29 Rainey, “Table 4,” in Revisiting The Waste Land, 200–01. 30 I am indebted to Eleanor Cook for this emphasis on The Waste Land as Mediterranean and European. Cook argues that the poem “was always so through the early drafts, and it became noticeably so when, in Part V, London was listed as the last in a series of five great cities, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London,” and that the “map . . . coincides roughly with the theater of war during World War I.” Her “hypothesis” is that “a vision of Rome and the Roman Empire lies behind Eliot’s vision

194

Nancy K. Gish

of London and the British empire.” Cook’s prescient discussion is framed, however, like Kenner’s, by the assumption of an early and “discarded notion” of a kind of “modern Aeneid” based on then available dating of the poem’s fragments. My argument is that it not only “lies behind” but remains, and is fundamental to understanding the poem. See especially Cook, “T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace,” 81–83. 31 Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet, 28. 32 The first draft, untitled, of “The Death of St. Narcissus,” places him in Carthage: “If he walked in city streets, in the streets of Carthage.” The line points back to the early poems of a narrator walking dark and sexually disturbing streets and also to the many allusions to Carthage as the site of Dido’s story, Augustine’s Confessions, and Rome’s defeat of Carthage. See The Waste Land: A Facsimile. 33 Virgil, “Aeneid X,” in Virgil: II Aeneid 7–12, The Minor Poems. Translated by H. R. Fairclough, rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1934), 209. Similar images of bodies moved by undersea currents or waves and drifting corpses eaten by sea creatures remain in the published version of “Death by Water” (“A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers)” and in the Facsimile: in the unpublished section, “Dirge,” the body of Bleistein is eaten by crabs; in the unpublished draft beginning “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” crabs “clamber through his stomach” and eels grow fat. 34 Virgil, “Aeneid XI,” in Virgil: II Aeneid 7–12, 239. 35 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 82. 36 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 234. 37 Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 23. 38 Virgil, “Aeneid XII,” in Virgil II, 365. 39 B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 154. 40 Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems, 154. Southam adds Hayward’s comment that “All wars are one war” and Matthiessen’s claim that this reference underlines “the essential sameness of all wars.” Yet the Battle of Mylae was, in fact, a significant and decisive battle leading to Rome’s naval dominance of the Mediterranean. It is, moreover, the only battle specifically named in the poem. 41 VAD stands for “Volunteer Aid Detachment,” the many young women who volunteered to nurse in the War. Although they were not trained nurses, lack of medical personnel, the great numbers of casualties, and terrible conditions meant that many, like Vera Brittain, ended up performing what nurses and even doctors did. 42 J. Rickard (November 9, 2009), “Battle of Thermopylae, 191 B.C.,” accessed April 17, 2016, www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_thermopylae_191.html.

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

195

43 For a history of the long and violent struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic wars, and their importance in leading to the Roman Empire, see Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: the Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (New York: Viking, 2011). 44 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920; New York: Penguin, 1988), 36. 45 T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 207. 46 Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” 145–46. 47 See the statement about Sir Edward Carson who “has been quoted by the Oxford students . . . as describing the peace established by the Treaty of Versailles as “‘The Peace which passeth all understanding,’” in The New Outlook, Vol. 132 (1922): 365. John Reed’s play opened on March 21, 1919: see http://www.provincetownplayhouse.com/peace.html, accessed February 1, 2016. Vera Brittain comments on the Oxford student debate in Testament of Youth (New York: Penguin, 1989), 470. Frequent references also appear on websites, including listings in historical accounts, a statement in a New York Socialist newspaper in 1919, and a short story spoof by the Washington Gridiron Club in 1921. 48 See Nancy K. Gish, “Discarnate Desire: T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation,” in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). 49 Rainey, Revisiting, 103. 50 Eliot, WLF, 1. 51 Crawford, Young Eliot, 324. 52 Crawford, Young Eliot, 9. 53 Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” 145. 54 Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” 145.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014 Elisabeth Däumer

Books Atkins, Douglas G. T. S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. ——. T. S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Bîrsanu, Roxana Ştefania. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Place of Intercultural Exchanges: A Translation Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Blanc, Claudine. Les livres de l’Inde: Une Littérature étrangère en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014. Dempsey, James. The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2014. Ducroux, Amélie. La relation et l‘absolu: lectures de la poésie de T. S. Eliot. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Prose: The Critical Edition, vol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918. Edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP and Faber & Faber, 2014. Online via Project Muse. ——. The Complete Prose: The Critical Edition, vol. 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919– 1926. Edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP and Faber & Faber, 2014. Online via Project Muse. ——. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5: 1930–1931. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. ——. Macavity the Mystery Cat. London: Faber, 2014.

197

198

Elisabeth Däumer

Epstein, Josh. Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Grieve-Carlson, Gary. Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Ley, James. The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lockerd, Benjamin G., ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014. Moses, Omri. Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2014. Mukherjee, Ankhi. What is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2014. Musgrave, David. Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Schmidt, A. V. C. Passion and Precision: Collected Essays on English Poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Geoffrey Hill. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2014. Viney, William. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Watson, Gay. A Philosophy of Emptiness. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Whittier-Ferguson, John. Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2014. Book Chapters Araujo, Anderson. “Between ‘Absolutism’ and ‘Impossible Theocracy’: Hierarchy in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism.” In Lockerd, ed., T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 192–205. Atkins, Hazel. “T. S. Eliot, W. R. Lethaby, and Sacred Architecture.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 163–76. Blisset, William. “T. S. Eliot and Catholicity.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 33–51. Dharwadker, Vinay. “Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination (1932–2004).” In Smita Agarwal, ed. Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 151–81. Dilworth, Thomas. “Eliot for David Jones.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 285–300. Essert, Emily. “Cats, Rats, Apes, and Crabs: T. S. Eliot among the Animals.” In Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian, and Andrew Smyth Sonst, eds.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014

199

Representing the Modern Animal in Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 119–36. Esty, Jed. “‘All That Consequence’: Yeats and Eliot at the End of the End of History.” In Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente, eds. Yeats and Afterwords. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2014. 314–36. Evans, Curtis. “Murder in The Criterion: T. S. Eliot on Detective Fiction.” In Curtis Evans, Steven Steinbock, and Boonchai Panjarattanakorn, eds. Mysteries Unlocked. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 171–82. Huisman, David. “‘A Long Journey Afoot’: The Pilgrimages toward Orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 251–64. Huttar, Charles A. “C. S. Lewis’s Appreciation of T. S. Eliot.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 265–83. Lockerd, Benjamin G. “Beyond Politics: T. S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 217–36. Manganiello, Dominic. “T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and Dante’s Way of Love.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 145–62. Marx, William. “Eliot and Maurras on Classicism.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 77–88. Matthews, Steven. “T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word.’” In Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning, and Henry Mead, eds. Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 97–112. McVey, Christopher. “Backgrounds to The Idea of a Christian Society: Charles Maurras, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 179–93. Morgenstern, John. “T. S. Eliot and the French Catholic Revival: 1910–1911 Paris.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 59–75. Omoteso, Ebenezer Adedeji. “A Comparative Study of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Abdias Nascimento’s Sortilégio (Mistério Negro).” In Femi Ojo-Ad, ed. Home and Exile: Abdias Nascimento, African Brazilian Thinker and Pan-African Visionary. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2014. 29–46. Oser, Lee. “T. S. Eliot and John Henry Newman.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 131–43. Robichaud, Paul. “Eliot’s Christian Sociology and the Problem of Nationalism.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 207–15. Riquelme, John Paul. “Staging the Modernist Monologue as Capable Negativity: Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue between and beyond Eliot and Joyce.” In S. E. Gontarski, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 397–408. Risden, E. L. “Middle-Earth and the Waste Land: Greenwood, Apocalypse, and Post-War Resolution.” In John William Houghton, et al., eds. Tolkien

200

Elisabeth Däumer

in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 57–64. Seaton, James. “Poetry and Religion in George Santayana and T. S. Eliot.” In Lockerd, ed. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. 239–49. Journal Publications Ahn, Joong-Eun. “Death in The Waste Land.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 53–94. Bae, Soon-Jung. “The Relationship of T. S. Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche: Death of God and Eternal Recurrence.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 27–65. Barber-Stetson, Claire. “Slow Processing: A New Minor Literature by Autists and Modernists.” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 147–65. Bartlett, Tom. “How a Persistent Scholar Landed an Invitation to T. S. Eliot’s Archive.” Chronicle of Higher Education 61, no. 13 (November 28, 2014): A12. Belk, John. “Snapshots of Identification: Kenneth Burke’s Engagements with T. S. Eliot.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2014): 363–82. Bevis, Matthew. “Eliot Among The Comedians.” Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (2014): 135–56. Bryant, Marsha. “Epic Encounters: The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies.” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 4 (2014): 70–90. Butler, Thomas. “Fanny Howe’s Catholic: Moving on from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Explicator 72, no. 3 (2014): 241–44. Callison, Jamie. “An Unnoticed Liturgical Parallel in T. S. Eliot’s ‘A Song for Simeon.’” Notes and Queries 61, no. 4 (2014): 592–94. Cechinel, André. “Notas para The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot e a máquina literária.” Letras de Hoje 49, no. 4 (2014): 399–405. Charyn, Jerome. “Tatiana & T. S. Eliot.” American Scholar 83, no.  2 (2014): 81–87. Chung, Kyung-Sim. “Eliot’s Early Ladies beyond Gender Binary.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 157–71. Crawford, Robert. “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual.” Time Present 84 (Fall 2014): 1–2, 4. Davidson, Graham. “Wordsworth’s Wasteland or the Speargrass Redemption.” Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 20, no. 1 (2014): 73–83. De Gennaro, Mara. “Man Is Man Because . . . : Humanism Wars, ‘Sweeney Erect,’ and the Makings of Modernist Imagination.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 41 (2014): 159–93. Dutta, Anindita. “Allusions, Symbols and Imagery in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’” New Academia: An International Journal of English Language Literature and Literary Theory 3, no. 2 (2014): 1–5.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014

201

Dzelzainis, Martin. “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Other Margate Sands.” Notes and Queries 61, no. 4 (2014): 590–91. Formichelli, Jennifer. “Childhood in Twain and Eliot.” Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (2014): 125–34. Gish, Nancy. “Satellite Culture and Eliot’s Glencoe.” Complutense Journal of English Studies 22 (2014): 35–40. Glover, Jon. “Creative Writing as Curriculum or Subversion: T. S. Eliot, Bonamy Dobrée and the Gregory Fellows in Leeds.” PN Review 40, no. 3 (2014): 44–47. Griffiths, Dominic. “Looking into the Heart of Light: Considering the Poetic Event in the Work of T. S. Eliot and Martin Heidegger.” Philosophy and Literature 38, no. 2 (2014): 350–67. Grotjohn, Robert. “A Hegemon’s Privilege: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Ashbery’s ‘Three Poems.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 193–217. Hargrove, Nancy. “T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’: Past, Present, and Future.” Complutense Journal of English Studies 22 (2014): 51–67. Huh, Jung-Ja. “‘A Song for Simeon’: A Song for ‘Eliot’s Simeon.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 99–127. Irmscher, Christoph. “Listening to Eliot’s Thrush.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 2 (2014): 231–50. Jang, Cheol-U. “‘Journey of the Magi’: Retentive Agony of Mind-Scape in the Physical and Spiritual Travelogue.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 177–92. Joh, Byung-Hwa. “T. S. Eliot’s Political Posture as Found in The Elder Statesman: A Psychological View.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 131–56. Johnson, Loretta. “Feeling the Elephant: T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic.” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 4 (2014): 109–29. Joshi, Rakesh Chandra. “Psychology and Literary Criticism: Examining Critical Theories of William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot.” The Procedia— Social and Behavioral Sciences 158 (2014): 279–81. Kaveney, Roz. “T. S. Eliot: Searching for Sainthood Amid Hate Speech and Hurt.” The Guardian March 31, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/mar/31/ts-eliot-sainthood-hate-speech-hurt-poetry. Kim, Koo-Seul. “Eliot and Bradley in Special Reference to ‘Marina.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 1–25. Kim, Sung-Hyun. “T. S. Eliot and Surrealism.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 1–32. ——. “T. S. Eliot’s Poems Written in Early Youth: 1904–1910.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (Spring): 25–51. Ku, Tae-Hun. “A Reconstruction of ‘An Objective’: Eliot, Zukofsky and Stevens.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 1–24.

202

Elisabeth Däumer

Laroque, François. “Will in the ‘Waste Land’: Shakespeare and Eliot ­Revisited.” Forum for World Literature Studies 6, no. 1 (2014): 108. Lee, Cheol-Hee. “An Interpretation of Eliot’s Concept of Time Using Consciousness and Unconsciousness.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 157–76. ——. “Byron and Eliot: Eliot’s Evaluation of Byron and Its Reality.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 107–29. ——. “Husserl’s Philosophy and Eliot: Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 77–98. Lee, Man-Sik. “The Subject in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 2 (2014): 67–105. ——. “The Subjectivity of T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 129–56. Lockerd, Martin. “‘A Satirist of Vices and Follies’: Beardsley, Eliot, and Images of Decadent Catholicism.” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 4 (2014): 143–65. Mccue, Jim. “Appreciating the Rupee.” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 117–18. ——. “Did Eliot Mis-Ascribe the ‘Water-Dripping Song’ in The Waste Land?” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 118–19. ——. “Roy Campbell and ‘The Dry Salvages.’” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 121–23. ——. “T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters and Glorious France.” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 1 (2014): 45–73. McCue, Jim, and Oliver Soden. “An Unknown Bird in the Early Faber Nest.” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 151–53. Michael, Krystyna. “Neomedievalism and the Modern Subject in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 34–43. Morel, Frederick, and Marysa Laurence Demoor. “Binyon and the Modernists: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and F. T. Marinetti.” English Studies 95, no. 8 (2014): 907–22. Nusser, Tanja. “‘What Tiresias Sees, in Fact, is the Substance of the Poem’: Die Figur des blinden Sehers von Ovids Metamorphosen bis zu Dürrenmatts Das Sterben der Pythia.” Monatshefte 106, no. 2 (2014): 249–69. Orlich, Ileana Alexandra. “Translating T.  S.  Eliot in Communist Romania.”Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 13 (2014): 262–71. Ortiz, Rodolfo. “Las deslecturas de Borges: Eliot, el traductor argentino y la tradición.” Variaciones Borges 37 (2014): 37–52. Outka, Elizabeth. “‘Wood for the Coffins Ran Out’: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic.” Modernism/modernity 21, no. 4 (November 2014): 937–60.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014

203

Pfeffer, Kate. “‘The Loud Lament of the Disconsolate Chimera’—T. S. Eliot’s Tea Time Allusions.” Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (2014): 157–70. Rion, Rosanna. “T. S. Eliot’s Ekphrastic Poems.” Advances in Literary Study 2, no. 1 (2014): 31–37. Röder, Katrin. “Reparative Reading, Post-Structuralist Hermeneutics and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 132, no. 1 (2014): 58–77. Samarrai, Ghanim. “Rejuvenating T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 41, no. 2 (2014 June): 112–25. Saroyan, Aram. “War of the Worlds: T. S. Eliot versus D. H. Lawrence.” PN Review 40, no. 6 (2014): 26–27. Schrock, Chad. “The Passage T. S. Eliot Took.” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 1 (2014): 74–89. Son, Ki-Pyo. “Death in ‘East Coker.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 33–51. Soud, David. “‘The Greedy Dialectic of Time and Eternity’: Karl Barth, T. S. Eliot, and Four Quartets.” ELH 81, no. 4 (2014): 1363–91. Son, Ki-Pyo. “Death in ‘East Coker.’” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 33–51. Spurr, Barry. “Eliot on Pound and James.” Time Present 84 (2014): 9–10. Stayer, Jayme. “T. S. Eliot as a Schoolboy: The Lockwood School, Smith Academy, and Milton Academy.” Twentieth-Century Literature 59, no. 4 (2013): 619–56. Temple, George. “Gender through Tradition in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Songs to Joannes.’” eSharp: Electronic Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Review for Postgraduates 21 (2014). Toda, Kit. “Eliot’s Cunning Passages: A Note.” Essays in Criticism 64, no. 1 (2014): 90–97. Underwood, James. “Larkin’s ‘Church Going’: A Source.” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 146–48. Viney, William. “T. S. Eliot and the Textualities of the Discarded.” Textual Practice 28, no. 6 (2014): 1057–75. Virkar-Yates, Aakanksha. “‘Erhebung,’ Schopenhauer and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton.” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014): 126–27. White, Kevin. “Accidents and Incidents: A Phenomenologist Reads T. S. Eliot.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 17 (2014): 169–83. Williamson, Kevin D. “Looking for Tom.” National Review 66, no. 17 (September 22, 2014): 45. Wylie, Alex. “‘This: “Ad Socium”?’: Verbal Power in Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love.” English: The Journal of the English Association 63, no. 243 (Winter 2014): 330–46.

204

Elisabeth Däumer

Yang, Byung-Hyun. “‘Great Glory’ in Coriolan and The Rock.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 1 (2014): 95–128. Yang, Jae-Yong. “‘The Origin of East Coker’ and T. S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic Identity.” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society of Korea 24, no. 3 (2014): 53–76. Zhou, Tingting “The Deconstruction of American Myth in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’” English Language and Literature Studies 4, no. 4 (2014): 108–12. Dissertations Banerjee, Sreenjaya Ria. “Reclaiming Space: Buildings in Modernist Literature and Film.” City U of New York, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Baptista, Cristina J. “Aura, Ambivalence, and Allure: The Portuguese in Modern American Literary Spaces.” Fordham U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Brisbois, Michael. “Millenarian Moderns: A Study of Utopian Desire.” U of Calgary, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Brown, Jeffrey. “To Stage a Reading: The Actor in British Modernism.” Columbia U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Collins, David Brendan. “All that is solid melts into spirit: Autonomy, fluidity, and impersonality in Hegel, Emerson, and Eliot.” State U of New York at Buffalo, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Domestico, Anthony Paul. “Theologies of Crisis in British Literature of the Interwar Period.” Yale U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Dudley, John. “The Subject of Belief: Modernism, Religion, and Literature.” U of Wisconsin, Madison, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Guriel, Jason. “Making It New: Creating an Audience for Poetry.” York U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Holt, Megan. “The Canon of Empire: Britain, Spain, and Modernism.” Tulane U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Karas, Andrew Charles. “The Versions of Modern Poetry.” Yale U, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Marsh, Cheryl R. “From the Madhouse to the Unreal City: The Dramatic Monologue, Polyvocality, and Agency in Robert Browning, Sarah Piatt, and T. S. Eliot.” The U of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2014. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2014

205

Reviews Banerjee, A. Review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vols. 3 and 4. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. English Studies 95, no. 3 (2014): 347–49. Bradnock, Marianne. Review of Macavity the Mystery Cat, by T. S. Eliot. School Librarian 62, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 90. Chace, William M. Review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vols. 3 and 4. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. Common Knowledge 20, no. 1 (2014): 145–47. Coyle, Michael. Review of The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound, by Frances Dickey. Twentieth-Century Literature 59, no. 4 (2013): 657–65. Dawson, Terence. Review of War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, by Carl Krockel. The European Legacy 19, no. 7 (2014): 922–23. DelloBuano, M. Review of Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, by Omri Moses. CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 52, no. 3 (November 2014): 446. Donahue, Denis. “Eliot in Full.” Review of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918. Edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard; and The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. The New Criterion 33, no. 4 (2014). http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Eliot-in-full-8034. Fajardo, Adam. Review of Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense, by Paul Stasi. Time Present 84 (2014): 11–12. Fraser, Inga. Review of A Life’s Devotion: The Collection of the Late Mrs. T. S. Eliot, Christie’s, London, King Street, Sale 1187, November 20, 2013. Time Present 82 (2014): 1–2. Gallo, Rubén. Review of Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence, by Tom Boll. Modernism/modernity 21, no. 2 (2014): 564–65. Greaves, Margaret. Review of T. S. Eliot in Context, by Jason Harding. Time Present 82 (2014): 5–6. Hankins, Gabriel. Review of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing, by Patrick R. Query. Time Present 83 (2014): 5–6. Harding, Jason. Review of T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature by Steven Matthews. Review of English Studies 65, no. 269 (2014): 375–77. Hargrove, Nancy and Guy Hargrove. Review of At the Still Point of the Turning World [musical composition], by Ralf Yusef Gawlick. Time Present 82 (2014): 4. Haynes, George. Review of T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography, by John Worthen. Time Present 82 (2014): 10.

206

Elisabeth Däumer

Johnson, L. L. Review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4. Edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 51, no. 12 (2014): 2230. Lockerd, Benjamin G. Review of T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature, by Steven Matthews. Time Present 83 (2014): 2, 5. Morgenstern, John D. Review of T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature, by Steven Matthews. Modernism/modernity 21, no. 4 (2014): 1041–42. Scholick, Jennie. Review of Literature, Modernism, and Dance, by Susan Jones. Time Present 82 (2014): 6–7, 9. Van Mierlo, Wim. Review of The Work of Revision, by Hannah Sullivan. Time Present 84 (Fall 2014): 7–8. Welsch, J. T. Review of The Waste Land [musical composition], by Anthony Burgess. Time Present 82 (2014): 2, 4. Williams, Whitney. Review of Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence, by Thomas Boll. Time Present 82 (2014): 9–10. Witen, Michelle. Review of The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture, by T. Austin Graham. Time Present 84 (2014): 8, 10–11. Worthen, John. Review War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, by Carl Krockel. Time Present 83 (2014): 7–8.

Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors

Jamie Callison is a doctoral student on the Modernism and Christianity project at the University of Bergen, Norway and the University of Northampton, UK. He read English at Trinity College, Cambridge and Theology at Heythrop College, University of London, and he has held a Research Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. His doctoral work explores the interaction between debates in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church and modernist literature. He has essays on Eliot and David Jones either published or forthcoming in Literature and Theology, Modernist Cultures, and ELH. 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 and Faber and Faber, 2014). He is the Secretary of the T. S. Eliot Society. Elisabeth Däumer teaches literature and literary theory at Eastern Michigan University. She is the coeditor, with Shyamal Bagchee, of The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (2007), editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and creator of the Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive website (http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/). 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), coeditor of The Complete

207

208

Notes on Contributors

Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume III: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929 (Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber, 2015), and coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (Edinburgh UP, 2016). She is President of the T. S. Eliot Society. Nancy K. Gish is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Time in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1981) and The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire (1988), as well as many articles on Eliot and modern poetry. She coedited, with Cassandra Laity, Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot (2004). She also writes on Scottish modernism, including two books on Hugh MacDiarmid and articles on contemporary Scottish poets. Nancy D. Hargrove is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University. She has published Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1978), The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1956–1959 (1994), and T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009) and well over fifty essays. She has received five Fulbright awards as well as teaching and research awards such as the MSU Outstanding Faculty Award and the CASE Mississippi Professor of the Year. She served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Michael Opest has just completed his dissertation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Titled “The Modernist Playground: Ludic Gestures, Literary Games,” it examines play and gaming in works by such eminently serious figures as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. His work is also forthcoming in Joyce Studies Annual. Anita Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (1997) and Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (2008) and is currently writing a book about Japonisme and American modernism. April Pierce is the founder of Oxford Writers’ House. April grew up in the Silicon Valley, California. She received a BA in Literature and Philosophy from Boston College, an MA from the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program at New York University, and a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford. She is a former president of the Oxford University Poetry Society and a RAI scholar. She tutors a range of writing topics at the University of Oxford, and has published essays, criticism, fiction, and poetry. Joshua Richards is an Assistant Professor of English at Williams Baptist College, and he earned his Ph.D. at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Notes on Contributors

209

His research interests are centered in religious and mythological intertextuality in British Literature between 1880 and 1945. Christopher Ricks is the author of T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988) and of Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (the Panizzi Lectures, 2002); the editor of T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (1996); and the coeditor, with Jim McCue, of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2 volumes, 2015). 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). Matt Seybold is Assistant Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, home of the Center for Mark Twain Studies. He is also editor-in-chief of MarkTwainStudies.org. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. Dr. Seybold’s scholarship focuses on intersections of economics, mass media, and literary culture in the United States from the founding of the New York Stock Exchange in 1817 to the 2008 financial crisis. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics. His other work can be found in Mark Twain Annual, Mark Twain Journal, Henry James Review, Western Humanities Review, and Reception. In 2016 he was an NEH Summer Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He has also been a Taylor Fellow in American Literature at University of Virginia’s Harrison Institute and, in 2013, received the Eliot Society’s Fathman Young Scholar Award. Jayme Stayer holds a double degree in music and literature from the University of Notre Dame, an MA and a PhD in English literature from the University of Toledo, and an MDiv from Boston College. He has held faculty posts at Texas A&M University–Commerce and Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador. Currently Associate Professor of Literature at John Carroll University, he has published work in the fields of rhetoric, music, and modernism. His most recent books are The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. V: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939, coedited with Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi (Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber and Faber, forthcoming); Think About It: Critical Skills for Academic Writing (2015), coauthored with John Mauk and Karen Mauk; and T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe (editor, 2015).