T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe [Unabridged] 1443877387, 9781443877381

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Eliot and France
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part II: Eliot and Europe
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Afterword
Memorial Lecturers of the T. S. Eliot Society
Abbreviations Used for Works by T. S. Eliot
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Edited by

Jayme Stayer

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Edited by Jayme Stayer This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Jayme Stayer and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7738-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7738-1

For my parents, Richard and Patricia Stayer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ......................................................................................................... x Eliot and France, France and Eliot William Marx Introduction ............................................................................................... xv Eliot and France, Eliot and Europe Jayme Stayer Part I: Eliot and France Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Playing Possum: Symbolic Death and Symbolist Impotence in Eliot’s French Heritage Jean-Michel Rabaté Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 24 Seduction and Disenchantment: Eliot in the Bergsonian World Jewel Spears Brooker Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39 “Between the idea / And the reality”: Hyperconsciousness in Eliot’s Early Works Charlotte Webb Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 50 Parisian Influences in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Nancy D. Hargrove Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 64 Eliot’s Culture Shock: Imagining an Audience for the Paris Poems Jayme Stayer Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 75 Cummings Rewrites Eliot Michael Webster

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 92 T. S. Eliot, Gaston Bachelard, and the Element of Air William Blissett Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 112 T. S. Eliot, Jean Epstein, and the Physiology of Modern Poetry Elisabeth Däumer Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 129 T. S. Eliot and Charles Péguy Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec Part II: Eliot and Europe Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 146 Eliot and Theory Tomislav Brlek Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 171 It Sounds Like Writing to Me: Speech, the Auditory Imagination, and Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts Fabio Vericat Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 188 “A people without history”: Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary History Benjamin G. Lockerd Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 204 “The Waste Land was made out of splinters”: T. S. Eliot, Edwin Muir, and Contrasting European Influences Margery Palmer McCulloch Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 214 T. S. Eliot’s Expressionist Angst Joyce Wexler Afterword ................................................................................................ 231 Where We Start From: Tradition and the T. S. Eliot Society David E. Chinitz

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List of T. S. Eliot Society Memorial Lecturers........................................ 235 Abbreviations Used in This Volume ....................................................... 236 List of Illustrations .................................................................................. 238 Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 239 Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 240 Index ........................................................................................................ 245

PREFACE ELIOT AND FRANCE, FRANCE AND ELIOT WILLIAM MARX

T. S. Eliot and France: quel sujet! Long after Edward J. H. Greene’s T. S. Eliot et la France (1951), now a classic, and in the wake of Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s recent T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009), I am glad that Jayme Stayer and his collaborators have tackled the question once again in this book, for the relationship between Eliot and France is an inexhaustible subject. The French influence on Eliot’s poetry and thought could not be underestimated in any way; it might even be one of the most intense and long-lasting love stories an English-speaking writer ever had with Baudelaire’s country. As far as Eliot and France go then, ça suffit. But what about France and Eliot? What I mean is: what about the way Eliot has been read in the country that influenced him so much? What level of understanding has the poet actually attained in his second literary homeland? Foreign literatures are specific systems more isolated from their neighbors than one might think, and Eliot’s case can reveal the unformulated laws that govern these systems. If the question must be asked in this way, it is because Eliot has not actually been read much in France. Very few books are published about him, and even more worrying, his own works are hardly known at all. If only they were easily available … but they are not. You can find currently in French bookstores a bilingual paperback edition of Eliot’s major poems (with a terribly inaccurate English text) and a children’s edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. And that is all, however unbelievable such a scarcity may seem. His shorter poems, his plays, his criticism: none of them are available anymore. Under these conditions it is hardly surprising that for the French, Eliot is but a name, respected if meaningless. A few years ago the French National Library organized a series of lectures on major literary figures of the twentieth century. Typically enough, among the English-speaking

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writers you could find Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Pound, but not Eliot. This seems a sorry fate for an eminent writer who treasured French literature and who worked so hard to make it known in Britain and America. Of course, one would not expect Eliot to enjoy in France the same status he has in English-speaking countries. But why hasn’t he at least the same reputation he possesses in Italy, where new and good editions of his books are published regularly and where he is widely read? The problem of Eliot’s status in France is complex and is bound up with the problem of poetry in general. Since the time of Mallarmé, poetry has become less and less popular in France and is perceived as a plaything for connoisseurs. Achieving success and literary recognition is already a difficult task for a French poet, and still more for a foreigner: in France, where the formal approach to literature is so prevalent, the translation of poetry feels more like a betrayal than in any other country. These suspicions—of recondite verse and of translated poetry—explain in part why Eliot’s contemporaries such as Joyce and Woolf are now largely recognized, while he himself remains in a dim light. He wrote poetry, and they published novels. Moreover, Eliot’s French publisher, Le Seuil, while prestigious enough, is not as famous for poetry as Gallimard: it can boast no easily recognizable poetry series, for example, which is a real drawback for marketing an already unmarketable genre. An Eliot volume in the famous Pléiade collection would do wonders for his reputation certainly, but that collection belongs to Gallimard, and besides, the copyrights would likely fetch a price much too high for the expected readership. It is a catch-22 born of the specific ecosystem that is French letters: the discrepancy between Eliot’s second-rate position in France and his high reputation in the rest of the world is the very thing that will keep him from making any progress in the French publishing business, that is, unless Faber and Faber is willing to negotiate its terms with respect to the peculiarity of the French situation. There is also an aesthetic barrier to cross: from the French point of view, surrealism, which eradicated everything in its way, dominates twentieth-century arts. The French do not always realize that in the 1920s and 30s, there were other ways of writing innovative poetry besides the surrealist way, and that English and American modernism was a particularly productive mode. Some knowledge of Eliot’s contribution to world literature and to literary criticism would be most welcome for rectifying this distorted vision of modernity.

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So Eliot’s problem in France is closely related to the specificities of the history of French poetry. One question remains open nonetheless: why is Eliot’s position in France weaker than Ezra Pound’s, even though Pound was also a modernist poet? You could say, in the first place, that Eliot was not always lucky with his French friends. At the end of the war, they were either dead, like Paul Valéry; politically compromised because of their collaboration with Vichy France, like Ramon Fernandez, who died shortly afterwards; or marginalized in foreign countries, like Saint-John Perse. In the 1940s and 50s, the translators Henri Fluchère and Pierre Leyris proved to be excellent go-betweens, and they were helped along in their work by the aura of Eliot’s Nobel Prize, but they now lack successors. Paradoxical though it may seem, I do not think that Eliot has suffered much from his well-known reactionary stance. As long as a writer shows enough talent, French readers do not care about politics, for they use essentially formalist and aesthetic criteria. One example will suffice to illustrate this point. In the English-speaking world there was much talk recently about Eliot’s anti-Semitism: books were written on the subject, the case was brought into the public arena and occupied The Times Literary Supplement for months and even years. In some respects, the case might be compared with Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s. Yet, rightly or wrongly, French critics have always been prone to dissociate Céline’s literary personality from his real one. However outrageous his anti-Semitic writings are, his central place in the French literary canon has never been seriously challenged. Thus, in 2004 and 2005, Céline’s masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night featured prominently in the program of the national competitive examination designed to recruit the best high school teachers in literature (agrégation). English-speaking critics would find this unbelievable, for if Eliot’s anti-Semitism had been one tenth as blatant as Céline’s, they would not even take the trouble to argue about his case: Eliot would immediately be expelled from the canon, and the case would be closed. While the English literary canon is also a moral one, the French canon is more formalist. In fact, the problem is more religious than political. This is the main difference between Eliot’s and Pound’s cases. Unlike the latter, Eliot’s Christian faith serves as the ground for much of his work. This religious tenor explains, among other things, why he is more famous in Italy. Conversely, French culture is so anticlerical today that few Christian writers can avoid being sidelined, even the most innovative among them, like Joris-Karl Huysmans or Georges Bernanos. (Paul Claudel would probably be an exception, but as a general rule theater people have a soft spot for rituals or anything likely to inspire religious fervor on the stage.)

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This dismissal has nothing to do with censure, at least not consciously; it is just that most French readers feel uncomfortable with a Christian theme or find it difficult to understand its meaning. The problem of secularism is even more fundamental to Eliot’s case, as it relates to the very idea of literature in France. Indeed, as shown by Marc Fumaroli in Exercices de lecture: de Rabelais à Paul Valéry (2006), the history of French literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be summed up in the emergence of a secular power that gradually took the place of the Catholic Church, an evolution that was prepared by the success of the Gallican movement. The culmination of this evolution is, of course, the triumph of the “absolute literature” of the late nineteenth century, a literature that presented itself as a new form of religion: an aesthetic religion. Certainly, we find a similar pattern of evolution in other European countries. In England, for example, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater provide a very clear illustration of this shift away from religion and towards aestheticism. But it is in France, probably because of the trauma of the Gallican dispute, that literature reached its highest level of autonomy and was considered absolute and inviolable. It is worth noting that the French still live more or less under this ideological regime with all of its consequences, one of them being precisely the inability to conceive of a religious literature or a Christianity that could inform it. In a system where literature plays the role of a new clerisy, pressing literature to Christian ends is seen as nothing less than a betrayal of the religion of literature, because literature is not supposed to worship anything other than itself. Since one cannot serve two masters at the same time, the concept of a Christian literature seems an inherent contradiction to the French mind. These two labels, Christianity and literature, have been antagonistic at least as far back as French writers have struggled against the authority of the Church. For a French reader, Christian writers can only be traitors at best, if not frauds. Since their work refers to a sacredness other than its own, they cannot be taken seriously as writers. The disapproval of any Christian literature has less to do with anticlericalism than with the French overvaluation of literature in the last two centuries. The specific problem encountered by the introduction of Eliot’s work in French literary culture becomes clearer in this context: the religion of literature—to which Eliot was so strongly opposed—cannot tolerate the presence of a religious literature that would necessarily challenge its own foundations. The ultimate paradox, of course, is that Eliot himself was a great admirer of those French Symbolists who did so much to establish a new religion of literature. But what he admitted in foreign writers he could not accept at home—in Arnold, for instance.

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So there is still much work to be done by Eliot scholars in France. If they propose new readings, if they provide appropriate editions and translations, and moreover, if they work for a paradigm shift in French literature, they might reasonably hope to overcome Eliot’s handicap in France. Is it any wonder, finally, that a poetry such as Eliot’s, which questions more than any other the definition of culture, would reveal the crucial differences that separate literatures from each other? Attending to such divisions is the first step for any critic who wants to reconcile them.

INTRODUCTION ELIOT AND FRANCE, ELIOT AND EUROPE JAYME STAYER

In late 1910, when the young T. S. Eliot sailed across the Atlantic for a year of life and study in France, he was headed to a country whose poets had already deeply affected his sensibility. His short year in the country would change him even more decisively, as he swam in the artistic, philosophical, psychological and political currents of early-century Paris. That particular place and time was part of a larger Sargasso Sea of influences that Eliot later termed “the mind of Europe,” a geographical and historical entity with which he aligned himself and his poetics. For scholars who have tracked influences on the poet, T. S. Eliot’s indebtedness to France has never been in dispute. But because Eliot’s year in Paris was so decisive for his development, mapping the contours of that influence has never been a simple matter. The first connection between Eliot and France was made moments after Eliot entered the public arena. In 1917, the same year that Eliot published his first slender volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, Ezra Pound was pointing out Eliot’s similarities to the French Symbolist Jules Laforgue (73). Since then, studies of French influences have fallen roughly into the two categories of source study and analysis. Of the source studies, there are countless monographs and articles that track the French influences not just on Eliot’s early work but on the whole of his output. Edward J. H. Greene’s T. S. Eliot et la France (1951) was the first book-length study of this kind. Grover Smith’s T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (1956/1974) also ferreted out many French sources, but as Smith’s was a general study, it offered no summative account of French influence. Both a sourcebook and an analysis, Cyrena Pondrom’s The Road from Paris (1974) widened the frame of reference and corrected the prevailing assumption that Eliot and Pound had been the primary importers of French influence to the Anglophone world. Nancy Hargrove’s study, T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009), is the most recent entry in this category, bringing to life the Paris

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of 1910-11 and documenting in exhaustive detail Eliot’s potential engagements with French popular culture, literature, and music. In addition to these source studies, a rich critical literature analyzes facets of Eliot’s work as they relate to France. Some of the more widely noted works in this category include Kenneth Asher’s T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995), which derives Eliot’s political aesthetic from Charles Maurras and the Action Française; John T. Mayer’s T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices (1989), which explores the effect of French verse on Eliot’s poetry; and Piers Gray’s T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 19091922 (1982), which assesses the influence of English and French philosophy on Eliot’s intellectual growth. Since there is no understanding T. S. Eliot without measuring the impact of French culture on his development, our volume serves as both a centennial commemoration of Eliot’s year in Paris and a reconsideration of the role of France, and more widely Europe, as they bore on his growth as an artist and critic. While this volume does not offer a singular, revisionist account of French and European influence in Eliot’s work, it does take France as its center while reaching across national borders, revisiting familiar topoi, and opening up new veins of inquiry from unexpected sources and understudied phenomena. The volume is divided into two overlapping sections. The first, “Eliot and France,” focuses on French authors and trends that shaped Eliot as well as on the personal experiences in Paris that are legible in his artistic development. Much scholarship on Eliot and France has focused on Eliot’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Symbolists and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and two of the essays here deepen and complicate those accepted narratives. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s “Playing Possum: Symbolic Death and Symbolist Impotence in Eliot’s French Heritage” offers a French context for Eliot’s ideas about the artist’s death of self and submission to a tradition. Jewel Spears Brooker’s “Seduction and Disenchantment: Eliot in the Bergsonian World” reads the French philosopher through the lens of two separate critiques Eliot makes of Bergson—one in his poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the other in his graduate philosophy essays. In its focus on Eliot’s Paris poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” Charlotte Webb’s “‘Between the idea / And the reality’: Hyperconsciousness in Eliot’s Early Works” provides a thoughtful counterpoint to Brooker’s analysis of that poem. Rather than focus on Bergson, Webb brings the psychoanalytic concept of hyperconsciousness to bear on the poem’s negotiations between internal and external reality.

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Nancy D. Hargrove’s “Parisian Influences in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’” offers new discoveries of French sources for Eliot’s famous poem. And my own “Eliot’s Culture Shock: Imagining an Audience for the Paris Poems” offers a possible biographical impetus behind Eliot’s poem “The Triumph of Bullshit” and places that odd blemish within the chronology of his rhetorical development as a poet. Michael Webster, in his “Cummings Rewrites Eliot,” offers a way of seeing the styles and concerns of Eliot and E. E. Cummings—two poets who could hardly be more different from one another—in the context of their French inheritances. This first section on Eliot and France also includes essays on French authors who either influenced or were influenced by Eliot. Three essays in particular break new ground: William Blissett’s “T. S. Eliot, Gaston Bachelard, and the Element of Air” places Eliot and Bachelard together for the first time. Elisabeth Däumer’s “T. S. Eliot, Jean Epstein, and the Physiology of Modern Poetry” follows up on a long-ignored aside in Eliot’s canonical essay “Metaphysical Poets,” thereby illuminating his early insistence on poetic difficulty and unraveling a number of mysteries surrounding his metaphors of technology and the nervous system. Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s “T. S. Eliot and Charles Péguy” considers the overlooked influence of Péguy, especially in Eliot’s religious works. The second section of the volume, “Eliot and Europe,” situates Eliot in a wider matrix of influences and aftereffects. Tomislav Brlek’s “Eliot and Theory” offers a bracing assessment of—and correction to—the ways in which Anglo- and Francophone theory has distorted Eliot’s theoretical preoccupations. Fabio Vericat’s “It Sounds Like Writing to Me: Speech, the Auditory Imagination, and Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts” speculates about the ways in which Eliot’s commitment to radio broadcasts for the BBC challenged and transformed his poetics. Benjamin G. Lockerd’s “‘A people without history’: Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary History” shows how Eliot’s engagement with the Catholic historians Christopher Dawson and Hilaire Belloc enabled him to critique the popular historiographies of Herbert Spencer and H. G. Wells. Margery Palmer McCulloch’s “‘The Waste Land was made out of splinters’: T. S. Eliot, Edwin Muir, and Contrasting European Influences” places Eliot’s French inheritance against Muir’s German influences and assesses their effects on competing versions of modernism. Joyce Wexler’s contribution, “T. S. Eliot’s Expressionist Angst,” reconsiders “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that for a hundred years has been considered vrai français in its sources; Wexler reads it instead as an echt expressionist poem, showing

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how French neoclassicism and German expressionism were different aesthetic responses to the same modern anxieties. *

*

*

“To enjoy any French or German poetry,” Eliot opined, “I think one needs to have some sympathy with the French or German mind; Dante, none the less an Italian and a patriot, is first a European” (SE 239). With a leap and a bound, Eliot moves from France, Germany, and Italy to a notion of universality that is still provincially rooted in Europe. Eliot first offered the phrase “the mind of Europe” in his early essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). It is an idea that runs through his essays, is never clearly defined, and is often modified with equivocations. (A sketcher of ideas, Eliot did not have the scholar’s temperament for proving a theory in exhaustive, historical detail.) Even at its first appearance, the concept is fraught with instability: [The poet] must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. (SP 39)

Married to his idea of the “historical sense” (SP 38), this developing mind of Europe is also, confusingly, the mind of the poet’s “own country.” In another essay, Eliot describes the Europe of Dante’s time as “mentally more united than we can now conceive,” but even that unity is clouded by “dissensions and dirtiness” (SP 207). Thus, the “mind of Europe” for Eliot was less an arbitrary imposition of order on a chaotic present than a historical ideal that was never fully realized. Even when Dante wrote— before the dissociation of sensibility had begun to unravel this supposed unity—Europe was never completely unified according to Eliot, only “more or less one” (SP 209). And when Eliot puffs the universality of Dante’s Italian for having been derived from the universal Latin, he hedges his bets by emphasizing the “localization” of Dante’s Florentine speech as cutting across national boundaries. The paradox of provincial universalism mirrors the complexities in all of Eliot’s work, the philosopher’s mind endlessly backtracking with an “If and Perhaps and But” (CPP 137). While Florentine speech may have been the local springboard through which Dante achieved a supposed universality, it was the rhythms of

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French and the culture of Paris that launched Eliot from his schoolboy studies of France into the broader culture of European languages and history. To understand Eliot’s interest in European-ness, one might start with his familial roots in St. Louis and Boston, and with his constant sense of his own doubleness: the outsider status that made him feel first like an easterner in Missouri, then a southerner in Boston, an American in France, a metic in Britain, an Anglican within the Catholic tradition. Eliot’s latenineteenth-century education took European history and literature as its lodestar. Beginning at Smith Academy, his classical course included European history, Greek and Roman history, and intense study of the languages and literatures of Europe, including English, Latin, Greek, French, and German (see Stayer). A. David Moody has observed that the curriculum of Harvard University, where Eliot undertook multiple degrees, was more Eurocentric in its concerns than Oxford or Cambridge in the early twentieth century (62). Even so, it was while Eliot was at Harvard that the dominance of the Western tradition finally opened to Eastern religion and philosophy, studies in which he immersed himself seriously. But all of these preparatory engagements, slowly broadening the young Eliot, did not strike him as forcefully as the French influence did when it appeared, accidentally, outside of the classroom, when he stumbled across Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This volume first introduced Eliot to the work of the French poet Jules Laforgue, a chance meeting that sparked a passionate intellectual kinship that made Eliot’s own poetry come alive for the first time. France became Eliot’s doorway to the European ideal, a “mind” both cultural and geographical where he would later make his home—though, tellingly, not on the continent, but on the outlying island of Britain. That Eliot always expressed, as Patrick Query has argued, a “commitment to constituent cultural particularities” rather than (in Eliot’s dismissive phrase) an “emotional summons to international brotherhood” does not make his appeal to European unity any less internationalist in its scope (Query 38). Nor was Eliot’s urge to unify necessarily restricted to those whose politics were conservative or whose worldview was metaphysical. For example, Eliot’s theories might be placed in such universalist movements or artistic collectives as the Bauhaus or Dadaism. These European movements expressed solidarity in internationalist terms—especially socialist ideology—and sought to break down barriers between artist and artisan in order to forge a new European mind. All of these contexts and theories take as their backdrop the Great War. Modernism was in large part the artistic response to that disaster, but certain strains of modernism (especially Bauhaus and Dadaism) explicitly rejected both expressionism

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and impressionism as redolent of the nationalism and individualism that had led to the conflict in the first place. The near-futility of conceiving a unitary mind of Europe in the wake of that continent’s catastrophic disintegration was an underdog project that Eliot relished for years.1 As Moody has argued, Eliot “knew perfectly well that he was invoking an ideal conception which had little support in actuality. It was precisely because the mind of Europe did not exist in any practical form that it was necessary to invent it, or to reinvent it” (61). While such universalizing metaphors as the “mind of Europe” are subject to critique, they cannot yet be discarded. However literary scholars and historians may complicate such tropes, the mind of Europe—the concept of a unified cultural ideal—is still a potent one in the contemporary political realm: the question of what it means to be European reverberates through political discussions, financial markets, diplomatic treaties, and national and international borders. For Eliot, the entryway into that broad, historical discussion was France, the first European culture he came to know intimately, and a country whose tutelage would enrich his exploration of other European traditions. Paris, in the intellectual and artistic ferment of the particular year of 1910-11, was the place where his alien eyes were trained on the present and the past, the country and the continent, the local and the universal.

Notes 

1

For extended analyses of the phrase “the mind of Europe”—its origin, meaning, and shelf life—see Query, Moody, Douglass, Cooper, and Vanheste.

Works Cited Asher, Kenneth. T. S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Cooper, John Xiros. “T. S. Eliot’s Die Einheit der Europäischen Kultur and the Idea of European Union.” T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe. Ed. Paul Douglass. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 145-58. Douglass, Paul, ed. T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Greene, Edward J. H. T. S. Eliot et la France. Paris: Boivin, 1951. Gray, Piers. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909-1922. Sussex: Harvester, 1982.

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Hargrove, Nancy. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Mayer, John T. T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Moody, A. David. Tracing T. S. Eliot’s Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1996. Pondrom, Cyrena. The Road from Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Pound, Ezra. “Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot.” Egoist 4.5 (1917): 72-74. Rpt. in Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2004. 4-6. Query, Patrick. Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Stayer, Jayme. “T. S. Eliot as a Schoolboy: The Lockwood School, Smith Academy, and Milton Academy.” Twentieth Century Literature 59.4 (2013): 619-56. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: Dutton, 1958. Vanheste, Jeroen. “The Idea of Europe.” T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 52-59.

PART I: ELIOT AND FRANCE

CHAPTER ONE PLAYING POSSUM: SYMBOLIC DEATH AND SYMBOLIST IMPOTENCE IN ELIOT’S FRENCH HERITAGE JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ

What will happen if I live again? … But the dilemma—to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive? Is it best to make oneself a machine, and kill them by not giving nourishment, or to be alive, and kill them by wanting something that one cannot get from that person? —T. S. Eliot (L2 627) [A] not unrecent peep at Tears Eliot … has mightily confirmed my negligible suspicion that be it never so humble there’s no:Solly,after entertaining that hombre for 15 minutes you feel like taking out a patent for manipulating the dead —E. E. Cummings (Letters 178)

To situate Eliot in a French context, it helps to recognize him as participating in a late Symbolist tradition. Such a tradition had its own concept of the “death of the author” and saw this death as relayed by a living tradition. I would like to begin exploring this theme, which Eliot evokes in a passage from the Turnbull Lectures on Laforgue and Corbière: “when I first came across these French poets, some twenty-three years ago, it was a personal enlightenment such as I can hardly communicate. I felt for the first time in contact with a tradition, for the first time, that I had, so to speak, some backing by the dead, and at the same time that I had something to say that might be new and relevant” (VMP 287). The prudent qualification—“so to speak”—would not be necessary for readers of the earlier essays, or of some poems. In this lecture, we hear echoes from two other passages, two different regimes of utterance; the poetic: “I should be glad of another death,” as the closing of “Journey of the Magi” (CPP 104). Or the critical mode, this time from “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so

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much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know” (SP 40). I will now try to provide a French context for Eliot’s sense of a homology between his personal death and the collective death entailed by the idea of tradition. In his exploration of tradition and death, Eliot revisits the ancient topos of dwarves—as the terminology then had it—who see better because they are sitting on the shoulders of giants. This idea had been formulated much earlier by Bernard de Chartres and reported by John of Salisbury: Bernard “used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulder of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature” (Salisbury 167).1 Yet the trope of giants who need to be alive in order to carry others on their backs will now underpin, for Eliot, a thanatopoeia according to which one makes a link between a dead poets society and the newer forms expressing the contemporary world. The authors Eliot mentions in his Turnbull Lectures include Baudelaire, Corbière, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Charles-Louis Philippe. Their significance derives from a comparison of respective worth among the dead, an idea that Eliot explains in an oftquoted passage from “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (SP 38). This is the basic presupposition that I will examine: to become one with the dead, to identify with their language and their accumulated insights, implies that the creative individual merges with a collective mind before finding a way toward singular expression. In the French context, this tradition begins with Symbolism. Eliot sees Baudelaire as the initiator, but Mallarmé had the keener insight into his own death, and his plural “deaths” have been well studied by Leo Bersani in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé writes to his friend Cazalis: “I am perfectly dead” (Mallarmé, Correspondance 342). The conceit, paradoxical as it sounds, sends us in the direction of a concept of writing that has been proposed by Jacques Derrida and that points to a critique of subjective identity. This idea was earlier developed by Jules Laforgue, as we see from “Dimanches” (III), a posthumous poem much admired by Eliot and quoted in the same Turnbull lecture: Bref, j’allais me donner d’un “Je vous aime” Quand je m’avisai non sans peine Que d’abord je ne me possédais pas bien moi-même.

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Chapter One ...................................... Ainsi donc, pauvre, pâle et piètre individu Qui ne croit à son Moi qu’à ses moments perdus, Je vis s’effacer ma fiancée Emportée par le cours des choses, Telle l’épine voit s’effeuiller, Sous prétexte de soir sa meilleure rose. (Laforgue 306)2

Eliot discovered Laforgue in Arthur Symons’s book on the Symbolist movement. In the section on Mallarmé, Symons begins with the idea that the French poet was the acknowledged leader of the movement because he had posited an “absolute” in poetry: Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those who love literature too much to write it except by fragments; in whom the desire for perfection brings its own defeat. With either more or less ambition he would have done more to achieve himself; he was always divided between an absolute aim at the absolute, that is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain for the compromise by which, after all, literature is literature. (Symons 62)

The “absolute” is a term that Eliot later rethinks philosophically via Bradley, but he first embraces it via Symons on Mallarmé and Laforgue. In Mallarmé’s letters, we see the poet documenting an existential and intellectual crisis. In April 1866, he evokes a trip to Cannes that had allowed him to “dig down into verse” [creuser le vers] and reach his artistic breakthrough, but only after a dismal encounter with nothingness (Correspondance 297). A letter to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam describes the crisis: “my soul is destroyed. My thought has reached the point where it could think itself and has no strength at its disposal to evoke in a unique Nothingness the void disseminated in its porosity” (366). Yet even though he feels that he had “died,” Mallarmé announces the “interior dream” of two parallel books, one on “Beauty” and the other on “sumptuous allegories of Nothingness.” He can sense these books but feels impotent to write them: “Really, I am afraid to begin (although, it is true Eternity has scintillated in me and devoured any surviving notion of time) where our poor and sacred Baudelaire ended” (367). Then in 1869, an extraordinary series of letters are sent to various addressees, all dictated by Mallarmé to his wife because he was suffering from a writer’s block akin to hysteria. His doctor had forbidden him to touch a pen. Maria’s handwriting records her husband’s words: “The first phase of my life is over. Consciousness, overburdened with shadows, wakes up slowly to shape a new man, and has to find again my dream after its creation. This will last a number of years during which I must relive the life of humanity since its childhood as it

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becomes conscious of itself” (425). While this crisis of 1869 forces him to reject the literary program that had preceded it, the poet keeps promising new work to come. The metaphysical encounter with absolute Nothingness commemorated by Mallarmé’s Igitur has been productive, and the poet accepts that he is just a littérateur and not a philosopher or a hero of the mind. One can postulate a convergence among Mallarmé’s letters, his few published poems, and the notes that he left for a never finished “Book.”3 Blanchot’s Livre à Venir demonstrated that Mallarmé’s own “Livre” could only be a future project. It had to remain “to come” and could not be defined, as the editor of Mallarmé’s notes says, as a real possibility.4 But the lost or vanishing Book may also have been realized elsewhere: in the letters themselves. This is the radical thesis set forward by Roger Dragonetti’s book Un fantôme dans le kiosque. Dragonetti argues that Mallarmé’s meditation on an absolute Book implied as a dialectical counterpart the contingent inscription of the author in the futile concerns of everyday life. It was from this lived life that a few postcards or occasional light verses would be sent to contemporaries. Mallarmé worked with a view to the social inscription of his writings, especially toward the end of his life, when he occupied himself with poems for anniversaries, banquets, commemorations, burials, all the rituals surrounding the busy life of a literary Master, much more than with the neo-Hegelian agenda presupposed by Blanchot. In Les loisirs de la poste, Mallarmé launched a new genre in which futility and ingenuity blend triumphantly. The addresses of his correspondents became pretexts for quatrains that the mailman had to decipher in order to deliver the message—and he always did! Such poems were indistinguishable from gifts for friends, as they were written on fans, fruits, packages of candies, tobacco or coffee. For lack of the absolute Book, poetry was condemned to fulfill the function of miniature decorations. Ornamentation appeared as the bourgeois rewriting of an ontological futility. The decision to invest in futility provides a solution to Mallarmé’s contradictions: just as he was describing to his disciples the absolute task of a “Supreme Fiction,” his real activity consisted in rhyming addresses. The death of the Hero—for which the notes for the Book elaborate several scenarios—was a demise that Mallarmé reserved for himself in a curious, self-fulfilling prophecy and that confirmed his inability to create a Book to which he pretended to have devoted his life. Is it a coincidence, then, that Mallarmé died of a laryngeal spasm while struggling at last with the fantastic creation of the Book? His physical demise points to the inevitable “elocutionary disappearance” [la

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disparition élocutoire] of a poet who vanishes into a pure language (Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes 366). The lethal crisis which seized him is called in French by a name derived from English, faux croup (spasmodic croup): very nearly a faux coup or “false throw of the dice,” grabbing you in the throat, leading to the throes that parody Death’s final throw of the dice, Death as a dishonest croupier. Caught in this fatal, spastic throw, Mallarmé could be said to have died from the discrepancy between his sublime aspirations to the Book and the awareness that he would never fulfill them. Trapped between the radically new poetical language of the impossible Book and the daily practice of a new poetic language, we come quite close to the angel evoked by Walter Benjamin after Klee’s famous figure. Here, in Benjamin’s description of it, we see the poet meditating on history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” The storm blowing from Paradise, Benjamin says, “propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (259-60). When he died, Mallarmé was conscious that he left no legacy: no heir could take up the project. The last letter to his family, written between two seizures, stresses the desperate character of his position; alluding to the “half-centenarian heap of notes” that he alone could have deciphered or used, Mallarmé asks for their destruction: “Burn, therefore; there is no literary heritage there, my poor children…. Believe that it was to be very beautiful” (Correspondance 642). Mallarmé’s inheritance would thus exist in tension between the absolute Book and the futility of everyday life. The tension will only be resolved via a systematic practice of serial deaths leading to a renewal or rebirth of the subject. But for Eliot, Mallarmé’s dead-serious dialectic was lacking a principle of supreme importance that Eliot found in two lesser poets, Corbière and Laforgue: irony. To explore how irony opens up this closed dialectic for Eliot, we must first make a detour through prose. Les lauriers sont coupés (1887, translated as The Bays Are Sere), a slender novel by Edouard Dujardin, was the book that Joyce discovered in Paris in 1903 and later credited with having shown him the technique of interior monologue. This novel is important in our context because it opens a pathway between Symbolist poetry and modernist writing. What can be stressed, if we imagine that Eliot ever read the novel, is the mixture of irony, sexuality and musicality skillfully deployed by Dujardin. The opening paragraph zooms in on Daniel Prince, a young man who appears in the middle of a Paris crowd: For from the chaos of appearances, amid periods and sites, in the illusion of things being begotten and born, one among the others, distinct from the

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others, yet similar to the others, one the same and yet another, from the infinity of possible existences, I appear; … Paris, on a bright evening of setting sun, the monotonous noises, the pale houses, the foliage of shadows; a milder evening; and the joy of being someone, of walking; the streets and multitudes, and, stretching far in the air, the sky; all around, Paris sings, and, in the haze of shapes perceived, softly it frames the idea. (Dujardin, Bays 3)

The slightly blurred and impressionistic passage evokes a diffuse unanimism of the big city. Dujardin’s narrative technique is ideally suited to a subjective apprehension of everyday life in Paris. Some technical difficulties, though, were hard to solve. The novel’s first pages stick to one interior perspective, and so the physical progression of the main character cannot be described from the outside. Such problems are obvious, for example, in the scene in which Prince gropes his way up the stairs of a friend, a sort of Prufrockian confidant. Prince thinks: Here’s the house I have to go into, where I shall find someone; the house; the entrance to the hall; let us go in. Night is falling; the air is mild; there is a cheerfulness in the air. The staircase; the bottom steps. Supposing he’s left early? he sometimes does; but I want to tell him about the day I’ve had. The first floor landing; the wide, well-lit staircase, the windows. I’ve confided in him, in this decent friend of mine, about my love affair. (Dujardin, Bays 3)

This may be clumsy writing, yet a certain rhythm emerges as the novel progresses. That rhythm is Wagnerian, and The Bays Are Sere was the first novel to translate a Wagnerian musicality into both its prose and structure. The editor of the influential Revue wagnérienne (1885 to 1888), Dujardin had introduced the music of Wagner to Mallarmé, whose Mardis he regularly attended, as did Arthur Symons. In one of the novel’s street scenes, the tune of a barrel-organ is reproduced with its score as Prince leisurely strolls down a boulevard. Various types of music are mixed with his sexual excitement in a sequence of tumescence and detumescence. Innuendoes from popular tunes (“I love you more than my turkey-cocks”) lead to the leitmotif of “love you more.” The rather frenzied erotic fantasy is cut off with: “I’ve my lecture tomorrow” (Dujardin, Bays 47-49). Prince then surveys his diary and remembers love letters written to him by Léa d’Arsay in a recapitulation of their courtship. All these motives, intertwined graciously, are controlled by a pervasive irony. Irony and eroticism are the two outstanding qualities of The Bays Are Sere. Prince is a delicate but by no means unsexed suitor of the cocotte Léa. We understand that she takes advantage of him by giving small

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Chapter One

favors piece-meal, in return for which she gets sums of money from the young student who can barely make ends meet. The action is on the night of decision: Prince wants Léa to pay back in kind, or he will break up with her. The irony is that she seems quite willing to do so while he is embarrassed by romantic notions about purity. At one point, to put him at ease, she pretends to fall asleep in his arms, where Prince is overwhelmed by her sensuality: “it is her body’s perfume I can sense in the deep essence of the mingling flowers; yes, her woman’s being; and the profound mystery of her sex in love; lecherously, daemonically, when virile mastery of fleshly impulse surrenders to a kiss, thus the terrible, bitter, blanching ecstasy rises” (55). But in spite of this sexualized evocation of her body, Prince does not dare to take advantage of the situation. Instead, he falls asleep: she sleeps; I feel sleep coming over me; I half close my eyes … there … her body; her breast swells and swells; and the sweet scent mingled … fine April night … in a while we’ll go for a ride … the cool air … we’re going to leave … in a while … the two candles … there … along the boulevards … “love y’more than m’ sheep” … “love y’ more” (55)

He dozes in this way until he is woken up by Léa’s ironic taunt: “congratulations, my dear” (56). Prince’s words always betray him; he is paralyzed by romantic clichés about love that hide petty calculations about the sums spent on her. When the call of flesh imposes itself, he says naively: “renunciations, goodbye to the renunciations, I want her!” (78). In the end, having given her all the money he had with him, Prince leaves without having decided whether to continue or break up. Léa’s “honor” is intact, but Prince thinks he’ll “to the woods no more,” a resolution which will last as long as the song. They do part: “gone for ever, the possibilities of love between us.... Pale and unforgettably beautiful, my friend stretches out her hand to me. // ‘Goodbye.’ // ‘Goodbye.’ // She gives a friendly smile; on her breasts the lights glimmer, blonde and nocturnal” (79). We glimpse Léa laughing at Prince’s delusion, which pushes us back to the beginning: the awkwardness and naiveté that characterized the style of the first pages can be blamed on Prince’s immaturity rather than on the author’s lack of art. Mallarmé immediately acknowledged the novelty of Dujardin’s discovery. In a letter, he thanked him for the novel in 1888: I can see you have set down a rapid and dancing mode of notation [une mode de notation virevoltant et cursif], whose sole aim, independent of large-scale literary structures, poetry or decoratively convoluted phraseology, is to express, without misapplication of the sublime means

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involved, an everyday life that is so crucial to grasp [le quotidien si précieux à saisir]. So there is here less a happy result of chance than one of those discoveries we are all tending towards in our different ways. (qtd. in Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 22)

Le quotidien si précieux à saisir: such a phrase sketches a program for a modernism intent on catching up with modernity. This program of grasping everyday life is valid for poetry as well as for prose, and Eliot will make good use of it. The experience of life in great cities with their countless chance encounters generates a sense of the fleeting beauty of such urban “trivialities.” Random, anonymous encounters in Dujardin also provide a new link between ethics and form. It was another post-Symbolist novel’s connection between ethics and form, forged in its analysis of modern sexuality, that appealed to Eliot, perhaps because it explained sexual frustration via the degradation of the love-object (a syphilitic prostitute) and also by a certain lack of virility: Bubu of Montparnasse. Charles-Louis Philippe, one of the foremost proletarian writers in France, had died at the age of 35 in 1909. His Bubu de Montparnasse (1901) was, as Eliot averred, his masterpiece; it is the first novel that explores the underworld of Parisian pimps and prostitutes in a tone that rings true. It allowed Eliot to penetrate with a reader’s imagination the world of pimps and prostitutes that he cautiously avoided while living in Paris. Bubu provided the phrase “mixing memory and desire” with which he opens The Waste Land, as well as a critique of modern civilization by way of examining its sexual mores. Here is the plot: a pimp and a student from the provinces fight over the love of Berthe, a young prostitute. When Bubu goes to jail for pimping, the student lives happily with her for a while, even though he has caught syphilis from her. But then Bubu is released from jail, and he comes at night to fetch Berthe. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, she follows him without any discussion. The student remains alone, in despair. Eliot wrote a moving preface to the English translation of Bubu in 1932. He concludes his preface in a Christian manner, hinting that no one can feel virtuous or self-righteous after having read this novel. He stresses that there is compassion yet no passion in Philippe’s scrupulous rendering of the underworld. Fundamentally, Eliot claims, Philippe is capable of “not thinking” when he writes, in a perfect exemplification of modernist negative capability. As early as 1910, Lukács had reached a similar conclusion as to the negativity displayed by Philippe in Soul and Form. For Lukács, Philippe is the poet of the limited aspirations of the underworld and the petty-bourgeoisie, who would exhibit the structure of unsatisfied longing as determined by the social context. Philippe’s characters can never enjoy happiness; they

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cannot even perceive it when it is at hand: “their social position has become a state of longing” (Lukács 120). Thus, the scenes of doomed love amidst mercenary sexuality take on an ethical function. Philippe’s ethical sense, Lukács argues, was always very strong; even the abject Bubu is a product of it. When Bubu learns that his mistress is ill, he wants to abandon her, but his friend—another pimp—says he would consider such behavior dishonorable. “On ne lâche pas une femme parce qu’elle a la vérole.” Philippe’s development, like that of every strong man, was from lyricism to objectivity. (122-23)

This is the law of the underworld: one does not cast aside a woman because she is syphilitic. Such codes regulate sexual commerce. What stands out is that the true hero of the novel is not the sentimental student— who does little to save his romantic love, crushed as he is by the pimp’s stare, unable to shake his lover’s passivity—but Bubu himself. Even when he goes to jail, Bubu is fundamentally a “free man.” He walks up and down the boulevards fearlessly, nothing can cow him, neither the police nor syphilis. If Philippe paints humanity at a basic and physiological level, he does not do so in the naturalist manner of Zola. His vision was not clinical but lyrical, and it posited a collective subject in an unanimist setting avant la lettre. Pierre Hardy walks in the city: Un homme qui marche porte toutes les choses de sa vie et les remue dans sa tête. Un spectacle les éveille, un autre les excite. Notre chair a gardé tous nos souvenirs, nous les mêlons à nos désirs. Nous parcourons le temps présent avec notre bagage, nous allons et nous sommes complets à 5 tous les instants.” (Philippe 53)

In the end, it is Bubu who asserts his rights over the world, like Herr Peeperkorn who sways the others at the end of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. This novel might be the true successor to Flaubert’s realism with its cult of perfect form. A new prosaic lyricism has emerged from the conflation of Symbolism and realism. Unrequited desire directly generates a new form of expression: “Philippe’s longing truly dissolved itself into form” (Lukács 127). Lukács’s positive appreciation can be contrasted with André Gide’s increasingly negative critique. Gide gave a lecture in homage to CharlesLouis Philippe on November 5, 1910, and it is likely that Eliot went to hear it.6 In the lecture, Gide presents Philippe as a French Dostoevsky: Philippe shares the Russian writer’s ethical directness and his compassion

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for the poor and humble. In the French literary scene, Gide argues, Philippe corresponds to the mounting generation of new “barbarians,” authors deprived of education, coming from the lower classes, who were hence in a better position to capture the impact of modernity on the disenfranchised masses of big cities (Gide, “Philippe” 480). Social alienation, sexual humiliation, financial exploitation, and strategies of survival among the demimonde: these experiences of raw suffering are the themes of Philippe’s first novels. In later years though, Philippe discovered Nietzsche and Claudel. Gide had initially seen in the glorification of the pimp at the end of Bubu a Nietzschean trait. The weak student accepts his humiliation while secretly admiring the innate strength of Bubu, a superior man. Gide’s assessment became more negative a quarter of a century later. When he was asked to write another homage to Charles-Louis Philippe in 1935, Gide wrote in December: “I hold for certain that, today, Philippe would be a fascist…. Given his need for certainties, and as a reaction to his earlier books that were all about pity, he would now think: woe betide the weak!” (Les Cahiers 495). Pity as such would always fail to provide a stable ethical ground: sooner or later, politics or religion would take over to define public morality. What Gide expresses via a politicized reading—offered during his involvement with Communism—corresponds more or less to Eliot’s contemporary religious reading in 1932. Thus, poetry would be capable of tackling ethical issues in a way that is not available to prose fiction, a notion shared by Pound and Eliot in the twenties. Here is where Corbière’s influence comes into play. Eliot always recognized that Corbière was superior to Laforgue, and he saw in Corbière a modern Villon. (Like Pound, Eliot took Les amours jaunes as a modernist equivalent of Villon’s Le grand testament). We may link Eliot’s comparison of Corbière and Villon with another statement of Eliot’s: he once remarked in a seminar that for him, Heraclitus reminded him of Villon. This statement, made in conversation with Bertrand Russell at Harvard, impressed the British philosopher (Sencourt 38). From the start, the tone of Wry-Blue Loves—or Les amours jaunes to be more precise—is totally parodic. Nothing is spared, not even the speaker. What is curious nevertheless is that such parody seems to offer a blueprint for the opening of Four Quartets. As all lovers of Corbière know, the series begins with a number of epitaphs. Of two poems entitled “Epitaph,” the second has as its epigraph this prose-piece: Except for lovers beginning or finished who wish to begin with the end there are so many things that end with the beginning that the beginning begins to end by being the end the end of which will be that lovers and

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Chapter One others will end by beginning to re-begin with this beginning which will have ended by being only the return of the end which will begin by being equal to eternity which has neither beginning nor end and which ends by being as finally equal to the rotation of the earth whereupon one will have ended by no longer distinguishing where the end begins from where the start finishes which is every end of every beginning equal to every beginning of every end which is the final beginning of the infinite defined by the indefinite —Equally an epitaph equally a preface and vice versa. (Corbière, WryBlue 45)

In an ironical litany that follows, one finds: “His one regret, not having been his mistress, no less” (Wry-Blue 46). One could say that this sends up in advance the bisexual fantasies of Eliot’s “The Death of Saint Narcissus.” Let’s take a look at one of the most direct re-workings of Corbière in Inventions of the March Hare, “Petit Epître”: Ce n’est pas pour qu’on se dégoute Ou gout d’égout de mon Ego Qu’ai fait des vers de faits divers Qui sentent un peu trop la choucroute. Mais qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, nom d’un nom, Pour faire ressortir les chacals? J’ai dit qu’il y a une odeur mâle Et aussi une odeur fémelle Et que ces deux sont pas la même. (L’autre jour, à mi-carême, Je l’ai constaté, chez une telle). Ce que dit autrement le prêtre. Surtout à la saison de rut. (IMH 86)7

This French poem by Eliot offers a perfect gloss on one of Corbière’s most memorable lines: “Pur, à force d’avoir purgé tous les dégoûts” (from “Le Renégat”); “Pure, by way of purging all of his disgusts!” (Les amours 505; Wry-Blue 343). Corbière’s recurrent trick is to pile abuse on himself, to portray himself as an ugly homeless man who has been rejected by all save a few animals. Yet he embodies an ideal of pure poetry. He presents himself as always in rut, as capable of having sex only with filthy prostitutes who take his money and seldom pity him. There was, we know, a biographical basis to this outsider status: Corbière was not only sick and disabled, but he also preferred, like Villon, to frequent brothels and to keep the company of prostitutes. What Eliot adds to the satirical self-portrait is a distinctive

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question about sexual difference. That difference is here manifested by bodily smells, a note sounded frequently in Les amours jaunes and one or two prose pieces. The end of the poem places the poet in categories of abjection such as “eunuch” and “pederast.” It is clear that Corbière’s model gave the impetus for Eliot’s bawdy verse. The “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” could have come from either a parodied Villon or Corbière, who includes at the end of Les amours jaunes his famous ballad of “Le bossu Bitor.” This tall tale follows a diminutive and ugly hunchback into a brothel where he finally manages to have sex with a prostitute only to be found much later, dead of either violence or excess enjoyment. Such a scene of drunken male revelry is, of course, very close to the atmosphere of the opening of “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” with its story of a night out in Boston and the meeting with Sweeney. As another example, I’ll quote the first stanza of “The Triumph of Bullshit,” a text that is fairly well known and has attracted attention recently. The speaker imagines that “Ladies” are condemning his poetical gifts as Orotund, tasteless, fantastical, Monotonous, crotchety, constipated, Impotent galamatias Affected, possibly imitated,

These negative predicates are suddenly deflated with the obscenity: “For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass” (IMH 307). Focusing on one of these negations, “Impotent galamatias,” I am struck by the fact that even in the “male” and “hard” hyperboles (as Pound would say, opposing the “feminine” and the “soft” in French poetry) that define the tonality of the Corbière pastiches, one finds traces of a worry about sexual potency. This issue also dominates in the texts influenced by Laforgue. After his stay in Paris and his friendship with Jean Verdenal—who was an avid reader of Laforgue—Eliot soon found limitations in Laforgue’s poetics and ideas. In a letter to Mary Hutchinson, he asserts that Laforgue’s technique was inferior to that of Corbière’s (L1 378). Yet he always felt Laforgue’s mind was more interesting (VMP 286). Peter Dale adds: “as more biographical details emerge, it may perhaps be seen that another of Eliot’s fascinations with Laforgue was not chiefly poetic but with Laforgue’s sexual confusions over women—an area in which Eliot had problems of his own and, perhaps, needed some company” (Laforgue, Poems 19). A good introduction to Laforgue’s work on Pierrots might be by way of Mallarmé; in “Crayonné au théâtre,” Mallarmé meditates on the performance of a famous mime, Paul Margueritte, who has performed in “Pierrot, Murderer of his Wife.” Here is an important section:

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Chapter One Such is this Pierrot Assassin de sa Femme … a mute soliloquy that the phantom, white as a yet unwritten page, holds in both face and gesture at full length to his soul. A whirlwind of naïve or new reasons emanates, which it would be pleasing to seize upon with security: the aesthetics of the genre situated closer to principles than any! nothing in this region of caprice foiling the direct simplifying instinct! … This: “The stage illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a Hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. That is how the mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction.” (Mallarmé, Divagations 140)

The theme of a “false appearance” of the present comes to the fore in Laforgue’s amazing Pierrot Fumiste, the only play wholly devoted to the exploration of male impotence. If Eliot read it, he could not but have been struck by parallels between his predicament with respect to his first wife and the predicament of Laforgue’s Pierrot. Later on, in the thirties, Eliot added more distance and questioned the relevance of Laforgue’s conceptual vocabulary: It is noticeable how often the words “inconscient,” “néant,” and “L’absolu” and such philosophical terms from the vocabulary of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the Valkyrie, and such properties from the dramas of Wagner, recur. Laforgue is the nearest verse equivalent to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the philosophy of the unconscious and of annihilation, just as Wagner is the nearest music equivalent to the same philosophies, though apart from this approximation to a similar philosophic mood, it would be difficult to say what there is in common between Wagner and Laforgue. But in Laforgue there is continuous war between the feelings implied by his ideas, and the ideas implied by the feelings. The system of Schopenhauer collapses, but in a different ruin from that of Tristan and Isolde. (VMP 215)

To illustrate this statement, Eliot proceeds to translate one of the most difficult and experimental prose passages in Laforgue’s poetry, “Grande Complainte de la Ville de Paris”: The public cries recommence. Important notice! Redemption Loan has weakened, Panama Canal shares firm. Auctions, experts. Advances against securities quoted or unquoted, purchase of unencumbered properties or annuities; advances against expectations; time-tables, annuals, new-year’s gifts. Circular tours at reduced prices. Madame Ludovic predicts the

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future, daily, from 2 to 4. Au paradis des Enfants: toys for children and cotillon favours for adults … Sole agency! … Cylinder machines Marinoni! Everything guaranteed, everything for nothing! Oh the rapidity of life also sole agency … (VMP 215)

Eliot adds that this looks like Dadaism or Surrealism even though it was written in 1884, Laforgue here “deploring the existence of the state of affairs which we usually date from the Treaty of Versailles” (VMP 216). The same page of Laforgue announces Finnegans Wake, it seems, with “Haberdasheries: voluptual standing on ceremony [Maisons de blanc: pompes voluptiales]; … And monastic corners, exilent bells of dies iraemissibles” (Laforgue, Poems 163). At the very least, this text seems clearly to anticipate the verbal pyrotechnics and associative delirium of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant. I would like to sketch three moments in Eliot’s appropriation of French Symbolist models. The first one is the concept of masculine hysteria seen as an expression of bisexuality. To offer a contrast with Eliot, Oscar Wilde, writing in De Profundis, confesses that his main trope was the paradox, the systematic inversion of commonsense statements. For Wilde, the paradox corresponds to what he calls “perversity” or perversion, that is, same-sex love. But Eliot, in spite of attempts to queer him, cannot be reduced to this sexual category. Paradox or oxymorons are his main tropes, suggesting less the practice of late-nineteenth-century “inversion” than the hysterical positioning of men and women by way of repressed bisexuality, as Freud has suggested. As a consequence, I would be tempted to read Eliot’s prose-poem “Hysteria” not only as the staging of a hysterical woman facing a man who is trying to remain cool and collected, but also as the description of the fascination exerted by this same woman on a man who at first is merely neurotic but who then discovers a deeper vertigo. This vertigo consists of a downward descent into the feminine body doubled by a recurrent contagion. This leads the poet to questions such as: “Am I alive or am I dead?” Or: “Am I a living person who has already died several times?” This would be the essential question posed by Prufrock after Dante: And would it have been worth it, after all, ................................... To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head,

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Chapter One Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” (CPP 15-16)

This woman debunks any apocalyptic revelation with her lack of interest. Her studied indifference is only the other facet of her latent hysteria: now, please, can you tell me all? This power is a power shared by men and women if only they know how to use the absolute weapon of humor. We see this in “Short Romance” [Conversation Galante]: “You, madame, are the eternal humourist, The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!— With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—” And—“are we then so serious?” (IMH 346)

Just as Hegel saw in the character of Antigone the agency of an irony capable of destroying the coherence of the Greek Sittlichkeit, Eliot sees in these women who remain refractory to his poetics the real threat for his art: these Laforguean rebels see its lack of relevance. The equivalent for Beckett will not be Guido da Montefeltro, punished in hell for his lack of good judgment, but Belacqua, who asks the question “So what?” Belacqua’s question provides an entry point, via Dante, for the second moment in Eliot’s appropriation of French Symbolist models. Ascending through Purgatory with Virgil, Dante hears a voice exclaiming: “Perhaps you will / have need to sit before you reach that point!” (Purgatorio, IV, ll. 98-99). Startled, they see a group of people; one of them says: “Climb, then, if you’re so vigorous!” (l. 114). It is Belacqua who then asks Dante whether he has seen the rays of the sun moving to his left. His slowness and odd words allow Dante to identify Belacqua, whom he greets with a smile. But Belacqua answers his queries with: “O brother, what’s the use of climbing?” (l. 127). This colloquial phrase, “O frate, andar in sù che porta?” (“Brother, what’s the point of going up?”), betrays a disabused taedium mundi. We are told then that Belacqua has waited until the last minute to repent for his sins. Upon dying, he had to wait in ante-purgatory the number of years equal to those spent on earth. My attempt here, as you will have guessed, is to connect the Guido of “Prufrock” with the Belacqua of Beckett. Whether they react with violence or indolence, the effect of their radical questioning—you must be dead and in hell if you are here talking to me; why continue this absurd quest and not enjoy the evening air?—is that all boundaries are suddenly abolished rather than crossed.

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The nightmarish resolution of such boundary crossing will be given in the Sweeney cycle, especially “Fragment of an Agon.” Sweeney speaks: He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead He didn’t know if the girl was alive and he was dead He didn’t know if they were both alive or both were dead If he was alive then the milkman wasn’t and the rent-collector wasn’t And if they were alive then he was dead. (CPP 125)

The pure oxymoron consists in this equation: “Death or life or life or death / Death is life and life is death” (CPP 125). A possible resolution to such a crisis would be the Proustian one: to live only for art and become one with tradition. A good catalyst will lead to a unification of sense and spirit, which might be paraphrased as: I am all the dead and all the living. But in this optimistic fusion, there always lurks the danger of a parody of Christ’s Passion, a fake ecstasy leading to more dissociation. Such a religiously parodic dissolution is clearly on display in “The Little Passion: From ‘An Agony in the Garret’”: Of those ideas in his head Which found me always interested Though they were seldom well digested – I recollect one thing he said After those hours of streets and streets That spun around him like a wheel He finally remarked: “I feel As if I’d been a long time dead.” (IMH 57)

We meet in this poem a modernist “man of the crowd.” As with Poe’s ominous narrator, Eliot’s character may well contain the essence of crime. In the poem, it is not at all certain that the cross will be redemptive—the character is closer to Judas since his smile cannot conceal “a washed-out, unperceived disgrace.” An earlier version had: “A thin, unconscious, halfdisgrace” (IMH 58). A similar tension between grace and disgrace, between conscious and unconscious, between reunion and dismemberment is perceptible in all of Eliot’s work, especially visible in Four Quartets. And this tension between grace and disgrace leads me to the third moment in Eliot’s appropriation of Symbolist models. Let us go back to the operation of involuntary memory,

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which supposes that in the end, all the particular places, names or sensations can be brought together by the poem. For Proust, this suggests that time will be definitively abolished once two sensations are superimposed. Why? One answer would read it as a certain Platonism. But Eliot would not allow for such an easy way out. He knew that one could not bracket off the “historical sense”; hence, for Eliot the historicity of all phenomena is a pre-condition to any “mystical” apprehension. Along with Husserl, Eliot sticks to the idea that the world as we know it is constituted by our consciousness as “intentionality.” A phenomenological point of departure means more than a simple trust in consciousness. Here, the concept of tradition brings to this consciousness a tradition shaped by all the dead, famous or infamous, and with them, all their attendant unconscious urges and unholy desires. Here, necessarily, Eliot is closer to Durkheim, Mauss or Freud: consciousness is haunted by the Unconscious. Like the Freudian Unconscious (das Unbewusste), Eliot’s notion of the Unconscious shares certain features with tradition: the over-determination of all images is the rule; there is no principle of logical contradiction; even time does not really exist for it, since—given a logic of reversibility—the present can influence the past. The poet or writer will nevertheless learn to trust this Unconscious. There is a certain reassurance that the work of art will continue being written in each of us. We can even enjoy this process. This sums up, more or less, the movement of Time Regained. Eliot’s literary essays from the twenties and thirties reach similar conclusions. What Proust calls a “metaphor” becomes an “objective correlative” with Eliot. Both see the work of art as promising a utopia where time has been abolished. The main difference is that Proust’s promise can be given without invoking or requiring a personal God, whereas Eliot’s promise entails the framework of Christian revelation. Proust’s religion of art remained insufficient, too “aesthete” for Eliot. Eliot insists that he must overcome aestheticism in order to reach a mysticism capable of “redeeming the time.” This mysticism revolves around an intuition of the essential vacuity of human life if that life is not underpinned by a collective movement of redemption. In later years, Eliot became aware of the need for a pedagogy of conversion. There was to be a gradual dawning upon the character that he or she had been dead. Thus, Mary exclaims in The Family Reunion: “It takes so many years / To learn that one is dead !” (CPP 343). Her insight comes at the end, as a response to the aging Dowager who had expressed, early in the play, her wish to keep the family together: I keep Wishwood alive To keep the family alive, to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I live to keep them.

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You none of you understand how old you are And death will come to you as mild surprise, A momentary shudder in a vacant room. Only Agatha seems to discover some meaning in death Which I cannot find. (CPP 287)

This slow-moving pedagogy leads to what I would like to call Eliot’s Beckettian stage, by which I mean his resolve to work, like Beckett, not on the mastery of expression, as Joyce or Proust did, but on the opposite: impotence and ignorance. The perception of the inadequacy of language does not lead to a Mallarmean “compensation” or to Joycean elation in the command of as many languages as possible, but to a radical weakness and deprivation. This idea came to Beckett just after the traumas of the Second World War. Let us note the curious coincidence of dates: in 1953, Eliot completes The Confidential Clerk and Beckett, Waiting for Godot. These are two farces, one in the manner of Wilde, the other of Maeterlinck. Then in 1958, The Elder Statesman and Krapp’s Last Tape are once more contemporaneous. Both are dramas of old age, presenting male characters haunted by the the painful memory of love lost or of iniquity. No doubt, the differences of style and tone are such that a systematic parallel would be absurd. I only wish to point to a similar logic at work. We see in both cases a poet and a novelist who suddenly devote all their energies to the theater. And both find an unexpected but deserved popular success. The detour via the stage allowed them to reconstitute their worlds, to “remember” a hitherto dismembered body, as in Beckett’s trilogy or in Ash-Wednesday. In fact, The Elder Statesman seems to take its point of departure exactly where Beckett’s Godot had left us: with a character waiting for Nothing. One can see this in Lord Claverton’s long speech at the beginning as he is talking to his daughter: No, I’ve not the slightest longing for the life I’ve left— Only fear of the emptiness before me. If I had the energy to work myself to death How gladly would I face death! But waiting, simply waiting, With no desire to act, yet a loathing of inaction. A fear of the vacuum, and no desire to fill it. It’s just like sitting in an empty waiting room In a railway station on a branch line, After the last train, after all the other passengers Have left, and the booking office is closed And the porters have gone. What am I waiting for In a cold and empty room before an empty grate? For no one. For nothing. (CPP 530)

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Much like Beckett, Claverton derides his “failed successes, the successful failures” (CPP 531), a chiasmus that is a good evocation of the world of politics. When the fake Gomez reappears, it is to remind Claverton that if “Dick Ferry died long ago” (CPP 536), then he is not dead for everyone. The worst betrayal comes from his son, who accompanies Gomez—the man who has achieved success without any scruples. Lord Claverton wants to let his son know that by leaving with Gomez he will thus renounce his inheritance, but Michael is dismissive. First, the title of Lord has been usurped; the money came from his marriage. And second, Michael scoffs, his father only wanted to see in his son an idealized image of himself: And what satisfaction, I wonder, will it give you In the grave? If you’re still conscious after death, I bet it will be a surprised state of consciousness. Poor ghost! reckoning its profit and loss And wondering why it bothered about such trifles. (CPP 559-60)

In the end, Lord Claverton understands that he had indeed desired to perpetuate his own image and that he had not paid attention to his son’s wishes (CPP 581). His remorse seems sincere, and when he confesses the truth to all, he eschews moral blackmail. It is only when he accepts the idea of dying alone that he understands the meaning of life. He says of his son: I love him, even for rejecting me, For the me he rejected, I reject also. I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone; And in becoming no one, I begin to live. It is worth while dying, to find out what life is. (CPP 582)

For the first time, Claverton does not request the presence of his daughter next to him, and he lets her free to love Charles, her fiancé. He takes himself off to a distance, heading toward a tree that is “quiet and cold” (CPP 583). Symbolically at least, he has died. Like Oedipus at Colonnus, he can then bless their union: Monica: “In becoming no one, he has become himself.” .............................................. Charles: “The dead has poured out a blessing on the living.” (CPP 583)

As Jacques Lacan had argued about Antigone in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the paradigm of a “second death” defines her end

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(Lacan 270-83). This concept can be found in Murder in the Cathedral, when Becket decides not to escape but to stay when the four knights enter his church. He prefers a me physei—not to be—as the best for humans. The answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is thus less “man” than “not to live,” which would be, according to Sophocles at least, a preferable fate for humanity than its endless litany of suffering. Freud admired a Witz on this subject, having cut out from the pages of a satirical weekly a comment on the old saying: “‘Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.’ ‘But,’ adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter, ‘this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand’” (Freud 65). Eliot, perhaps more optimistic in his pessimism, could assert that serial deaths happened only to him. Finally, one could say that my remarks add more resonance to Eliot’s nickname of “old Possum” given to him by Ezra Pound. Eliot always gained some advantage from games with symbolic death, following the example of Mallarmé, Corbière, and Laforgue. If he knew how to pretend to be dead like a possum, he also might have known that this word of Algonquian origin contained a serendipitous similarity to the Latin phrase “non possumus” (“we cannot”), the recurrent tag by which a number of popes, from Pius IX to Pius XII, would justify their personal refusals. Eliot’s “non possumus” is also the source of his indomitable urgency to write, his unbreakable and creative possum.

Notes 1

See also Merton 177-82. “In short, I was going to say ‘I love you’ / When I realized with some difficulty / That first of all I didn’t possess myself fully.… So then, poor, pale, and paltry individual, / Who believes in his Ego only in his spare time / I saw my fiancée fade / Carried away by the ways of the world / As the briar sees the decay / And fall, under the pretext of one evening, of its loveliest rose petals.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3 I have tried to develop some of these insights in two chapters of my Ghosts of Modernity (84-121). 4 See Maurice Blanchot, “Le Livre à Venir” in Le Livre à Venir (1959), where he refers to Jacques Schérer’s Le “Livre” de Mallarmé (1957). 5 “A man who walks carries with him all the things of his life and mixes them up in his mind. A sight wakes them up, another excites them. Our flesh has kept all our memories, we mix them with our desires. We race through the present with all our luggage, we walk and are complete at every instant.” 6 See Hargrove 35. 7 Here is a very literal translation: “It is not for people to be disgusted / By the taste of sewer coming from my Ego / That I make poetry out of everyday incidents / 2

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That smell too strongly of sauerkraut. / But what did I do, great Lord, / To have all the jackals follow me? / I said there were a male smell / And a female smell / And these two are not the same. / (The other day, at Lent-time / I verified this with that woman.) / This is what the priest says otherwise, / (Especially in rut season.)”

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Bersani, Leo. The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Blanchot, Maurice. “Le Livre à Venir.” Le Livre à Venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 270-97. Corbière, Tristan. Oeuvres poétiques complètes: Rimbaud, Cros, Corbière, Lautréamont. Paris: Laffont, 1980. —. Wry-Blue Loves. Trans. Peter Dale. London: Anvil, 2005. Cummings, E. E. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. Ed. F. W. Dupee and George Stade. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. Dujardin, Edouard. The Bays Are Sere and Interior Monologue. Trans. Anthony Suter. London: Libris, 1991. —. Les lauriers sont coupés. Paris: Bibliothèque, 1968. Dragonetti, Roger. Un fantôme dans le kiosque: Mallarmé et l’esthétique du quotidien. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Eliot, T. S. “Preface.” Bubu of Montparnasse, by Charles-Louis Philippe. Trans. Laurence Vail. Paris: Crosby Continental, 1932. vii-xiv. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989. Gide, André. Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame. Vol. 2: 1929-1937. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. —. “Charles-Louis Philippe.” Essais Critiques. Ed. Pierre Masson. Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1999. 475-92. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. Trans. Dennis Porter. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1992. Laforgue, Jules. Oeuvres Complètes Tome 2. Lausanne: L’âge d’Homme, 1995. —. Poems. Bilingual ed. Rev. ed. Trans. Peter Dale. London: Anvil, 2001. Lukács, György. Soul and Form. Trans. Anna Bostock. Ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Philippe, Charles-Louis. Bubu de Montparnasse. Paris: A. Michel, 1905.

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Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance complète, suivi de lettres sur la poésie. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. —. Divagations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. —. Oeuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Merton, Robert. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. New York: Free Press, 1965. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. Salisbury, John of. The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A TwelfthCentury Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium. Ed. and trans. Daniel D. McGarry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982. Schérer, Jacques. Le “Livre” de Mallarmé. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. New York: Dodd, 1971. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958.

CHAPTER TWO SEDUCTION AND DISENCHANTMENT: ELIOT IN THE BERGSONIAN WORLD JEWEL SPEARS BROOKER

By the seduction of his style we come to believe that the Bergsonian world is the only world…. It is not so. Bergson is the sweet Siren of adventurous philosophers. —T. S. Eliot, “Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics” (1914)

In the fall and winter of 1910, as a student in Paris, T. S. Eliot experienced what he later recalled as “a temporary conversion to Bergsonism” (Sermon 5). Three years after this “conversion,” in the midst of his graduate studies in philosophy, he would dismiss Bergson as “the sweet Siren of adventurous philosophers” (“Relationship” 99). Having heard and survived the Siren’s song, the aspiring philosopher’s sigh of relief is almost audible. Eliot’s allusion is telling. The Sirens were beautiful creatures who, with irresistible music, lured sailors into situations that ended in certain death on the rocks. Odysseus was able to resist them only because he was tied to the mast of his ship; his men only because their ears were plugged with wax. Their appeal, as Jane Ellen Harrison points out, was not to the body, but to the mind: “To primitive man, Greek or Semite, the desire to know—to be as the gods—was the fatal desire” (198). The Sirens claimed to know everything: Come this way, honored Odysseus … listen here to our singing; … for we know everything that the Argives and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite. Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens. (Odyssey XI.184-85, 189-91)

They attracted sailors with promises of happiness, omniscience, and, in due course, freedom to return home. My thesis is that although Eliot was irresistibly drawn to the fateful music on the Seine, he tied himself to the mast of lived experience, and once back in America, analyzed Bergson’s

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ideas and found them wanting. The first indication of his resistance appears in the poems he wrote while still in Paris, notably “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”; the irrefutable confirmation is a 1913 lecture on Bergson that he presented to the Harvard Philosophical Club after returning to Boston. Eliot was awarded his BA at Harvard in June 1910, and in October, he crossed the Atlantic to study in France. He was attracted to Paris in part for its cerebral glamour. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the French capital was alive with intellectual and artistic activity. The cafes, studios, and bookshops were frequented by brilliant thinkers and artists, including Remy de Gourmont, André Gide, Paul Claudel, Pierre Janet, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Matisse, Picasso, and hovering over this scene, Eliot later recalled, was “the spider-like figure of Bergson” (“A Commentary” 452). In 1910, Bergson was at the height of his international fame. His lectures at the Collège de France attracted overflow crowds consisting of intellectuals, social climbers, and the general public. To get a seat, Eliot recalled in a 1944 retrospective written in French, one had to arrive an hour and fifteen minutes early; it would be difficult, he reflected, for anyone who had not actually been in the lecture hall to understand la ferveur bergsonienne (“What France” 9). To judge from the poems that Eliot wrote shortly before he went to Paris, including the “First Debate between the Body and Soul” and the earliest portions of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” the aspiring poet was tormented by a perception of discontinuity—between mind and body, intellect and feeling, and mind and world. He was attracted to Bergson in large part because the French philosopher claimed to have overcome the dualism of both Descartes and Kant. Based on an intersection of his own psychological needs and Bergson’s philosophical optimism, Eliot embraced Bergsonism in the months surrounding his arrival in Paris, but within a short time, he concluded that he should resist the Siren on the Seine. His disappointment is evident in the poems he was then writing and in the papers he was to write on his return to Harvard to study philosophy. In Bergsonian terms, the anxiety conveyed in the poems arose from intuition; the critique in the essays, from analysis. Eliot prepared for his Parisian adventure by immersing himself in Bergson, reading the books for which he was then known—Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matière et mémoire (1896), and L’Évolution créatice (1907)—in French. He planned to follow up by attending the master’s lectures at the Collège de France, scheduled to begin 9 December 1910 and extend through 20 May 1911. Bergson offered two courses during this period, the first focused on issues related

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to the self, and the second on Spinoza’s Traité de la reformé de l’entendement [Treatise on the Reform of Understanding]. Eliot attended part of the first series and took detailed notes in French. 1 He was fascinated by the philosopher’s celebrity and intrigued by the relevance of his ideas for addressing the psychological and intellectual conundrums dramatized in his own early poems. The Siren’s song emanating from the three books Eliot read was that the conflict between soul and body, thought and action, and self and world had been confronted and resolved. This claim is most strikingly presented in the first two books, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and Matière et mémoire. The third, L’Évolution créatice, shares assumptions with the first two, but in its concern with reconciling science and philosophy, it has a different focus. The groundwork for the whole of Bergson’s thought is presented in his first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), translated as Time and Free Will by F. L. Pogson (1912).2 Bergson’s main subject is the old debate between free will and determinism, and his purpose is to uphold the former and expose the latter. The root of the problem, he explains, is that language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp … distinctions as between material objects. This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life…. But it may be asked whether insurmountable difficulties … do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space. (xix)

The methodology present here is at the heart of virtually all of Bergson’s work. He introduces a binary and specifies the difference between the two terms. Thoughts are not things. Time is not space. He then overcomes the dichotomy by prioritizing one (thought, time) and assigning it a higher status. Instead of assimilating “thought to things,” he assimilates things to thoughts. Bergson’s distinction between time and space is of the essence, both here and in subsequent books. He argues that previous philosophers, notably Kant, conflated time and space by failing to realize that time is understood in two different ways. The first, anchored in language, assumes identical and thus repeatable units—minutes, hours, years. This concept, associated with speech and clocks, is artificial. The second (durée réelle), anchored in consciousness, assumes an undivided continuum of heterogeneous and thus unrepeatable elements. The first treats time, which is a process, as if it were space with parts that could be separated, counted, and placed side by side or end to end. The second treats time as an

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indivisible part of consciousness. In regard to his thesis in Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that the claim by determinists that the present can be explained by something a priori and that the future in turn will be shaped by the present is built on the erroneous premise that time can be segmented. In the durée réelle, there are no yesterdays and tomorrows, no causes and effects; thus, Bergson concludes, determinism is a chimera and freedom a reality. The antitheses here considered enfold several others, including mind and matter, which is the focus of Matière et mémoire, the second Bergson book on Eliot’s reading list. Bergson’s heady claim to have overcome dualism is nowhere more emphatic than in Matière et mémoire (1896), translated as Matter and Memory (1911). His topic is announced in the subtitle: “Essay on the relation of body and spirit.” Admitting that the subject is “frankly dualistic,” he promises to deal “with body and mind in such a way as … to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism” (vii). His larger purpose was to undercut Cartesian dualism, but more immediately, his aim was to refute the thesis of Théodule Ribot, who maintained in The Maladies of Memory (1881) that memory is situated within the brain and thus originates in matter. Drawing on his earlier distinction between durée réelle and clock time, Bergson asserts that there are two types of memory. Pure memory is identified with consciousness and thus with the durée réelle. Motor memory, on the other hand, is ingrained in the body and involves an automatic replay of past action in the service of present needs (Matter 89-105). Bergson dismisses the conflict between idealism and realism as a delusion due “to the conception, now realistic, now idealistic, which philosophers have of matter” (vii). His thesis is that matter “is an aggregate of ‘images,’ … more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing” (vii). In his final chapter, devoted to resolving “the metaphysical problem” of the disjunction between “soul and body” (234-35), Bergson explains that the fissure can be bridged by dematerializing matter and placing it between the thing and the idea in the halfway house of memory (293-95). Given Bergson’s obsessive attempt to overcome dualism, it is not surprising that Eliot later remembered his attraction to the renowned philosopher in religious terms (re-ligare: to reconnect or rebind). In a letter to his brother Henry in January 1936, he maintained that his interest in Bergson and in philosophy more generally had been due to a religious preoccupation. Much earlier, in a 1916 review, he had associated Bergsonism with weak substitutes for religion (Review 417). The Catholic Church agreed, for in 1914 it placed Bergson’s books on its index of

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prohibited works. In 1911, while Eliot was still in Paris, Bergson’s work came under withering attack from the left by rationalists such as Julien Benda and from the right by neo-Thomists (Marx 30). In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote a widely read attack on Bergson for The Monist, a leading English journal. Eliot’s own objections were most clearly articulated in a talk he gave for the Harvard Philosophical Club in December 1913, but as Piers Gray has suggested, his disillusionment was evident much earlier (86), well before the end of Bergson’s lectures in May 1911. Of the twenty lectures in the series, Eliot may have attended only seven, for he ceased taking notes on February 17. Perhaps, as Hargrove assumes, Eliot continued to attend (285n22), but whether he did or not, it is clear that by March he was thoroughly disenchanted. Several poems that he dated in February and March incorporate Bergsonian terminology and concepts but end with a bitter realization of having been led into a box canyon. These poems, of which the most revealing is “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” illustrate what Gray refers to as the logic of defeat (58-61). A number of critics have discussed the presence of Bergsonian elements in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Given that Eliot embeds an allusion to Matter and Memory in the structure of his poem by using Bergson’s announced antithesis to anchor his debate, and given that the narrator declares that “Memory” holds “the key,” it is not surprising that the critical focus has been on Bergson’s analysis of memory. In one of the earliest close readings, Gray builds on the distinction in Matter and Memory between pure memory, associated with consciousness unrestrained by action (fantasy, reverie, dreams), and practical memory, associated with bodily movement issuing in action (habit). Gray emphasizes the disjunction in this and other poems, including “Prufrock,” between thinking and acting, between the conscious and the unconscious life (43-52). Manju Jain, similarly, relates pure memory to perception and emphasizes the paralyzing conflict between freedom (consciousness) and automatism (habit) (70). In a perceptive reading based in part on Eliot’s 1913 essay, Donald J. Childs also discusses the poem as a dialogue between pure and practical memory (duration and the practical intellect), but his main emphasis falls on Bergson’s epistemology. He relates Bergson’s opposition between intuition and analysis to a conflict in early Eliot between mysticism and logic (From Philosophy 52-54). M. A. R. Habib summarizes Eliot’s 1913 paper, placing his objections to Bergson in the context of contemporary philosophical debates between idealism and realism and, in literary terms, romanticism and classicism (41-42). Most of these discussions of Bergson’s influence on “Rhapsody” are good as far as they go. The contrasts between pure and practical memory

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and between intuition and analysis are important in both philosopher and poet. Most critics agree that Eliot uses Bergsonian dichotomies, but they reach different conclusions, depending on whether or not they reckon, as Childs does, that Eliot was still under Bergson’s spell (From Philosophy 51). Most, however, ignore or slight Bergson’s actual thesis. His argument is not that contraries exist but that they are artificial, unreal, foisted on us by language, and unacknowledged by earlier philosophers. His central claim is that by correcting an error in philosophy (disentangling space and time) he has overcome both the psycho-physical (mind/body) dualism of Descartes and the epistemological (mind/world) dualism of Kant. He analyzes antinomies in order to show that they are phantoms. His topic in Matter and Memory, implied in the title, is dualism in both its Cartesian and Kantian guises, and his thesis, announced in his preface and endlessly pursued in his text, is that he has triumphed over these and other dualisms. In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” using his own experience on the streets of Paris, Eliot interrogates Bergson’s claim to have overcome dualism. He begins by acknowledging dualities (soul/body, mind/world) as givens, proceeds to explore the French thinker’s formula for overcoming them, and concludes with an image of violent severance— “The last twist of the knife.” Using the French technique of dédoublement (dividing the self in two), Eliot dramatizes the conflicts between mind and body, between intellect and feeling. His basic strategy involves two overlapping and complementary elements: one that is dialogic and prioritizes space, the other that is narrative and emphasizes time. The first element establishes a dialogue between clock time and durée réelle, Bergson’s foundational antithesis, and uses this conflict as an umbrella for cognate polarities in Time and Free Will (space/time) and Matter and Memory (matter/mind). As the rhapsody begins, a clock reveals that the time is “twelve o’clock,” and simultaneously a narrator registers the time as “midnight,” the first marking a precise moment in an endlessly repeated series of identical moments, and the second marking a resurgence of memories and sensitivity to “lunar incantations.” This jarring discrepancy between the mechanical and the free introduces the “voices” in the dialogue. The second part of Eliot’s strategy attaches the dialogue to a narrative base that gives forward momentum to the back-and-forth between the two types of duration. The narrative base is clear from the fact that both the hand of the clock and the mind of the narrator are in time, moving from twelve o’clock to four, and from the streets to a furnished flat. The overall effect of Eliot’s two-pronged strategy suggests a protracted debate superimposed on a parody of nostos. In combining temporal and spatial form, Eliot anticipates his experiments in

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“Gerontion,” The Waste Land, and most brilliantly in Four Quartets. In the latter, he presents a moment in a rose garden that is simultaneously timeless (unmoving, spatialized) and in time (moving, passing away). In the first stanza of “Rhapsody,” the speaker is heading home at midnight; in the last stanza, four hours later, he arrives at his urban flat. In the intervening stanzas, he moves step by step, minute by minute, as consciousness and its other (both internal and external) mutter and sputter, cogitate and recollect, against the background of a ticking clock. The narrator’s mantra is pure Bergson: in a brilliant maneuver in Time and Free Will, the French philosopher had replaced Descartes’s “I am a thinking thing” with “I am a conscious automaton” (168). In a striking parallel, Eliot’s thinker is not represented as a thing, but as an automaton aware of itself. His body has its own rhythm, his feet know the way home and move in tandem with the clock, not with the mind tussled by a mixture of disgust and desire on a windy night. By conceiving of matter (a “twisted branch,” a “crab with barnacles,” the “hand of a child”) as neither a thing nor an idea, but rather as a series of overlapping images, Eliot is testing the Bergsonian hypothesis. If it is valid, then this prioritizing of memory over matter, of the durée réelle over the clock, will lead to peace between the mind and the body. But for this narrator, there is no rapprochement, and even in sleep, no escape from the dingy doubleness of life on the streets of Paris. The narrator’s journey takes him through city streets separated into spaces illuminated alternatively by lamplight and moonlight: Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. (Poems 51)

By virtue of being mechanical, the lamps are associated with the body, but by revealing the street life, they impinge on consciousness. They function automatically, emitting a sound that suggests the beating of a drum, a “fatalistic” sound that contributes to a dark undertone of ambivalence and madness. The Cartesian split between the automatic movements of the body (footsteps, heartbeat) and the random oscillations of the mind (memory interacting with the present) is developed throughout the poem but not resolved. In an image suggested by its title, the poem also presents the debate in musical terms, as a rhapsody with a steady beat in the bass line and wild improvisations in the treble. The images associated with Eliot’s

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overarching antithesis suggest others, including the conflict at the heart of Bergson’s first book: free will (consciousness, madness, memory) and determinism (the clock, the footsteps, the drum beat, the street lamps). In the middle stanzas of “Rhapsody,” Eliot explores the Kantian distinction between mind and world discussed in Time and Free Will. Using a three-part pattern, he develops and deepens the conversation broached in the first stanza. (1) As the narrator enters the sphere of the lamplight, he looks at his watch; (2) hearing the sputtering sound of the gas lamp, he directs his attention to the scene exposed by the light; and (3) moving back into the dark, he is visited by memories evoked by what he has perceived. The remarks of the lamp, appearing in quotation marks, and the ensuing memories alternate for the rest of the poem. The second stanza launches the pattern: Half-past one, ............. The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.” (Poems 51)

In the next stanza, memory responds to the twisting eye of the prostitute by tossing images of other twisted things upon the beach of consciousness: The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach ........................... A broken spring in a factory yard (52)

Like the prostitute, these twisted things are “torn and stained with sand”; like them, she is “Hard and curled and ready to snap.” The images surface automatically from the depths of experience stored beneath consciousness. They surface, Bergson argues, because without them it would be impossible to interpret and order one’s perceptions: “Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it” (Matter 170). The fourth stanza continues the pattern of a dialogue between the world as perceived and the world as remembered:

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Chapter Two Half-past two, The street-lamp said, “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter.” So the hand of the child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. I could see nothing behind that child’s eye. (Poems 52)

The analogy between the tongue of the cat and the hand of the child is explicit, and as various critics have remarked, what the two have in common is that both are reflex actions, examples of Bergson’s practical memory. This stanza contains several images of life below consciousness, including that of the crab, an image that also appears in the virtually contemporaneous “Prufrock.” The dialogue between mind and world in this poem encompasses the conflict between idealism and realism, a quarrel that Bergson claimed to have settled once and for all. The conflict, he argues, is a delusion easily dispelled by defining matter as an “image” existing somewhere between what is normally thought of as mind and as matter; matter is neither outside nor inside (Matter vii-viii). The tongue of the cat, which exists somewhere between the mind of the narrator and the gutter in the street, pulls from the narrator’s memory bank the claws of the crab and the hand of the child. As they are perceived in space, these things are material and mechanical; they are countable, itemizable; perceived in real time (durée réelle), by contrast, they are qualitative, constantly in flux, interpenetrating, and melting into what Bergson’s friend William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) referred to as the stream of consciousness. At half-past three, the lamp directs the eye of the narrator to the moon, but as various critics have observed, although the image and the language point to romanticism, these are subverted by association with such things as smallpox, dust, nocturnal odors, and paper roses. It is crucial to note, however, that disease and dirt, foul odors and fake flowers are not characteristics of the moon in the sky, but the moon in the mind. The external moon is a discrete material object; the moon within, by contrast, is a diseased and aging flirt who “winks a feeble eye” and “twists a paper rose” (Poems 53). Both the sullied wench in stanza two and this cosmic cocotte in stanza five are images mediated by literature, the former in large part by novels Eliot was reading at the time, including Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse, and the latter by distorting a common image from nineteenth-century songs and novels. The woman in the doorway can be seen as an “in-between” image (neither the woman herself

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nor an idea of her, à la Bergson), but the strumpet moon is a total fabrication. She is a phantasm, which is why, unlike the prostitute in the street, she has no memories and thus no ill will: “La lune ne garde aucune rancune” (Poems 53). The dialogue that begins with an image of the moon as a gargantuan flirt concludes with the memory tossing up images of entrapment in narrow, squalid spaces: The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums ......................... And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars. (Poems 53)

Caught between perception and memory, memory and imagination, the narrator arrives home and at last is able to exit the sordid street: The lamp said, “Four o’clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes by the door, sleep, prepare for life.” The last twist of the knife. (Poems 53)

The first line—“The lamp said”—is part of the narration, but the last is both an ironic retort and a coda suggesting a retrospective interpretation of the long journey home. The startling final image—“The last twist of the knife”—has been read in different ways, depending on whether or not the reader believes that Eliot was still a Bergsonian. Gray sees the image as undermining Bergson’s distinction between practical and pure memory. Practical memory has enabled the narrator to reach his door, find his key, brush his teeth, and get into bed. Once asleep, free of what Bergson refers to as the “necessities of present action” (Matter 199), he should be able to slip into the realm of pure memory and rise refreshed to live another day. In sleep, there is “a relaxing … of the tension of the nervous system,” a liberation from motor memory that enables us “to replace ourselves in the life of dreams.” In sleep, past experience returns to restore us for another day (Matter 199-200). In Gray’s reading of the poem, however, the images

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that return are the very ones from which the narrator is seeking to escape, the images of “the lonely street inhabited by sterile unthinking life.” “The last twist of the knife” is that in sleep the narrator experiences an endless replay of the images of his waking hours (Gray 50-51). Childs, who believes that Eliot was “still a full-blown Bergsonian” when writing this poem (From Philosophy 52), discusses the image in terms of the contrast between intuition and the practical intellect, epistemological parallels of durée réelle and clock time. The poem, he suggests, confirms Bergson’s critique of the practical intellect: “The life of the practical intellect is death; the death of the practical intellect is the immortality of Life everlasting.” The main tension in the poem, according to Childs, is “between Life and life” (62). The “last twist of the knife” is not the expression of dissatisfaction with Bergsonism…. Rather, it is an expression of frustration with the inadequacy of his own intuitive ability…. The point of the poem is to acknowledge how difficult … it is to escape the confines of the practical intellect. (63)

Most discussions of the poem, including those by Gray and Childs, ignore Bergson’s claim in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and Matière et mémoire that he has overcome dualism. “Rhapsody” is a brilliant empirical refutation of this thesis. The “last twist of the knife” is the realization that memory, the Bergsonian key, opens the door not only to the flat but in sleep to the theater of horrors resident in his subconscious (Brooker 11-12). In its rejection of Bergson’s claim to have mediated between mind and matter, its refusal to equate reality with the durée réelle, and its refutation of the ideal genesis of matter, “Rhapsody” prefigures the formal critique Eliot would present in 1913. Eliot spent most of the summer of 1911 in Munich, where he finished “Prufrock,” and in mid-September, following a brief tour of northern Italy, he sailed for America. In October he returned to Harvard to work for a PhD in philosophy. In the spring of 1913, he took a Kant seminar that contributed to his unfolding critique of Bergson. In his third essay for that class, Eliot defends Kant’s position that the mechanical and the moral cannot be merged or reconciled. Kant’s “permanent virtue,” Eliot claims, is to have seen that dualism is embedded in the human condition, to have recognized that “the twofold aspect is irreducible” (“Report” 53). In 1913-14, his final year of course work at Harvard, Eliot gave two lectures to the Philosophical Club, of which he was then president. The first, presented at the December 1913 meeting, is an analysis of Bergson’s conclusions in the books Eliot had studied in Paris.3 The second, presented

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at the spring meeting in 1914, is an analysis of the relationship between politics and metaphysics that includes a comparative discussion of Bergson and William James. 4 In the first lecture, Eliot clarifies the discontent adumbrated in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” His purpose, stated in the opening paragraph, is to show the “inconsistencies in Bergson’s position” regarding idealism and realism (“Inconsistencies” 67). His thesis is that Bergson’s claim that he has mediated between mind and world, in the process overcoming dualism, is too weak to warrant assent. Bergson’s “in-between” is simply a faulty and indefensible version of idealism (Brooker 13-15). Eliot begins by scrutinizing the sine qua non of the durée réelle, that is, Bergson’s assumption of a clear distinction between qualitative and quantitative perception. The qualitative is associated with indivisible interpenetrating states of consciousness; the quantitative with parts that can be distinguished and counted. One consists of interior states fluctuating in time; the other of exterior objects immobilized in space. Eliot interrogates Bergson’s argument that there are two ways of knowing that a bell has tolled four times. One is by counting the strokes; the other is “not by counting, but because four strokes is a quality, different from three, five, and the rest” (“Inconsistencies” 69). Eliot points out that the perception of four as purely qualitative is not only inherently contradictory, but inconsistent with Bergson’s position in Time and Free Will that qualitative perception “contains number en puissance [in potential]” (70). He concludes that even in Bergson’s own examples, qualitative perception is never pure, that it inevitably includes an element of number and thus of spatiality. Number exists in both “the physical world … and the world of introspection.” There is “no essential difference” (70). In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” Eliot tests this distinction between quality and quantity in the laboratory of the street and finds, notwithstanding Bergson’s elegant argument, that the two elements cannot be separated. Bergson’s inconsistency extends to his definition of reality. In Time and Free Will, he associates reality, including consciousness, with motion and temporality, but in Matter and Memory, he declares that perception depends on immobilization: “To perceive means to immobilise” [“Perçevoir signifie immobiliser”] (275). Regarding this contradiction, Eliot asks: “Where again is the reality—in the consciousness or in that which is perceived?” (“Inconsistencies” 77). In the durée, Bergson says, consciousness is a stream characterized by constant change as moments interpenetrate. Eliot counters that “It is only as the moments do not wholly interpenetrate that we can be said to have … change.” That is because

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change depends on the perception of difference (number, spatiality, exteriority). He concludes by rejecting the cornerstone of Bergson’s work: “We cannot rest at the durée réelle. It is simply not final” (“Inconsistencies” 79). His conclusion, prefigured three years earlier in “Rhapsody,” is that reality exceeds consciousness, for it includes things that are real in themselves, objects such as the tongue of the cat and the toothbrush on the wall. Eliot addresses two other inconsistencies in Bergson’s thought: his “attempt to occupy a middle ground between idealism and realism” and his concept of “the nature of matter … [and] its relation to consciousness” (“Inconsistencies” 67). These issues are connected. In Matter and Memory, Bergson dismisses the conflict between idealism and realism as a misunderstanding generated by the inclination to accept one or the other. Bergson posits an “intermediate reality,” identifies it as the promised land, and takes his stand there. Eliot objects: “the crux of the affaire Bergson seems to me to be in his attempt to invest with the title of reality this middle territory … this territory cannot be regarded as selbststandig [selfsufficient]” (“Inconsistencies” 78). Bergson uses this notion of an “intermediate reality,” less than an idea but more than a thing, in his definition of matter. Matter, he argues, is an “aggregate of images”; “things” are unreal, generated by perceiving reality piecemeal (Matter vii). Eliot protests this absorption of matter into the nebulous in-between and rejects the argument that it overcomes dualism by bridging the real and the ideal. This theory, he concludes, is simply watered-down idealism; most or all of Bergson’s attempts to reconcile oppositions entail this slide into subjectivism—thus, time is more real than space, quality than quantity, free will than determinism, consciousness than matter. As Eliot points out, Bergson disposes of quantities by reducing them to qualities. He dematerializes the world by re-defining it as an aspect of consciousness. In this lecture, as in his Kant essay, Eliot concludes that monism is an abstraction; in the human world of meaning, dualism is inescapable: “Reality, though one at bottom, divides itself into a Cartesian dichotomy—consciousness and … matter” (“Inconsistencies” 73). In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the narrator discovers that neither consciousness nor dreams provides a sanctuary from the realities of the street. This “no exit” is the “last twist of the knife.” Eliot decides that Bergson’s “weakling mysticism” is less convincing and less honest than the absolute idealism of Bradley or the robust realism of Russell. At the conclusion of his studies at Oxford, Eliot married and began a career as a journalist. Although he was no longer preoccupied with Bergson, he employed Bergsonian concepts in his criticism and often used

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his name as a catchword for anti-intellectualism. On two occasions, he refocused on Bergson: the first in 1916 in a lecture for an Oxford Extension course, and the second in the mid-1920s in an extended public debate on romanticism with John Middleton Murry. In the first, he discussed Bergson’s use of “science against science” (Syllabus 475), and in the second, he criticized Bergson’s reliance on intuition (“Mr. Middleton”). The last word on Eliot’s response to the Siren on the Seine, however, does not lie in these disputations in prose, but in the more profound traces of Bergsonian motifs in his poetry, principally Four Quartets. In his 1911 lecture notes, Eliot quotes Bergson’s comments on the interpenetration of time past, time present, and time future, the very topic he was to explore in the opening line of Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past” (CPP 171). This is one of many traces of Bergson in Eliot’s philosophical meditation on keeping time in time. Such echoes bear witness to the continuing relevance of the French philosopher in understanding Eliot’s late poetry and plays.

Notes 1

Eliot’s notes on Bergson’s lectures are in the Houghton Library at Harvard (bMS Am1691). 2 The interpretation of Bergson here is examined more closely in my essay “Eliot and Bergson: ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and the Intractability of Dualism.” 3 Both Childs and Habib discuss the significance of this paper as it pertains to their respective readings of the early Eliot. 4 For an account of the identification and dating of these two lectures (previously mislabeled by an archivist), see the textual notes to each in Apprentice Years, volume one of The Complete Prose, edited by Brooker and Schuchard.

Works Cited Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. —. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911. —. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen, 1912. Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Eliot and Bergson: ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and the Intractability of Dualism.” Partial Answers 13 (2015): 1-17.

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Childs, Donald J. From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience. New York: Palgrave, 2001. —. T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son, and Lover. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Eliot, T. S. “A Commentary.” Criterion 13.52 (April 1934): 451-54. —. Apprentice Years: 1905-1918. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Vol. 1 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot. —. “[Inconsistencies in Bergson’s Idealism.]” Apprentice Years. 67-89. —. Letter to Henry Eliot. 1 January 1936. Private collection. —. “Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis.” Criterion 6.4 (1927): 340-47. —. Poems. New York: Knopf, 1920. —. “[Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics.]” Apprentice Years. 90-105. —. “Report on the Ethics of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.” Apprentice Years. 49-56. —. Rev. of Group Theories of Religion and the Individual, by Clement C. J. Webb (29 July 1916). Apprentice Years. 417-19. —. A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948. —. Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Literature [Oxford, 1916]. Apprentice Years. 471-77. —. “What France Means to You.” La France Libre (15 June 1944): 94-95. Gordon, Lyndall. The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot. London: Virago, 2012. Gray, Piers. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1982. Habib, M. A. R. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1908. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Jain, Manju. A Critical Reading of The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Marx, William. “Paris.” T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 25-32. Russell, Bertrand. “The Philosophy of Bergson.” Monist 22.3 (1912): 32147.

CHAPTER THREE “BETWEEN THE IDEA / AND THE REALITY”: HYPERCONSCIOUSNESS IN ELIOT’S EARLY WORKS CHARLOTTE WEBB

In the Clark Lectures of 1926, Eliot explored the “Copernican” revolution brought about by Descartes and the assertion “that what we know is not the world of objects, but our own ideas of these objects” (VMP 80). Descartes’s thinking, Eliot seemed to remark, had brought about an irreversible severance between subject and object that had lodged humanity firmly “inside its several skulls.” The modern age had been dispossessed of a sense of immediate engagement with the world, the ability to see through thought to whatever lay beyond. In the absence of “ideas as meanings” as concrete “references to an outside world,” the individual was faced with the task of trying to meaningfully negotiate between the internal sphere of consciousness and the external world of material reality (80). The negotiation was more problematic than it appeared; for, as Eliot writes in The Hollow Men, it is “Between the idea / And the reality” that the shadow falls, that meaning is seemingly emptied out (CPP 85). Many of Eliot’s early works are centrally concerned with this failed negotiation of betweenness; with the rift between consciousness and the external world and with the psychological side effects of being trapped inside one’s own skull. From the passivity and solipsism of Prufrock, bemoaning the inability of language to “say just what I mean,” to the neurotics of “Gerontion” and The Waste Land, Eliot’s speakers suffer the most acute symptoms of isolated and disengaged subjectivity (CPP 16). In fact, current research in the cognitive sciences seems to reveal just how precisely Eliot anticipated the psychological side effects of modernity’s interiorizing culture.

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In his highly influential work, Madness and Modernism, contemporary psychologist Louis Sass explores the connection between “intensified forms of self-consciousness” found in certain works of modern literature and philosophy, and the core phenomenology of schizophrenia (37).1 Sass does not attempt to diagnose the modernist text or pass a value judgment upon it; rather, through a series of closely argued parallels, he aims to illustrate how the nature of the attention we bring to the world alters what we find there. Eliot himself made the almost identical point when he noted that “to turn the attention to the mind … is to create, for the objects alter by being observed” (VMP 85). The question is: what happens when the object under observation is in fact part of the subject—in other words, when attention is turned onto the mind itself? Sass describes this phenomenon as a form of “hyperconsciousness.”2 Coined by Sass and further discussed by neurologist Iain McGilchrist, hyperconsciousness refers to a particular species of intensified selfconsciousness whereby thought is abstracted to a level in which it is capable of observing itself. Elements of the self and experience “which normally remain, and need to remain, intuitive, unconscious, become the objects of a detached, alienating attention” (McGilchrist 394).3 In such cases, the object under observation is in fact a part of the subject, producing a kind of internal rupture within the self: one is simultaneously the thinking subject and the object of one’s own intense scrutiny. Unsurprisingly then, McGilchrist describes the hyperconscious state in terms of a lack of “betweenness” (397): the mind, so intent upon its own inner workings, is unable to move fluently between interior and exterior reality or to negotiate between components of the self. The application of contemporary psychological frameworks, such as the above, to early twentieth-century texts may be regarded as a problematic endeavor; certainly, Eliot could not have been aware of the findings of the theorists presented in this chapter. My aim, however, is less to posit the work of Sass and McGilchrist as explaining or influencing Eliot’s thought and writings, and more to show how Eliot’s early poetry seems to anticipate the findings of these latter-day psychologists. In other words, I argue that Eliot was alive to the psychological consequences produced by exaggerated introspection and self-reflexivity, and his representation of these side effects is supported by new research in the fields of neurology and psychology. I therefore use Sass’s concept of hyperconsciousness as a model for examining “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and the short prose poem “Hysteria” in order to shed new light upon Eliot’s poetic explorations of modern interiority.4

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As McGilchrist points out, when thought becomes the object of its own intense observation, “levels of consciousness multiply, so that there is an awareness of one’s own awareness, and so on” (394). Interestingly, Eliot himself had touched upon a similar problem in his thesis on F. H. Bradley, when he wrote of the multiplying points of view which make up the sum of total experience. In the Bradleian universe, the self moves through fractionated points of view, or finite centers, each containing its own experience. The attainment of a unified self, which Eliot, quoting Bradley, refers to as a “construction based on, and itself transcending, immediate experience” (qtd. in KE 149), requires the successful integration of these many varied centers. As Eliot explains, the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself. (KE 147-48)

The problem, as Eliot sees it, arises from the attempt to reconcile two or more opposing points of view, for “the assertion of one point of view against another must be made from a third point of view, which somehow contains the first and second” (121). Simply put, in negotiating between two points of view, both of which we have ourselves experienced, it is necessary to have a seemingly impartial mediator with a bird’s-eye view of both—a third level of consciousness, as it were. Yet, the complexity does not end here. For, as Stephen Medcalf points out, “as soon as we realize that the third point of view is only a point of view, we find ourselves at a fourth point of view” (67). At this point, Eliot suggests, “the first and second reassert themselves once more” (KE 121). The cycle thus appears to continue, ad infinitum. Even if one were able to successfully juggle so many disparate levels of consciousness simultaneously, each point of view may be, as Eliot implies that they are, “so mad and strange that they will be boiled away before you boil them down to one homogeneous mass” (168). The path to unification is ironically strewn with fragmentation. Whether regarded as Bradleian “finite centres” or simply as a series of incompatible perspectives, the “indecisions … visions and revisions” (CPP 14) required for negotiating the winding maze of consciousness inevitably produce a number of meaningful effects. For Sass, one central consequence is the way in which this form of attention to the mind isolates and disjoins aspects of the self:

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Chapter Three To become aware of something, to know it as an object, is necessarily to become aware of its separateness, its nonidentity with the knowing self that one feels oneself to be at that very instant. To perceive something is, ipso facto, to cast it outward, into the domain of the not-me that lies at the farthest reaches of the experiential universe. And since this is an essential fact about consciousness, it must surely apply to self-awareness as well: to know my own self is, inevitably, to multiply or fractionate myself. (Madness 75)

The disunity of the self which results from such marked introspection is of particular concern in Eliot’s early poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in which, as Hugh Kenner has remarked, we find not one consistent self, but “a name plus a Voice” (40).5 In fact, the enigmatic “you and I” of the opening lines may well reflect a schizophrenic division of the self into two separate, yet mutually influential components.6 Here, as in his doctoral thesis, Eliot is centrally concerned with the problem of self-awareness, with the way in which the observation of one’s own mind divides the self into both the thinking subject and the observed object. On the one hand, Prufrock is the self who interacts (in however limited a fashion) with the external world of sawdust restaurants and oyster shells.7 On the other, he is the observer of this self, the relentless interrogating consciousness whose endless decisions and revisions act as an impediment to physical action and self-transcendence. In other words, Prufrock is both—as Eliot put it in his dissertation— an “awareness and that of which it is aware” (KE 29).8 From a cognitive perspective, a heightened focus on one’s own thought processes does appear to inhibit an individual’s capacity for effective or voluntary action.9 The mind becomes detached, disengaged from the external world in such a way as to render action or interaction with the material world problematic, if not impossible. As Nietzsche observed in 1870, “If one is fully aware of what is involved in moving a limb, one can no longer move it…. Consciousness is a screw with no end: at each moment it is applied, an infinity begins, so it can never be brought into action” (qtd. in Sass, Madness 148). Similarly, Prufrock’s “overwhelming question”—one of the poem’s most urgent and recurrent concerns—is not the rolling of the universe into a ball, but the problem of action itself. The question “Do I dare?” is posed repeatedly throughout the poem and is fraught with weighty metaphysical implications, as though the divide between mind and material reality were a watery membrane across which actions skim like pebbles, rippling the surface, disturbing the universe (CPP 13-14).

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Prufrock’s infamous lack of physical action is rendered all the more striking in contrast with the ceaseless activity of his conscious mind. The patient etherized upon the table—the very image of the inert physical form—is juxtaposed with an onslaught of fragmented questions, reflections and impressions which appear to suspend the speaker’s consciousness in a more or less constant state of insomnia. This pronounced distinction between cerebral and physical activity in turn provides an insight into the poem’s distorted sense of temporality. With his hair “growing thin” and his life running out, it seems natural that Prufrock would be acutely aware that little time remains in which to live the full and active life he seems to desire (CPP 14). Yet, strangely enough, the speaker seems entirely convinced that there is no shortage of time left to him; that, if anything, the progression of time is painfully drawn out. For Sass, such a distortion in temporality may be regarded as a consequence of exaggerated introversion; the accelerated activity of the hyperconscious mind results in the perception that “real” or clock time has slowed down. As one schizophrenic patient put it: “[my] inner experiences took place at greatly increased speed, so that much more than usual happened per minute of external time…. The speeding up of my inner experiences provided in this way a slowing down of the external world” (qtd. in Sass, Madness 160). Similarly, the one thing that Prufrock appears to be assured of is that “there will be time”—for, as external action decelerates to the point that the evening appears to fall asleep, thought processes race on at such a frenetic speed that a single minute contains “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse” (CPP 14). While Eliot’s early poetry is crammed with what Sass would refer to as “hyperconscious” speakers, absorbed in the winding labyrinths of their own thought, there is little evidence in “Prufrock” or anywhere else that such mental activity is successfully controlled. However, a marked effort toward this end is articulated in Eliot’s short prose poem “Hysteria.” Here, a male speaker is depicted in the grip of an acute neurotic attack, his vision of another human being dissolving into a menacing disunity of fragments.10 Across the table from him, the speaker’s female companion suddenly appears as teeth like “accidental stars with a talent for squaddrill,” a dark and cavernous throat, and two shaking breasts (CPP 32). The description bears a startling resemblance to that of a young schizophrenic patient, Renee, who recounts her experience of a nervous episode in which a trusted friend—her therapist, Marguerite Sechehaye, or “Mama”— appeared to her only as a chilling conglomeration of component parts:

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Chapter Three I looked at “Mama.” But I perceived a statue, a figure of ice which smiled at me. And this smile, showing her white teeth, frightened me. For I saw the individual features of her face, separated from each other: the teeth, then the nose, then the cheeks, then one eye and the other. Perhaps it was this independence of each part that inspired such fear…. And the terror, the mad anguish, mounted in me. (Sechehaye 51)

Here, as in Eliot’s poem, perceptual fragmentation—a phenomenon common to the early stages of the schizophrenic episode—seems to be evidence of a broader breakdown of meaning, a distortion in the self’s relation to the external world (Sass, Madness 50-51). In “Hysteria,” the boundaries between the self (the speaker) and the other (the companion) are dissolved, so that he becomes “involved in” her laughter: “drawn in,” “inhaled,” and finally “lost” in her throat. This confusion is not merely theoretical or abstract; the speaker experiences it so immediately as to feel himself “bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.” Perceptual order becomes allied with the greater order of reality, so that how the world is viewed is effectively how the world is. Thus, as the speaker observes, if he can just stop the shaking of the woman’s breasts, “some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,” and he concentrates his attention “with careful subtlety to this end” (CPP 32). Whether or not the poem’s attempt to restore order from chaos succeeds, “Hysteria” is remarkable for its clear articulation of the goal of mental control. The majority of Eliot’s early works, by contrast, seem to have abandoned such an attempt altogether, instead chronicling the often disturbing side effects of the powerless individual mind, adrift in a chaotic and fragmentary reality. In some of these works, the gap between interior and exterior meanings is made explicit by a willed projection of the self outward onto exterior objects or entities. One of the more pertinent examples of this particular form of self-surrender occurs in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Here, the volition of the speaker’s mind is cast outward onto inanimate objects passed on an evening stroll, so that the whole act of perception and association, down to the direction of the speaker’s gaze, is relinquished to a nearby streetlamp: The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.” (CPP 24)

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Down to the formulation of the simile—the eye like a crooked pin—it is the streetlamp that directs the act of looking, relegating the whole act of cognition to the sphere of the impersonal. Even memory appears as an object divorced from the subject, untouched by any personal pronoun, referred to only by means of the definite article. It is “the” memory, rather than “my” memory that throws up a “crowd of twisted things” in what is little more than an obedient or automatic response to the injunction of the streetlamp. The agency of the mind is effectively propelled, as Sass would say, into the domain of the “not-me,” a transference implicit in the image of midnight shaking the memory “As a madman shakes a dead geranium” (CPP 24). Even though its observations seem undirected by a conscious force of will, “Rhapsody” is assuredly a poem about vision, and about vision of a particular kind. All-seeing without being affectively engaged with the world, the speaker views reality as a kind of representation, devoid of immediacy and emotional content. As McGilchrist observes, such a mode of detached, hyper-reflexive scrutiny often “alienates us from the world and leads to a belief that only we, or our thought processes, are real” (393). Descartes experienced this very phenomenon in his infamous experience at the window: looking out upon the streets of the city, he found that there was little but his own powers of inference to convince him that the men walking outside were more than machines in hats and coats (85). Wittgenstein too noted that when this particular form of staring attention took over, others appeared to lack consciousness, to be automata rather than minds.11 Similarly, in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the everwatchful speaker encounters a small child on the quay and is unable to attribute a mind or a sense of empathy to this other being. Observing that “I could see nothing behind that child’s eye,” he goes on to associate the innocent action of pocketing a runaway toy with the opportunism of an alley cat licking up a morsel of rancid butter, or the automatic action of a crab clinging to the end of a stick (CPP 25). Such automatism seems to be a consequence of the failed negotiation between subject and object, self and other. In her Autobiography, schizophrenic patient Renee describes her perception that other people, “who in reality behaved in accordance with goals and well-defined incentives became void and lost their souls. Only their bodies were left them, moving like automatons, and their movements were deprived of emotions and feeling” (Sechehaye 50-51). It is a vision paralleled in the “human engine” of The Waste Land, the soulless child of “Rhapsody,” and of course, the empty, straw-filled headpieces of The Hollow Men. All of these works evidence a similar inability on the part of their speakers to

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form an immediate and personal engagement with the external world. There is, in other words, what McGilchrist refers to as a lack of seeing through thought, to what lies beyond, to the shared world of common experience. The problem of hyperconsciousness is the problem of the cerebral intellect, and the highly cerebral nature of Eliot’s poetry contributed to the disapproval of some of his earliest reviewers.12 Yet, Eliot’s early works are by no means purely detached and intellectual, and in fact, they contain some of the most poignant moments of emotional resonance in his oeuvre. The hollow men are aware of the sensuous desire of their lips to kiss, rather than form prayers to broken stone; even Prufrock has heard (and mourned) the beauty of the mermaid’s song. Eliot’s speakers quite openly manifest the desire for greater knowledge and self-transcendence, if only they could come by it. His speakers observe, but they never dare to fully engage that external world. In identifying this struggle to reconcile the subjective and objective elements of experience—the relation between the self and the world, or between components of the self—Eliot touches not only upon one of the central philosophical problems of his time, but also upon a fundamental aspect of human consciousness whose significance resonates to this day.13 As I have attempted to show, Sass’s characterisation of the hyperconscious mind provides a useful model for examining the essential failure of betweenness in Eliot’s early works. Eliot’s anticipation of the consequences of this failure—paralysis, automatism, perceptual fragmentation, to name but a few—is at times remarkably in line with Sass’s findings. In attempting to think its way out of isolation, the self-reflexive mind seems only to aggravate this condition, a paradox captured perfectly in the final section of Eliot’s later poem, The Waste Land: We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison (CPP 74)

It is important to note, however, that while the problem of solipsism is identified in Eliot’s poetry, it is hardly posited as the necessary end point of introspection or philosophical thought. Rather, such passages as the one quoted above reveal Eliot’s ability to empathize with the prevailing sense of isolation, instability and doubt that permeated Europe in the early twentieth century, an era of dramatic socio-cultural and philosophical transitions. In this respect, poems such as “Prufrock,” “Rhapsody,” and “Hysteria” make consciousness itself the site of dramatic action, pointing to the ways in which we view ourselves and the nature of our own perception. Two years after the publication of “Prufrock,” Eliot noted of

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Shakespeare’s rhetorical speeches that “we have this necessary advantage of a new clue to the character, in noting the angle from which he views himself.” Eliot suggests that in our own lives, “we are at times aware of ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very great usefulness to dramatic verse” (SE 40-41; emphasis mine). Noting the angle from which Eliot’s speakers observe themselves—and the sense of isolation, fragmentation and estrangement produced by this painful self-reflexivity— reveals Eliot’s profound intuition of the modern subject and his sense of a chaotic, modernizing reality that seemed, as Eliot would later put it, increasingly “Unreal.”

Notes 1

Sass has written widely about the culture of modernism in connection with some of the central characteristics of schizophrenia, finding that detached, introspective observation (“tendencies toward … contemplative self-control, towards separation of self from world and from other selves and toward … a kind of cerebral selfinterrogation” [37]) produces significant alterations in perception, especially sensations of unreality, isolation and fragmentation. See also Sass’s The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. 2 See pp. 8 and 37-38. Though not a pathological condition per se, hyperconsciousness, according to Sass, produces perceptual or ontological side effects reminiscent of the schizophrenic condition: notably, a pronounced sense of detachment, isolation and fragmentation. 3 Oddly, neither McGilchrist nor Sass address the works of T. S. Eliot in the context of hyperconsciousness at all, except for a short comment by the former, who argues that the patient “etherised upon a table in the opening of ‘Prufrock’ seems prophetic of the anaesthetised state of modernism, in which everything physical and emotional is cut off” (396). While I agree with McGilchrist’s identification of the prophetic qualities of “Prufrock,” the assertion that “everything physical and emotional is cut off” in modernism (or in “Prufrock” in particular) is certainly debatable. 4 For an in-depth examination of the potential influence of earlier perspectives in the field of psychology, especially the theories of Pierre Janet and William James, see Nancy Gish. 5 “J. Alfred Prufrock is a name plus a Voice…. What ‘Prufrock’ is, is the name of a possible zone of consciousness where these materials [allusions, objects, etc.] can maintain a vague congruity; no more than that; certainly not a person” (40). 6 Grover Smith has argued that these pronouns refer to two disharmonious aspects of Prufrock’s own person—a differentiation between his “thinking, sensitive” self and his “outward” or “public” self, the motive being to “repudiate the inert self, which cannot act, and to assert his will” (16). Joyce Meeks Jones arrives at a similar conclusion in her interpretation of Prufrock as an “extravert who is unable

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to resolve the conflict between the demands of his own individuality, and those of his persona, or social mask” (10-11). 7 As Francis Dickey points out, Eliot learned this technique of “endowing apparently unpoetic modern objects with significance,” along with a particular mode of “ironic detachment” from Jules Laforgue (121). 8 The concern of awareness is central to Bradleian philosophy, to Eliot’s doctoral thesis, and to the early poetical works. In particular, the early poem “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (1913-1914) turns quite explicitly on the paralyzing influence of self-awareness, as does the later prose poem “Hysteria.” 9 See Sass, Madness 31. As McGilchrist points out, “The result of [the hyperconscious mind-set] is a sort of paralysis, in which everyday ‘automatic’ actions … can become problematic.” He explains that such paralysis “goes with an inability to trust one’s own body or one’s own intuitions. Everything gets dragged into the full glare of consciousness” (394; emphasis mine). 10 While Craig Raine argues that the poem depicts a man’s attempt to control his companion’s hysterical outburst, I can find no textual evidence to suggest that this is indisputably the case, nor even the main focal point of the poem (60). As readers, we see the female companion only through the eyes of the male speaker, and it is this vision which is agitated and distorted. 11 See McGilchrist 394. 12 Jayme Stayer provides an enlightening overview of the criticism of the early works, as it developed from 1915 through 1995, including the comments of one early reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement, claiming that the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations were “purely analytical … untouched by any genuine rush of feeling” (qtd. in Stayer 319). 13 As Jewel Spears Brooker points out, “The larger intellectual context that informs Eliot’s philosophical studies includes two clusters, both strong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…. The first is the strenuous critique of dualism occurring in philosophy and science, and the second is the tenuous promise of overcoming dualism contained in the emerging social sciences” (54).

Works Cited Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Yes and No: Eliot and Western Philosophy.” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David Chinitz. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009. 53-65. Descartes, René. Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Dickey, Frances. “Prufrock and Other Observations: A Walking Tour.” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David Chinitz. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009. 120-32. Gish, Nancy. “Discarnate Desire: T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation.” Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Ed.

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Cassandra Laity and Nancy Gish. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 107-29. Jones, Joyce Meeks. Jungian Psychology in Literary Analysis: A Demonstration Using T. S. Eliot’s Poetry. Washington D.C.: UP of America, 1979. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: Harbinger, 1969. McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Medcalf, Steven. “Points of View, Objects and Half-Objects: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry at Merton College, 1914-15.” T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 63-79. Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Sass, Louis. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1992. —. The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind. New York: Cornell UP, 1994. Sechehaye, Marguerite, ed. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. New York: Penguin, 1970. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956. Stayer, Jayme. “‘I grow old’: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Inventions of the March Hare 100 Years On.” Literature Compass 9.4 (2012): 317-25.

CHAPTER FOUR PARISIAN INFLUENCES IN “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” NANCY D. HARGROVE

T. S. Eliot arrived in Paris in the fall of 1910 with the goal of finding his poetic voice in the city that had inspired many of the French poets whom he had recently discovered. As he revealed in his 1944 essay “What France Means to You,” it was not chance that had led him to Paris (94) but the belief that “[t]he kind of poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, … was only to be found in French” (SP 248). During the year that he spent there, he not only found that voice but produced at the age of twenty-two an original and striking poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which broke with the established rules of poetry and opened onto a new poetic landscape. As a poem which has received a great deal of critical commentary, its genesis in his Parisian experience has not been explored in depth. In this essay, I will suggest the numerous and significant influences of Paris on Eliot’s early masterpiece. Eliot himself was to a great extent a model for his main character so that, as Marjorie Perloff has claimed, Prufrock cannot be separated from the poet who invented him (24). However, his speaker derives not only from biographical roots but also from identifiable Parisian sources. Eliot merges two distinctly Parisian male figures drawn from the poetry of Baudelaire and Laforgue to create Prufrock. In the mid-nineteenth century, Baudelaire coined the term flâneur to describe an upper-class, educated, and cosmopolitan man who strolled through the streets of a great modern metropolis, specifically Paris, observing with curiosity and detachment its sights and people of all classes. And in the late nineteenth century, Laforgue reinvented the dandy: a type who was interested in fashion and manners, possessed impeccable taste and elegance, was highly intellectual, disdained the bourgeois and working classes, and possessed an ironic impassivity, conveyed with a cynical tone of voice—all traits that equally describe Laforgue himself. The dandy also evinced, as Erik Svarny puts it,

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a “painful failure of communication with the opposite sex” (48). Eliot borrowed liberally from both these types in creating Prufrock.

Figure 1: Parisian Male Fashions, 1911. “La Mode Masculine” [Male Fashions]. Le Matin (2 April 1911): 4.

To convey Prufrock’s dandy-ish fashion sense, Eliot dressed him in elegant clothing reflecting the most current trends (Figure 1). In the Paris of 1910-1911, suits for men featured single- or double-breasted jackets; pants with narrow legs, some of which sported the recent trend of cuffs; hard, detachable collars reaching the chin; neckties; bowler or top hats; gloves; and canes. Prufrock’s clothes reflect these fashionable items favored by the dandy: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin” (CPP 14). According to John H. Young’s 1879 book Our Deportment: Or The Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society, the very formal morning coat or frock coat was appropriate for morning calls and receptions as well as garden parties, Sundays, and social teas, such as the one that Prufrock is attending. 1 Regarding the appropriateness of such coats, the 1905 book The Cynic’s Rules of Conduct by Chester Field offers this droll comment: “At afternoon funerals, wear a frock coat and top hat. Should the funeral be your own, the hat may be dispensed with” (21). Prufrock wears “white flannel trousers” with their bottoms “rolled” or

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cuffed (CPP 16), a variation that also reflected current Parisian trends. It was considered “elegant to turn up the trouser bottoms,” François Boucher notes, adding the typical Frenchman’s explanation of this British innovation: “You turn up your trousers in Paris because it is raining in London.” Boucher was alive to subtle distinctions in dress and manner; he notes that it was acceptable for men to “take their canes into drawing rooms and the Opéra,” but that they should be “malacca canes with silver or enameled knobs” (403-04). Eliot, likewise alive to the significations of fashion, caused “a sensation” when he returned to Harvard from Paris in the fall of 1911. His college friend Conrad Aiken describes him as sporting “exotic Left Bank clothing,” parting his hair behind, and making “a conspicuously un-American point of carrying a cane, was it a Malacca?” (Ushant 143; “King Bolo” 21). While borrowing the traits of Baudelaire’s flâneur and Laforgue’s dandy, Eliot rang some changes upon these established French precedents, investing Prufrock with a lack of confidence, and replacing French impassivity with a very personal, subjective view of himself and his surroundings. Furthermore, Prufrock’s consciousness is not limited to objective descriptions of urban or seedy environs. Although his musings begin à la mode du flâneur, his observations of urban detritus give way to a personal response. His inner anguish, contrasting with the chatter of the women, dispenses with the objectivity of Baudelaire’s and Laforgue’s speakers. In merging these two French male character types and adding new traits, Eliot demonstrated early in his career an impressive ability to experiment with and expand established models. Eliot may also have been influenced in his creation of Prufrock by a somewhat unlikely source, a cartoon entitled “Élégance.” The drawing appeared in the June 15, 1911 issue of the Parisian arts magazine Comoedia and depicts a woman wearing a dress and an enormous hat with large geometrical designs and carrying a matching parasol (Figure 2). To an observer’s apparent query about her outfit, she responds: “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I was inspired by the costumes in D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien” (3).2 D’Annunzio’s daring multimedia production was the talk of Paris in the late spring of 1911, and Eliot may have attended a performance or even seen this cartoon in Comoedia. James Campbell, mentioning my book in the Times Literary Supplement, reproduces this cartoon, advising readers to “Note the rolled trouser-bottoms of [the woman’s] Prufrockian admirer” (32). Campbell thus points to yet another possible model for Prufrock with his double-breasted jacket, his cane, and his hat—the latest Parisian male fashions. We might also note his timid posture with raised shoulders, hands in pockets, and bent knees. Indeed, the

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Figure 2: Moriss, “Élégance.” Comoedia (15 June 1911): 3.

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male seems dwarfed by the woman in her ostentatious clothing. While these influences are not strictly “sources”—in the sense of texts that are consciously adapted by an artist—they are certainly evidence of a Parisian environment of fashion, attitude, and manner which Eliot absorbed and whose influence on Prufrock seems unmistakable. Given some critical speculation that the setting of “Prufrock” is the Boston culture in which Eliot was immersed during his undergraduate years at Harvard, such Parisian contexts and their relevance to “Prufrock” complicate our sense of where the poem resides, both geographically and emotionally.

Figure 3: Vaslav Nijinsky as Petrouchka, Dover Street Studios. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Another Parisian context that may have had a bearing on “Prufrock” was the character Petrouchka from the ballet by that name performed by the Ballets Russes in June 1911 (Figure 3). A work of “extraordinary novelty,” according to the reviewer Henri Ghéon (251), the ballet was based on a Russian folk legend about the disastrous love affair of three puppets (a ballerina, a Moor, and Petrouchka, the Russian Pierrot) at a

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street fair in 1830s St. Petersburg. The folk aspects of the plot and characters were skillfully merged with the experimental music of Stravinsky and the innovative choreography of Michel Fokine. The famed Russian dancer Nijinsky performed the role of the melancholy, would-be lover who tries but fails to win the ballerina, a role that was his favorite. The dance historian Joan Lawson comments that Petrouchka’s “pathetic attempts to make his limbs express his love, joy, sorrow, and rage are those of a human being frustrated by his inability to communicate his thoughts to others” (111). There is a compelling synchronicity between Petrouchka’s doomed lover in this ballet that premiered in June 1911, and Prufrock’s predicament, a draft of which was completed in July 1911. The image of the decapitated prophet may likewise be as indebted to Parisian images as to biblical narratives. The lines “though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, / Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, / I am no prophet” (CPP 15) may have been inspired by any number of paintings in the Louvre of this New Testament scene. Located near Leonardo’s first version of The Madonna of the Rocks, to which Eliot alludes ironically in The Waste Land, are Bernardino Luini’s sixteenth-century Salomé Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist depicting Salomé holding a platter while above it an unseen person’s hand suspends the head of the saint by his hair, 3 and Andrea Solario’s 1507 The Head of St. John the Baptist, in which the head (said to be a self-portrait) is on a footed platter (see Baedeker 124). An odd—though no less likely—source from the world of lowbrow entertainment is the decapitation act that was popular at the time in Parisian street fairs. The decapitation act existed in two versions. In one, according to Nancy Perloff, the performer “cut off his head and presented it on a plate to his baffled spectators,” underscoring “the tremendous appeal of the Salomé legend for artists … and the Parisian public during the early decades of the twentieth century” (30-31). In the other, an executioner cut off the head of his hapless victim. A turn-of-the-century postcard (Figure 4) shows a preview of this act outside the tent, designed to entice the audience to pay to see the “actual” decapitation, created by a mirror trick and rabbit’s blood. As Charlotte Perret notes, the effect was so successful that “many spectators felt ill when the rabbit blood was released at the moment of ‘beheading,’ including perhaps the disconcerted young spectator turning towards the camera, [and] some women fainted” (165). With his formal reserve and indecision, Prufrock’s comparison of himself to John the Baptist is out of place and even shocking; the allusion maintains something of the air of this street fair act, with its gruesome voyeurism and hucksterism.

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Figure 4: Postcard of the Decapitation Act at a Paris Street Fair. “731. Maurice Delavaquerie, le Coupeur des Têtes” [The Decapitator]. In Charlotte Perret, At Their Doorstep: The Street Fairs of Paris and their Carnival Folk in Stories and Photographic Postcards, 1900s, 165. Used by permission of Charlotte Perret.

If it is possible that John the Baptist appears in “Prufrock” under the influence of French sources, then it is just as possible that Lazarus pops up trailing clouds of Gallic-Russian perfume. During his year in Paris, Eliot had been introduced by Alain-Fournier to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in a French translation. John C. Pope notes that Eliot confirmed the “prominence of Dostoevski in his mind during the period of composition” of “Prufrock” (“Prufrock and Raskolnikov Again” 321): During the period of my stay in Paris, Dostoevsky was very much a subject of interest amongst literary people and it was my friend and tutor, Alain Fournier [sic], who introduced me to this author…. [Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov] made a very profound impression on me and I had read them all before Prufrock was completed. (“Prufrock and Raskolnikov Again” 319)

Pope argues that Crime and Punishment influenced Prufrock’s comparison of himself to Lazarus and his similarities to Raskolnikov (“Prufrock and Raskolnikov”).

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Aside from such direct sources, more amorphous influences on the style and technique of the poem may be adduced as well. The title itself is an ironic undoing of the commonest of artistic tropes: the passionate love affair. And Paris was awash with literary and musical instances of it. Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was playing at the Opéra at the time of Eliot’s arrival, and he perhaps saw it with his new French friends Jean Verdenal and Alain-Fournier, both of whom shared his passion for Wagner. Writing to Eliot in 1912, Verdenal described Tristan as “terribly moving at the first hearing, and leaves you prostrate with ecstasy and thirsting to get back to it again” (L1 32n), and Stravinsky concluded from a conversation with Eliot in 1956 that “Tristan must have been one of the most passionate experiences in his life” (92). Another doomed love story of Wagnerian origin, Der Ring des Nibelungen, was presented in its entirety for the first time ever in Paris in June 1911. Verdenal attended and wrote an enthusiastic description to Eliot, who was travelling in Germany and Italy, describing the end of the opera as “one of the highest points ever reached by man” (L1 25n). A third passionate couple who comes to a disastrous end was portrayed in a February 1911 revival of Claude Debussy’s sensuous opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck. Because Eliot noted in his unpublished essay “The Art of the Theatre: Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues” that, during his Harvard undergraduate years, he had discovered Maeterlinck’s drama, Debussy’s music, and best of all the combination of the two in this work, he likely would have availed himself of the opportunity to see it in Paris. Finally, the spectacular multimedia extravaganza The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, with poetic text in French by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, music by Debussy, and lavish sets and costumes by the Russian artist Leon Bakst, was performed at the Théatre du Châtelet in May 1911. In a scandalous reversal of gender roles, the part of Saint Sebastian was performed by the sensual Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church threatened excommunication to those who attended a performance, though many defied the pronouncement. In a 1911 cartoon by Abel Faivre entitled “La Confession de la Parisienne,” a well-dressed woman in a confessional reveals that she has seen the play, to which the priest responds, “How many times?” (3). The scene of the saint’s death—he is shot by archers while bound to a tree—mixed spiritual and sexual ecstasy with pain so intensely that it caused a frisson of excitement in the audience. He pleads:

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D’Annunzio inscribed a version of this quotation on Bakst’s sketch of Rubenstein as Sebastian tied to the laurel tree with an arrow piercing her throat. As the arrows penetrate his flesh in the play, he cries out in ecstasy five times “Again!”, adding “Eternal love!” (257-59). There is a passionate religious relationship between Sebastian and the archers, who weep as they obey his plea to shoot him as an act of love and address him as “Savior” and “Beloved” (259). After he has died, they cry out, “Alas! Alas! We have killed our beloved!” (260). Thus, this dramatic and highly erotic “love song” might be yet another inspiration for the title of Eliot’s poem, completed just two months after the play’s premiere. The poem’s epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, though added at a later date, also has its roots in Eliot’s Parisian year. He had read the Commedia for the first time in Italian at that time, perhaps at the suggestion of AlainFournier or Verdenal. Eliot noted in his two essays on Dante that “my Italian is chiefly self-taught, and learnt primarily in order to read Dante” (IMH 389), admitting that he used a prose translation beside the original Italian to help him figure it out (TCTC 125). Also, each time Eliot attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, he would have passed a bronze statue of Dante near the entrance, depicting him as he accidentally kicks the head of the Florentine traitor Bocca degli Abbati while traversing Antenora in the ninth circle of Hell (see Inferno 32: 76-123). The work of Jean-Paul Aubé, it had been installed in 1882. Inset on a postcard of the statue preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France is a sonnet by Philippe Dufour based on the legend that the Italian poet had come to Paris between 1307 and 1310 in the course of his wanderings: Dante is described as a “mysterious passerby / who, tragically alone, wandered far from Florence,” arriving eventually in Paris, a harsh, desolate, and terrifying city beneath which he felt the circles of hell yawning. This inscription perhaps inspired Eliot’s allusions to the Inferno in The Waste Land. Eliot may also have seen some of the sculpture of Rodin’s monumental masterpiece The Gates of Hell depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno, begun in 1880 but still unfinished at his death in 1917.

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Although time and familiarity have diminished for us an appreciation of how startling the poem was at the time, one of the most innovative aspects of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is Eliot’s transformation of the dramatic monologue into an internal one that reveals Prufrock’s thoughts and emotions, his fears and insecurities. The poem’s focus on the psychology of the human being mirrors similar explorations by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and by Alfred Binet and Pierre Janet in Paris, the last of whom Eliot described as “the great psychologist” in his 1934 essay on Paris, where he lists the most outstanding intellectual stars of 1910-1911. However, the most important figure for Eliot in this regard was surely Henri Bergson, whose name ends this list in the place of honor: “and over all swung the spider-like figure of Bergson” (“Commentary” 451-52). Bergson’s penetrating and provocative focus on the inner life of the human being, which Eliot imbibed both at the philosopher’s riveting lectures4 and in his books, was a powerful influence on the aspiring poet’s depiction of Prufrock’s inner life through the use of internal monologue. And, since Eliot was reading works by André Gide with Alain-Fournier, it is possible that the experimental dialogue between the inner and outer narrator in Gide’s 1902 psychological novel L’Immoraliste bore fruit in a similar technique in “Prufrock.” In keeping with the psychological nature of Prufrock’s internal monologue is the poem’s fragmented and nonlinear structure which eschews transitions. Such techniques were inspired not only by new insights into human psychology but by innovative movements in contemporary art, especially cubism; by experiments in the complex and through-composed forms of Wagner and late Beethoven, both of whom were extremely popular in 1910-1911 Paris; and by the abrupt episodic shifts in Parisian cafe-concerts, music halls, circuses, and early cinema. Cubism made its sensational public debut in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants from April 20 to June 13, 1911. Works such as Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower and Léger’s Nudes in a Landscape evoked rage and derision, leading to a near riot. Eliot likely went to the exhibition since it was the talk of Paris, since Bergson was linked with contemporary art, and since Alain-Fournier had been to a private reception before the official opening and perhaps encouraged Eliot and Verdenal to see it. Indeed, in a letter of April 1912, Verdenal specifically mentions cubism and his fear— unfounded as it turned out—that it would be destroyed by futurism (L1 35, 36n). A congeries of sources then may account for the poem’s disjunctive structure: the technical innovations of cubism and futurism, the experiments in music, and the rapid, disconnected acts of popular entertainment.

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In creating the “voice” of Prufrock, Eliot found his own distinct poetic voice. A year of living in Paris gave him an intimacy with the language— its inflections, rhythms, slang, vulgarities, and idioms—that allowed him to build on and adapt the voices of the Baudelairean and the Laforguean sophisticate that he so admired. Indeed, Vincent Cronin has argued convincingly that the degree of intimacy with the French language that Eliot acquired in Paris, in combination with his knowledge of Parisian writers, led to his writing poems that year that were “nearer to translated French than to idiomatic English … so that translator and poet are so intimately linked as to be scarcely distinguishable” (131, 137). Finally, the seedy, depressing slum area through which Prufrock passes, as well as the yellow smoke, the “pools that stand in drains,” and “the soot that falls from chimneys” of the urban scene reflect details that Eliot observed in the French capital (CPP 13). Such descriptions of grim Parisian slums were given literary form in Charles-Louis Philippe’s novel Bubu de Montparnasse about pimps and prostitutes, a novel that Eliot read soon after his arrival in Paris at Alain-Fournier’s instigation. In his preface to the 1932 English translation of the novel, he recalled that he had first read Bubu de Montparnasse in 1910, when he had come to Paris: “Read at an impressionable age, and under the impressive conditions, the book has always been for me … a symbol of the Paris of that time” (vii). Of course, the poetry of Baudelaire and Laforgue also furnished him with literary models of urban decay, as he acknowledged elsewhere: “I think that from Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis…. From him, as from Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had … in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (TCTC 126). Marjorie Perloff terms Eliot’s portrayal of the realistic details of the modern metropolis “revolutionary urbanism,” pointing out that it is most unusual in high modernist poetry (26), and I suggest that the explanation for this striking singularity lies primarily in Eliot’s lived experience of the French capital in combination with various literary descriptions. Eliot’s annus mirabilis in Paris provided him with numerous influences which enabled him to write, at the age of twenty-two, this groundbreaking poem that has become an integral part of the American and British literary canon. The characters, title, metaphors, material, style, and technique had their inspiration in the fecund atmosphere of Paris, where the visions and revisions of the young poet’s experience were reworked into this early masterpiece.5

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Notes

1

See Nelson for an illustration of the morning coat in the section “The Frock Suit.” All translations from French are mine, with the exception of those from Verdenal’s letters. 3 See Hargrove 155 for a reproduction of this painting. 4 Lyndall Gordon and others following her lead have argued that Eliot only attended Bergson’s lectures for a few weeks in January and February 1911, based on his limited notes in Harvard’s Houghton Library. However, a close look at these notes shows that the first three and one half pages are the last part of a previous lecture, which would be the lecture for December 23, 1910, the last before the three-week Christmas holiday, and the notes immediately following these undated pages bear the date of Friday, January 13, the first class meeting after the holidays; thus, I suggest that a previous notebook containing his notes for the first three class meetings (December 9–23) has not survived along with subsequent notes for the remainder of the semester, which ended on May 19. Such was Bergson’s charisma and the enthusiasm of Eliot and those who packed the amphitheater that it is nearly impossible to believe that Eliot would have ceased attending in February. Eliot himself stated that “to have truly experienced la ferveur bergsonienne one had to have gone, regularly, every week, to that lecture hall filled to bursting where he gave his courses at the Collège de France” (“What France” 94). Eliot’s words “regularly, every week” imply that he attended for a substantial period of time. 5 While this essay focuses largely on wide-ranging influences on this particular poem in the Paris scene itself during Eliot’s year there, earlier studies have identified French sources, typically literary and/or intellectual, in Eliot’s work in general. For those authors most germane to this essay, see Montgomery Belgion, Herbert Howarth, James E. Miller, Peter Ackroyd, A. David Moody, and Lyndall Gordon. Other studies, which focus on the literary or philosophical, include Edward J. H. Greene, Grover Smith, and Piers Gray, while a number of essays explore the influence of a single French writer on Eliot. 2

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. New York: Penguin, 1993. Aiken, Conrad. “King Bolo and Others.” T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949. 2023. —. Ushant: An Essay. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1952. Baedeker, Karl. Paris et ses environs. 16th ed. Paris: Ollendorf, 1907. Belgion, Montgomery. “Irving Babbitt and the Continent.” T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949. 51-59. Boucher, François. 20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment. New York: Abrams, 1966.

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C[ampbell], J[ames]. “Prime Time.” Times Literary Supplement 29 Apr. 2011: 32. Cronin, Vincent. “T. S. Eliot as a Translator.” T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958. 129-37. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. “Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, mystère composé en rythme français par Gabriele D’Annunzio et joué à Paris sur la scène du Châtelet le 22 mai, avec la musique de Claude Debussy.” Internet Archive. 1-270. N.d. Web. 31 October 2013. Eliot, T. S. “The Art of the Theatre: Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues.” Typescript draft. Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge University. —. “A Commentary.” Criterion 13.52 (April 1934): 451-54. —. “What France Means to You.” La France Libre 15 June 1944: 94-95. Faivre, Abel. “La Confession de la Parisienne.” Le Figaro 25 May 1911: 3. Field, Chester. The Cynic’s Rules of Conduct. Philadelphia: Altemus, 1905. Ghéon, Henri. “La Saison ‘Russe’ au Châtelet.” La Nouvelle Revue Française 1 Aug. 1911: 250-51. Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1998. Greene, Edward J. H. T. S. Eliot et la France. Paris: Boivin, 1951. Grey, Piers. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922. Sussex: Harvester, 1982. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Howarth, Herbert. Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Lawson, Joan. A History of Ballet and Its Makers. New York: Pitman, 1964. Miller, James E. T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005. Moody, A. David. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Nelson, Walter. “The Gentleman’s Page: Victorian Gentleman’s Attire: The Frock Suit.” Mass Historia. N.p. 2011. Web. 12 June 2011. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Perloff, Nancy. Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

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Perret, Charlotte. At Their Doorstep: The Street Fairs of Paris and their Carnival Folk in Stories and Photographic Postcards, 1900s. San Francisco: Blurb, 2012. Pope, John C. “Prufrock and Raskolnikov.” American Literature 17.3 (1945): 213-30. —. “Prufrock and Raskolnikov Again: A Letter from T. S. Eliot.” American Literature 18.4 (1947): 319-21. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956. Stravinsky, Igor. “Memories of T. S. Eliot.” Esquire Aug. 1965: 91-93. Svarny, Erik. “The Men of 1914”: T. S. Eliot and Early Modernism. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1988. Young, John H., ed. Our Deportment: Or The Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society. Springfield, MA: King, 1879.

CHAPTER FIVE ELIOT’S CULTURE SHOCK: IMAGINING AN AUDIENCE FOR THE PARIS POEMS JAYME STAYER

Nearing the end of his time at Harvard in 1910, T. S. Eliot decided to spend a year in France. Even though his academic training was in philosophy, his instincts were pushing him toward literature. And for the young Eliot, France was not primarily the land of philosophy, but of poetry. As he explained the matter: “ce n’est pas un accident qui m’avait conduit à Paris. Depuis plusieurs années, la France représentait surtout, à mes yeux, la poésie” (IMH 406). His discovery of Jules Laforgue in 1908 and his infatuation with other French Symbolists had radically changed his style and themes, and he had begun experimenting in this new manner in a private notebook, published posthumously as Inventions of the March Hare. As he described it, his earliest experience of the poetry of Jules Laforgue had given him “an unshakeable confidence” in his own vocation as a poet (IMH 400).1 That confidence played a part in his bold request to spend a year in France. The problem, on the practical level, was that this decision was the source of significant distress on the part of his mother. In an April 1910 letter to her son, Charlotte Eliot objected to his going to France on a number of grounds, not the least of which was that his “literary activity” seemed to be getting in the way of a more sensible approach to a career (L1 11). And so, even as the twenty-one-year old began to chart an unconventional course for himself, he was wise enough to package the trip to his parents as a conventional Grand Tour, one that would aid his academic work and allow him to study the “particular genius” of French culture. But his mother suspected that the trip signified some kind of rejection. Conscious of her own lack of education, Charlotte Eliot ended



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the discussion of his trip abroad with a hint of wounded pride. Throwing her son’s words back at him in disapproving scare quotes, she wrote: “I suppose I am not enough of a scholar to know what is termed the ‘particular genius’ of any people” (L1 12). Eliot’s request to spend a year abroad caused a small rift in the normally affectionate exchange between mother and son. Perhaps she had intuited that a year in France would have been more than just a yes to poetry and a no to philosophy because, for the first time in his life, her son declined the part of the obedient boy capitulating to his family’s expectations or his mother’s worries. In later life, Eliot destroyed dozens and perhaps hundreds of his mother’s letters, but he kept this one. It is possible that it survived serendipitously, but it is worth considering that Eliot kept this letter because it recorded a crucial break, the maturation of an independent identity. Unbeknownst to Charlotte Eliot, her son was hatching even bolder plans for a more permanent escape. At some point, either before or shortly after his arrival in France, Eliot concocted a secret plan to remain in Paris, a plan which, we may safely speculate, he never discussed with his parents and which, as we know for certain, soon fell apart. Much later in his life, Eliot recalled this state of mind when he was asked by an interviewer: “Did you think at all about becoming a French symbolist poet … ?” Eliot answered: “I only did that during the romantic year I spent in Paris after Harvard. I had at that time the idea of giving up English and trying to settle down and scrape along in Paris and gradually write French. But it would have been a foolish idea even if I’d been much more bilingual than I ever was” (Hall 56). After only a few months in Paris then, he abandoned his romantic whim and within the year returned to Harvard for another philosophy degree after all, capitulating (for a few more years, at least) to his family’s expectations that he complete a doctorate. But for this essay, I want to linger in this moment of giddy expectation and hard-won arrival in Paris in the fall of 1910—a moment in which the grand hopes and blossoming ambitions of a young writer are momentarily dashed by his poor conversational skills in French. We do not have much information about Eliot’s emotional state in his first months in Paris. But the extant material refers explicitly to his struggles with the French language, contemporary evidence that mirrors his later claim that he was never fully bilingual. Some months after his arrival in France, Eliot writes to his young niece, referring to his continuing difficulties with communication: “it is hard to talk to the little ones, because they don’t talk French very well yet, and I don’t either” (L1 15). In a letter to another correspondent, he casts his mind back to the



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month of November 1910—his first few weeks in Paris—describing that time as the period of his greatest difficulties with the language (L1 16-17). Because of Eliot’s erudition, his classical education, and his penchant for citing obscure sources in their original languages—think, for example, of the polyglot virtuosity of The Waste Land and, even more, of its notes—scholars refer quite facilely to the poet’s skill with languages. But in the messy context of second culture immersion (as opposed to the tidy classroom), acquiring a language is not a steady path of increasing mastery, as with algebra or a musical instrument. Even for the naturally gifted linguist, the exotic otherness of a foreign land is exciting only for a few weeks. Then the exhausting, quotidian slog to put words together can become overwhelming. While Eliot’s grasp of French would eventually become quite masterful, his later claim that he was never fully bilingual, even by the end of his stay, is evident in drafts of his 1917 French poems, where Pound, the more idiomatic speaker of French, corrects some of Eliot’s grammatical uncertainties and elementary errors (see IMH 363-64). The loss of linguistic ability, especially for those who are articulate in their native language, is a particularly humiliating experience. That loss of language is only one part of a complex of experiences that I will anachronistically refer to as “culture shock,” a concept that did not become fully theorized until the 1950s.2 Circa 1910, there was no such thing as a coherent psychological or sociological theory of second culture acquisition. Aside from novelistic explorations of the problem—of which there were plenty—the closest thing to a theory of culture shock that precedes the Great War are brief descriptions in travel guides that address certain customs, warn about dangers, or explain common misunderstandings for the would-be tourist.3 But platitudes about being open to the unfamiliar do not constitute a general theory of long-term adjustment to a second culture. The absence of a theory of second culture acquisition for 1910 would seem to be at least half of the problem for my argument here. The other half of the problem is a missing object for that missing theory: we simply do not know much about what Eliot was thinking, reading, or doing in the fall of 1910. There is no hard data upon which to hang a chronology of his first months in Paris, and even the means and date of his arrival are still unknown. Nancy Hargrove, in her recent T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, provides the fullest account to date of what Eliot may have seen and read in his year abroad, but she is silent on this matter of his movements and preoccupations in his first weeks in Paris. But in spite of these two problems, I do not need anything so elaborate as a contemporaneous model of culture shock for the speculative and focused argument I want to make here.



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I will start with this mostly unobjectionable claim: when persons find themselves immersed in a second culture, even when they have been prepared for it with language study, they are bound to encounter, on an hourly basis, situations of stress, confusion, misunderstanding, helplessness, and disorientations both cultural and linguistic. The cumulative effect of these problems provokes a very different emotional response than, for example, the response a student might have to getting an answer wrong in the classroom. Anger is a common response to the complex of experiences known as culture shock, especially in the early stages of second culture acquisition. By way of illustrating this claim, I offer two anecdotes by English speakers abroad. In both of these anecdotes, note that the setting for each is a few weeks after arrival in the foreign country, and that the emotional tenor of each anecdote is one of anger, disintegration, and hopelessness. The first anecdote is by Edward Gibbon, who in his Memoirs describes arriving as a young man at Lausanne, Switzerland: In my childhood I had once studied the French grammar, and I could imperfectly understand the easy prose of a familiar subject. But when I was thus suddenly cast on a foreign land, I found myself deprived of the use of speech and of hearing; and, during some weeks, incapable not only of enjoying the pleasures of conversation, but even of asking or answering a question in the common intercourse of life. To a home-bred Englishman, every object, every custom was offensive…. From a man I was again degraded to the dependence of a school-boy…. My condition seemed as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure. (96; emphasis mine)

Gibbon describes the helplessness that comes as a result of confronting the gap between a clever schoolboy’s grasp of French grammar and the adult’s inability to make headway in the welter of conversation. The second anecdote is from a less celebrated if equally acute observer, the American comedian Mel Brooks, who describes his own confrontation with the French language during his army days in the Second World War. It will help if the reader can summon Brooks’s exuberant, Jewish-Brooklyn accent: We travelled in a big truck through the nation of France on our way to Belgium, and every time we passed through a little town, we’d see these signs “Boulangerie,” “Patisserie,” and “Rue” this and “Rue” that, and rue the day you came here young man. When we got to our hundred and eightieth French village, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “The joke is over! English, please!” I couldn’t believe a whole country couldn’t speak English. One-third of a nation, all right, but not a whole country. (qtd. in Storti 85)



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In Brooks’s comic representation of his anger, his emotional response to alienation comes as a defense against disintegration, a nationalistic assertion of identity in the face of its slippage. We normally associate Eliot’s Paris poems with the haunting evocations of “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” or, since the 1996 publication of Inventions of the March Hare, with the hazy atmospherics of “Interlude in a Bar” or “Entretien dans un parc.” But in November 1910—a few weeks after his arrival in France—when he was experiencing the first stages of culture shock, Eliot wrote an especially dyspeptic poem, “The Triumph of Bullshit.” The first word of each stanza apostrophizes its audience-in-the-poem, “Ladies,” who are not the same as the authorial audience-of-the-poem. In every conceivable way, these Ladies misunderstand, misrepresent, and misjudge the speaker’s artistic intentions. They find that his “merits are small”; that his artistic ambitions are “Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous”; that he is merely an “Ingenuous child” and no real artist. In response to their tally of his failures, the enraged speaker hammers away at his own refrain: “For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass” (IMH 307). Scholarship on this poem often lumps it with the Bolo poems and other scatological inventions relegated to the appendix in Christopher Ricks’s edition. But I prefer not to look at the blue verse as inhabiting a different universe than the other poems, because all the poems of the notebook, when placed in chronological order of their composition, tell us something about the apprentice poet’s developing sense of rhetoric. We do not have dates for the Bolo poems, scattered verses of which seem to have been written over the course of many years. Fortunately, we do have the November 1910 date for “The Triumph of Bullshit.” Unfortunately, there is a textual problem with the handwriting that records this date. The final “0” of the year 1910 is imperfectly scrawled by Eliot, and Ricks has suggested a “6” (for 1916) as an alternate reading of the date.4 Baffled by the indecipherable cipher and the surprising viciousness of the poem, Ricks offers a tentative explanation to support the alternate 1916 dating. He suggests that if the later date is indeed correct, it is perhaps in response to Harriet Monroe’s dithering in her publication of “Prufrock”— negotiations that occurred in 1914-15. Aside from its illegibility, the suspicion about the 1910 date for “The Triumph of Bullshit” seems to be (1) that its hostility toward “Ladies” comes out of nowhere; (2) that such raw hostility towards an audience could not be invented; and (3) that there must be some actual “lady” or ladies who have thwarted Eliot’s ambition and misunderstood his work.



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While it would be too much of a stretch to suggest that Eliot’s unconscious target was his mother, given the fleeting tensions described earlier, it is still worth noting that his mother’s society connections bear a suspicious resemblance to the species of ladies who appear in “The Triumph of Bullshit.” (Charlotte Eliot was an active member of several women’s groups, including the St. Louis Woman’s Club and the Wednesday Club, which had an artistic and intellectual character.) But in spite of this biographical possibility, it is exactly my contention that the target of hostility is invented—though not the anger itself, which is a response to Eliot’s humiliating loss of cultural and linguistic control in November 1910. Nor does it come out of nowhere, this anger toward “Ladies” who serve as a symbol of hostile audiences. In fact, in numerous poems written in the preceding year, Eliot had often adopted defensive poses in order to forestall unsympathetic responses. From his earliest poems, including his juvenilia, Eliot’s rhetorical imagination was keenly attuned to the anticipated responses of his audiences. Here are a few examples of “female readers,” “you[s],” and other hostile or uncomprehending audiences that appear in Eliot’s poems just in the twelve months before November 1910: While female readers all in tears are drowned:— “The perfect climax all true lovers seek!” —“Nocturne,” Nov. 1909 (CPP 601) “Why don’t you people get some class” (And here contemptuous of nose) “Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas …” —“Humouresque,” Nov. 1909 (IMH 325) “You, madame, are the eternal humourist, The eternal enemy of the absolute, ................................ With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—” —“Conversation Galante,” Nov. 1909 (IMH 346) [Marionettes] Await an audience open-mouthed At climax and suspense. —“Convictions (Curtain Raiser),” Jan. 1910 (IMH 11)



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Chapter Five Oh, spare these reminiscences! How you prolong the pose! —“Portrait of a Lady” [II], Feb. 1910 (IMH 328) You may say what you will, At such peace I am terrified. —“Silence,” June 1910 (IMH 18)

The notebook and the juvenilia abound with even more examples of hostile or uncomprehending audiences-in-the-poem, and when those audiences are pegged as female, the hostility increases. The only other poem Eliot writes in the same month as “The Triumph of Bullshit” is section I of “Portrait of a Lady”—yet another lady who misunderstands. Eliot’s displaced rage is a recognizable effect of culture shock. “The Triumph of Bullshit” is a poem written by a young man who is in great psychic pain, whose playful scatology has soured into anger as a result of his loneliness, frustration, and loss of control. The poem’s ire, while seemingly irrationally aimed at an undeserving target, is in effect a crystallization of the very problems of audience anxiety that Eliot has been struggling with for over a year in the notebook. For, in moments of anger, we say overtly and in exaggerated ways what we have been thinking in more sober moments. In the year preceding his arrival in Paris—from November 1909 to October 1910—Eliot had been modulating Laforguean irony and scorn with varying degrees of success. If we compare, for example, the similar poems “First Caprice in North Cambridge” (drafted Nov. 1909) and “Preludes” [I] (drafted Oct. 1910), we can see how Eliot has learned to temper the blistering irony that has given thrust to his voice but also limited its potential. Both poems explore the seedy underside of city life, focusing on grimy details and urban blight. “First Caprice,” one of the first to show the effects of Baudelaire and Laforgue on Eliot’s style, attempts to summon the audience’s sympathy by employing a series of metaphors for suffering and alienation: “Bottles and broken glass, / Trampled mud and grass[.]” But after such seriousness, the poem ends with an oddly sarcastic dismissal: “Oh, these minor considerations!” (IMH 13)—a line that is set off in isolation from the rest of the poem. A year later, by October 1910, Eliot has solved the problem of conflicting tones with “Preludes.” The first section of this poem sequence likewise focuses on “grimy scraps” and on “broken blinds and chimney pots,” but the final line is managed more elegantly: “And then the lighting up of lamps!” (IMH 334). Like the ending of “First Caprice,” this poem’s final line is also set off in isolation and ends with the telltale exclamation point. But in the later poem, the



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concluding line is oddly (and effectively) exclaiming about nothing. The lighting of lamps is simply another drab detail; it makes neither summary judgment nor dismissal, and so its isolated placement and punctuation teasingly offer a conclusion whose content is inconclusive. Though modeled on “First Caprice,” the first section of “Preludes” solves that earlier poem’s rhetorical muddle, and the isolated final line and exclamation mark visible in the draft are no longer strictly necessary. When the poem was first published in 1915, the stand-alone line was moved up into the preceding stanza (“Preludes,” Blast). In later editions, the exclamation point disappeared.5 One month after this first section of “Preludes” is drafted, those subtle modulations of tone have fallen apart in “The Triumph of Bullshit,” and this angry poem represents an uncharacteristic step backwards for an artist who, up to this point, had been demonstrating increasing rhetorical mastery.6 How one reads the tone of “The Triumph of Bullshit” depends on whether one categorizes it as scatological poetry or light verse. In either case, if the intent was to shock, it is unconvincing; if the intent was to amuse, it is clumsily handled. While the poem represents a low point in the young author’s hostility to uncomprehending audiences, it is possible that the vehemence of the poem galvanizes Eliot’s sense of the rhetorical problems to which he must address himself. In the following month, December 1910, he regains his balance in another city poem, “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse.” Here again are images of urban detritus and despair: “a landscape grey with rain” and a “mass of mud and sand.” When the artist approaches the tricky last line— the most tempting place to reach for the transcendent or the summative— he deflates himself with a light exclamation masquerading as a question: “But why are we so hard to please?” (IMH 14). The uncomprehending “you” and the hostile “Ladies” are nowhere in evidence, only the unnerving, conspiratorial “we.” This artist knows who his audiences are: both the addressee—the audience-in-the-poem—and the authorial audience outside of the poem. From a rhetorical perspective, the trajectory of the notebook is one of widening horizons and more finely rendered, intimately addressed audiences: the notebook as a whole is a workshop where the unsteady apprentice at first curses and coerces his audience into the shape he desires. The dynamic of suspicion between speaker and audience, especially evident in the apprentice poems of November 1909, works itself out more subtly in the late 1910 poems, notably in “Preludes,” enabling Eliot to move beyond suspicion to imagine a sympathetic audience—a resolution that paves the way for “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and



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“Prufrock.” After the frantic gesticulations of “The Triumph of Bullshit” of November 1910, Eliot regains his countenance and remains selfpossessed. Figuratively speaking, one could say that on or about December 1910, the character of Eliot’s audiences changed. Eliot becomes the master rhetor, seducing a willing audience with the oblique persuasions of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the thrilling danger of Prufrock’s invitation, whose “you and I” signal a terrifying intimacy.

Notes 

1

As Christopher Ricks points out, Eliot does not explicitly name the French author in this passage, but it is clear that Eliot is speaking of his personal experience of finding Laforgue (399). 2 In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic theory was not concerned with culture shock, nor can its theorizations of grief or anger be arbitrarily pressed into service for a different kind of experience. In the United States, the concept of culture shock dates to the 1930s. After the 1950s, the term becomes heavily theorized in sociology and psychology in response to the waves of foreign exchange students in America and American students abroad. In spite of such empirical and speculative work—or perhaps because of it—there is still no coherent theory of second culture acquisition, only competing and contradictory theories. For example, there is a stage model, a disease model, and a growth model. Whatever the case, many theories contrast something like a honeymoon stage to a disintegration phase, though they disagree on the order and signification of these phases. See Pedersen and Ward, et al. For a different example of how the term “culture shock” has been translated backwards in time, see Lohfink. In spite of its intriguing subtitle—Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain—Rupert Christiansen’s The Victorian Visitors has nothing to do with this phenomenon. 3 Travel guides consulted include various Baedeker, Cassel and Bradshaw handbooks to Europe or European countries published between 1890 and 1910. Such guides are sometimes vaguely attuned to the problems of assimilation and feelings of alienation that attend extensive travel: “Nothing is better calculated to afford the traveller some insight into the labyrinthine topography of London, to enable him to ascertain his bearings, and to dispel the first oppressive feeling of solitude and insignificance, than a drive through the principal quarters of the town” (Baedeker 78). 4 All of the poems of the notebook, written over a period of years and revealing Eliot’s changing handwriting, were dated by Eliot at some later time, probably as he was on the verge of selling the notebook to John Quinn, a New York lawyer and patron of the arts. Having examined the manuscript myself, I concur with Ricks’s uncertainty: either Eliot was dating the poems of the notebook in a tearing hurry, or he was being jostled by bystanders. 5 Jim McCue has brought to my attention that though there are no line spaces in the poem in published versions prior to 1963, the space before the final line was added



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back in by Eliot sometime in the late 1950s. In the archives of Washington University, a copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems (1936, 15th impression, 1954) has been marked up by Eliot and David Bland, Faber’s production editor, for use in preparing the next edition. The space before the final line of “Preludes” (I) was subsequently added in editions that appear after 1963. It is unclear why the space was dropped in its first publication in Blast and in subsequent publications for decades. As is often the case with such textual issues, when there is no correspondence between poet and publisher, no extant galley proofs, and no marginalia to examine, it is difficult to speculate about how such changes are made—whether mistakenly or on purpose, and whether they originate authorially, editorially, or otherwise—and, if the changes did not originate with the author, whether Eliot declined to change them back, accepted them with equanimity, or simply did not notice. Christopher Ricks also considers the effect of the spacing change in “Preludes” (I) in his Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (86-87). 6 Another reverse course occurs a few months later: immediately after completing “Prufrock,” and in the very midst of writing “Preludes” (III), he penned “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu.”

Works Cited Baedeker, Karl. London and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1908. Christiansen, Rupert. The Victorian Visitors: Culture Shock in NineteenthCentury Britain. New York: Grove, 2000. Eliot. T. S. “Preludes.” Blast 2 (1915): 48-49. Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of my Life and Writing. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. I. Ed. Dean Milman, et al. New York: Harper, 1905. Hall, Donald. “The Art of Poetry I: T. S. Eliot.” Paris Review 21 (1959): 47-70. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Lohfink, Norbert F. “Culture Shock and Theology: A Discussion of Theology as a Cultural and Sociological Phenomenon Based on the Example of Deuteronomy.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 9 (1977): 1222. Pedersen, Paul. The Five Stages of Culture Shock. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Ricks, Christopher. Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot. The Panizzi Lectures 2002. London: British Library and Faber, 2003. Storti, Craig. The Art of Crossing Cultures. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural, 1990.



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Ward, Colleen, Stephen Bochner, and Adrian Furnham. The Psychology of Culture Shock. 2nd ed. Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, 2001.





CHAPTER SIX CUMMINGS REWRITES ELIOT MICHAEL WEBSTER

I have a very high opinion of Mr. Cummings as a poet, in spite of my dislike of his typography. —T. S. Eliot, in a 1957 letter to Charles Norman (Norman, xii)

T. S. Eliot’s year in France in 1910-11 intensified his writing of psychological, wanderer-in-the-city poems, a mode that would lead eventually to the urban collages we find in The Waste Land. Seven years later in 1917, E. E. Cummings’s first sojourn in Paris and his time in the ambulance corps and a French detention camp confirmed his faith in the individual, his distrust of the state, and his predilection for writing poems about street people and prostitutes. Despite these and other remarkable convergences, Eliot and Cummings are seldom mentioned together in discussions of modernism. For example, Charles Altieri’s 1994 article, “Eliot’s Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry,” fails to mention Cummings, for in 1994, scholars had only begun, as David Chinitz says, to “restore Eliot to a fuller context” (12). The previous academic context for Eliot did not often include Cummings, who was most often perceived as the anti-Eliot, the lower-case-“i” poet of spontaneity at odds with the impersonal poet of tradition. One 1938 article by John Peale Bishop attempted a tentative rapprochement, depicting an Eliot who finds spiritual life in asceticism and religious symbolism and a Cummings who finds spiritual sustenance in immediate sensation, for example, in the “actual miracle” of a non-symbolic goat in a twilight landscape. And while Bishop sees both poets as “transcending” personality in their art, they achieve transcendence differently: Eliot through asceticism and dramatized objective correlatives and Cummings by “staying within the record of sensations” and exploring the conflicts and confluences between self and other (127-30). More recently, at least two scholars have begun to re-read Eliot through the lens of Cummings, one (Rai Peterson) finding a

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sonnet sequence in “Prufrock,” and the other (Etienne Terblanche) exploring the “eco-logos” in each poet’s work. In this paper I wish to restore Eliot to a Cummings context (and viceversa), and to show how Eliot was a particularly appropriate poetic mentor for Cummings, because both sought to widen and deepen the forms of expression available to modern poets and because both fought against their genteel Unitarian upbringing and the culture of late nineteenth-century New England in which it was rooted. Although it is a mistake to create too great a separation between a “high,” impersonal, learned, allusive, and classical Eliot and a “low,” personal, spontaneous, idiosyncratic, and romantic Cummings, the two poets did differ in temperament, poetic technique, and political and religious views. And though both shared an obsession with finding new forms of expression, they differed also on how far a poet could push innovative techniques and still remain connected to the tradition. In spite of the poets’ manifold differences, the similarities in their backgrounds are striking: both were of New England stock; both were descended from Unitarian ministers; both had forebears who taught at Harvard; both studied languages and literature at Harvard; both were wellgrounded in the Greek and Latin classics; both studied Eastern religions; both were strongly influenced by French Symbolist poets; both visited Boston’s seedier districts while at Harvard. Some striking convergences stem from their Unitarian and Harvard milieu: for example, in 1900 Cummings’s father was named minister at South Congregational Church only after the preferred candidate, Samuel Atkins Eliot II (1862-1950)—a distant cousin of Eliot’s and the son of the president of Harvard, Charles William Eliot—declined the church’s unanimous offer. In addition, Edward Hale (the father of Emily Hale, Eliot’s long-term love interest) had been associate minister of the same church from 1886 to 1891. Because Eliot was six years older than Cummings, their undergraduate careers at Harvard did not overlap. But in the fall of 1911, the twenty-twoyear-old Eliot returned from a year in Europe to begin his graduate studies in philosophy, while Cummings, barely seventeen, was a scrawny freshman who lived at home. As far as we know, Eliot and Cummings met only once at Harvard, in May 1913, when they both appeared in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club’s production of Jerome K. Jerome’s The New Lady Bantock, or Fanny and the Servant Problem in roles that were highly symbolic of their later literary careers (Kennedy 86). Eliot played Vernon Wetherell, Lord Bantock; Cummings played one of the problem servants, a second footman named Ernest Bennet. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—their shared background among the Boston Brahmin,

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Eliot and Cummings both rebelled against a bookish gentility, seeking to create more varied forms of expression that would challenge “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, / The army of unalterable law” (CPP 30). As a consequence, both artists were interested in the Ballets Russes, vaudeville, and popular culture. Later, twenty years apart (1932-33 and 1952-53), both delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard (though Cummings preferred to call his “nonlectures”). Both were friends with Scofield Thayer, future publisher and editor of The Dial, though Eliot knew Thayer longer and was less friendly, while Cummings viewed Thayer very much as a mentor. Incredibly, each was introduced to his first wife through Thayer.1 And both shared with Thayer the notion that one of the prime criteria for judging a work of art was its intensity.2 While both searched for poetic models, Eliot found few to choose from in 1908. He wrote that there were no American or British poets “who could have been of use to a beginner in 1908. The only recourse was to poetry of another age and to poetry of another language” (IMH 388). Coming along six years later, Cummings had the advantage of mentors like S. Foster Damon and Scofield Thayer who kept him in touch with the latest developments in modern poetry. By 1916 Cummings had read Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Pound’s Exultations, Ripostes, and Cathay, along with H. D., Aldington, and F. S. Flint. As Eliot wrote, these poets “were evidence of a radical change in the whole practice of verse” (IMH 389). Cummings also kept up with the latest issues of Poetry and Others, and in 1915, Thayer introduced him to Eliot’s poetry by sending him Blast II, from which Cummings promptly copied out “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” (Kennedy 94-95).3 Cummings soon began to rewrite Eliot into his own idiom and experience. Kennedy tells us that Cummings especially admired the “use of detail and the introduction of ordinary objects such as the ‘toothbrush’” in the final lines of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: [“]You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair. Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.” The last twist of the knife. (CPP 26)

No doubt Cummings was also impressed by the one-word line “Mount”— and by Eliot’s frank and psychologically acute depiction of modern city life. The cityscapes of “Preludes” must have struck Cummings in much the

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same way that Eliot was struck by Baudelaire, who (Eliot wrote) elevated the imagery “of the sordid life of a great metropolis … to the first intensity—presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself,” thus creating “a mode of release and expression for other men” (SP 234). Though Cummings owned three copies of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (one dated 1944, one with no date, and the third given to him in 1954), in many ways he imbibed his Baudelaire, Laforgue, and Gautier through Eliot. Cummings’s early taste in French poets inclined towards the lyrical—Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, and Apollinaire—rather than Eliot’s more astringent and ironic influences. Cummings read Amy Lowell’s Six French Poets (1915) rather than Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in French Literature, and it is telling that, aside from popular songs, the only French poems he quotes in The Enormous Room are Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Verger” and “Chanson de l’automne” (57, 219). 4 Cummings quickly adapted the imagery of lines from “Preludes” such as “One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms” (CPP 22) to a colloquial dramatic monologue, quite different in tone from Eliot’s cityscapes, one that gains its intensity from short, Imagist lines and vernacular diction: raise the shade will youse dearie? rain wouldn’t that get yer goat (Complete Poems 100)

Most likely written in late 1916 or early 1917, this poem exchanges the flaneur’s perspective and the evocative tone of “Preludes” for the colloquial diction of one of those shade-raisers, a prostitute who feels “sorry” for the working girls “that / gets up god / knows when,” yet seems unaware that her “hard” profession is more demeaning than any shopgirl’s, wasting and “killing” her. Cummings’s short lines allow him to inhabit and present the speaker’s simple colloquialisms, discarding the evocative consciousness of an observer-speaker who hovers in and around the mind of a woman who “clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands” (CPP 23). Eliot would not assume the voice of a lower-class character like this until the brilliant dramatic monologue of Lil’s friend in The Waste Land. The first-person voice of the speaker in “raise the shade” is incapable of musing on the “masquerades / That time resumes” or of observing “The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world” (CPP

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22-23). Cummings’s search for direct expression of an actual world leads him away from the brooding sonority of “Preludes” and “Rhapsody” to a more visual presentation, creating radical enjambments and one-word lines that put more pressure on individual words and that bespeak a minimalist aesthetic. Even when Cummings’s lyric stance implies the presence of an authorial observer, his more adventurous poems push beyond Pound’s Imagist demand for spoken rhythms while still fashioning a single “emotional and intellectual complex” (Pound 3-4), as in “being / twelve,” which dates from around 1916-1918: being twelve who hast merely gonorrhea Oldeyed child,to ambitious weeness of boots tiny add death what shall? (Complete Poems 70)5

Although Sandburg, Pound, and Eliot had also used one-word lines for local effects, Cummings’s use of eight one-word lines in a thirteen-line poem drastically reduces word count, presenting each word as a small visual object well before Williams’s “The Great Figure” of 1921. This poem is an early example of what Cummings called the “poising of syllables simultaneously in time and space” (Letter, 25 Oct. 1916). This “poising” allows a word to have several meanings, depending on whether the reader connects it with the line above, the line below, or sees it in isolation. For example, the word “being” refers both to the subject’s being and her age. Likewise, the word “Oldeyed” is placed directly above the word “weeness,” emphasizing the simultaneous presence of experience and innocence, of age hovering over both the weeness of the child and her boots. One can see how these experiments in one-word line “poising” led Cummings to reorder words for syntactical ambiguity and semantic richness. For example, the proper word order of the final question should be “what shall tiny death add?” However, Cummings’s rearrangement

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emphasizes the tininess of boots, child, and death, and leaves the reader with a “shall” on the thirteenth line, representing the thirteenth year that the child may not live to see. Her “being” becomes a question: “shall?” Cummings’s rewritings of Eliot are not always so radical, but they always re-form Eliot in his own image. For example, Cummings’s “the sky a silver” reshapes the gritty winter twilight scene of Eliot’s “Preludes” into an impressionist evocation of a darkening spring sky. Eliot’s “The showers beat / On broken blinds and chimney-pots” (CPP 22) becomes in Cummings a rain that turns the sky to a “silver / dissonance” and resolves into stars, “a / clutter of trite jewels” (Complete Poems 60). Likewise, Eliot’s fanciful yet learned reference to the moon as “Prester John’s balloon” (CPP 33) becomes a faux-naif lover’s question in Cummings: “who knows if the moon’s / a balloon” (Complete Poems 202). And Cummings’s play Him opens with a visual echo of the famous opening simile of “Prufrock.” When the curtain rises, we see a cardboard cut-out of a woman being “etherized” on a table, placing the serious birth-death symbolism of the play in a vaudeville or carnival context. Similarly, Cummings adapted Eliot’s description of Mr. Apollinax laughing “like an irresponsible foetus” (31) to his own developing symbol system of the self’s destiny in the modern world: “ci-gît 1 Foetus(unborn to not die // safely whose epoch fits him like a grave)” (Complete Poems 394). These last examples show Cummings developing and changing Eliot’s striking imagery: in Him, Prufrock’s conceit of the patient on the table becomes a carnival sideshow that nevertheless signals a serious theme of the birth and death of the self, while the similarly fantastic conceit of the laughter of a foetus becomes for Cummings the symbol of an unborn-to-self modern bourgeois who is not even alive enough to be infantile, remaining at a fetal stage of development. Cummings’s Cambridge background allowed him to appreciate Eliot’s satirical portraits of Aunt Helens, tea-drinking hostesses, and readers of the Boston Evening Transcript. Gently controlled by the narrow ideology of their favored periodical, such society ladies “Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn” (CPP 28). Cummings quotes this line in his only published critical essay on any writer, living or dead—his review of Eliot’s Poems in The Dial—soon after quoting some remarks on style from Eliot’s essay “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe.” These remarks “are, to a student of Mr. T. S., unnecessarily illuminating,” Cummings comments, and then he cites these lines of Eliot’s: … this style which secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at the right moment …

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… this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some great painting and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.” (Miscellany 25; SE 124-25)

Clearly perceiving how Eliot theorizes his own verse while ostensibly commenting on others, Cummings here also gives us a glimpse of how he himself approached Eliot’s criticism and poetry as a “student.” Cummings’s own caricatures, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” (Complete Poems 115), are likewise dominated by the petty, genteel concerns of their class, living “unscented, shapeless” indoor existences, knitting and sharing gossip. Their belief in “Christ and Longfellow, both dead” has safely neutralized the power of religion or art to transform their already “furnished souls.” Where Eliot grants objective correlatives for “dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah” in the form of “a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon” (CPP 31), so Cummings characterizes the Cambridge ladies’ “permanent faces” in a conceit that evokes their boxed-in hardness while invoking the powerful natural presence of the moon they ignore: “the Cambridge ladies do not care,above / Cambridge if sometimes in its box of / sky lavender and cornerless,the / moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy” (Complete Poems 115). Using the clinking appurtenances of a tea service— Prufrock’s coffee spoons, candy boxes—Cummings has learned from his poetic mentor how to savage the trivialities of that culture. In his 1920 Dial essay on Eliot, Cummings sees his elder contemporary as an “extremely great artist” because he avoids “static” formulas by preferring “above everything and within everything the unique dimension of intensity, which it amuses him to substitute in us for the comforting and comfortable furniture of reality” (27). In the remainder of the essay, Cummings indicates some of the techniques that help Eliot create an intense and “alive” individuality in his work. Cummings argues that the sounds of Eliot’s lines and their precisely chosen words offer a charged verbal construct, with “a vocabulary almost brutally tuned to attain distinctness; an extraordinarily tight orchestration of the shapes of sound; the delicate and careful murderings … of established tempos by oral rhythms” (27-28). Cummings stresses the role of the individual talent, “Eliot himself,” in shaping and “directing the exquisitely and thoroughly built thing.” He quotes “Mr. Apollinax” as an example of such precision: “His laughter was submarine and profound / Like the old man of the sea’s.” The end of the review praises the sensitivity of lines from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: “The moon has lost her memory. / A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, / Her hand twists a paper rose” (CPP 25; Miscellany 28-29). This sort of sensitivity, Cummings implies,

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comes about only when technique, individuality, and intensity are one. Eliot, however, locates technique more firmly in an individual’s acquisition of the tradition, thus making the poet a “medium” and separating the person and personality from the “intensity of the artistic process” in a way that Cummings does not (SP 41). The three lines which Cummings cites from Eliot’s “Rhapsody” are derived from Laforgue’s own moon-deranged poems. And these Eliotic lines sound most like lines that might have been written by Cummings himself. Such a convergence is a testament to how the current of French influence subtly united two artists similar in background but divided by technique and temperament. Although Cummings credited superb technique for keeping Eliot’s poetry away from “static” and tired formulas, ironically, Eliot would privately criticize Cummings a year later for an excess of personal, individual technique, for overusing “clever” and “opaque” language that rendered Cummings’s poetry “unintelligible gibberish” (L1 564). Eliot implies that, unlike Joyce, Cummings lacks form, resorting instead to “[s]mall formulas” (564). It is telling, then, that an early draft of Cummings’s essay on Eliot compares Eliot quite favorably to Joyce. This draft sees both Joyce and Eliot as antidotes “to the diffuse and feeble and complicated and sickly bleatings” of their formulaic contemporaries, saying to them in effect, “shoot you’re faded” (Drafts). According to Ezra Pound, however, by 1946 Eliot had revised his negative opinion of Cummings as “the whiteheaded” boy at The Dial “& a Haaaavud man n a umorist” (Ahearn 183). Eliot himself indicated that he eventually, as Pound said, “got over” his aversion to Cummings’s jokey cleverness and came to appreciate at least the non-typographic aspects of Cummings’s technique, writing to Charles Norman in 1957: “I have a very high opinion of Mr. Cummings as a poet, in spite of my dislike of his typography” (Norman xii). For his part, Cummings had quite early expressed reservations about Eliot’s own brand of opaqueness: his allusion-laden style. Eliot’s getting punk as hel. The hippopotamus; alright enuf. but jeesus — latterly — . ………… Why can’t TS gather fuel in vacant lots instead of x raying the bust of Marcus Aurelius? for Christ’s sake. amen (Letter, 10 Jan. 1919)

By “punk,” Cummings meant “decayed” or “rotten” (as with wood), hence “[d]evoid of worth or sense; poor in quality; disappointing; nonsensical” (OED). Apparently, Cummings was re-reading his copy of the September 1918 Little Review and finding the new quatrain poems (“Whispers of

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Immortality,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales”) too steeped in allusions to Webster, Donne, Agamemnon, and enervate Origen—too full of “punky,” rotten flotsam from the past. Cummings sensed the change in tone from the humorous satire of “The Hippopotamus” to the compressed and allusive caricature of “Sweeney” that Eliot himself commented upon in a letter to Mary Hutchinson (L1 371). Cummings’s “punk” remark comes before Eliot had written his essay on Marlowe with its—to Cummings—“illuminating” comments on caricature, and so Cummings was missing a valuable key to reading the quatrain poems. Still, Cummings’s own poetry would remain closer to the cityscapes of “Preludes” than to the anfractuous allusions of the quatrain poems. Cummings soon got over at least some of his objections to Eliot’s heavy-handed allusions, for by his 1920 essay on Eliot, he is making witty allusions to polyphiloprogenitive Boston ladies and IJȩ ȑȞ, while praising the “vocabulary almost brutally tuned to attain distinctness” of the first quatrain of “Sweeney among the Nightingales” (28). Perhaps Cummings had come to think that Eliot’s technique was the result of “surrendering himself wholly,” first to the great authors of a laboriously acquired tradition, and then “to the work to be done”—the poem (SP 44).6 After surrender comes “recovery,” a “third moment [of] having something to say,” the moment of writing. On this surrendering, Eliot shrugs: “Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given” (qtd. in Spender 76-77). 7 In any case, Cummings’s review of Eliot no longer sees the allusive style as an example of “punk” rottenness, but as a technical marvel that avoids static slogans and formulas and presents instead, “through the lips of a tactile and cohesive adventure” (that is, a work of art), an “alert hatred of normality” (27). Some time later, Cummings analyzed in his notes the verse technique of the quatrain poems: VersUs(T.S.Eliot), using the Line as a receptacle tempo lowered overhanging first part of sentence8

In this analysis, each line of “Sweeney among the Nightingales” is a “receptacle” for a self-contained phrase, while the sentence hangs over as an enjambment: “Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees / Letting his arms hang down to laugh,” and “The zebra stripes along his jaw / Swelling to maculate giraffe” (CPP 56). Cummings is perhaps also referring to Eliot’s comment that the poet’s mind is “a receptacle for seizing and storing up

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numberless feelings, phrases, images” (SP 41). If so, we might see an ingenious critique hidden in Cummings’s quatrain: Eliot’s verse form (French vers) “contains” too much “Us” with a capital U, too much tradition and not enough individual talent. Cummings does not “contain” the lines of his satiric quatrains in this way; rather, he overhangs or enjambs the lines even more radically, speeding up the tempo. Some of the differences in attitudes about tradition between slightly younger modernists and their “elder” contemporaries like Eliot and Pound were explored by Malcolm Cowley in Exile’s Return: “Beneath the rich symbolism of The Waste Land … we felt the poet was saying that the present is inferior to the past.… It happened that we were excited by the adventure of living in the present” (113-14). Cowley felt that the younger poets saw themselves as “new men, without inherited traditions, … entering a new world of art that did not impress us as being a spiritual desert” (115). In a note written in 1954, Cowley asserted that the division was more a temperament, and less a result of social background.… The division was real, however, and it reflected attitudes toward life in our own time. When The Waste Land appeared, complete with notes, E. E. Cummings asked me why Eliot couldn’t write his own lines instead of borrowing from dead poets. In his remarks I sensed a feeling almost of betrayal. (114)

Presumably Cummings thought that Cowley’s word “betrayal” was not quite accurate, for Charles Norman’s biography—which was closely vetted by Cummings—tempers the tone: “‘Betrayal’ seems an odd word and may reflect more accurately the feeling of shock with which Cowley and other young poets interpreted the poem” (151). This preference in the younger writers for a lived experience in the now over the life of books was partially the result of when they inhabited Paris. Like Cowley, Cummings first lived in Paris for an extended period after the war, in the early 1920s. Also like Cowley, Cummings was friends with Dadaists and proto-surrealists like Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara. As his bold typography attests, Cummings was more interested in creating new ways of making art than in inhabiting and re-making a tradition. By contrast, Eliot’s formative year in Paris, 1910-11, occurred before the war and has a decidedly more learned and bookish tone, introducing him to Jacques Rivière (secretary and future editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française) and involving him deeply in studies of Bergson, Janet, and Lévy-Bruhl.9 When Cummings does embrace a tradition, as he did with the Shakespearean sonnet, he finds ways to incorporate his unique voice into it, while favoring contemporary, rather than traditional, allusions. The

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sonnet form suited Cummings the love poet, and it also offered him a tradition that could turn quickly from witty wordplay to serious metaphysical statement. (The epigrammatic nature of the sonnet is perhaps one reason why Eliot avoided it.) In “being to timelessness as it’s to time,” the concluding couplet sings of the mystical coincidence of opposites by upending a simple cliché: —do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell. Whatever sages say and fools,all’s well (Complete Poems 768)

Norman Friedman nicely summarizes the poem as a “vision of transcendence” through love (79). However transcendent, this couplet is certainly keyed more blithely than the stately conclusion of Eliot’s Little Gidding: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (CPP 198)

Cummings’s inversion of the cliché “to hell with it” resides more in the realm of witty phrase-turning than Eliot’s solemn call for a transcendent fusion of the hell of warfare and the heaven of the mystical Rose, of the fires of the London blitz and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, rather than Julian of Norwich, Cummings is doubtless remembering a frequent ironic ending of Krazy Kat cartoons: Krazy has been hit by Ignatz’s brick and thus both “lovers” are “heppy.” But the ignorant Offissa Pupp is also pleased, for he thinks Krazy is happy because he has saved her from the mouse—and so he intones a watchman’s “All’s well.” 10 (In this case, as Cummings’s essay on Krazy Kat makes clear, Krazy is the embodiment of a transcendent and “illimitable” love that reconciles the opposites of the rebellious Ignatz Mouse and officious Offissa Pupp.)11 In 1947, Cummings met Eliot to discuss Ezra Pound’s incarceration and found the elder poet far too reserved. In a letter to British zoologist Sir Solly Zuckerman, he implied that Eliot’s lack of liveliness was due in part at least to his long residence abroad: “a not unrecent peep at Tears Eliot,or maybe 2 l-s,has mightily confirmed my negligible suspicion that be it never so humble there’s no:Solly,after entertaining that hombre for 15 minutes you feel like taking out a patent for manipulating the dead” (Letters 178). Charles Norman summarizes the misfire: during the visit, “Mr. Eliot remained wrapped in his reserve, and Cummings had little

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opportunity to be entertaining” (319). Cummings saw Eliot’s physical dislocation to Europe as cutting off a source of present delight to his self. Eliot, the “invisible poet” whose self was projected through the lenses of literary and cultural allusions, must have appeared to have been swallowed up in a dry patina of foreign culture and polite reserve. But Eliot was alive under that dead-seeming shell, playing possum. After all, the mature poet surrenders personality in order to become, as we have seen, a “medium” or “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images,” which are then dislocated into “a new compound” or poem. Eliot approached fragments and allusions as essential ordering devices for a poet trapped in the chaos of modernity: “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (SP 65). This situation forces the mature poet to steal phrases and then dislocate them, to become a burglar who leaves meaning behind like a piece of meat for the dog (reader). Eliot famously said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different” (SP 153). For Eliot, maturity is theft, but it is also surrender—“something better” or “something different” comes about only through theft from and surrender to the tradition—and then dislocating it anew. Cummings is not a mature poet in this sense. For Cummings, the tradition is a source of technique rather than a site of surrender. In Cummings’s poems, the tradition most often appears as a source for parody or satire. For example, the short four-line squib against Ernest Hemingway, “what does little Ernest croon” (Complete Poems 409), parodies not only Death in the Afternoon but also Tennyson’s “Cradle Song” and Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” In his workshop, Cummings searched the tradition for support for his philosophy of being. But he does not quote his reading directly in his poems as Eliot quotes Lancelot Andrewes or St. John of the Cross. Most allusions in Cummings’s poems are parodies or transformations of nineteenth-century chestnuts, popular songs, Bible verses, advertisements, or nursery rhymes.12 Outside of these allusions, Cummings dislocates not so much a tradition as the basic elements of language—syntax, words, and letters—to express the life, death, and rebirth of the earth and the self. In this essay, I have discussed mostly death—the Cambridge ladies who ignore the moon, the businessman who is “unborn to not die.” Another study needs to be made of the similarities and differences between Eliot’s and Cummings’s visions of rebirth and the transcendence of paradoxes. For example, the most Cummings-esque lines in The Waste Land are: “I was neither / Living nor

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dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of the light, the silence” (CPP 62). I end with a Cummings poem set in Paris that shows him rewriting Eliot’s Parisian poems in his own idiosyncratic “typewriter language” (Letters 140). It is about sub-lunar life and death on a particular portion of Earth: Montparnasse on a Sunday evening in July. It shows Cummings in the flaneur mode of Eliot’s “Preludes” or “Rhapsody,” yet rendering the now of the time and place in Cummings’s idiosyncratic style: moon over gai -té.a sharp crone dodders between taxis swirl hues crowds mov -ing ing ing among who dreams whom mutterings dream & :the moon over death over edgar the moon over smellings of gently smell of deads (Complete Poems 384)

By breaking (or dislocating) the word “gai / té” in the first line, Cummings activates a marvelous pun. The moon rises over the rue de la Gaîté but also over Ge or Gaia—the earth. Cummings makes a similar pun in his play Him when the protagonist says, “Gay [earth] may change” (123). The round O of the full moon rises over the life of the Festival of the Lion, with its carousel, street performers, and lion-tamer; it rises also over the “deads” in the Montparnasse cemetery, along the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. The Festival happens right above even more “deads” at Place Denfert-Rochereau, where there is an entrance to the catacombs of Paris, stacked full with thousands of skulls and bones. At the end of the poem, a “hard” singer raises her voice in “soft” song over—what? A child chasing a white ball into the dark: “(whi!tethatr?apidly / legthelessne sssuc kedt oward / black” (Complete Poems 385). The ephemeral song of hard and soft life is raised over the sub-lunar child’s moon or ball—which bounces like the bouncing ball over song lyrics in the early cinema. The girl’s “sing / -ing ing (ing / sing)ing” is softer than the “mov / -ing ing ing” of the traffic and the crowds; images of ball and moon and crowds and song merge to create a unity of nature, art, and human life devoid of literary references.

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Notes 1

Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivien Haigh-Wood (Gordon 113), while Cummings began an affair with Thayer’s wife Elaine in 1919. Cummings was the father of Elaine’s child Nancy—and after divorcing Thayer, Elaine married Cummings in 1924, only to divorce him eight months later (see Kennedy 189-201 and 245-25). 2 Lawrence Rainey notes that cognates of the word intensity “appear 21 times in Eliot’s essays from the first half of 1921” (“Eliot’s Poetics” 308). Cummings quotes an earlier instance of the word “intense” in his essay on Eliot, and then writes on the next page that “before an Eliot we become alive or intense as we become intense or alive before a Cezanne” (25-26). 3 For the gift of Blast II, see the letter from Cummings to Thayer (undated, but most likely summer 1915): YCAL 34, box 30, folder 794, Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 4 Cummings’s three copies of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal are at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas. He also owned a 1947 edition of Baudelaire’s Eugène Delacroix; His Life and Work and a 1955 edition of Baudelaire’s writings on art. Cummings’s companion in the Enormous Room, William Slater Brown, introduced him to Lowell’s Six French Poets (Kennedy 140). The six poets discussed are Emile Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, and Paul Fort. Unlike Eliot and Pound, Cummings seemed uninterested in de Gourmont’s critical writings. 5 A mono-width font that mimics the spacing of a typewriter is necessary here to convey Cummings’s intent clearly. It matters, for example, that “Oldeyed” appear directly above “weeness” and that both words be the same length. Cummings had his own printer, S. A. Jacobs, who helped him translate his works from “typewriter language” into “linotype-ese” (Letters 140). 6 The personal tradition is what the early Eliot called “culture,” which “if it means anything decent, means something personal” (L1 377). For surrendering to the work of literature, see Eliot’s 1935 letter quoted in Spender 75-76. For a discussion of this pattern of surrender and recovery of the self in Eliot’s reading, criticism and poetic practice, see Kermode x-xiv. 7 Cummings’s unpublished 1918 draft of an essay on modern art presents a theory of “tactile” surrender and recovery very close to Eliot’s. For example, Cummings describes his loss of self in front of a Cézanne: “As my eyes explored, a curious sensation of fearful nausea came over me. I felt. I was being skillfully sucked into the picture’s accuracy! I stood, perfectly helpless, dead with terror. Out of this frame a slow swiftness surely was, reaching, for my mind. The sense of hearing quickly deserted me. Then sight - - - - Suddenly: easily splashes of hideous sensual electricity drenched my completely nervous concentration. Touch. The sensation that I can only describe by saying that the picture had Touched me” (E. E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. bMS Am 1892.7: [70] folder 5, s. 45). 8 Houghton Library, Harvard University (bMS Am 1823.7 [39] folder 7, sheet 129).

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9 Cowley relates an incident when, along with Dos Passos, Aragon, and Cummings, he decided to burn some of the “bad review books” and textbooks that he had accumulated. When the books merely smoldered, “Cummings proved he was a better dadaist—at least in someone else’s studio—by walking over and urinating on the fire” (159). For Eliot’s French contacts in Paris, see Hargrove 2425 and 261-63. 10 For numerous examples, see Bill Blackbeard’s three edited volumes of Krazy Kat. 11 For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Eliot’s and Cummings’s visions of a transcendent “third,” see Etienne Terblanche’s chapter “Eliot’s affirmative eco-logos: his ‘threeness’” (204-15). 12 Though Cummings’s allusions differ from Eliot’s more erudite ones, they still function to open up and enrich the discourse of the poem, and thus are well worth annotating and studying. See my article “Notes for Cummings.”

Works Cited Ahearn, Barry, ed. Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Altieri, Charles. “Eliot’s Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 189-209. Bishop, John Peale. “The Poems and Prose of E. E. Cummings.” Southern Review 4 (1938): 173-86. Rpt. in Guy Rotella, ed. Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 125-35. Blackbeard, Bill, ed. Krazy & Ignatz, by George Herriman. “Love Letters in Ancient Brick.” Continuing the Complete Full-Page Comic Strips, 1927-28. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002. —. Krazy & Ignatz, by George Herriman. “A Kind, Benevolent and Amiable Brick.” Convening the Full-Page Comic Strips, 1919-21. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2011. —. Krazy & Ignatz, by George Herriman. “At Last My Drim of Life Has Come True.” Completing the Full-Page Comic Strips, 1922-24. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012. Chinitz, David E., ed. A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009. —. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. 2nd ed. New York: Viking, 1951. Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed. George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1994.

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—. Drafts of “T. S. Eliot” essay, ms. and ts. 1920. bMS Am 1892.7 (70), folders 7 and 8. E. E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. —. The Enormous Room: A Typescript Edition with Drawings by the Author. 1922. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978. —. “A Foreword to Krazy.” Krazy Kat. By George Herriman. New York: Henry Holt, 1946. Rpt. in E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised. Ed. George J. Firmage. New York: October House, 1965. 323-28. —. Him. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Rpt. New York: Liveright, 1955. —. Letter to Scofield Thayer. 25 Oct. 1916. Dial/Scofield Thayer Collection. Beinecke Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 34 Series IV, Box 30 Folder 783. —. Letter to Scofield Thayer. 10 Jan. 1919. Dial/Scofield Thayer Collection. Beinecke Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 34 Series IV, Box 30, Folder 788. —. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. Ed. F. W. Dupee and George Stade. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. —. “T. S. Eliot.” Dial (June 1920). Rpt. in E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised. Ed. George J. Firmage. New York: October House, 1965. 2529. Friedman, Norman. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet, 1962-1993. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1998. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Kermode, Frank. “Introduction.” The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Penguin, 1998. vii-xxvii. Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980. —. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Longenbach, James. “‘Mature poets steal’: Eliot’s Allusive Practice.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 176-88. Norman, Charles. E. E. Cummings, The Magic-Maker. 3rd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Peterson, Rai. “‘The women come and go’: Sonnet Cycles in T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings.” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 18 (2011): 20-34. Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968. 3-14.

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Rainey, Lawrence. “Eliot’s Poetics: Classicism and Histrionics.” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David E. Chinitz. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009. 301-10. Spender, Stephen. “Remembering Eliot.” Sewanee Review 74.1 (1966): 58-84. Terblanche, Etienne. E. E. Cummings: Poetry and Ecology. New York: Rodopi, 2012. Webster, Michael. “Notes for Cummings: A Resource for Students and Teachers.” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 17 (2010): 96-105.

CHAPTER SEVEN T. S. ELIOT, GASTON BACHELARD, AND THE ELEMENT OF AIR WILLIAM BLISSETT

I. Time, Space, and Sages The schoolboy is father to the philosopher and poet: If Time and Space, as Sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity. (CPP 590)

The talented recruit to the tribe of Ben Jonson already capitalizes the philosophical words (Time, Space) and the philosopher’s status (Sage), and he is already aware of the crisis in modern physical theory.1 The sun, vast and distant, handles Space in two lines; the remaining four and the ensuing stanza are given over to Time, a lopsided proportion to be maintained for the rest of his life by T. S. Eliot, philosopher, poet, and Sage. Anyone concerned with Eliot has to ponder the presence of Time— the concept, the image, even the plangent way he delivers the word in his recordings. Two of Eliot’s Sages were much possessed by Time: Bergson, under whose spell he remained for about a year—but what a year, that year in Paris!—and Heraclitus, a pervasive presence, watching and waiting, over a lifetime. As for Space, Aristotle, whom Eliot studied closely, obviated the emptiness, the silence, the terror of Descartes’s res extensa by referring, with no such frisson, to place. Places are evoked frequently in Eliot’s imaginative writing, but Space hardly figures in his thought. Air is another matter altogether, as I shall be arguing.

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II. Philosophy: Up and Down Escalator Eliot was a promising student, not as prodigious as his younger contemporary Norbert Wiener, to whom he wrote the only letter so far published that can be called philosophical. The correspondence with Professor Wood, of Harvard, has to do with the business of philosophy; that with Bertrand Russell with the business of life. Eliot worked at philosophy, continued to read poetry, equipped himself with languages. Two of his electives were surprisingly adventurous. His concern for literature and for thinking about literature led him to Irving Babbitt’s course on masters of French criticism; and his interest in anthropology and comparative religion led him beyond the mind of Western Europe to the serious study of Sanskrit, in which he reached a “state of enlightened mystification” (ASG 40). A tantalizing question: did he practise any of those breathing exercises so basic to the world of Eastern thought? As a doctoral student he wrote several articles and reviews for philosophical journals that would find their natural home in the curriculum vitae of a candidate for appointment, promotion, and tenure, their best hope of survival lying in the transference from one learned bibliography to another. The thesis on F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, completed and submitted but never defended because of wartime conditions and personal difficulties, was well regarded by the Department, Josiah Royce terming it “expert.”2 Short of a respected and influential Unitarian pulpit, there was nothing that could have pleased his parents more than his placement in a department of philosophy in a good university. Eliot forwent it. A reading of the Letters will subject its readers to the agony of Eliot’s marriage, to his prolonged money-worries, ill-health and overwork. If his Bergsonian year had been marked by élan vital, his move to London brought with it aboulie mortale. Proof of vocation is acceptance of drudgery. We see in Eliot, negatively, a waning interest in the details (yes, the drudgery) of philosophizing and, positively, a gaining interest in the details (and, yes, the drudgery) of a life in literature. Looking back later he is to refer to “the desiccation of the study of philosophy in universities” (SE 486 and note) and to its “famishing pabulum” (511). Eliot, of course, did not and could not unthink philosophy: the practice of disciplined thought continues, implicit in the poetry, apparent in the criticism.3 When the thesis on Bradley was at last published in 1964, Eliot confessed that he no longer followed its argument. Nor is this estrangement attributable entirely to old age or to his habit of quizzical self-deprecation—a habit he observed in Bradley and attributed to genuine

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modesty. Bradley’s death in 1924 was noticed in The Criterion; in 1927 Eliot wrote for The Times Literary Supplement an extended tribute, from which it is clear that he felt no urge to engage further with philosophical issues. Instead, he concerned himself with what, in our context of air, may be called the “aura” of Bradley’s personality and the style, or the “atmosphere,” of his writing.4 Long betrothed to academic philosophy, Eliot recognized that his heart was not in it and broke the engagement, remaining on good terms with her family—religion, anthropology, ethics, political theory. For her part, she bestowed her favors on his contemporaries—Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Heidegger—with whom he seems to have had no more than a nodding acquaintance. If I had to give a date for the decisive break, I would hazard 20 October 1921, the publication of the essay on “The Metaphysical Poets.” In it he wrote a passage that has since become famous: A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, 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 two 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. (SE 287)

While a few philosophers may include, or make a stab at including, noises and smells, classical philosophers such as Spinoza, such as (with one exception to be noted shortly) Bradley, shut them out, as did serious professional students of Eliot’s generation. Painstaking scholarship may show that Eliot’s argument here is consistent with Bradley. Be that as it may: Eliot excels in sending his readers where he thinks they ought to go, and from here on he sends them to poetry and not to philosophy, making no further attempt to keep his metaphysics warm.

III. This Breathing World A philosopher may forget breathing; many do, but cannot stop breathing. The poet Eliot found air and breathing central to experience and contrary or irrelevant to most academic philosophy. However seriously the graduate student may have taken space and time and the monad and the absolute, the world of sense, especially at its most sensual, in odor, asserted its hegemony. Smell is the phenomenal world at its most primitive, most insistent, and in memory most persistent. This phenomenon can perhaps be best demonstrated by a cento of

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passages, in rough chronological order, quoting just enough for recognition, from the Complete Poems and Plays (1969). Readers have always found Eliot to be memorable even before he is understood and to survive quotation out of context. A preliminary epigraph? Here are two: If all existing things turned to smoke, the nose would be the discriminating organ. (Heraclitus no. 7) Souls have the sense of smell in Hades. (Heraclitus no. 98)

To these may be added a third. Eliot cultivated epigrammatic turns of phrase, and so did Bradley, whose epigrams were collected and published after his death. Prominently displayed in the “Preface” to the first edition of Appearance and Reality are half a dozen of them, including this: “Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst,” or “Where all is rotten it is a man’s work to cry stinking fish.” (x)

(The two on pessimism must have delighted a young student of philosophy in process of turning away from optimistic but odorless Bergson.) The first smell of the 1917 collection is of a gas with an insistent presence. Prufrock and (shall we say?) the reader, supine as if under ether, apprehend fog like a cat, a cat-like fog, and breathe accordingly. Then to a room too cramped to allow for Michelangelo or for his sculptures, which feature women of ample presence and gravity; in it women circulate, talking. That room is close. Nor is it airier outside where we watch, a quietly desolate sight, the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows … (CPP 15)

Only at the very end of the poem is there a breath of fresh sea air. “Portrait of a Lady” begins “Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon,” moves indoors to an “atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb,” attempts an escape—“Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance”—and continues on a note of vain regret punctuated by a sound and an odor that are somehow a rebuke: 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. Are these ideas right or wrong?

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It ends, as it began, on an Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose; ........................................... With the smoke coming down above the housetops (CPP 18-21)

Heavy air pervades the shorter early poems. Consider the first of the “Preludes”: The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.

Winter usually “settles in,” but here it is more domestic, comfortable, even cozy, with the feel of the end of the day—and of the end of youth (“isn’t it time you settled down?”); we also speak of sediment or dust as “settling.” The smell of a single steak at dinner time would be appetizing, but a plurality of steaks in passageways suggests cramped quarters and hasty meals. “The burnt-out ends of smoky days”—the end of the day, the accumulation of cigarette-butts. The “gusty shower” simply agitates the rubbish (CPP 22). The breath of the lonely cab-horse steams in the cold. The poem itself breathes heavily. “Morning at the Window” is entirely enveloped by air, the warm and moist element, except when the poet, “aware of the damp souls of housemaids,” indirectly recalls for us the saying of Heraclitus, “a dry soul is wisest and best” (No. 118). “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” mixes taste and smell when a cat “devours a morsel of rancid butter”; it achieves great concentration (or is it dissipation?) of olfactory impressions when the raddled old moon’s hand “… twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and eau de Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain.” The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars. (CPP 25)

Even the paper rose flaunts its lack of rose-scent, and the geraniums are all the more rank for being dry.

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In a perceptive review of Eliot’s 1920 collection Ara Vos Prec, Desmond MacCarthy observes that Eliot does not steal phrases from other poets but “borrows their aroma” (qtd. in Brooker 33). This calls for expansion, on another occasion. In a later reminiscence William Empson notes the presence in Eliot of a strong “east wind,” doubtless recalling the definitive east wind of Bleak House (qtd. in March 35). “Gerontion” is a poem of winds—a “dull head among windy spaces,” “Vacant shuttles / Weave the wind,” “Under a windy knob,” “Gull against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle”—but just outside the house, which is “decayed,” are found “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds”: the last word, in the place of emphasis, stinks (CPP 37-39). In “Sweeney Erect,” too, the “insurgent gales” of Aeolus are coupled with more noxious air—“Gesture of orang-outang / Rises from the sheets in steam” (CPP 42). The celestial Hippopotamus is contrasted with our lot, who remain “Wrapt in the old miasmal mist” (CPP 50). “Lune de Miel” detects “une forte odeur de chienne” (CPP 48), and “Whispers of Immortality” comes right out with it: Grishkin, who “Gives promise of pneumatic bliss” (about as spiritual as an air-cushion), recalls the jaguar’s “subtle effluence of cat”: The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its arboreal gloom Distil so rank a feline smell As Grishkin in a drawing-room. (CPP 52-53)

The wind blows over The Waste Land: “Frisch weht der Wind” (its élan in contrast to the flat calm, the aboulie, of “Oed’ und leer das Meer”); “the wind under the door”; “The wind / Crosses the brown land”; “at my back in a cold blast” (CPP 61-67). It reaches back to the climate of the early poems—“Under the brown fog of a winter noon” (CPP 68). At the chapel perilous “the grass is singing” until the Thunder issues a change of climate with “a damp gust” (CPP 73-74). The most oppressive olfactory passage revels in heavy perfume with a sort of morose delectation: In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. (CPP 64)

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“Freshened” picks up a certain velocity, but whatever freshness comes in with the word is obliterated by the “fattening” of the candle-flames and by their smoke.5 It is striking how much of the air redolent in Eliot’s poems to this point is physically bad air, in ethical bad odor. His descent from the “dry ribs” of metaphysics is congruent and concurrent with his intuition of original sin, to which he seems to have given full assent before assenting to any positive Christian doctrine. To continue the survey by cento, in The Hollow Men wind is barely a presence, dry to the point of desiccation, erratic, remote: And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. ........................ Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer— (CPP 84)

The poet of Ash-Wednesday questions himself parenthetically, “(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)” and part of a negative answer is: Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry (CPP 89-90)

This harks back immediately to the wind of The Hollow Men but more decisively to “Gerontion”—“Vacant shuttles / Weave the wind” (CPP 38). This is no quickening wind such as despairingly might almost be hoped for in “Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only / The wind will listen” (CPP 91). Nor is there any comfort in warm moist air, “Under the vapour in the fetid air” (CPP 93). Near the end, however, strengthening the note of hope conveyed by Biblical and liturgical recollections and by the purifying air of desert and the vivifying air of garden, we find the quietly beautiful line “the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down” (CPP 95). The way up and the way down here pass through good air. The Ariel Poems are particularly alive to the element of air, even “A Song for Simeon,” in the face of death: My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand. Dust in sunlight and memory in corners Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land. (CPP 105)

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“Marina” celebrates the scent of pine and woodthrush singing through the fog. The small soul in “Animula” has begun life by taking pleasure In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree, Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea (CPP 107)

(The four elements, notice.) The much later poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” comments in parenthesis on the gifts, “(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),” which runs counter to my belief that the preparation of Christmas dinner will completely dominate the olfactory occasion. The Minor Poems are so rich in birds that no census need be taken—there are “999 canaries” in a single line (CPP 136); and in “Cape Ann” the air is alive with birds. In Coriolan, that puzzling, truncated sequence where Eliot shows the blankest incomprehension of Plutarch’s Life and Shakespeare’s play, small creatures appear and disappear, croak, sweep by on bat’s wing, or have a “breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon.” The vicinity of “a sweaty torchbearer, yawning” insinuates an unmistakably demotic air (CPP 130). Thus, it should have surprised no one when in the Collected Poems 1909-1935 Eliot should add, as one of his latest and most ambitious poems, Burnt Norton, in which he gives prime poetic attention to the element of air, and that he should come thereafter to see the capabilities of a foursome, each dominated by one of the elements.6 He was wafted, or he breathed his way, into the Four Quartets.

IV. Four Elements Having demonstrated the pervasive presence in Eliot’s poetry before Four Quartets of air in its ordinary manifestations, as breath and wind, scent and stink, birdsong and animal cry, not to mention the click of the typewriter and the pulse of the internal combustion engine, I should like to recall briefly the notion of the elemental and particularly the status of air in the long-established scheme of the four elements. Aristotle, certainly a sage, is of all philosophers the least given to mystification, and yet his arresting statement still stands: the beginning of philosophy is wonder—wonder about beginnings. Origins. The elemental. One of the pre-Socratic sages asserted that the things of this world arise from the Boundless. This comes across as a hunch—there being no way of supporting or refuting it, and no way to proceed from it. Others reduced all things to air or to water, showing indeed the basic scientific impulse to reduce but satisfying no one by the reduction. The explanation that took

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and enjoyed a life of two thousand years in “natural history” and still thrives in the verbal universe of poetry is the scheme of the four elements as propounded by Empedocles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire—for some unexplained reason now remembered as “earth, air, fire, and water,” as if one were to count one, three, four, two. These elements, readily grasped by anyone, fit neatly together in two arrangements, physical density and ethical bearing. Physically, earth settles, water flows, air circulates, and flame rises. So too, that which is of the earth is the least excellent, though most basic, in mankind; what is lively and impassioned belongs to the liquid state; air, the rarefied state, claims what is conscious and communicative—ideas (true and false) are in the air; fire is inspirited and inspiring and consuming. The history of ideas and habitual assumptions dominant to the time of Shakespeare and continuing long after will demonstrate how the four elements fit in with the four humors of Galenic medicine and their derivatives, the four temperaments and complexions. Even the very early attempt to simplify and generalize the elements into four abstract qualities—the hot, the cold, the wet, the dry (always as four pairs)—stays close to ordinary experience. By a sort of pop-psychology the man on the Roman via or the Elizabethan road could judge by a handshake whether another man in the street was a choleric hothead, a sanguine warm-hearted plain man, a phlegmatic cold fish, or a melancholy dry stick. We can only wonder, from lack of evidence, how this scheme applied to women. I think myself that Shakespeare’s Shrew would be recognized as choleric, Rosalind as sanguine, Ophelia as phlegmatic. Melancholy? John Ford’s Broken Heart and of course Dürer’s great picture. The four elements—are they not altogether superseded by the hundred plus elements of the periodic table? In the chemical laboratory they most certainly are, and in all applications of chemistry: anything else belongs to the history of error. But the non-chemist, the great permanent majority, has never seen or handled more than a dozen: there is for us nothing elemental about the remainder and nothing complete about the dozen. We even need a mnemonic to remember the constituents of our own protoplasm (CaFe C.HOPKNS Mg).7 If homo sapiens were to begin again from scratch, he or she would surely reinvent, come upon, the four states—solid, liquid, airy, fiery—and recognize them as elements and see them imprinted on humankind. How unlikely the reinvention of the humors, with their gross overemphasis on black and yellow bile. A naive look of wonder at the sky—how unlikely now to find there in sketchy vignette a goat, a crab, a water-carrier. The elements are not always or even mostly in their pure state. They

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harmonize with or mingle or molest one another. Earth molests water as mud, air as dust, fire as smoke; water invades air as fog but caresses air and fire as rainbow, and air reaches up to fire as aurora. Water floods the earth and erodes stone; air wreaks its anger on sea and land; fire strikes as lightning. Of the elements, air is the most elusive and our intimate involvement with it hardest to grasp. Children may wonder why we breathe and may attempt to stop breathing. If they succeed at all, they will lose consciousness and start breathing again. It did not occur to Descartes (as it might have occurred to a Hebrew prophet) to say “I breathe, therefore I am,” though even that thinking man spent vastly more of his life breathing than in thought.8 Air envelopes everything. To every form it is the formless ground—to the landscape, the structure, the statue, the human body. It is in almost constant motion, and when still it proclaims its stillness, and when stale it obtrudes its staleness. Inhaling is akin to inspiration, exhaling to expiration. Unless noticeably pure it has some scent or stink; unless noticeably still there is some sound tending to music or noise. The world, as it fills up, brings more exchange of ideas, more chatter, more twitter, in the air or over the air. Air is the home of climate—and of climate of opinion. The fact that we so seldom recall and put together these undoubted facts of experience is further evidence of the pervasiveness of air. Just as “matter” has proved a more useful concept in modern times than any generalization of the element of earth, so “space” has challenged air. Space is at its most spacious when empty, the geometer or theoretical physicist being undistracted by things with qualities. Air is at its airiest when circulating, the breather being aware of qualities when he takes the air. Space, longing as it does to be empty, is air minus air, res extensa and strictly nothing else—no weather, no atmosphere, no scent, no sound.

V. Four Quartets Burnt Norton begins and ends with movement of air—“Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves,” “Even while the dust moves” (CPP 171, 176). Just as striking as this memento mori is lively movement in air—the thrush saying “Quick” and “Go,” deceptively, though it does not register as malicious falsehood, calling us into our first world: There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

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What the poet wants, and gets, is the air of the place. Another bird makes its appearance (it will reappear with Gaston Bachelard): After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world. (CPP 175)

That last line occurs twice in this poem and once in the roughly contemporary Coriolan. It has lodged itself in everyone’s experience of Eliot. With some trepidation I proffer a further extension of its already rich meaning. The still point is the place of light and the freedom of the bird; the world turning round it is on the move, on a spin, “on the turn,” going bad, or, to use that questionable phrase Eliot adopted from T. E. Hulme, “endowed with original sin” (Hulme 49; SE 430). The nose is the discriminating organ in this turning world. This “place of disaffection” receives its most plangent expression in a passage where the element of air is most to the fore: Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time, Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after. Eructation of unhealthy souls Into the faded air, the torpid Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London, Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney, Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here Not here the darkness, in this twittering world. (CPP 174)

The other three poems, dominated by the other three elements, continue also to sound the note of air. That unemphatic phrase, “sound the note,” is the best I can find: one soon gets lost in assigning an element to an instrument or to any other specifically musical—what shall I say?—

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element. It leads to the same sort of distraction and frustration that attends the attempt to work out the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses as a “fugue.” Suffice it to say that reading Four Quartets feels like listening to string quartets, as reading Joyce’s chapter is like following a fugue, somewhat. East Coker is of the earth, earthy. The rustic dance takes place on a summer night in a “warm haze,” and the dancers move close to the ground, circulating like air (CPP 177). No one could confuse this with even the most primitivistic ballet, such as The Rite of Spring. We are accidental spectators, and the dancers do not (like ballet dancers) have the look of dancers who are looked at. At the end of the dance “the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides” (CPP 178). At the end of the poem a grand entrance to the realm of water is prepared: Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. (CPP 183)

The Dry Salvages provides vivid moments of odor—“the rank ailanthus,” “the smell of grapes,” the fog in the fir trees—but its distinctive air is full of sound, from the evocation of “sea voices” to the “voice descanting,” or to music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. (CPP 184-90)

Eliot has often exercised the technique, which requires considerable finesse, of evoking a presence by noting an absence. What could be more energetic than Gerontion’s roster of places where he had not exerted himself? What more cluttered than the “testimony of summer nights” not borne by the Thames (CPP 67)? So here, in Little Gidding, how alert we are to wind and smell in “windless cold” with “no earth smell / Or smell of living thing” (CPP 191). In contrast to this negative technique stands the explicit stanza assigning its distinctive death to air: Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. Dust inbreathed was a house— The wall, the wainscot and the mouse. The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air. (CPP 192)

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Dante’s stanza, terza rima, carries him, most of the time rapidly, through the three realms of the dead, and the figures he meets are often in circulation as if blown by the wind. Eliot, after great effort and frustration, rises to comparable swiftness and urgency in the entire encounter with the “compound ghost,” who comes As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. (CPP 193)

One further detail I am reluctant to omit: We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. (CPP 196)

“Suspire” is the right word, though a most unusual one, for going on living and breathing, with difficulty. It has already made a memorable appearance in literature: “Seems,” madam? Nay it is. I know not “seems.” ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath … That can denote me truly. (Hamlet I.ii.77-83)

Hamlet’s scorn is directed at people pretending to be so choked with grief that they can hardly breathe. One is struck, reading Eliot’s Letters, not only by the prolonged crisis of vocation and the agony of his marriage but by the state of his health. They reveal not only the aboulie that all biographical critics must speculate about, but a long succession of attacks of grippe and flu that were to develop into the chronic bronchitis that plagued his years of accomplishment and recognition and finally ended them. The death of air. Of great interest in our context is Eliot’s final poem, “A Dedication to my Wife.” It harmonizes with the note of reparation so strong in his later criticism: the reconsiderations of Milton, Shelley, and Goethe, the respect for Americans like his grandfather, who edified their fellows by service in church, community, and university. It is more than a correction of judgment: it is an expression of love. The poet who had written, with satiric bite, of his conversation, so nicely Restricted to What Precisely And If and Perhaps and But (CPP 137)

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and had scorned in all seriousness “this twittering world” (CPP 174), now celebrates The breathing in unison Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech And babble the same speech without need of meaning. (CPP 206)

The noxious air, the breath of corruption, so long dominant, has, here at least, been wafted away.

VI. Gaston Bachelard and Air A close contemporary of T. S. Eliot, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) grew up among the rivers and amid the fresh country breezes of the Champagne region and looked the countryman-philosopher, with his full beard and flowing locks—more like Walt Whitman than like a Parisian intellectual. He taught science in a lycée in Dijon and in the university there, distinguishing himself in a series of publications to such good effect that he was called to the Sorbonne, where he held the chair in the history and philosophy of science. Of its three amphitheaters, one is named for Cardinal Richelieu the founder, one for René Descartes, the third for Bachelard. In 1938—just too late for notice in The Criterion—he contributed to “the mind of Europe” two contrasting books of high interest: La Formation de l’esprit scientifique: Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective and La Psychanalyse du feu, the latter to be translated as The Psychoanalysis of Fire, with a preface by Northrop Frye. Both, by the way, use the term psychoanalysis in a broad sense, trespassing on Freud’s proprietary rights. The first of these books continues his main professional line of thought, the assertion of the strict necessity, in science, of scientific method, which is radically skeptical of received opinion, habitual observation, and what passes for common sense, while allowing for openness to wonder and “material imagination” as motivating scientific truth as well as error. The second book strikes out in a new direction, in which Bachelard was to continue for the rest of his life. He takes his own widely shared experience of regarding a candle flame or of sitting in reverie before a blazing hearth, both in themselves and as recaptured in literature, and explores what is “elemental” there, in some valid sense not to be ascertained in the laboratory. He was not fully satisfied with this pioneering sortie and returned late

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in life to write The Flame of the Candle and the posthumously published Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. Just as Eliot composed Burnt Norton with no conscious intention of writing Four Quartets, each dominated by one of the four elements, so Bachelard found in himself an unexpected necessity to reach out to the other three. Water and Dreams was completed in Dijon, August 1941; Air and Dreams in Dijon, May 1943. Dates and place are significant; Bachelard in occupied France was possessed by the elements, as Eliot was likewise possessed in beleaguered London. There are also two studies of the element of earth: La Terre et les rêveries de la volunté (1947) and La Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948). The order of composition reflects Bachelard’s lack of interest in the sequence of the elements. He more than once lists them in garbled order, and he seldom turns his attention to their conflict, interpenetration, or harmony.9 It may be noted that Bachelard moves freely among writers, especially poets, and among painters, but shows little interest in music, drama, or ballet, intense concerns of Eliot. Eliot’s championship of thinking in poetry—in Dryden and the Metaphysicals, in the poets of The Faber Book of Modern Verse—is not matched by Bachelard, who keeps returning to Shelley and Poe, to Novalis and Nietzsche (the dithyrambist), to Gabriele D’Annunzio and the surrealists. His poets are the poets who stimulate “reverie” (a word which belongs to Rousseau and romanticism), not a “direct sensuous apprehension of thought” (SP 63). Air and Dreams, which will serve for most purposes here, is subtitled An Essay in the Interpretation of Movement. The first quarter of the book is devoted to chapters on “The Dream of Flight” and “The Poetics of Wings.” There especially, but throughout, Bachelard insists on the “verticality” of air as we apprehend it. Air for him is the realm of aspiration, alacrity, hope, of growing tall and holding heads high. He adduces the widespread occurrence in reverie, of flying and the appeal, in metaphor or myth, of the flyer or airman—“as free as the bird in the air,” as the German saying goes. Eliot matches this aerial trance in the opening line of the first chorus from The Rock—“The Eagle soars in the summit of heaven” (CPP 147)—which I read as the height of the element of air, though certainly not outer space. He had earlier drawn away from any such uplift: the answer to “Quando fiam uti chelidon” (CPP 75) is surely never, or nevermore. Warm and moist, sanguine Bachelard; cool and dry, melancholy Eliot. Bachelard’s chapters on flying and wings are ample and enthusiastic; in contrast, he treats “The Imaginary Fall” briefly and with something like distaste. For him the upward movement of air is a vivid imagination, the fall a mere “concept.” Moreover, for him, the metaphors of moral failing

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are terrestrial—hampering weight, black earth, the pit. Being French, he knows his Edgar Poe. Here I must leave exposition for remonstrance in defense of Eliot and of most of the passages from his poetry that I have cited. While it is in the nature of things, both as scientific fact and “material imagination,” for warm air to rise, it is equally in order for cold air to sink. In the scheme of the four elements, earth lies down, and water flows down, and fire points up, but air is in constant inconsistent motion: the way up is the way down. Its primary and typical movement is not vertical but lateral. Odor and sound and speech and weather come across. Yes, I know, “It smells to heaven,” we “raise our voices in song,” we “raise points in argument,” but all these movements are directed across, to what is out there, and only incidentally to what is up there. On vastly different levels, sea air and mountain air vie for the prize of freshness and freedom. Sea air may have an admixture of fog and redolence of seaweed, mountain air an admixture of cloud and, near volcanos, a redolence of sulfur; but in both cases the air comes across to us as both rising and falling. The circulating, mixed, lower air of mundane life is pervasive in Eliot. The higher air, the aether, aspiring to fire or to heaven, is present rarely, like the “higher dream.” After a highly sympathetic consideration of Nietzsche as a poet (no affinity to T. S. Eliot here), 10 Bachelard moves on to a set of related causeries, on the blue sky, the constellations, clouds, nebulae, the aerial tree, and the wind, a set of reveries in which the reader is delighted to join. We get used to a mindset consistently looking up rather than across, and there is plenty to see and to ponder. I was particularly struck by a section in the chapter on the blue sky. Four poems are quoted, genuine poems, chosen with sensitivity. In three of them birds appear, as one might expect, for Bachelard’s reveries abound in birds. But here they appear not as freeholders of the air but as intruders, even polluters. His intuition that the nature of air is to rise and purify itself is over-asserted here. Bachelard died on the eve of the Space Age. We who live in it can more readily see that space and air are at enmity: entering upon space is leaving air behind, leaving birds utterly superseded, and losing the blue of the sky.11 In his last completed book, The Flame of the Candle, Bachelard, I believe for the first time, quotes Eliot: Of all flowers, the rose is a veritable image-hearth, for imaginary plantflames. It is the very embodiment of Imagination eager to be convinced. What intensity there is in this single line by a poet who dreams of a time when … the fire and the rose are one. (51)

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This will serve as a good example of his gift of short, accurate, appropriate quotation, a gift he shares with Eliot. Birds of flight are seldom strikingly or beautifully colored, Bachelard observes in the chapter on “The Poetics of Wings.” What is beautiful in them is their flight; but in a footnote, as a necessary afterthought, he adds: “The kingfisher, with his fiery brilliance, is the exception. Has he retained all the river’s reflectiveness?” (66). He returns to the kingfisher, and to Eliot, for the last time in the chapter on the phoenix, or firebird, in the posthumous Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. A substantial passage (33-36) which should ideally be quoted in full, touches on Burnt Norton and, I think, circulates in the same air as that poem. In it the lifelong champion of scientific impersonality in its own great sphere returns in reverie to the world he breathed in childhood in airy riverine Champagne, most particularly to a moment in and out of time in which the firebird-kingfisher flashes in the air, livening the water and the earth beneath, uniting in one image the four elements. How appropriate here the citation of Eliot’s kingfisher: After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world. (CPP 175)

We regret that Bachelard omits “and is silent” and the final line, and we may be astonished that Eliot is given second place to “another, more subtle author … the Good Lady of Nohant,” who turns out to be George Sand. Let us not permit our astonishment to turn to argument: rather, breathe easily and accept the intuition and the élan displayed in this passage of some durée. (Yes, in using these three magic Bergsonian words, I am noticing the fact that, while continuing to reject Bergson’s pretentions as a philosopher of science, Bachelard is not at all hostile to him in the realm of imagination and reverie.) Let the kingfisher lighten and quicken our consideration of two great figures who shared for three quarters of a century a turbulent mixture of scent and stink, music and noise, discourse and chatter, climate and climate of opinion, in the casing air, the living air.

Notes 1

I hope anyone interested enough to follow my argument will turn or return to Benjamin G. Lockerd: Aetherial Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, which opens with the same quotation and covers much the same material, providing ample documentation of Eliot’s knowledge of pre-Socratic, Aristotelian, and twentieth-century theoretical physics. The scheme of the four elements has implicit

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in it an upward thrust, and Eliot at his most depressed retains some aspiration. Accordingly, Lockerd has given his closest attention to the upper region of air, the aether, which is air aspiring to fire or spirit. My concern is sublunary, with the air we breathe. 2 Eliot proposed in September 1915 to send sections of his thesis to Harvard. Not having received a reply in December, he presumably sent the text anyway, but it could hardly have been received before the new year. Royce, who was in failing health and greatly preoccupied by the iniquities of the German Empire (see Vincent Buranelli, Josiah Royce 64), and who was to die in September, chose the professional, the professorial word “expert” to characterize a dissertation he must have handled but could hardly have examined closely, for it is, in the words of the leading Bradley scholar Richard Wollheim, “a painfully obscure work” (170). 3 Since the redoubtable Anne C. Bolgan in effect discovered Eliot’s thesis and persuaded him to let it be published, there have been a number of impressive studies by Eliot scholars. I list the names of those to whom I am grateful, from the bibliography of the latest, Jane Mallinson, T. S. Eliot’s Interpretation of F. H. Bradley: Anne C. Bolgan, Jewel Spears Brooker, Donald J. Childs, Lewis Freed, Piers Gray, M. A. R. Habib, Richard Shusterman, and William Skaff. Most philosophical studies of Bradley pay no attention to Eliot; those that do, pay scant attention—vide T. L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality: on page 533 Eliot is mentioned as linking Bradley to Leibniz’s monad. 4 Is Eliot being quizzical in the note to line 411 of The Waste Land? After having devoted a chapter of his thesis to the question of “solipsism” in Bradley and, with some effort, absolved himself and his mentor of that failing, he places here a passage that any tyro in philosophy will shy away from as pure solipsism. Whether insensitive or mischievous, it is surely unphilosophical, like his free play with Heraclitus’s notions for their “poetic suggestiveness,” as I assume in my essay “T. S. Eliot and Heraclitus.” 5 Space does not permit discussion of The Waste Land manuscript, where there is more London air and a strong wind off Gloucester. Inventions of the March Hare and the plays are left untreated for the same reason. 6 See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (16-18), on the stages of the adoption of fourfoldness—quartets, elements, seasons. 7 The Italian novelist Primo Levi, who was himself a chemist by profession, wrote a novel in which each chapter was assigned to and dominated by a chemical element. The novel, The Periodic Table, is a success but has no successors. 8 The function and necessity of respiration was a mystery for long ages. A great scientific mind like Aristotle could do no better than to guess that we breathe to cool our inward parts, and this had to serve until the discovery of the circulation of the blood, of oxygen, and of aeration in the lungs. To balance this long delay, a prompt and correct guess: when the humors were matched with the elements, blood was (we see, correctly) matched with air and breathing. I mention an early article of mine on Macbeth because it has altogether eluded bibliographical notice: “The Secret’st Man of Blood” (1959). The investigation of air, from early modern science to the present, is well discussed by Steven Connor in The Matter of Air (2010): both T. S. Eliot and Gaston Bachelard enter its pages.

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9 A useful bibliography is to be found in Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination. Two other of Bachelard’s works should be mentioned here: The Poetics of Space (1958), his most popular book, does not deal with outer space but with dear perpetual places, nooks and crannies of poetic reverie. His book-length study of the nineteenth-century poète maudit Lautréamont (1939) must have taken as many hours of prime time as Eliot’s translation of St.John Perse’s Anabase (1930). 10 Nietzsche, who had been primus, or head boy, at the best school in Germany, always thereafter strove to pull down rivals and look down from heights, his favorite prefix being “über.” Bachelard welcomes this as part of the upward thrust of air. 11 Gerard Manley Hopkins in “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe” recognizes that the blue of the sky is a phenomenon of atmosphere and not of space.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell. Dallas: Dallas Institute, 1988. —. The Flame of a Candle. Trans. Joni Caldwell. Dallas: Dallas Institute, 1984. —. Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. Trans. Kenneth Haltman. Ed. Suzanne Bachelard. Dallas: Dallas Institute, 1990. —. Water and Dreams. Trans. Edith R. Farrell. Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983. Blissett, William. “The Secret’st Man of Blood.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 397-408. —. “T. S. Eliot and Heraclitus.” T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. London: Macmillan, 2001. 29-46. Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930. Brooker, Jewel Spears, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Buranelli, Vincent. Josiah Royce. New York: Twayne, 1964. Chimisso, Cristina. Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination. London: Routledge, 2001. Connor, Steven. The Matter of Air. London: Reaktion, 2010. Empson, William. “The Style of the Master.” T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949. 35-37. Gardiner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1973. Heraclitus. “Fragments.” Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Trans. Kathleen Freeman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1952.

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Hulme, T. E. Speculations. Ed. Herbert Read. London: Kegan Paul, 1924. Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken, 1984. Lockerd, Benjamin G., Jr. Aetherial Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 1998. Mallinson, Jane. T. S. Eliot’s Interpretation of F. H. Bradley. Dortrecht: Kluwer, 2003. March, Richard and Tambimuttu, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949. Sprigge, T. L. S. James and Bradley. Chicago: Open Court, 1973. Wollheim, Richard. “Eliot and Bradley: An Account.” Eliot in Perspective. Ed. Graham Martin. London: Macmillan, 1970.

CHAPTER EIGHT T. S. ELIOT, JEAN EPSTEIN, AND THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY ELISABETH DÄUMER

when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting —T. S. Eliot I have electric knobs on my nerve endings —Blaise Cendrars

When Eliot encountered Jean Epstein’s La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un nouvel état d’intelligence, in the fall of 1921, he was in the midst of writing The Waste Land and suffering from severe exhaustion and “psychological troubles,” which he described in a letter to Richard Aldington as an “aboulie and emotional derangement” (L1 594, 603). 1 Aldington had sent him Epstein’s recently published book, perhaps in hopes that he would review it. Eliot responded enthusiastically: The Epstein book is most interesting; I disagree with some important conclusions, but it is a formidable work to attack, and therefore very tonic. Also, he makes his texts—Aragon, Cendrars, Apollinaire etc.,—a more serious affair, to be tackled in earnest. (580)

In the same correspondence, in an apparently unrelated side note, Eliot vented his frustration with Alexander Methuen, who had chosen his poem “La Figlia Che Piange” for inclusion in an anthology because “it is the mildest of my productions.” (In fact, Methuen had requested a poem for his anthology, writing: “it must be of a lyrical and moderately intelligible character. Please forgive this insult” [L1 517]). Eliot’s seemingly unrelated thoughts—on Epstein’s La Poésie d’aujourd’hui, Methuen’s avoidance of difficult poetry, and his own recently diagnosed “neurasthenia” and

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emotional troubles—converge in his influential essay on the metaphysical poets, completed only about a week later.2 There he writes: poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

And he continues in parentheses: (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd-hui [sic].) (SP 65)

This parenthetical reference to Epstein, an afterthought, it appears, and largely ignored by critics despite occurring in one of Eliot’s hallmark essays, leads us to an early work by Jean Epstein.3 An anomaly in his oeuvre since it deals with literature (and marginally with film), La Poésie d’aujourd’hui advances a physio-technological theory of modern writing that provides an illuminating backdrop to Eliot’s insistence on difficulty in modern poetry. In particular, Epstein’s study suggests an understanding of difficulty that cannot be reduced to what Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” had described as the “ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry)” his “programme for the métier of poetry” appears to require (SP 40). What makes modern poetry difficult, Epstein proposes, is its reliance not only on the intellect but on sensory immediacy. Engaging a reader’s sensations, feelings, and nerves, such sensory immediacy is both product of and reaction to the conditions of modernity in all of its manifestations: the ever accelerating speed of new technologies of transport, the automatization of bodily functioning, the assault on the brain by multiple stimuli—visual, aural, and neurological (an assault which includes the invisible, but palpable force of electricity). That Epstein’s book had a greater impact on Eliot’s criticism and art than his brief references to it imply can be gauged in two works that he composed in the fall of 1921: the above-mentioned essay on the metaphysical poets, a review of Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, in which Eliot sketched the outline of a theory of the dissociation of sensibility; and the typist episode from section three of The Waste Land, a typescript of which he prepared in November of 1921. 4 In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot frames his discussion of the unifying capacity of metaphysical poetry in terms of

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modern technology as it affects the movement of bodies, minds, and machines. The typist episode, moreover, despite its dystopian view of human alienation, deadening mechanization, and cultural decline, betrays Eliot’s lively interest in the erotic potentiality of the machine and thus in the heterogeneous ramifications of technology—in this instance, the automobile, the typewriter, and the gramophone—for human intimacy and, by extension, for poetry. Epstein’s physio-technological theory of modern literature modeled for Eliot a bracing receptivity toward technology as potential ally in the search for an art that could capture the dizzying speed and sensory richness of modern life, both abject and sublime, while enhancing the physiological and cognitive responsiveness of poets and readers alike.

Jean Epstein’s physiological theory of literature and l’aristocratie névropathique Jean Epstein rose to prominence in France as an avant-garde filmmaker with such movies as Coeur fidèle (1923) and La chute de la maison Usher (1928). He was also a well-known theorist of cinema, whose first collection of essays, Bonjour cinéma, has been described as “an extravagant, visionary reflection about the potentialities of cinema” (Brenetz and Eue 6). This collection was followed by numerous essays and books in which Epstein developed his conviction that cinema, in the words of a recent retrospective, is “the true poetry of the machine age; a philosophy of time and movement; an avant-garde art that can also appeal to the masses” (qtd. in Brenetz and Eue 6). Published in 1921, the same year as Bonjour cinéma, Epstein’s La Poésie d’aujourd’hui reflects his fascination with Blaise Cendrars, to whom he dedicated the book. The author of such experimental works as La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), according to Monique Chefdor “one of the most original publishing ventures of the time” (41), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919), Cendrars practiced a poetics of elasticity. He infused his poetry with popular forms of art and “anti-art” (affiches, conversation and gossip, contemporary architectural marvels like the Eiffel Tower) as well as modern technologies of transport (train, automobile, airplane), celebrating their galvanizing impact on mobility and mental awareness. “Les fenêtres de ma poésie,” begins one of his poèmes élastiques, “sont grand’ouvertes sur les boulevards et dans ses vitrines” (147).5 Epstein’s study offers a vigorous defense of the French poetic avantgarde: Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, and Louis Aragon, among others. In the

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first part of the lengthy monograph, Epstein develops a physiological theory of literature in which he claims that modern literature appeals to an exclusive minority of people who form a “neuropathic aristocracy” (un aristocratie névropathique): a group of writers and readers distinguished by a sensibility comprising superior intelligence, a highly responsive nervous system—which Epstein describes as fort delicate, fragile, multiple, and nerveux (60-61)—and erudition that manifests itself in linguistic experimentation and play (63-66). Epstein’s understanding of “sensibility” derives from Remy de Gourmont, a ubiquitous presence in the study. Eliot, who had expressed his affinity with Gourmont via epigraphs for sections of The Sacred Wood, would have recognized a kindred spirit in Epstein’s emphasis on sensibility as inseparable from intelligence and fundamental to creative and critical activity. For Gourmont and Epstein, the concept of sensibility invariably led to speculations about the role of physiology in artistic creation. Summarizing the French critic’s thought, Glenn Burne argues that Gourmont held that mind is not an entity distinct from the body but is an aspect of the functioning of the entire organism; ideas are vital and “truthful” only in proportion as the intelligence, or mind, does not become “dissociated” … from its source of nourishment, the sensibility; and the sensibility, which Gourmont defines as “the general power of feeling as it is unequally developed in each human being,” is closely related to the subconscious, which in turn is the receiver and reservoir of sense impressions. (115)

Epstein importantly extends Gourmont’s theory of the relationship between intelligence and sensibility. Drawing on the work of contemporary psychologists and neurologists, he allocates to emotions an absolutely primary role in the human organism, which, in accordance with prevailing conceptualizations of the machine-like functioning of the body, he imagines as providing the essential energy of human life: emotions are the motor of life and as essential for human survival as oxygen and the circulation of blood. 6 Since in Epstein’s understanding the primary function of emotion is to provide the organism with energy, he views emotions as only secondarily reacting to external stimuli, that is, to reality. Thus, emotions are produced virtually involuntarily: In the course of an emotion, an organism expends an excess of energy. This fact allows us better to understand how a healthy organism tends to create in itself emotions, or rather feelings, in order to accumulate energy. The organism, as it continues to live, continues to form energy and is capable of retaining a reserve of energy so that the forming energy chases

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In order for the inevitable surplus of emotions created in such a corporeal economy to be released, emotions need to attach themselves to “something”—a person, an object, an event—which, like an “effigy” or “mannequin,” will be robed or enveloped within these emotions (2). This conceptualization offers an interesting echo of Eliot’s objective correlative, even if Eliot’s use of the term “formula”—as in “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (SP 48)—suggests a more inexorable relationship between object and emotion than Epstein appears to allow. Epstein’s metaphor for the object as an “effigy” or simulacrum indicates that its main function is to engage, and thus to expend, emotions rather than mechanically produce them. It is precisely in relation to the production and discharge of emotions that Epstein distinguishes between two classes of readers: ordinary readers and aristocratic readers. The ordinary, healthy reader is attracted to the sentimental literature of cheap thrills (what Epstein dismisses as “souslittérature”) which binds his rudimentary emotions, as a serpent is compelled by a flute player, leaving the reader in a post-orgiastic “delicious lassitude” (4). By contrast, the small minority of aristocratic readers maintain emotional lives that are so highly charged that they can only be satisfied by reading that engages their prodigious intellect and electrified nervous systems. Epstein illustrates his positive assessment of the nervous sensibility of such readers with an image from one of Blaise Cendrars’s poèmes élastiques, “F.I.A.T.,” in which the poem’s speaker, in envious longing, fuses with the object of his desire, an automobile (perhaps, as the title indicates, a Fiat): When M. Cendrars writes: “I have electric knobs on my nerve endings,” we must imagine: that the headlights protrude from a car like cheekbones underneath the eyes in a face; that the headlights are electric; that while driving, man commands the machine with which he becomes one body as a result of levers and throttle; that nothing gives a better impression of nervousness than an agitated motor; that a chauffeur who knows his car well can detect the slightest “malaise”; that he is bound to the car as to the most tender friend; and that the sensation of his nerves that command the muscles with which he moves the lever extends to the cables that command the motor. (58-59)8

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Epstein uses this passage to illustrate the speed required for grasping the modernist image; an agile brain, he asserts, will only need a fraction of a second to interpret Cendrars’s phrase (59). Such cognitive speed, moreover, demands not only intelligence, but a particular sensibility— delicate, nervous, concentrated, responsive. “Enfin, s’il faut être nerveux pour être poète,” he insists, “il faut être nerveux aussi pour bien aimer les poètes, proposition qui, par son universalité même, enlève … ce que pourrait conserver de désagréable le terme ‘nerveux’” (61).9 Epstein was no doubt aware that the characteristics he advocated as conducive to modern literature replicated the symptoms of “neurasthenia,” an amorphous nervous disorder dubbed the “disorder of modernity,” which its influential diagnostician G. M. Beard described as “depleted nerve force caused by ‘civilization’” (Hawhee 18). Roger Vittoz’s On the Treatment of Neurasthenia (1911), which Eliot read prior to consulting the author’s treatment in Lausanne, describes neurasthenics as patients whose “uncurbed” brains are in a “state of anarchy” and “prey to every impulse” (4); whose ideas are exaggerated or deformed; whose feelings are “indistinct or fantastical, with a tendency to be magnified inordinately” (7). Epstein traces the pathologically exasperated sensibility of modern writers and readers to an intellectual fatigue. Yet in a critique of rationalist notions of well-being, he defends such fatigue as a higher form of health, devoting the last segment of his study to “Une Santé: La Fatigue.”10 For Epstein, this image of the electrified cheekbones in “F.I.A.T.” represents the entanglement of mind, body, speed, and power that is central to his physiological theory of modern poetry as exemplified by Cendrars and Cocteau. Indeed, the image functions as a telling analogy for both the production and reception of modern poetry, in which author and reader are linked by a circuit of nervously agitated and agitating energy; on the one hand, this analogy compares the ideal modern reader to a throbbing, expectantly purring car, promptly responding to any cue from driver or author, who, as Epstein wrote, “demands a complementary intellectual effort from the reader in order to be understood” (57). On the other hand, the image invites us to think of both author and reader in terms of the driver, and the car as his sensitized body or nervous system, reacting in an alert and supple manner to the slightest impulse, whether external or internal. This analogy also suggests a subtle interplay of control and abandon, captured in the image of expert driver and responsive automobile. At the same time, the image of the electrified cheekbones gestures toward Epstein’s investment in cinematic technology as a prosthetic extension of the nervous system. Such technology Epstein conceived as an

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accelerated and sensitized mechanism for perception and response advancing the neurological capacities of modern writers and readers. Epstein addresses the affinities between cinematic technique and literary technique in one chapter of his book, “Le cinéma et les lettres modernes,” where he calls on both art forms to support each other and develop their common aesthetics: the aesthetic of proximity, of suggestion, of succession, of mental speed, of sensuality, of metaphors, of the instant (169-80). Epstein’s intriguing and wide-ranging book invites speculation about T. S. Eliot as its reader. What did he find “formidable to attack” and thus experience as a “tonic”? And why did he think it not “requisite” to associate himself with Epstein’s study? Eliot’s famous review on “The Metaphysical Poets” and the typist episode from “The Fire Sermon” offer several tantalizing answers.

The physiology of metaphysical poetry Epstein’s account of the benefit for modern literature of neuropathic conditions such as neurasthenia would have drawn Eliot’s attention, not only because of his own fragile mental state, which he discussed in multiple letters, and for which he had sought treatment, first with a doctor of nerves in London and then with Roger Vittoz in Lausanne. More importantly, Eliot had been preoccupied, over a number of years, with a theory of literature and emotions in which nerves—and the body as a pulsating organism of nerves—assumed a central role, a theory whose outlines he sketched in his review of the metaphysical poets. As with Epstein’s theory, Eliot’s was indebted to Gourmont. Both Epstein and Eliot stressed the importance of sensibility—of the role of bodily functioning and the physiological, emotional, and mental capacities exacted by the kind of literature each admired. For Epstein, that literature was the post-Symbolist poetry of Cendrars, Cocteau, and Apollinaire; for Eliot, that literature was the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, to which he turned for help in articulating the artistic principles of his own modernist poetics. Both men focused on the rhetoric of their respective literatures: how it reaches the reader by appealing to a particular sensibility—a “refined” sensibility for Eliot, a nervous and delicate sensibility for Epstein. Both distrusted sentimentality, a type of writing that appealed primarily to the heart, and they both sought a sensibility corresponding to primitive sensation, “le premier jet émotionnel,” in Epstein’s sexualized vocabulary (114); or, in Eliot’s review, “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts” (SP 66).11 For both,

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surprise and horror were essential ingredients for a contemporary art that would pierce through the veneer of an overly civilized or blunted sensibility, “blasées, usées, civilisées, difficiles à étonner,” in the words of Epstein (53). In addition, both stressed the mental agility required of the reader in order to comprehend modernist metaphors. In discussing the metaphysical conceit, Eliot comments on the “rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader” (SP 60), an observation that echoes Epstein’s insistence, cited earlier, on the mental speed required by the associative method of modern literature.12 In spite of these remarkable similarities, there remains a sharp difference between both men’s physiological theories of literature, a difference that is grounded in their divergent appropriations of Remy de Gourmont. While Epstein remained faithful to Gourmont’s edict that the intellect is but an epiphenomenon of the sensibility, and as such is an obstacle to the creation of art, Eliot extended Gourmont’s principles in the direction of an aesthetic that could restore mental and social order. Thus, when Eliot notes in metaphysical poetry “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a re-creation of thought into feeling” (SP 63), he implicitly critiques Gourmont’s distrust of intellect, echoed in Epstein’s insistence on the primacy of emotions. What Eliot calls for is a particular kind of intellect, one that, as Gourmont would insist, is nourished by sensibility but that, in its turn, nourishes and indeed enlarges the realm of sensibility. Metaphysical poets, Eliot asserts in a memorable observation, felt “their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility” (SP 64). Intellect and sensibility are mutually informing for Eliot; for Gourmont and Epstein, sensibility always holds the upper hand. Despite Eliot’s expressed, if unspecified, disagreement with Epstein’s arguments in his letter to Aldington, there are turns of phrase in his review of the metaphysical poets that suggest his serious engagement with Epstein’s paean to post-Symbolist poetry. The metaphysical conceit’s “rapid association of thought,” which Eliot frames in cinematic terms as a “telescoping of images and multiplied associations” (60), betrays his interest in the new art form of the moving pictures that Epstein celebrated as a profound influence on modern literature. Cendrars and Cocteau, themselves both authors and filmmakers, likewise thought modern literature was indebted to cinema.13 In addition, Eliot’s emphasis on the cognitive velocity enacted by metaphysical aesthetics brings to mind “The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in which Filippo Marinetti— exhilarated by the technological feats of automobile and airplane— advocates a new “wireless” imagination, “the imagination without strings

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… when we dare to suppress all the first terms of our analogies and render no more than an uninterrupted sequence of second terms” (60). Eliot’s nascent theory of metaphysical poetry is rarely read in light of futurist aesthetics. But the scientific idiom of his critical prose warrants the association with futurism. Moreover, Eliot was clearly interested in postSymbolist poetry, which was itself shaped by futurism (Cendrars was considered by some the direct heir of Marinetti).14 Certainly, against the backdrop of Epstein’s defense of contemporary French poetry, we have reason to conclude that not only the most experimental of Eliot’s works, The Waste Land, but also early formulations of his physiological theory of metaphysical poetry were in contact with avant-garde ideas and practices of his time.15 More traditional and skeptical than Marinetti, Eliot did not share futurism’s unalloyed enthusiasm for the artistic possibilities created by the new machines; yet he frequently turned to advances in science and technology for artistic metaphors. Depicting how thought and feeling are fused in the artist’s mind, he refers to “a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience”; likewise, he compares the arduous unification accomplished by the poet’s mind to the industrial process of fusion and amalgamation (SP 64). Such simultaneous manipulation of poetic and scientific registers creates a curious tension. In Eliot’s description of metaphysical sensibility, there is on the one hand a heightened sensitivity which is lyrically invoked—for example, the “odour of a rose,” a romantic commonplace— and on the other hand, there is the violence with which such heterogeneous ideas are “yoked,” as in this case, thought and scent. This violence, which the poet effects through such means as compression or transmutation, “dislocate[s] … language into his meaning” (65). The unified sensibility, one gathers, is the result of tremendous effort combining force with sensitivity, subtlety with speed. 16 Eliot chooses to cast this process of unification in a scientific idiom: fusion issues in heat and velocity. Such a yoking of artistic and technological processes suggests Eliot’s awareness of the inevitable entanglement of mind, emotion, and technology; from this awareness flows his conviction that the modern lyric had a genuine “stake” in modern technological innovations.17 In Epstein’s study, Eliot encountered a physiological theory of modern literature deeply attuned to science and technology yet decisively different from Italian futurism and the French variant promulgated by Nicolas Beauduin. While the latter glorified power and technological innovation in virile terms, denigrating decadence and nostalgia, Epstein’s theory manages the impressive feat of fusing two ideas that had been strictly opposed within the futurist avant-garde: the neuropathic aristocrat/artist—

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a remnant of decadence—with the modern engine. The offspring of such an unorthodox union is a neurasthenic machine, at times curiously erotic, at other times comical. For instance, Cendrars’s Fiat, notwithstanding its miraculous “ease” and power, is “always feverish” with “air pumps fart[ing] in [its] back” (168-71). The poem’s speaker, a version of Cendrars himself, envies the car’s self-propelled efficiency, which he identifies with a woman who has just given birth and is now “emptied … after her confinement”: To be in your place Sudden shift It’s the first time I’ve envied a woman That I’ve wanted to be a woman To be a woman In the universe In life To be And to expose oneself to the childbearing future The prospect dazzles me (171)

Although the speaker playfully asserts his male presence at the very end— “My pen maneuvers / Move on!” (or “Beat it” in Ron Padgett’s translation)—the poem’s title implies that the car is propelled by fiat, a decree that owes little to the male driver’s agency and everything to the mechanical, female body. Cendrars’s playful evocation of the automobile as a womanly prosthesis for male drivers suggests his departure from the predominantly phallic futurist aesthetics and its figurehead, Marinetti, who was himself the proud owner of a Fiat that, so legend has it, delayed the onset of futurism by four months when an “evasive maneuver” undertaken by Marinetti catapulted both car and driver into a ditch (Schnapp 26). Marinetti’s Fiat is immortalized as “A race car, its hood adorned with large pipes, like serpents with an explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot … and more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (26). By contrast, Cendrars’s more subtle, neuropathic automobile is not exultantly masculine, but like the taxicab or Tiresias in The Waste Land, it inclines toward androgyny: “throbbing between two lives” (CPP 68).

The androgynous machine: taxi, typist, and gramophone The gadgets and machines proliferating in what many consider the most dismal human encounter of The Waste Land—the tryst between a

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typist and her aggressive suitor—have permitted for only one interpretation: laboring humanity is reduced to an engine that “waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” at the introduction of the episode; the typist, or “typewriter,” as she was frequently referred to at the time (Rainey, Revisiting 53), reiterates her mechanized profession as the passive counterpart to the man’s brutal, “exploring hands”; and the gramophone, on which she puts a “record” with “automatic hand,” suggests an alienation from communal music-making, represented by the new means of mechanical reproduction. All three together appear to invoke the general cheapening of modern life in its various manifestations—cultural, artistic, emotional, sexual. The unedited draft of this episode tells a different story, however. Here the human engine is ready to “spring to pleasure,” and its “throbbing waiting” is associated with both the hermaphrodite Tiresias, “throbbing between two lives,” and the typist who perches on her window sill in “nerveless torpor” (WLF 42-45). Moreover, the details lavished on the typist’s apartment invoke a young woman with cultural aspirations—a “false” Japanese print on the wall, a kimono as house dress, a gramophone to relieve her drab solitude with music. Such details produce a realistic portrait of the typist as one of the many young women (some of them assisting Eliot at Lloyds bank) who sought an autonomous livelihood in the metropolis; one variety of “new women” who challenged the Victorian code of female respectability and relished the relative independence that the profession of typist offered (Rainey, Revisiting 53-61). Even so, in the same draft Tiresias comments on the manner of these “crawling bugs,” in sudden revulsion at the anticipated rendezvous. It is precisely such emotional and ideological incoherence (eventually sorted out by Pound) that makes this unedited version of interest as a barometer of Eliot’s ambivalent, and never wholly negative, attitude toward modernity in its quotidian manifestations. Indeed, when read alongside Cendrars’s Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques, the machines of this episode—automobile, typewriter, and gramophone— cease to be solely the trappings of a moribund humanity reduced to mechanized lethargy. Rather, they emerge as emblems of new potentialities of gender and eros. The androgynous resonance of the throbbing, waiting taxicab—hinted at in the draft—anticipates Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the androgynous mind in the final chapter of A Room of One’s Own, triggered by the sight of a young man and woman meeting at a corner and getting into a taxicab, which “glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere” (100). 18 Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf is keenly aware of how automated forms of

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transportation, in this case the bus, offer new liberties of movement to women and new forms of chance interaction between women and men. Even the gramophone need not be interpreted as a signifier of vapid entertainment offering escape from the feelings of horror, humiliation, or shame that such a woman would have been expected to feel.19 Instead, we might consider her “automatic hand” as anticipating the rhythms of popular music flooding her cramped lodgings, and with that the syncopated movements of jazz and ragtime, which stand in stark contrast to the graceless attack of the young man. Such a reading gains surprising biographical support from an episode in Eliot’s friendship with Woolf. According to Bonnie Kime Scott, in June 1922, Eliot had visited Woolf and “brought along gramophone records, and as extension of the experience, he offers to share what little he knows about the ‘Grizzly Bear’ or the ‘Chicken Strut’ [… and] asks if she has ‘The Memphis Shake’” (102). The machines of the typist episode are linked to modern alterations of domestic and urban space, some of them promising new forms of mobility and pleasure, and they gesture toward the desire for transformed gender relations. This desire collides with a different gender imperative embodied by the clerk’s brutal and selfish sexuality, one that Eliot associates with animality and an earlier form of transportation, the horse: —Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit; And at the corner where the stable is, Delays only to urinate, and spit. (WLF 47)

Eliot’s attitude toward modern technology—conflicted, fascinated, revolted—was elided, at least thematically, in the final version of this episode, where machines, as signifiers of inauthenticity and mechanical alienation, provide the symbolic props in the “grisly puppet show,” as Rainey describes the lifeless encounter (Revisiting 52). But machines, Juan Suarez reminds us, “are never simple, and Eliot’s poem attests to that” (126). For the poem in its entirety, even after Pound’s revision, testifies to Eliot’s complex engagement with machines and their mechanical potential to capture and reproduce the “immense panorama” of modern civilization, not only in its “futility and anarchy” (SP 177) but also in its edgy, syncopated pace and dizzying sensory immediacy. The poem’s technique of abrupt transitions, resembling the rapid juxtapositions of montage and “cinematic fades” (Suarez 136), is indebted to the cinema; likewise, the stream of disembodied voices and urban glossolalia would have been unthinkable without the phonograph. And these two inventions, as Suarez

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reminds us, created the modern “media-ridden” world (136). Citing a “well-kept secret about modernism,” Suarez maintains that “during the composition of The Waste Land, throughout 1921 and 1922, T. S. Eliot was attached to his gramophone much in the same way as Andy Warhol was later ‘married’ to his movie camera, Polaroid, and tape recorder” (121). We might also recall that Eliot produced the draft of the typist episode on a new typewriter, one that had been left to him in August of 1921 as a surprise gift by his brother Henry who had absconded with Eliot’s old machine and its “crabbed finishing strokes” (Rainey, Revisiting 10). In the light of Epstein’s study and Cendrars’s poetry, we can return to Eliot’s assertion in his essay on metaphysical poetry that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” What we may notice, perhaps for the first time, is the reference to “poets,” rather than simply “poetry.” Modern poets, as Epstein and Eliot suggest, must be “difficult” to the extent that the poet’s mind must be extraordinarily responsive (like a phonograph or a camera) in order to serve as “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images” (SP 41), those numberless emotions and images that are the stuff of modern life. As a filmmaker, Epstein embraced cinematic technology as an extension, a prosthesis of the nervous system, enhancing its cognitive and sensory capacities, and taking us ever closer, for instance, to the face and the skin. By contrast, Eliot, who shared many of Pound’s reservations about the new visual technologies as a threat to the ancient art of poetry, treated modern machines of reproduction—of text, sound, and vision—in a more ambivalent manner. Nevertheless, his nascent theory of metaphysical poetry and The Waste Land suggest the “tonic” of Epstein’s physiotechnological theory of literature and Eliot’s poetic stake in technology. Epstein’s book proved a tonic because it rejected the bleak view of modernity so pervasive in much of Eliot’s work, including The Waste Land. Suffused with excitement about the new experiences afforded by the automatization of modern life and its surprising effects on a refined sensibility, Epstein’s study re-acquainted Eliot with post-Symbolist poets and their fearless receptivity to technological forces that had traditionally been considered inimical to the creative autonomy of poetry. In addition, Epstein endorsed “the disease of modernism,” neurasthenia, as an essential piece of his physiological theory of modern poetry, offering an alternative to futurism’s aggressive virility in favor of a gender-bending, decadent modernism that defined itself in alliance with, rather than opposition to, machines of transport, automatization, and reproduction. However shortlived, the tonic of Epstein and post-Symbolist poetry testifies to Eliot’s

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genuine interest in technology, as a source of critical analogies, new aesthetic practices, and technologically mediated forms of human intimacy.

Notes 1

I would like to thank Juliette Moutinou and Marcel Muller for assisting me with questions of meaning and translation in Epstein’s study; many thanks as well to John Paul Riquelme for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 In a letter to Aldington from 16 September 1921, Eliot mentions having “just finished an article, unsatisfactory to myself, on the metaphysical poets” (L1 581). The essay appeared in TLS on 20 October 1921. 3 Notable exceptions are David Trotter’s “T. S. Eliot and Cinema” and Cinema and Modernism, which offer the fullest discussion to date of Epstein’s aesthetic impact on Eliot, as well as Lawrence Rainey’s The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, which references Epstein’s work. 4 In his meticulous examination of the composition of The Waste Land, Rainey speculates that the rough drafts Eliot used in preparing the typescripts of part III (among them the typist episode) were composed during either of two periods: the two months from June 10 to August 20, 1921 when his family was visiting, or the month following his family’s departure on 20 August 1921 (Revisiting 29). Rainey chooses the earlier period as more likely; my own reading of the typist episode links it to the later period, during which Eliot read Epstein’s study and composed his essay on the metaphysical poets. 5 “The windows of my poetry are wide open to the boulevards and in its showcases.” 6 Epstein cites Georges Bohn’s Étude objective des phénomènes cérébraux (École russe), Revue des idées, 15 Jan 1910, p. 30. See also Tim Armstrong’s study which provides a detailed summary of the impact of electricity on models of the human body as a machine or “human motor” (15). 7 “On peut donc remarquer tout d’abord qu’au cours d’une émotion l’organism dépense un excès d’énergie. Cela permet de comprendre mieux comment un organism sain tend à créer lui-même des émotions, c’est-à-dire des sentiments, pour employer à quelque chose ou plus simplement pour dépenser l’énergie dont il est capable, comme une sorte d’accumulateur. L’organism, continuant à vivre, continue à former de l’énergie, et, à le supposer capable de tenir en réserve une quantité limitée seulement de cette énergie latente, l’énergie en formation chassant l’énergie formée, on voit, à l’aide de cette explication … comment se créent des émotions d’origine purement interne et qui n’ont pour but que d’user un surcroît d’énergie.” (All the translations from Epstein are my own). 8 “Quand M. Cendrars écrit: ‘J’ai des pommettes électriques au bout de mes nerfs’ …, il faut songer: que les phares d’un automobile proéminent à l’avant de la machine comme les pommettes dans un visage au-dessous des yeux; que ces phares sont électriques; que l’homme au volant commande à la machine avec quoi qu’il fait corps, grâce aux leviers et aux manettes; que rien ne donne mieux

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l’impression de nervosité qu’un moteur trépidant; que le chauffeur qui a l’habitude de sa voiture, on connaît tous les bruits familiers où il sait distinguer, même en marche, le moindre malaise; qu’il se confond presque avec elle, comme avec une trop tendre camarade; et qu’il peut sentir prolongés ses nerfs qui commandent à ses muscles lesquels mouvent les leviers, par ces leviers mêmes et leurs câbles qui commandent au moteur.” 9 “Finally, if one must be nervous to be a poet, one must also be nervous in order to love poets, a proposition which, in its very universality, removes what remains disagreeable in the term ‘nervous.’” 10 Epstein argues, for instance, that “strictement, il n’y a pas d’homme qui pense et qui ne soit pas en même temps intellectuellement fatigué…. La maladie, ou la fatigue, nous berce, nous élève, nous instruit, nous permet de vivre” [strictly speaking, it is impossible for a man who thinks not to be intellectually fatigued at the same time…. Illness, or fatigue, appeases us, elevates us, instructs us, and allows us to live] (182). 11 Epstein devoted an entire chapter to the digestive tract and its impact on creativity, affirming: “l’homme est poète avec son tube digestif. Puisqu’il y a des moments où le fonctionnement de ce tube digestif inhibe plus ou moins certaines formes d’activité cérébrale, il est naturel qu’on retrouve des correspondances à ces moments dans la littérature.” [Man is a poet with his intestines. Since there are moments when the digestive functions more or less inhibit brain activities, it is only natural to find corresponding moments in literature] (75). 12 Of course, the emphasis on speed—cognitive, mechanical, and physical—was endemic to modernity. See, for instance, Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s Speed Limits. 13 For a discussion of Eliot’s early and abiding, if frequently denied, interest in cinema, see Trotter. 14 According to Perloff, “Eliot’s link to Vorticism and its Cubist-Futurist antecedent was largely negative” (253) and exhausted by 1915. Stephen Romer, in his essay on Eliot and French poetry, does not mention Cendrars, Cocteau, or Apollinaire at all. According to Pondrom, the period from the later years of World War I to 1920 were marked by English modernists’ “more reserved attitude toward most contemporary French poets and by greater interest in the French nineteenth century” (7). Eliot’s—and Aldington’s—perusal of Epstein suggests, however, that French avant-garde poetry may have played a more decisive role in shaping Eliot’s aesthetics than previously noted. See, for instance, Trotter, Morrissette, and Frick. 15 As Eliot developed his theory of metaphysical poetry in the Clark and Turnbull Lectures, he continued to employ metaphors linking creative and chemical processes, even as his early emphasis on cognitive speed gave way to an emphasis on order, a sign of his distance from his previous interest in French avant-garde poetry. Thus, in commenting on Laforgue’s “remarkable gift for metaphysical emotion,” in the Turnbull Lectures, he notes the French poet’s “passionate craving for order: that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification, and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its sentimental justification” (VMP 282). Cendrars and Cocteau are mentioned as “post-metaphysical” poets, apostates from the rigorous requirement for complete adequation and order (210-11).

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16 Epstein notes the same yoking of force and precision when he compares modern literature to the working of a steam-hammer: “the steam-hammer breaks, with great delicacy, the shells of hazelnuts without cutting into the fruit.” The power of the machine manifests itself not in brute strength, but in maneuvers requiring delicacy, subtlety, and precision (51-52). 17 I am alluding to Carrie Noland’s incisive Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology, in which she discusses Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, and René Char as poets who broke “with a critical and poetic tradition that had consistently situated poetry, and especially lyric poetry, in direct opposition to all forms of technological mediation” (4). 18 I am grateful to John Paul Riquelme for suggesting the connection, and its gender implications, between Eliot’s and Woolf’s taxicabs. 19 For a discussion of the typist as a figure in the realist fiction of the time, see Rainey’s Revisiting The Waste Land, especially 61-68.

Works Cited Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Burne, Glenn. “T. S. Eliot and Remy de Gourmont.” Bucknell Review 8 (1959): 113-26. Cendrars, Blaise. Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars. Trans. Walter Albert, et al. Ed. Walter Albert. New York: New Directions, 1966. Chefdor, Monique. Blaise Cendrars. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Epstein, Jean. Bonjour Cinéma und Andere Schriften zum Kino. Trans. Ralph Eue. Ed. Nicole Brenetz and Ralph Eue. Vienna: Synema, 2008. —. La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un nouvel état d’intelligence. Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921. Frick, Adrianna E. “The Dugs of Tiresias: Female Sexuality and Modernist Nationalism in The Waste Land and Les Mamelles de Tirésias.” The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective. Ed. Joe Moffett. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2011. 15-33. Hawhee, Debra. Movingbodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Marinetti, Filippo. “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Ed. Jon Cook. London: Blackwell, 2004. 56-60. Morrissette, Bruce A. “T. S. Eliot and Guillaume Apollinaire.” Comparative Literature 5.3 (1953): 262-68. Noland, Carrie. Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Perloff, Marjorie. “The Avant-Garde.” T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 252-62.

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Pondrom, Cyrena N. The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry 1900-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Rainey, Lawrence, ed. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. —. Revisiting The Waste Land. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Romer, Stephen. “French Poetry.” T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 211-20. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ed. Speed Limits. Milan: Skira, 2009. Scott, Bonnie Kime. “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf’s Gramophone.” Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie. New York: Garland, 2000. 97-113. Suarez, Juan A. Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007. Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. —. “T. S. Eliot and Cinema.” Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006): 237-65. Vittoz, Roger. Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching Brain Control. Trans. H. B. Brooke. London: Longmans, Green, 1911. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.

CHAPTER NINE T. S. ELIOT AND CHARLES PÉGUY JENNIFER KILGORE-CARADEC

Mon petit, il est évident que si Dieu était seulement servi par ses curés comme il est servi par ses écrivains … —Péguy to Alain-Fournier, February 3, 1914 (qtd. in Leplay 197)

Speaking in March 1914 at Cliff Dwellers, a Chicago club devoted to the arts, William Butler Yeats remarked on the state of English letters to an audience that included Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin, Vachel Lindsay and other supporters of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse: It is from Paris that nearly all the great influences in art and literature have come, from the time of Chaucer until now. Today the metrical experiments of French poets are overwhelming in their variety and delicacy. The best English writing is dominated by French criticism; in France is the great critical mind. (qtd. in Monroe 26)

Yeats was of course alluding to the France that he knew: he had met Paul Verlaine and had been influenced by the Symbolists. But Yeats was also referring to the France that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot knew. That Pound had been Yeats’s personal secretary in 1914-1915, as well as Yeats’s introduction to Harriet Monroe, had helped to ensure that the knowledge of current letters in France would influence literature in the United States as well as Britain. Meanwhile, La Nouvelle Revue Française, founded under the auspices of André Gide in 1909, was already being diffused in concentric circles through the British Isles, a dissemination eventually helped along by Eliot’s own reporting. American poetry was stagnant, Yeats informed his audience, “Not because you are too far from England, but because you are too far from Paris” (qtd. in Monroe 25-26). In a similar vein, “The Approach to Paris,” a collection of articles by Pound that first appeared in The New Age in the fall of 1913, begins: “For the best part of a thousand years English poets have gone to school to the

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French, or one might as well say that there never were any English poets until they began to study the French” (qtd. in Pondrom 174). Pound adds, “The present day English versifier … might do worse than look once more to the Mt. St. Geneviève and its purlieus,” (175). And again: “My contention was that Paris is rather better off for poets than London is” (199). Pound’s attention then turns to a spate of recent French poets: Remy de Gourmont, Jules Romains, Charles Vildrac, Laurent Tailhade, Henri de Régnier, Tristan Corbière, Francis Jammes, Arthur Rimbaud, Émile Verhaeren, Paul Fort, Paul Claudel, André Spire, Pierre Jean Jouve, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri-Martin Barzun. Amid this diverse spectrum of poets, however, Pound does not mention Charles Péguy, whose poetry was a recent discovery for French readers, beginning in 1910 with Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc. Before arriving in Paris in the fall of 1910, T. S. Eliot had been initiated to French writers through his Harvard professor of French and comparative literature, Irving Babbitt. He had read Arthur Symons and Jules Laforgue in 1908, and Baudelaire in 1907 or 1908. From Babbitt, he had heard praise of the classicism that Charles Maurras was promoting, but, like Pound, Eliot had not heard of Péguy, whose writings he would encounter during his year in France. A great deal is known about T. S. Eliot’s Paris year. According to René Taupin, Eliot had met Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon in Paris. Salmon’s influence could be felt in Eliot’s poems, particularly the character of Sweeney, which was drawn from Salmon’s La Maison du veuf (220). Other French cultural figures whom Eliot encountered have been identified by Nancy Duvall Hargrove in T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. She notes that Eliot’s French tutor AlainFournier introduced Eliot to journals such as La Nouvelle Revue Française, La Grande Revue, and Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine (14). How did Eliot first come upon Péguy? He may have noticed his caped presence at Henri Bergson’s lectures, and he may have gone by or entered the Boutique des Cahiers, which was facing the Sorbonne at 8, rue de la Sorbonne, a mere five-minute walk from his lodgings at 151 bis, rue St. Jacques. Before the year abroad had ended he had apparently read, at the very least, Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and had become aware of Péguy’s periodical, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, founded in 1900. Eliot’s interest in Péguy was based on an inaccurate understanding of the man and his work—placing him as politically to the far right—but the initial attraction would endure and evolve, inspiring some of Eliot’s own initiatives, especially the founding of The Criterion and the composition of Murder in the Cathedral.

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While Eliot’s public proclamations about Péguy are somewhat rare, occasionally erroneous, and often ignored, John Middleton Murry, editor of Rhythm (1911-13) The Athenaeum (1919-21) and then The Adelphi (1923-48), frequently alluded to Péguy in his literary essays. Murry’s readers would not have been inclined to associate the name of Péguy with Charles Maurras or the Action Française or their affinity for classicism, as Eliot was prone to do. Murry, who had a deeper knowledge of Bergson, and more affinity for his positions, understood Péguy better than Eliot did. Murry was one of the first to evoke Bergson to the English reader in the summer of 1911, in the first issue of Rhythm: “The philosophy of Bergson has of late come to a tardy recognition in England. In France it is a living artistic force” (Pondrom 55). One could add that Péguy was one of Bergsonism’s key practitioners (hence Murry’s intense interest in Péguy). Bergson and Bergsonism were forces that Eliot would reckon with in Paris and beyond, even though he finally chose to concentrate his PhD thesis on F. H. Bradley. But during the first decade or so after leaving Paris, Eliot came to view Bergson through the eyes of T. E. Hulme, whose “Complete Poetical Works” in The New Age (1912) he had read, and whose essay “Romanticism and Classicism” he had perhaps also seen. Hulme translated both Bergson (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1913) and Sorel (Reflections on Violence, 1916) for English readers before he was killed at the front in 1917. Eliot’s Maurrassian distinction between romanticism and classicism continued up to After Strange Gods (1933), which R. P. Blackmur criticized in a 1934 review, claiming that Eliot’s “analogue between the orthodox and the classical, the heretical and the romantic” was questionable (274). Bergson was the major philosophical influence for Charles Péguy, who had followed his teaching from the École normale supérieure, where he had been his student, to the Collège de France, once Bergson had been appointed there. Their admiration and friendship were reciprocal: Péguy’s last written work, interrupted in mid-sentence as he prepared to leave for the front in 1914, was about Bergson, and Bergson would financially support Péguy’s wife and children after Péguy’s death on September 5, 1914, on the eve of the first battle of the Marne. Eliot probably first heard about Péguy from his French tutor, AlainFournier, who wrote to his best friend and brother-in-law Jacques Rivière on August 11, 1910, about a meeting with Péguy, and the way he had inscribed a copy of his recent Notre jeunesse. Two weeks later, AlainFournier wrote again to say that he had read Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and that he had admired the way Christ’s passion was made concrete through Péguy’s text. André Gide, who had read Le Mystère

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when it appeared in Cahiers de la Quinzaine (January 1910), was also enthusiastic: he immediately bought ten copies to distribute to friends. Alain-Fournier, the pen-name of Henri-Alain Fournier, author of Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), was to become one of Péguy’s closest friends during the last four years of his life. He had met Péguy in the spring of 1910 and had read Notre jeunesse with enthusiasm (Rivière 1986, 61). Through Rivière, Fournier had access to Gide’s Nouvelle Revue Française (founded 1909), where he published his work and became an avid reader of Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine and his late manuscripts (which Fournier was invited to comment on while they were still in process). Like Péguy and Rivière, Fournier went to the front in 1914. He was killed in action a few short weeks after Péguy, but his brother-in-law Rivière managed to survive the war, continuing his work at NRF. Eliot would start writing regularly for NRF, after an invitation from Gide to take over the “rubrique des lettres anglaises” (L1 610). Perhaps not coincidentally, Rivière published a two-part memoir of Fournier in NRF in 1922-23. This text too, Eliot would have read. In it Rivière recounts how he had been friends with Fournier from their days at lycée Lakanal in 1903, when they were both seventeen, how they both had shared an interest in Symbolist poetry, and how fascinated Fournier had been with Laforgue (Rivière 2009, 335, 343). Alain-Fournier had been writing poems in the Symbolist style for several years before he met Eliot. He had travelled to England where he had become enamored with the pre-Raphaelites (Rivière 1986, 30). During his military service, while stationed in Mirande in 1909, he drew closer to Catholicism, which had interested him since 1907 (Rivière 1986, 46). By 1910 Fournier had begun to write Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). It was Péguy’s “matérialisme spirituel” that drew him toward friendship with the elder poet (Rivière 1986, 62). Fournier was gradually becoming a friend of Péguy’s, and they discovered they had in common their origins from the central region of France as well as their peasant stock (Rivière 62). Fournier’s first letter to Péguy was dated September 28, 1910 (Rey-Herme 21), and by October Péguy and Fournier were regularly walking around town together, with Péguy taking an interest in Fournier’s literary development. After Fournier’s “Portrait” was published in NRF in September 1911, Péguy wrote to him: “Je viens de lire votre Portrait. Vous irez loin, Fournier. Vous vous rappellerez que c’est moi qui vous l’ai dit. Je suis votre affectueusement dévoué. Péguy” (qtd. in Rivière 1986, 63). Their correspondence intensified. But intensity of correspondence should be understood according to the specific situations of Fournier, Rivière, and Péguy. As Yves Rey-Herme notes, the three men lived in Paris

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during much of the period between 1910-1914, and frequently saw each other daily. Letters were useful and numerous primarily during periods when they were on vacation or carrying out military service (Rey-Herme 16). As for Rivière, he wrote regularly for NRF, beginning in February 1910 (Hargrove 14), and he became its editor in 1919. Eliot had met him in 1911, later praising “the charming and gracious personality and alert and enthusiastic spirit” of the man after his death in 1925 (“Rencontre” 657-658). When Eliot arrived in Paris in the fall of 1910, he was twentytwo years old; Fournier and Rivière, close to him in age, were both twenty-four, while Péguy was thirty-six. Fournier was a language teacher to Eliot, not exactly a friend, and probably did no more for Eliot than suggest that he read Péguy, or perhaps show him the Boutique des Cahiers, where Péguy kept shop.1 Eliot is named in none of Fournier’s letters to Péguy or to Rivière, although there may be a joking allusion to his giving Eliot French lessons, when Fournier writes, after correcting a spelling error of Rivière’s, “(Un jeune professeur non marié, mais dont la situation ne laisse pas d’être intéressante donnerait leçons de français, etc., etc....)” (1 September 1911). Meanwhile, Fournier had written a polite letter to Eliot (25 July 1911), thanking him for the information about English literature, and alerting him to watch for his first article to be published in NRF in September (L1 25-27). After such a letter, one might expect a continuing exchange between the two, but there seems to be no further correspondence. While Eliot may have been exposed to Péguy’s writing through Fournier, it is unlikely that Fournier officially introduced Eliot to Péguy. It is probable that Eliot had read Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, but less likely that he had finished reading Notre jeunesse before he left Paris. It is a work that Maurras would not have liked—had Eliot read it, he might have had a clearer picture of Péguy’s political stance—but Eliot may have perused Œuvres choisies by Péguy, which came out in April 1911. Possibly Eliot recommended Le Mystère to his fellow pensionnaire at Mme. Causaubon’s, Jean Verdenal, who wrote to Eliot in mid-July 1911: “J’ai lu Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc. J’aime surtout le récit que Madame Gervaise fait de la Passion” (L1 24). In its errors, Eliot’s initial understanding of Péguy’s ideological positioning owes much to Hulme. In his 1916 University Extension lectures, Eliot associated Péguy with Sorel, a problem that the notes to Geoffrey Hill’s poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983) would seek to correct (Collected Poems 206). The notes to the fourth of Eliot’s University Extension lectures, “Royalism and Socialism,” mention Pierre Lasserre and Charles Maurras as noteworthy royalists: “Their reaction

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fundamentally sound, but marked by extreme violence and intolerance” (Schuchard 29). Eliot continues with more specific information about Péguy, attempting to show he was conservative, since he emphasized the compromised character of bourgeois socialism. Eliot described Péguy as a “peasant journalist” once fond of Jaurès, whose celebrity was “due to his death on the battlefield” (see Schuchard 29). The notes are brief, but continue thus: Péguy illustrated nationalism and neo-Catholicism as well as socialism; and the fusion of nationalism and Catholicism in his Jeanne d’Arc. A more violent reaction against bourgeois socialism is found in Georges Sorel, the initiator of syndicalism. His philosophic creed. His theory of the general strike. His development toward royalism. Both of these men—Péguy and Sorel—were strongly influenced by Bergson. (Schuchard 29)

During the same period, Eliot reviewed in the New Statesman Victor Boudon’s testimonial, Avec Charles Péguy, de la Lorraine à la Marne (October 7, 1916). With Ezra Pound, Eliot struggled to remember a colleague of Péguy’s: “I have not yet received the Benda of which you speak. I recall his name as a colleague of Péguy. Is that the same man?” (L1 471). In an article published in NRF in November 1923, Eliot claimed that Péguy’s main influences were Charles Maurras and Julien Benda, though in truth, Maurras could only have been a counter-influence for Péguy, and it is probable that Péguy influenced Benda more than Benda influenced Péguy. Then, in 1925, in a special issue of NRF dedicated to the memory of Jacques Rivière, Eliot wrote about his Paris year in a paragraph that was later reprinted in a piece published as Allied Forces were struggling to move forward across France, one week after D-Day. He recalls heady days of intellectual ferment, especially the enthusiasm for Bergson’s ideas and the austere cover of Péguy’s journal: Je crois que c’était une bonne fortune exceptionnelle, pour un adolescent, de découvrir Paris en l’an 1910. La Nouvelle Revue Française était encore vraiment nouvelle: et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine paraissaient, sous leur austère couverture de papier gris. Je suppose qu’il y a encore des bergsoniens: mais pour avoir vraiment connu la ferveur bersonienne, il faut être allé, régulièrement, chaque semaine, dans cette salle pleine à craquer où il faisait ses cours, au Collège de France. (qtd. in Rosaye 50 and Greene 10)

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In 1925, during the midst of the many funding crises that beset The Criterion, Eliot contemplated starting a new review to run alongside The New Criterion entitled Cahiers de la Quinzaine, after Péguy’s periodical (see L1 713, 741). Perhaps he was dissuaded after observing that one of Péguy’s sons was still editing Cahiers. In February 1928, Eliot briskly dismissed Péguy in a review of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (discussed below). In 1932, he briefly mentioned Péguy in a commentary in The Criterion where he intended to discuss “what Péguy would have called la mystique of economics” (467). This reference to Péguy is notably a prelude to a text that evolved into a full-fledged attack on Murry (468). In 1934 Péguy is quoted in the preface to After Strange Gods. In 1937 he appears in Eliot’s study “Byron” (published in On Poetry and Poets, 1957): Mais que Hugo aussi était dans tout ce peuple. The words of Péguy have kept drifting through my mind while I have been thinking of Byron: ‘Non pas vers qui chantent dans la mémoire, mais vers qui dans la mémoire sonnent et retentissent comme une fanfare, vibrants, trépidants, sonnant comme une fanfare, sonnant comme une charge, tambour éternel, et qui battra dans les mémoires françaises longtemps après que les réglementaires tambours auront céssé de battre au front des regiments.’ (OPP 233)

In 1956, Eliot explained to Philip Mairet in a letter that the line “Garlic and sapphires in the mud,” from Burnt Norton II, “is an echo of a line in a sonnet by Mallarmé” that Péguy also echoed in one of his poems (IMH xxv). What this incomplete listing demonstrates is that Eliot’s attraction to Péguy remained constant after the initial contact. His reading and understanding of Péguy matured with time, and eventually came to influence his poetry, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate. Pound was also aware of Péguy’s existence (Eliot wrote to him as if he had such knowledge), but he never exhibited great interest in or wrote about Péguy. Péguy does not figure in the index to Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals because he was never discussed in Pound’s numerous essays in periodicals about French poetry, nor did he figure in The Little Review’s special French poetry number in February 1918 that Pound had prepared, beginning with Laforgue and ending with Jules Romains. However, there is a footnote to the survey of French poets in that issue indicating his intention to perhaps return to poets he had not adequately discussed:

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Pound had included Péguy’s friend André Spire in the anthology (Baechler 47-48), after previously writing about him in 1913 (as noted above), and naming him in an essay for Poetry in 1918 (Baechler 57).2 Pound rarely, if ever, mentioned Péguy in his correspondence.3 Nonetheless, what is certain is that Pound, Eliot, and Péguy were all involved in what Vincent Sherry has termed “political aesthetics” along with those who influenced them (5).4 Upon his arrival in Paris in 1920, Pound wrote in June to John Quinn that Julien Benda was the “best mind” in the city. This conviction led him to write the essay “Julien Benda” in The Athenaeum in July 1920.5 Possibly Pound made a conscious choice to avoid discussing Péguy’s poetry because he intended to engage Eliot to write about him. Or possibly he did not have a personal affinity for Péguy. His footnote in the February 1918 Little Review had acknowledged Péguy’s existence (hard to ignore during that period), without actually offering any information about him to American readers. Julien Benda was quite close to Péguy: he had used his pen to write in support of Dreyfus during the Affair (Julliard and Winock 134), and he was one of Péguy’s friends. He subscribed to Péguy’s Cahiers, and he was a contributor with an introduction to an essay by Georges Sorel in 1907 (Cahiers 7.16; Laichter 205), and he also was responsible for three issues in the twelfth series of the Cahiers (1910-11): Mon premier testament (12.3), Dialogue d’Eleuthère (12.5), and L’Ordination (12.9). The latter novel was one vote short of winning the Goncourt prize in 1912. Benda also contributed to the final, fifteenth series (1913-14) with Une Philosophie pathétique (15.2). Frantisek Laichter, who devoted a book-length study to Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine qualified Benda’s ideal of nationalism as “étroit et ambitieux” (299) and in contradiction to Péguy’s ideals (205). One may wonder why both Pound and Eliot wrote essays about Benda, rather than Péguy, during the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to Pound, Eliot does mention Péguy more often in his letters. In addition to the allusion to Péguy in the letter of 1956 quoted above, a scattering of references to Péguy appear in Eliot’s letters between the years 1911 and 1945, which suggests that Eliot continued to read and contemplate Péguy over an extended period of time. Péguy as magazine editor of the Cahiers was attractive enough a figure to Eliot that he had him in mind as he edited the various permutations of The Criterion. Both magazines dealt with literature, criticism, politics, and poetry, and they both featured an editorial column that might go in any direction. As an editor,

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Péguy liked to print opinions different from his own (such as Benda’s), and he also took great liberties in his review, considering himself free from allegiances to political parties or to a university, emphasizing in L’Argent (1913) that a periodical could only be lively if it displeased a rotating fifth of its subscribers with each issue (Péguy 821). Eliot’s acquaintances in Paris were often linked somehow with Charles Péguy: Verdenal, Fournier, Rivière, Gide, Bergson, and John Middleton Murry (with whom Eliot spent a weekend in 1922, and continued to be on friendly terms, though they often had literary disagreements in public). In Eliot’s prose one occasionally finds the name Péguy cropping up, but more often in short allusions than in fully developed prose pieces. To these texts should be added the essays and reviews that Eliot wrote about others who frequented Péguy’s circle, such as “The Idealism of Julien Benda” (1928), or the lecture “The Modern Mind,” in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), which concerns Maritain and Rivière. Eliot published an essay on Sorel in 1917 that mentioned Dreyfus, who was a pivotal figure for Péguy. Eliot’s letters to Herbert Read in the early 1920s are also sources of information about his (and Read’s) reading in French literature. In a review article for the TLS in February 1928, Eliot (anonymously) discussed Benda’s Trahison des clercs, praising Benda’s attack on Bergson in Belphégor (12). Benda is described as a careful, conscientious writer who “writes well” (12). In La Trahison des clercs—Eliot says that clercs “can only translate feebly” as “intellectuals” (12)—Benda accuses intellectuals of subjugating thought to political passion, including Kipling, and for Eliot the work has “international importance” (12). The use of the word “mystique” by Eliot suggests that Péguy is present in this review before he is named. Yet Eliot uses the word rather differently than Péguy did in Notre jeunesse (1910). Eliot is convinced by Benda’s “grave criticism of democracy” (12) where the passions of nationalism and class, distinguished as proletariat and bourgeoisie, are at work: The national emotion, cause of so much hatred between nations as well as the class emotion and the race emotion, has become a kind of mysticism (there is no English equivalent for la mystique). Religion consequently is no longer universal as it always pretended to be, becomes national and enters the national service; it reinforces national (and even class) emotions instead of checking them; the “old German God” of 1914 is merely an extreme manifestation of a universal tendency. (Rev. of Trahison 12)

Eliot notes that Benda classes “Barrès, Péguy, Maurras and the other directors of L’Action Française, D’Annunzio, William James, and Kipling” among the “modern clercs who have ‘betrayed’ the cause of pure

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thought to political passions” (12). The review ends with Eliot’s defense of Maurras, whom Eliot distinguishes from Maurice Barrès (the antiDreyfusard who had published Le Culte du moi in 1888 and Les Déracinés in 1897). More revealing than Eliot’s TLS review of Benda are the letters he exchanged in 1915 with Herbert Read, who had read some of the same French writers. In December 1925 he wrote frankly to Read: At the end of Belphégor an appendix has some acid words about the romanticism of the anti-romantics, which is probably aimed at Maurras. As for religion, I should say he was very much the Jew, no doubt a very emancipated Jew, but perhaps still responsive to le mysticisme juif. He was a detached and critical Dreyfusard. His circle of friends is rather a Jewish circle—Spire etc. and at one time there was a Jewish review—not this tedious Revue Juive—but I think called the Revue Blanche—with which he was associated. (L2 795)

When Eliot first read Péguy, he shared an erroneous interpretation of Péguy’s political and social leanings with his like-minded friend Jean Verdenal, who also shared his sympathies toward Maurras and the Action Française. Eliot admired Péguy then, but his deepest admiration was reserved for Maurras, as Kenneth Asher’s study has demonstrated. A quotation from Maurras’s Le Conseil de Dante was the epigraph Eliot chose for his Dante (1929), and its dedication originally read: “For Charles Maurras,” though both the epigraph and dedication were expunged in the 1932 reprinting in Selected Essays (see Hill, “Between Politics” 329). But as Eliot gradually sought another path after Maurras was put on the Index, his own religious poetry reveals a debt to Péguy that has been previously overlooked. As Georges Cattaui suggests, “c’est en vérité, sa foi chrétienne qui l’éloignera peu à peu, à son insu, de Maurras, pour le rapprocher de Jacques Maritain” (Cattaui 470). And of course, in turning to Maritain, Eliot would have run into Péguy again: Maritain was another of Péguy’s close, if sometimes troublesome friends—and Maritain’s mother, Geneviève Favre, was probably Péguy’s closest confidant (see Burac 200, 21415). Péguy’s two portrayals of the national patron saint of France, Joan of Arc—who was not declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church until 1920—may have been one inspiration behind Eliot’s portrayal of the national British martyr and venerated saint, Thomas Becket. In contrast to the use of Joan made by those who rallied behind Maurras, Péguy’s Joan was not anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite: in the midst of the twelve-yearlong Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), Péguy’s play Jeanne d’Arc (1897) was

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written as a patriotic act in support of Alfred Dreyfus. It was a rebuttal to the use made of statues of Joan during the Dreyfus Affair, which had become meeting points for anti-Dreyfusards throughout France and French Algeria. This first Joan of Péguy’s was founded on historical sources like Michelet and Quicherat. Péguy’s second version of Joan, Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910), portrayed her as a figure of universal religious anxiety, worrying about the salvation of all the damned and transcending national frontiers. Meanwhile, the Action Française (co-founded in 1899 by Maurras, Vaugeois, and Pujo) also rallied around Joan— against Dreyfus. As late as 1931, Maurras published Méditation sur la politique de Jeanne d’Arc. Posthumously used by all parties, Joan was finally to emerge from France’s Third Republic as a “Sainte de la Patrie” as Michel Winock has suggested, making her a kind of patron of the French Revolution. As such, she was also a figure that the agnostic Mark Twain would lovingly portray in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1904). By comparison, what kind of a saint is Eliot’s Thomas Becket? George Orwell got it both right and wrong in his discussion of Eliot’s religious turn, by way of reviewing The Dry Salvages. Orwell favored Eliot’s early work, explaining why he knew it by heart: “it simply stuck in my mind as any passage of verse is liable to do when it has really rung the bell” (452). But he also speaks of “the gloomy Pétainism to which [Eliot] now appears to have given himself over” and is of a piece with his conversion to AngloCatholicism (454). Orwell describes this Pétainism (the word used twice in a five-page review) “which turns its eyes to the past, accepts defeat, writes off earthly happiness as impossible, mumbles about prayer and repentance and thinks it a spiritual advance to see life as ‘a pattern of living worms in the guts of the women of Canterbury’” (455). Eliot’s earliest poetry is most powerful even when Orwell disdains its ideology—“a reactionary or austro-fascist tendency has always been apparent in his work”—that is even more manifest in the later writings (454). But Orwell had failed to perceive that the later Christian verse, while perhaps weaker poetry, did show signs of Eliot’s ideology moving away from Maurras and Pétain, and towards more openness in the church and in society, as well as a personal reconciliation of the self. Perhaps Eliot’s continued interest in Benda, whose own trajectory evolved considerably, helped him make that shift. Eliot might not have been able to adhere to Péguy’s prose, which continued to promote Bergson, but he must have taken considerable interest in all of his religious poetry. Murder in the Cathedral (1935)—commissioned by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and close friend of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer—was

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to commemorate the anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket at the very site where the murder had occurred. Murder in the Cathedral would try to make Becket come alive, even as Péguy had breathed new life into Joan. Eliot clearly imagined it as a kind of contemporary passion play. But we should also remember that Eliot was not only interested in the British saint as a model of contemporary faith, but in courageous resistances to political events in Germany. Like Bell, Eliot was well aware of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was in large part drafted by Bonhoeffer after he had decided to return to Nazi Germany, even though he was encouraged by many friends to remain in exile in England. The Barmen Declaration was the foundation of the confessing church which resisted submission to Nazi policies. The martyrdom that Eliot wrote about in the verse play (like Péguy’s verse play) is Christian martyrdom that is linked to political resistance. Thomas’s martyrdom is closer to Bonhoeffer’s (and Joan’s) actual demise than to Pétain’s. Read “England” in the place of “France,” and “Dietrich” in the place of “Thomas” in the following lines, and informed viewers such as Bell could weep together with the chorus, who anticipated the worst: “O Thomas, return, Archbishop; return, return to France. / Return. Quickly. Quietly. Leave us to perish in quiet” (CPP 243). Did Eliot know about Fournier’s remark to Rivière that Péguy had “made Christ’s passion concrete through the text”? Had Fournier discussed Péguy’s Joan with Eliot? Did Rivière speak with him about it when they met in the 1920s? Madame Gervaise’s story of the passion brings it alive in Péguy’s Mystère, and Thomas’s Christmas sermon addresses Christ’s passion and Christian martyrdom in Eliot’s play. The images of peace the play suggests—“the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children” (CPP 260-61) —might have come straight from Péguy’s poem Eve (1913). Péguy can be seen to identify himself with Joan’s concern for the damned. There is also a kind of religious identification within Eliot’s text, since he was somehow fused to Becket through their shared name: “Old Tom, gay Tom, Becket of London” (246). With Murder in the Cathedral, and thanks in part to Charles Péguy, old Tom’s most reactionary days had come to an end. Now he was writing against the fascism of Hitler.

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Notes 1

In a note to Alain-Fournier’s 25 July 1911 letter to Eliot, the editors explain: “Fournier shared with his pupil his delight in Gide, Péguy, Stendhal, Marivaux, and the novels of Dostoevsky in French translation” (L1 26). 2 Pound’s essays from about 1913 to 1925, as discussed by Dannah Edwards in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (122-26), including ‘‘The Approach to Paris’’ series for The New Age, and articles written in Poetry and The Little Review, were particularly useful to the development of this paragraph. 3 To the present, I have found no allusions to Péguy in Pound’s correspondence with his parents, nor in his letters to Harriet Monroe, or Margaret Anderson. 4 Sherry views certain figures of opposition involved in a similar quest to merge their aesthetic inquiry with social statement, such as Gourmont, Benda, Bergson, Sorel, and LeBon in France, Worringer and Lipps in Germany, the Italian futurists, and Ortega y Gasset in Spain (5). He compares the attacks of Sorel, Benda, and Gourmont on the French Parliament, without mentioning Péguy’s own similar attack in L’Argent (30-31). 5 Pound’s authorship was confirmed by Donald Gallup; see Sherry 55 and 205n29.

Works Cited Alain-Fournier. Lettres à sa famille et à quelques autres. Nouvelle édition. Paris: Fayard, 1991. —. Miracles. Ed. Jacques Rivière. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1988. Asher, Kenneth. T. S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Baechler, Lea, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach, eds. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, in Ten Volumes. Vol. 3. New York: Garland, 1991. Blackmur, R. P. “The Dangers of Authorship.” Rev. of After Strange Gods, by T. S. Eliot. Hound and Horn 7 (1934): 719-26. Rpt. in Jewel Spears Brooker, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 273-75. Burac, Robert. Charles Péguy: La révolution et la grâce. Paris: Laffont, 1994. Cattaui, Georges. “Ezra Pound et T. S. Eliot: Quelques influences réciproques.” Ezra Pound. Cahier de l’Herne, No. 6 et 7. Ed. Dominique de Roux and Michel Beaujour. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1997. 46772. Edwards, Dannah. “French Literature and Translation.” The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams. London: Greenwood, 2005. 122-26. Eliot, T. S. “A Commentary.” Criterion 11.44 (April 1932): 467-73.

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—. “Rencontre.” La Nouvelle Revue Française 139 (1925): 657-58. —. Rev. of La Trahison des clercs, by Julien Benda. TLS 23 Feb. 1928. —. Rev. of Avec Charles Péguy, de la Lorraine à la Marne, by Victor Boudon. New Statesman 7 Oct. 1916. —. “The Idealism of Julien Benda.” Cambridge Review 6 June 1928. —. “What France Means to You.” La France Libre 15 June 1944: 94-95. Fowlie, Wallace. “Baudelaire and Eliot: Interpreters of Their Age.” T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. Ed. Allen Tate. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. 299-315. Greene, Edward J. H. T. S. Eliot et la France. Paris: Bovin et Cie, 1951. Hargrove, Nancy. T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009. Hill, Geoffrey. “Between Politics and Eternity.” The Poet’s Dante. Ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2001. —. Collected Poems. London: Penguin, 1985. Julliard, Jacques and Michel Winock, eds. Dictionnaire des intellectuels français. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Laichter, Frantisek. Péguy et ses Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Trans. Dominique Fournier. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985. Leplay, Michel. “L’amitié entre Alain-Fournier et Charles Péguy.” Bulletin des Amis de Jacques Rivière et d’Alain-Fournier 117 (2007): 189200. Monroe, Harriet. “Poetry’s Banquet.” Poetry 4.1 (1914): 25-29. Murry, John Middleton. “Art and Philosophy.” Rhythm 1.1 (1911): 9-12. Rpt. in Pondrom, The Road from Paris. 54-57. —. Aspects of Literature. London: W. Collins Sons & Co, 1920. —. Between Two Worlds. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. —. The Evolution of an Intellectual. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1920. Orwell, George. “Points of View. T. S. Eliot.” Rev. of The Dry Salvages, by T. S. Eliot. Poetry 2.7 (1942): 56-59. Rpt. in Jewel Spears Brooker, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 452-55. Péguy, Charles. Œuvres Complètes III. Ed. Robert Burac. Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1992. Pondrom, Cyrena N. The Road From Paris: French Influence on English Poetry 1900-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Pound, Ezra. “The Approach to Paris.” New Age 13.25 (1913). Rpt. in Pondrom, The Road from Paris. 174-200. —. “The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry.” Poetry 9.5 (1918): 264-71. Rpt. in Baechler, et al., Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose. 55-58.

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Rey-Herme, Yves, ed. Correspondance Charles Péguy Alain-Fournier: Paysages d’une amitié. Rev. ed. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Rosaye, Jean-Paul. T. S. Eliot, poète-philosophe: Essai de typologie génétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2000. Rivière, Jacques. “Alain-Fournier.” (1922-3, 1924), preface to AlainFournier, Miracles. Paris: Fayard, 1986. Also in Alain-Fournier. Le Grand Meaulnes. Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2009. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Scott, Thomas L., Melvin J. Friedman, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence. New York: New Directions, 1988. Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Stead, C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. London: Macmillan, 1986. Taupin, René. L’Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à 1920). Paris: Honoré Champion, 1929.

PART II: ELIOT AND EUROPE

CHAPTER TEN ELIOT AND THEORY TOMISLAV BRLEK

the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life —T. S. Eliot (Essays Ancient and Modern 63)

According to most market indices tracking the academic stock exchange, “T. S. Eliot and theory” is a subject one would be ill-advised to invest in. There is no place for an “and” between the notions believed to be mutually exclusive in current academic wisdom. Edward Said is fairly representative in writing that “American literary theory … came of age only in the 1970s” (World 1), whereas “the period until the early 1960s” was the age of “the intellectual hegemony of Eliot, Leavis, Richards, and the New Critics,” of whom Eliot was, he allows, “much the most international critic” (164). This figure of an Eliot whose “extraordinary powers of codification and influence produced the almost too familiar canon of critical practices and touchstones” (Reflections xviii) regularly figures in discussions of Eliot in relation to “theory” on the AngloAmerican academic scene. Our concern here are the figures of theory in Eliot’s writing, in particular the asseverations that they are only notable by their absence. As we shall try to show, that if the term theory is understood “in the Greek sense of that word” (Sacred Wood 171), nothing could be farther from the truth. It is true that Eliot was more of an essayist than a scholar, that his voluminous articles reveal a mind not limited by the silos of academic disciplines, and that he preferred outlining many notions to pressing few to their furthest conclusions. However, this neither warrants the condescension of theorists to Eliot’s philosophical chops, nor does it excuse Eliot scholars who chose to ignore that Eliot was an academically trained philosopher, having written a doctoral dissertation which his professor Josiah Royce deemed “expert” (L1 156). As M. A. R. Habib rightly complains, in a little read book that fully corroborates his statement, “to imagine that Eliot, whose philosophical reading and ability

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vastly exceeded that of any of his critics, somehow lacked the capacity for so-called ‘abstract’ thought, is clearly absurd” (119). As opposed to “the Greek sense of that word,” the American usage of the term “theory” seems to be marked by a conspicuous predilection for a mode of criticism that unearths various historical sources and unfathomable biographical currents even as it silently passes over the fact that biographical and historical figures are themselves available only as inscribed in the figures of writing. Therein lies the relevance of Derrida’s insight that any “discourse of history” must be poor if it can only “chatter on about heritages, readings, borrowings, biographical inner springs” (Margins 275). Said’s claim for Eliot’s “extraordinary powers of codification and influence” would surely fare poorly, for instance, in light of the fact that Eliot failed to persuade the Times to publish his obituary appreciation of Joyce, quoting Gosse and Bennett instead (see “A Message to the Fish”). And how could Eliot be accused of promoting a rigid canon of “touchstones” when he clearly endorsed the opposite view, to wit: “an atmosphere of diverse opinions seems to me on the whole favourable to the maturing of the individual; because when he does come to a conviction, he does so not by ‘taking a ticket,’ but by making up his own mind” (“Commentary” 452)? There is something to be said for such hegemony, as it contrasts tellingly with the current situation, where it is nigh on impossible to be considered a theorist, let alone obtain tenure, without “taking a ticket.” Under this new regime, Said insists that an intellectual’s task is “to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories.” In this spirit, he has reasonably complained of unsubstantiated accusations made against him: “Nothing by me was quoted: it was just supposed to be a matter of common knowledge” (Representations xi). Apparently, such courtesy does not extend to Eliot. Said declares that Eliot advocated the giving up of “amusement, pleasure, [and] relevance to worldly circumstances” in “reading of certain difficult texts,” and, more damningly, claims that as a critic Eliot produced but “narrow quibbles about Shakespeare, Johnson, Dickens, and numerous others whom he did not consider serious or grave or hieratic enough” (Humanism 16). Said neither cites where Eliot allegedly condemned pleasure in reading, nor does he bother to summarize what Eliot’s quibbles were or why they were so trivial. It is just supposed to be a matter of common knowledge. And while we may quibble about whether only the serious, the grave or the hieratic were of interest to Eliot—who considered a lack of a sense of humor to be a severe deficiency (see TCC 25)—it is patently untrue that he excluded enjoyment from reading (see, for example, UPUC 9).

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In fact, whenever Eliot makes a token appearance as a villain in the writings of the proponents of theory, grievous ignorance of his work is usually demonstrable. Witness Christopher Norris, apropos of nothing whatsoever, invoking T. S. Eliot’s well-known pronouncement that the great task of modern literature and criticism was to effect a “complete severance between poetry and belief,” thus leaving poetry free to explore ranges of human experience and cultural memory untouched by the encroachments of modern secular rationalism. (Deconstruction 156)

There is a good reason no specific reference is provided for this “wellknown” pronouncement: none could possibly be found. It was, rather, I. A. Richards who had claimed that Eliot had effected “a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs’” (Richards, “A Background” 520n).1 And it was Eliot himself who stated—twice, in fact—that Richards’s claim was to him “incomprehensible” (SE 269; see UPUC 122). As Norris’s disastrous misreading appears in a book which warns against “any too ready acceptance of a mode of thought which gains its uncanny … power from a professed disregard for basic standards of philosophical, interpretive, or textual-expository truth” (136), one might be excused for not taking Norris at his word when he claims that deconstruction has nothing to do “with textual ‘interpretation,’ of the kind developed to a high pitch of subtlety and refinement by literary critics from Coleridge to Eliot” (Derrida 18). One might be suspicious as well of Norris’s claim that “the dissociation of sensibility” is merely a variant of the “persistent nostalgia for some long-lost state of communal grace” derived from Rousseau’s “mythology of nature, origins and presence;” specifically, a “version of this homespun mythology that has exerted a very potent latter-day appeal” in which “the conservative implications are clear enough” (125). What is clear enough is that Norris has not read what Eliot had to say about Rousseau (see, for example, KE 198). But even if one is ignorant of Eliot’s take on Rousseau, Norris’s logic is still hard to credit: how could any notion still exert such malignant force when, as Frank Kermode has pointed out, it has been “wilting under well-directed criticism” (153) longer than any other of Eliot’s bon mots? Apart from those openly hostile to his critical practices, poor opinions of Eliot’s theoretical competence have been stated by some who should know better. George Steiner contends that Eliot’s literary criticism is “casual in its linguistic and philosophic interest” (94), and Tzvetan Todorov rules that “Eliot was neither a philosopher nor a scholar, but a poet and an essayist” (182). Such high-handed proclamations bespeak a

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striking unfamiliarity with his writings and an unwillingness to engage them against the grain of received wisdom whereby Eliot is consigned to a period of theoretical innocence. This inverted state of grace construed by current critical radicals is by no means universal, but peculiar to the English-speaking world. Again, Said is the spokesperson—or the poster boy—for this problem: “But how much more challenging [than the conventional historicist approach to literature] is a theoretic for study that takes writing as being produced for something formed in the writing: this was Mallarmé’s discovery” (World 138-39). True, but did not Eliot, keenly aware of the “battle [Mallarmé] fought with the syntax” (“Prose and Verse” 9), make this very point? “If poetry is a form of ‘communication,’ yet that which is to be communicated is the poem itself” (UPUC 21); in the writing of the poem, in the poem as writing, “something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before” (OPP 124), because “what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed” (UPUC 131; see 137). For Michael Edwards, who is emphatic on the point, it was only in his poetry that Eliot was able to engage “the problem of language radically” (48); it “seems to have no corroboration from his criticism” (45; see also 38). Strange as it may appear, the idea that Eliot lost his “sense of language” when writing prose is common. In his unjustly neglected study of the problems of literary theory, Metacriticism, Suresh Raval argues that it is “clear that [Eliot] grasped the principle of aesthetic relativity” and “therefore differs from the New Critics and others who propose definitions of poetry,” as well as from Arnold’s “ideal and immutable touchstones.” The problem, Raval rightly suggests, is that this difference has not been “generally noticed” due to Eliot’s laconic style (167). It takes a Borges to realize that Eliot is, “como Valéry, un prosista ejemplar” [like Valéry, an exemplary prose writer] (Textos cautivos 98), for things go curiously offkilter even when Eliot is read by avowed adherents of close reading. The alleged innocence of Eliot and other Anglophone critics with respect to theory is elaborated upon by Geoffrey Hartman: when we “set Eliot, Richards, and Leavis beside Lukács, Benjamin, and Valéry, the differences cannot be overlooked” (Criticism 5). Not that Eliot fits into this scheme neatly, since he was, “of course, strongly indebted to French developments,” and perhaps even “kept in touch with the Continent” (240). Hartman’s case in point for his claim that Eliot “supported the limitation on theory” (174) is truly breathtaking: Eliot’s observation that “criticism is as inevitable as breathing” (SP 37) apparently means that Eliot wants to widen “the gulf between philosophic criticism and practical

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criticism.” Eliot, Hartman explains, “did not want to emphasize” criticism “as an activity that should receive special attention” but “saw it as a natural rather than specialized function” (4). Eliot’s whole point, however, is that criticism is like breathing insofar as it happens unnoticed—and should precisely for that reason be analyzed. We cannot not criticize, but we can be, and for the most part are, unaware of how we go about it. We should criticize the critic, that is, “our own minds in their work of criticism” (SP 37). In support of his idiosyncratic view, Hartman can only marshal evidence from the stock of idées reçues: Eliot “armed himself with the received past: established religion, classical art, conservative politics” (13). While Eliot’s historical “thesis is not naïvely progressivist,” Hartman continues, “yet it flatters our capacity to bear or recreate the past without … distortion” (55). Eliot’s writings are never so much beyond our capacities to bear the past as when we adopt a naïvely progressivist stance of believing that there is no time like the present. On the rare occasions when Eliot’s theoretical thinking does receive credit, it is in the form of a backhanded compliment. Terry Eagleton contends that “Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot, who are not usually seen as ‘theorists,’ are sometimes quite as abstract as Jacques Derrida” (75). Such faint praise is no more appreciative than Paul Morrison’s The Poetics of Fascism, where the author first affirms the bond between Eliot and theory and then condemns both as quietist: The shared opposition to tropes of achieved interrelatedness, aesthetic totalizations, betrays a massive devaluation of cultural labor, a deeply antiutopian impulse. Eliot would have us see things as they are, see that they cannot be otherwise, and see that they will never suffice. Poststructuralism would have us see things as they are, see they cannot be otherwise, and celebrate the impasse as the “radical.” (10)2

Naturally, such cultural laborers who believe they have “achieved interrelatedness” cannot possibly accept the double bind of Eliot’s claim that it is “not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be” (SE 399). Likewise, they would balk at Eliot’s idea that “the free intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to inquiry” (SP 56). Far easier, not to say complacent, to give in to “a tendency to legislate rather than to inquire” (SP 56), especially perhaps among the champions of freedom. Deconstruction is conservatism by default—in Paul de Man it teaches the many ways to say that there is nothing to be done. The mood is all from early T. S. Eliot. We are Prufrocks all, all hollow men, who inhabit the

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wasteland that we know now is the humanities wing of the modern university: “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” (Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change 51)

But this mood is likewise all from early Eliot: “We would see a sign” (CPP 37), not multiply varieties of meanings in a wilderness of interpretive mirrors. It might seem odd that, on the one hand, there is Said’s “Eliot,” who is a literary fascist, exerting a hegemonic control over the critical landscape, while on the other, there is Lentricchia’s and Morrison’s “Eliot,” whose pessimism unfits him from exerting any kind of political control. Framing the reception of Eliot as “theorist,” what both these views have in common is the refusal to read, evident in substituting the write-up of “theories” for the movement of truly theoretical writing. For it is Prufrock who is paralyzed; the poem in which he appears most certainly is not. What could possibly explain such tergiversations? Eliot said that in his youth France had represented above all “la poésie” (IMH 406). If in our own eyes France represents above all “la théorie,” this is in large measure due to the work of a poet, Paul Valéry, whose influence on literary theory in France “cannot be exaggerated” (Rabaté, Future 79; see Compagnon 1). Given that Eliot’s intellectual kinship with Valéry likewise cannot be overstated (see Marx, Naissance), why should Eliot suffer such abuse at the hands of “theory”? Perhaps the true point of contact between “Eliot” and “theory” obtains in the avoidance of reading. Paul de Man’s succinct claim that “the resistance to theory is in fact a resistance to reading” (15) is often repeated, but its import is just as often unnoticed: the evasion of reading is not mere disregard, but evidence of uncanny intimations. Maybe what is at stake is not a question of accurate references, or of “how much must be read of any particular” author, but of Eliot’s contribution being “of a very different kind from that of any other [author] of equal reputation” (SE 323). Here we enter the domain presided over by Harold Bloom, who pits Eliot against Borges on the issue of tradition: “Borges remarks that poets create their precursors. If the dead poets, as Eliot insisted, constituted their successors’ particular advance in knowledge, that knowledge is still their successors’ creation, made by the living for the needs of the living” (19). With this implicit contrast (“still”), Bloom saddles Eliot with the naïve belief that the canon (“dead poets”) is a self-evident body of knowledge, a naïveté that Bloom takes it upon himself to correct. The problem is that no such correction is necessary, as Eliot maintained otherwise. If “every generation must make its own appraisal of the poetry of the past, in the light of the performance of its contemporaries” (UPUC 56), then the new

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work is “certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics,” or “it would not be new,” and “novelty is better than repetition.” But the process “is not one-sided” (SP 38-39). With exemplary pithiness, Bloom avails himself of the oft used legerdemain of attributing to Eliot the view that is the opposite of the one that he demonstrably holds. In fact, Borges explicitly draws on Eliot, providing the following gloss on “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” notable for its penchant for negative definition, a favorite heuristic device of Eliot’s: Llego a la tesis formulada por Eliot. No es la vindicación o el instrumento de un gusto personal. No se propone recusar el acumulado orden clásico ni promete a sus clientes un talismán que vaticine glorias. No es una idea política…. Su corolario—la influencia del presente sobre el pasado—es de una veracidad literal, aunque parece una travesura relativista. Pruebas no 3 faltan. (Textos recobrados 52)

And in his seminal text on Kafka, Borges credits Eliot as the precursor of his idea that “every writer creates his own precursors” (Labyrinths 201). Perhaps Bloom in turn offers himself as the ultimate proof of his theory of misprision. Following in Bloom’s steps, while also playing Eliot off him, Gregory Jay construes Eliot’s tradition as a contradiction in order to save Eliot from his own writing: “Eliot’s logocentrism chooses his spatial metaphor [“ideal order”], but the essay’s genealogical rhetoric and its expression of the new poet’s labor of acquisition belie the metaphysical figuration of tradition.” However, if “simultaneity is a modernist spatial metaphor troping time into order” (Poetics 77), why does Eliot write “simultaneous order,” which, on Jay’s reading, could only mean “ordered order”? The contradiction would arise if order annulled time, but that is exactly what Eliot is well aware it does not do. Because “the word [tradition] itself implies movement,” it evidently “cannot mean standing still” (ASG 2324). The drift of Eliot’s argument is precisely not to trope time into space; why else would tradition involve (and “in the first place,” no less) “the historical sense”? The past is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” as they are “measured by each other” in a process of change—which, incidentally, is why tradition “cannot be inherited”—and “this change is a development which abandons nothing” (SP 38-39), being the pure potentiality of everything: precisely, the ideal order. In spatial terms, Eliot’s order would be space ceaselessly folding upon itself—in time. In a passage Jay draws on, Jacques Derrida explicitly opposes the structuralism of Jean Rousset to what Derrida calls the “project of an

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infinite tradition,” which is predicated upon the “emancipation of meaning from the natural predicament in which everything refers to the disposition of a contingent situation,” that is, according to Derrida, both the “essential objective” and the “fatal risk” of inscription, whose “essential characteristic is to be infinitely transmissible” (Writing 11). Thus, it is tradition that makes possible what Derrida calls “the history of the meaning of the work itself, of its operation” (14). This is essentially different from historicist history because this “meaning present[s] itself as such at the point at which the other is found, the other who maintains both the vigil and the back-and-forth motion, the work, that comes between writing and reading, making this work irreducible” (11). For Derrida, the work of reading/writing is irreducible because it involves and enables the constant fusion of horizons that are constantly changing. It is certainly not reducible, as in Jay’s simplistic characterization of Eliot, to “a rhetoric of denial that obscured the human problems at stake in his work” (5). On the contrary, Eliot’s awareness of the human problems involved in the work of reading as writing is no less keen than Derrida’s: The poem’s existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to “express,” or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader. (UPUC 21)

Or, as Derrida would say: “Meaning is neither before nor after the act” (Writing 11). Of course, for Eliot, pure reading must remain an ideal as long as it “is an affair of limited and transient human beings existing in space and time” (UPUC 101), just as for Derrida, the fact that “this project of an infinite tradition” is unrealizable “is the mark of its pure finitude and its pure historicity.” Still, it “must be acknowledged and respected in its sense as a project” (12). It is precisely the fact that reality is impossible to grasp in an absolute sense that opens up the absolute possibilities of reality. Why this postulate should have important consequences for theory is closely related to the point Eliot makes about the effect that systematic investigation has on whatever it investigates: “In the process, reality has changed, in one sense; for the world of your theory is certainly a very different world from the world from which you began.” This difference, however, is precisely something the methodical investigator or system-builder cannot see: “To the builder of the system, the identity binding together the appearance and the reality is evident; to anyone outside of the system it is not evident” (KE 167). If literary theory exposes culture where convention postulated nature, if it “comes about when the premises of ordinary discourse on

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literature are no longer accepted as self-evident” (Compagnon 6), then any systematic inquiry which proceeds by established protocols, produces calculable results, and can be formalized is not theory. The importance of this point for readers of Eliot cannot be overstated, as it explains not only his method but his style, and, crucially, the relation between the two. Eliot preferred the essay over more formal modes of exposition for the same reason that he deployed rebounding structures in his writing—to circumvent the rebating effects of communication by making it as difficult as possible to reduce his texts to an aphoristic idea. As Derrida writes—insisting it is something he has already “said countless times”—what might be called deconstruction is “a process not of breaking, which makes no sense,” but of “reconsidering all the contracts” (Resistances 56). While emancipation from the language of metaphysics “must be attempted,” it can only ever be “as the dream of emancipation,” never as an “emancipation from it, which would be meaningless and would deprive us of the light of meaning. Rather, as resistance to it, as far as is possible” (Writing 28). Since Eliot maintained that “only by going too far can we find out how far we can go” (OPP 36) as “the relations, proportions, values of each [part] toward the whole are readjusted” (SP 68), he was clearly thinking along cognate lines. Most importantly, he practiced what he preached in his writing. On this view, the poet is of necessity a critic,4 concerned with shaking the ossified structures of thought and expression: “The artist, being always alone, being heterodox when everyone else is orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else is heterodox, is the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real” (VMP 288-89). As Compagnon reminds us, theory is marked by “a literary self-reflection (a critical inversion, a self-consciousness or selfreferentiality)” (9), characteristics which are also the distinguishing features of modernism as it has been conceived since Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Which is why Derrida, writing not incidentally on the latter, professes: “We here note a point/lack of method [point de méthode]: this does not rule out a certain marching order” (Dissemination 274). In other words, Derrida claims that the absence of a perfectly rigorous theory not only does not prevent critical writing but in fact makes it possible. Likewise, Eliot claims to “have no general theory of [his] own” (UPUC 136) and instead demands that we “scrutinise narrowly our method at every possible moment” (VMP 59). And although to scrutinize a method presumes that we first have one, finally, Eliot shrugs, “there is no method except to be very intelligent” (SP 55). As de Man’s theory of resistance and Bloom’s of misprision foretell, the urge to deny that Eliot’s writings are attuned to theory appears to be

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most intense where proof is most evident: “For Eliot,” Maud Ellmann intones, “impersonality implied a reinstatement of traditional authority; for Barthes, the deconstruction of authority per se” (14). Sorting out the flawed claim that appears after the semi-colon would take us too far afield, and so we will concentrate on the insupportable one before it. That Eliot’s notion of impersonality is an instance of serious theoretical, rather than wishful, thinking was clear to Maurice Blanchot: Des écrivains peuvent être proches, les œuvres ne le sont pas. Il arrive qu’elles s’éclairent apparemment l’une l’autre et que, comme le dit T. S. Eliot, la dernière venue suscite et influence toute la littérature antérieure. (La Condition 256)

Scarce as Blanchot’s remarks on Eliot may be, they bear vitally on his own project and show that, for a careful reader, there are important theoretical points in Eliot’s ostensibly casual comments. It might sound as if Eliot is idly musing when he writes that, in his own experience, “towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working” (OPP 297). But Blanchot sees the theoretical implications in this apparently personal boutade: “[Eliot is] well aware that it is not only in the middle of his life but at each turn of himself, and at each new work, at each page of the work, that one of these three choices” presents itself, to be anticipated only by “a sort of dexterity” (The Book 103). Such dexterity calls to mind Eliot’s comment that Bradley “always assumed … a curious blend of humility and irony, an attitude of extreme diffidence about his own work,” while showing “obvious zest” in “discomfiting an opponent with a sudden profession of ignorance, of inability to understand, or of incapacity for abstruse thought.” Such moves are not “mere pose[s],” for on closer inspection, Bradley’s manner of writing “convinces us that the modesty is real, and his irony the weapon of a modest and highly sensitive man” (SP 196). That is to say that the first impression, though superficial, was accurate, even as it reveals that the superficial cannot be delimited with any accuracy. The words indeed do mean what they say, only more so. If what Said called secular criticism finds it unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot, that has perhaps less to do with his clerical cut, and more with his if, perhaps, and but. Could that be the reason why the grim brow and the prim mouth have been found so captivating at the expense of the wopsical hat? In the face of an uncorroborated claim that for Eliot “the church stands in for the lost family mourned throughout his earlier poetry” (Said, World 18), one can wonder whether from this vantage point reading is

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tantamount to a profession of religious belief. But Said’s next pronouncement confirms that his own method consists in cramming as many blunders into a single sentence as possible: And of course the shift is publicly completed in After Strange Gods whose almost belligerent announcement of a credo of royalism, classicism, and catholicism form [sic] a set of affiliations achieved by Eliot outside the filial (republican, romantic, protestant) pattern given him by the facts of his American (and outlandish) birth. (18)

Said’s performance here is nothing short of what, inveighing against Derrida, he describes as a “manner of muddling traditional thought beyond the possibility of its usefulness” (203). When Eliot, in a preface to a book subtitled Essays on Style and Order, wrote that his “general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion” (FLA vii), he did not arrange his adjectives at random. For him, “catholicism” and “anglo-catholicism” were not interchangeable, any more than Unitarianism (the actual part of the “filial pattern” that was “given” him by birth) was synonymous with Protestantism; nor did he ever consider America an “outlandish” place (see, for example, ASG 20; TCTC 45). Even leaving aside the solecism that belies a belligerence of its own, there is something seriously wrong with every part of this pronouncement. Compare Said’s “announcement of a credo” and “almost belligerent” to Eliot’s mild explanation of why he explains himself: “to refute any accusation of playing ’possum” (FLA vii). But Said cannot be expected to know this, since Eliot’s purported summary of his critical, political and religious position does not appear in After Strange Gods, as Said claims, but in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes. Said, nonetheless, follows a well-trodden path. Almost everyone who wrote about Eliot managed to misconstrue or truncate the statement, which in the commandingly massive Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism appears as “Anglican, conservative, New Critical formalist” (Leitch 1091). Jacqueline Rose is typical in holding Eliot responsible for the “ferocious effects of [a] particularly harsh type of literary super-ego” and its attendant “political repressiveness,” evidenced by “his later allegiance to Empire, Church and State,” which “[m]uch recent literary theory can be seen as an attempt to undo” (“Sexuality” 102; “Hamlet” 129). The surreptitiousness she avers to uncover in Eliot’s reading of Hamlet—an exploit facilitated by conflating him with Walter Pater—is, however, branded all over her own discourse. The ill-fated quip is worth dwelling upon as it demonstrates the tenaciousness of Eliot’s prose, even in snatches. For many readers, the

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pithy remark was perfect in its cogency. “La formule est marquante,” Stéphane Giocanti notes, immediately adding: “Elle a l’inconvénient du slogan. Cette triade ramasse en vérité tout une itinéraire, exprime des aboutissements susceptibles de nuances, et exige une définition de ses propres termes” (191). That this point should have escaped well-neigh every other commentator is all the more surprising considering that it is explicitly presented by Eliot “merely as an indication of what may be expected” from the “three small books” the author has “in preparation” in order “to make [his] present position clear.” (FLA vii) (The books were never written.) Even many of those favorably disposed to Eliot found it unnecessary to read beyond this sentence, a fact demonstrated by the unfortunate neglect of what immediately succeeds it: a virtual about-face. I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define. (FLA vii)

Couched in such indeterminate terms, the professed definition is thus shown to lack a solid foundation, while its author is stripped of all authority, save to expose himself to ridicule: the terms used are “completely vague,” “without definition,” or their definition is not for the writer to make. After such knowledge, what forgiveness for the critics fuddling this self-cancelling announcement as a means of discrediting its author? Interestingly, no sooner does he read what Eliot actually wrote than Said finds much to agree with. Effectively opening his book Culture and Imperialism with a substantial quote from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he pronounces that, despite the various shortcomings of Eliot’s notion of tradition, “his central idea is valid: how we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding and views of the present” (4), and notes elsewhere that “the relevance of T. S. Eliot’s remarks … about the historical sense are [sic] demonstrably important” (55). What is more, nowhere in the book—which contains several references to Eliot and just about ends by echoing his echoes that inhabit the garden (see 336)—is there any mention of “Eliot’s conservative sense of tradition,” his “austere canonizations of European monuments,” or of his “idea of the great Western masterpieces enduring together,” as Said was in the habit of putting it elsewhere (Reflections 251 and 380). A little reading goes a long way, even if the solecisms remain.

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A charge of unduly insisting on close reading is not leveled inadvertently against both “Eliot” and “theory” by those who regard paying close attention to texts as the insidious intention of deflecting consideration from more pressing issues, namely the “actual” social, historical, and political contexts in which texts are supposed to be embedded, even as the obviously inferential, hence abstract, nature of contexts is conveniently disregarded. The argument against reading as an iniquitous patrimony of New Criticism was expressly put forth by William E. Cain (later one of the editors of The Norton Anthology). Even though for Lentricchia and most others, New Criticism had been in “moribund condition” since “about 1957” (After 4), for Cain New Criticism was evidently not only alive and kicking in the early 1980s but “so woven into the fabric of critical discourse that its assumptions are not recognized as assumptions at all” (112). Chief among such hidden assumptions is the idea that literary criticism involves reading texts. Precisely that, Cain helpfully explains, is the trap. We read texts because we feel that they are far better, richer, more deeply textured and organically unified than any world that we know from daily experience. Returning to the text means, in this sense, turning away from the world and dwelling within the verbal structures that literature provides. (110-11)

There was some hope that certain French influences would remedy this sorry state of affairs, but on closer inspection, they turned out to be even worse offenders. For even though the American New Critics’ “placement of close reading at the center of English studies was mistaken,” (114) it is even more “misleading” to see the French and other continental methods as being opposed to it; French theory is just as dubiously “committed to ‘close reading’ and the production of more analyses of texts” (113). Unhappy with both sides of the Atlantic, Cain argues that criticism must be “more than simply literary criticism” (117), it must be—and here Cain sides with Leavis—“criticism of culture, society, and contemporary civilization” (115). Cain would be pleased to know that some progress has been made since. Lawrence Rainey, for one, underwrites the claim that the “best reading of a work may, on some occasions, be one that does not read it at all.” Though he does immediately admit that “[s]uch an extreme formulation would doubtless be misleading,” he nevertheless advocates abstaining from close reading as “a historical form of activity,” a modernist ploy devised to enable texts to remain “desocialized and unexplored” (Institutions 106). Rainey duly produced an annotated edition of The Waste Land, that is, from this point of view, almost perfect. When Jim

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McCue suggests that it “ought to be withdrawn until at least its textual errors have been corrected” (4), he is barking up the wrong tree. McCue mistakes Rainey’s purpose when he points out how “Rainey sceptically comments that [Eliot’s] writings of 1921 could be called classicist ‘only by a remarkable extension of the term,’ without realising that this extension is precisely what Eliot achieved” (24). Extending the reach of a term is exactly what Rainey’s (and Cain’s) approach is devised to forestall. Fudging the hazards of textual inquiry, this manner of “reading,” which refuses to read, enables one to proceed in assurance of certain certainties. There is no telling what concitations may ensue once terms become extended. The claim that Eliot is hardly read by his detractors (whether they be “theorists” or not) is borne out by the fact that those who actually took the trouble to read Eliot have found his critical writings accommodating of more contexts than are dreamed of in the philosophies en vogue in the academy: Peirce, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, dialectics, scepticism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, pragmaticism, Indic traditions, Buddhism, anthropology, popular culture, irony, etc.5 Reading Eliot, one might come to the same realization as Patricia Waugh: regarding literary impersonality, “[t]here is actually little in either Bloom or Barthes that is not at least strongly implied by Eliot” (385), and “Eliot’s critical essays convey a paradoxical ‘resistance to criticism’ akin to Paul de Man’s later ‘resistance to theory’” (387). John Paul Riquelme would even say that Eliot “helped to set in advance the agenda of deconstruction in Anglo-American literary criticism” (113). The day may conceivably be upon us when the Pope of Russell Square—that sanctimonious elitist, conservative bigot, and pious upholder of the established order—will be shown to have been nothing but a straw-filled head-piece. Rainey himself, attending closely to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” notices such minutiae as the “use of the passive voice in every clause that registers a critical moment” (“Eliot’s Poetics” 304) and readily admits that, since “[w]hat is being passed off as tradition is actually something quite different,” it has to be conceded that “Eliot’s notion of tradition … is not very traditional” (302). In other words, employing a move that is so pervasive that it might serve to define his style of writing, Eliot accomplishes the extension of the term “tradition,” redefining it to such an extent that it retains, in Derrida’s words, only “an anasemic relation to the traditional … uses of the word” (“Fors” xviii). As long as the terms mean what we know they have always meant, as long as what they mean goes without saying, we are on solid ground. “It is because

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writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing.” Whenever “[m]eaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself,” there is “no insurance against the risk of writing” (Writing 11). Never more so than in Eliot’s writing, which presents itself as an epitome of pellucid formality and elegantly intelligent sallies. The threat, however, is easily staved off: “writing simplified into image of voice is no danger” (Hartman, Saving xxii). So when for whatever reason we cannot do without reading, we had better do away with it. Regarding the case at hand, the only problem is that, for some reason, Hartman and others do not apply this insight when it comes to Eliot. Instead, a guiding image is fabricated of an Eliot who is misguided in his thinking and not quite in command of his writing capacities, an Eliot who either did not mean or did not write what he evidently did. As Reverend Sterne’s Yorick used to say, they order this matter better in France, where Antoine Compagnon can state that by 1919 Eliot already “reasoned like a structuralist” (18). Such a claim would be as inconceivable to most “theorists” writing in English, as would be the assertion that the role of Eliot in America and Great Britain would correspond rather well to the roles played by both Mallarmé and Valéry in France.6 Yet, an unpretentious textbook from 1974 offers a survey of modern literary scholarship informed by the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette, Derrida, Bakhtin and others, and it unashamedly presents this modern approach to literature as initiated by “James, Proust, Gide, Valéry, T.-S. Eliot … qui ont libéré l’image que la critique avait donnée de la création littéraire” (Cabanès 15). The new and liberating kind of criticism in which these authors engaged had for its stated purpose the rendering of “le texte lisible et clair, comme si le contenu de l’œuvre se manifestait dans une immédiate transparence, une fois éclairées les difficultées dues à la situation de l’œuvre dans l’histoire de la culture” (12). What made such criticism so refreshing is that it avoided explaining “l’œuvre surtout à partir de ce qu’elle n’est pas” and in the process losing sight of “la spécificité du fait littéraire” (12). Some version of these latter assumptions has now been directing literary studies in the English-speaking world for decades. In spite of all the verbal bluster of the adherents of that specifically American concept “theory” (see Cusset), they continue to conceive of literature in a pre- or non-theoretical way, that is, in terms of what it is not. Timothy Clark named this paradigm “institutional Americanism” (24), though it is in no way a prerogative of Americans, institutional or otherwise. That American universities foster theoretical instruction as a set of tools for generating “critical readings” by those impatient to assume the world was already

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noticed by Eliot in 1917, when he referred to an account of “the Symbolist Movement after it has been boiled down in an American University” (“Reflections” 134). In a seminal, and virtually unread, piece specifically addressing theory in the American academic context, Derrida succinctly describes its protocols of “self-legitimation, self-institution, and selfnomination,” all “letterheads and self-representation,” underpinned by the oldest historicist “cultural stratagem,” which is “to periodize violently,” with the phrase “pousse-toi de là que je m’y mette (‘shove off’)” (“Some Statements” 68). The root of such determinism is “a notion of identity,” Clark writes, “either as given or striven for” that serves “as an exhaustive principle of explanation for anything in or of the text at issue” (17). In the rigidity of its “self-righteous” (21) manner, “[t]exts and people are continually subjected to kinds of trial procedure designed to either condemn or acquit them of degrees of complicity in metaphysical/colonial/patriarchal thinking” (20). Exceeding the crudeness of its determinism, this approach is unavoidably impervious to reading, regarding all ambivalence, ambiguity, and irony as evasion. To wit: as long as there is something like “the lingering authority of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and prose” (Lamos 1), and one still has to read him, his writings should come complete with a user’s manual. In “the wake of the scathing criticism” of the likes of Harold Bloom, Maud Ellmann, and Terry Eagleton, “the literary pieties that formerly exalted [The Waste Land] have been abandoned,” and it “is now primarily of interest precisely for [its] errant tendencies,” so that “fragmentation, obscurity, and anti-Semitic and misogynistic representations appear as symptoms of modern aesthetic and social dilemmas” (108). Here we have yet another “Eliot” who stars as the unwitting protagonist of a cautionary tale: “the priggish tyrant of the canon whose authority was as oppressive as his politics were offensive” (59). It is from a very different cautionary tale, however, that conclusions should be drawn as regards the relations that can be said to obtain between Eliot and theory (no scare quotes). Like theory itself, these relations are complex and dynamic, and are not amenable to summary proceedings of academic fashions. Of the great names customarily recruited for the concept of “theory,” Jacques Lacan—who made attempts at translating Eliot’s poetry in his youth (see Rabaté, “Qui jouit” 166)—explicitly refers to Eliot’s essay on Hamlet in his seminar on the play.7 As Jean-Michel Rabaté has shown, despite “surface variations, Eliot’s interpretation is not that far from Lacan’s” (Jacques Lacan 62). While their verdicts on whether Hamlet is a “good play” are diametrically opposed, both Eliot and Lacan interpret the play as staging the endeavor “to express the

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inexpressibly horrible” and as an invitation “to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable” (SP 49). That such similar readings of a text should result in divergent evaluations of it is surely due to their dissimilar rationales: the text appears in a different light when considered as an effective dramatic structure or as a moment in a developing psychoanalytic argument. What is of the essence, however, is that although Eliot reads Hamlet as a play “and not another thing” (Sacred viii), he is nevertheless aware that reading “cannot stop at any point” (x). Lacan, for his part, even as he reads the play as “another thing,” does not disfigure the text to make it suit his purpose. Reading and interpretation are not the same thing, inasmuch as they of necessity involve each other. This is another point rather pointedly ignored in contemporary critical discourse. Yet another unheeded warning is the one against psychoanalyzing authors, a warning, Rabaté has noted, which Lacan issued “whenever he has directly commented on writers” (Language 11). Writing of “the boorishness, or the pedantry of a certain type of psychoanalysis,” Lacan insists that that the subject be understood as “a scientific term” (qtd. in Rabaté, Language 11). Such a correction might reveal to those who engage in cheap psychoanalysis why they are prone to “slipping into some kind of silliness: that for instance of attributing an author’s avowed technique to some neurosis” (11). Eliot similarly cautioned an earlier generation against botching terminology by attributing literary works, etiologically, to the author’s nervous system: “remember please that ‘nerves’ used in this way is a very vague and unscientific term” (FLA 96). Likewise, Eliot cautions against attributing a work, epistemologically, to the solipsistic subject: “we have the right to say that the world is a construction. Not to say that it is my construction, for in that way ‘I’ am as much ‘my’ construction as the world is; but to use the word as best we can without implying any active agent” (KE 166). For Lacan, as for Eliot, the subject can only ever be the function of intersubjective relations ceaselessly being reestablished in the field of the symbolic, that is, language: “Not only is man born into language in precisely the way he is born to the world; he is born through language” (My Teaching 27). As for those who think that Eliot would not go that far, how else are we to understand his claim that “one of the reasons for not acquiring a new language instead of [not in addition to] our own is that most of us do not want to become a different person” (OPP 8)? Lacan’s most interesting Eliot reference by far is his pillaging of The Waste Land for the texture and structure of his seminal Rome Discourse of 1953, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” perhaps the most cogent outline of his teaching (see My

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Teaching 83-84). The possibility of accord is, of course, resolutely rejected by those who would not allow that there could exist any “really astonishing convergences between Lacan and Eliot” (Rabaté, “Tradition” 219).8 Thus, Malcolm Bowie self-assuredly reads Lacan’s appropriation of the voice of the Thunder as “an encouraging retort to the final pages of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which make use of the same Sanskrit text” (Lacan 86), though he neglects to demonstrate how the two texts understand the Thunder so differently. Yet even a cursory reading of the Rome Discourse makes it obvious that, far from being confrontational, Eliot’s is an informing (if unnamed) presence in it. Michael Payne, one of the very few readers of Lacan to take up the tacit Eliot reference, goes so far as to describe the “extensive use of … The Waste Land as a structural analogue” as its “most unusual feature” (43), and sees even Lacan’s ironic use of footnotes as modeled on Eliot’s example. Lacan not only quotes from The Hollow Men, he borrows from Eliot the very same parts of two texts Eliot borrowed from, the episode from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and the sibyl anecdote from The Satyricon. And crucially, Lacan cites these two texts to make the same point that Eliot does: that there is no point except that which the recipient is capable of perceiving. “You have heard me,” the thunder-god concludes (Lacan, Écrits 265). It is up to the reader (or the patient) and not the author (or the analyst) to decide what has been said. Like the author, the reader is subject to, rather than the subject of, language, which is no one’s property. Hence, the borrowed texts: “Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic function of language to give his desire its symbolical mediation” (Lacan, Écrits 264). The gift of language (speech) is the essential property of humankind, for it should be understood that “it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality” (265). If Lacan is able to find corroboration for his teaching in Eliot’s poem, Pierre Pachet argues, it is because “Lacan ne suspend pas sa pensée devant la profondeur d’un poème, il est à la recherche de formules, de points brillants sur lesquels sa pensée va s’appuyer” (94). As the Discourse shows, Lacan agrees with Eliot on the topic of the “purification of language”: that the literary artist is engaged in the “perpetual return to the real” (VMP 290), since “the birth of truth in speech … brings us up against the reality of what is neither true nor false” (Lacan, Écrits 212). Lacan would have theorists (analysts, anyway) learn from poets rather than analyze them. In the curriculum for prospective analysts, Lacan urges the study of poetics, which he describes as “the supreme pinnacle of the

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aesthetics of language” (238) and which he claims as the “central field of our domain” (203). Against the “tide” of condescending attitudes to “wording,” Lacan advises following Freud in paying close attention to the “resources of a language [langue], especially those that are concretely realized in its poetic texts” (244). It will be remembered that Eliot posited the social function of poetry as being “a constant reminder of all the things that can only be said in one language, and are untranslatable” (OPP 1314). He likewise insisted that poets are saying exactly what they mean and meaning exactly what they say, even when the words they use are nonsense words such as runcible (see TCC 66). If the poet’s “direct duty is to his language” (OPP 9), so is that of the reader. There is no world elsewhere, an insight for which the protagonist of Coriolanus paid dearly. After reading Lacan, it is less easy to claim arid formalism as the reason why Eliot considered that play to be superior to Hamlet. There is a striking irony in Lacan’s warning against “the growing devaluation of speech in both analytic theory and technique” (Écrits 211). Were such a devaluation of speech to continue, it would block access to a patient’s use of language, the only thing with which an analyst can legitimately be concerned. The irony then, as Lacan spells it out, is that, “it would provide the only example of a method that forbade itself the means to its own ends” (211). It is the argument of this paper that “institutional Americanism”—namely, the general tendency to read literary texts for their ideological use value—has provided just such an example of a method that forbids the means to its own ends. The purpose here has not been to argue for Eliot as a precursor of Lacan or anyone else, but to recognize the fact that “Eliot’s critical thinking is developed in a language of wit as complex and dense as the language of his poetry” (Waugh 389). To be sure, Eliot generally eschews theoretical vocabulary, but as Deleuze points out, the “philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by numbers of quotations, … but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself” (162). In both polemical and apologetic modes, Eliot wrote about the problems of criticism and theory in language that is easily recognized as theoretical. If theoretical activity is best defined as a constant shifting of perspectives and re-conceptualization of the means of inquiry, then Eliot’s pronouncements are themselves the hallmark of a theoretical enterprise, as his pronouncements on the issues and nature of theory are very easy to come by, while much harder to hold. Which makes theory and poetry closely related: indeed, “no theory can amount to much which is not founded upon a direct experience of good poetry; but on the other hand our direct experience of poetry involves a good deal of generalising activity” (UPUC 6). While Eliot here refers to

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poetical theories, he has just remarked on the preceding page that the “poetry of a people takes its life from the people’s speech and in turn gives life to it; and represents its highest point of consciousness, its greatest power and its most delicate sensibility” (5). Thus, a generalized inference about the affinities of poetry and theory is not implausible. Derrida, for his part, states outright that “Valéry reminds the philosopher that philosophy is written. And that the philosopher is a philosopher to the extent that he forgets this” (Margins 291). One of the points of Derrida’s endeavor is that philosophy should not be “determined as the reflection of poetic inauguration,” nor should literary criticism be “determined” as the “philosophy of literature” (Writing 28), even as both, if for different reasons, should be concerned with the poetic function of language (as Lacan would say with Jakobson; Derrida’s term is the “power of poetry”) (Writing 12). It is because “that which is written is never identical to itself”—its “force” being “a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest” (Derrida, Writing 25)—that meanings can always be given and taken, but never possessed: DA.

Notes 1

Richards, who made this claim in the pages of The Criterion, responded to Eliot’s eventual bafflement in various editions of his book Poetries and Sciences (for which, see 64n). 2 Sweeping claims of this sort notwithstanding, Morrison’s nuanced reading of (as opposed to inferred assertions about) Eliot in this tendentiously titled work repays scrutiny. 3 Translation: “I come to the thesis formulated by Eliot. It is neither a vindication nor an instrument of personal taste. It is not proposed that the accumulated classical order be rejected, nor are its patrons promised a good-luck charm heralding glories. It is not a political idea…. Its corollary—the influence of the present on the past—is a literal truth, although it seems a relativist prank. There is no lack of proofs.” 4 “The mind of Shakespeare was one of the most critical that has ever existed” (Sacred Wood 168). 5 See the work of Jewel Spears Brooker, David E. Chinitz, Robert Crawford, Harriet Davidson, Cleo McNelly Kearns, Walter Benn Michaels, Daniel O’Hara, Jeffrey M. Perl, Richard Shusterman, William V. Spanos, and, si licet, Tomislav Brlek (on Eliot and Lotman). 6 “Mallarmé plus Valéry correspondraient assez bien à celui d’Eliot auprès Américaines et des Britanniques” (Giocanti 14). 7 “Le séminaire: Hamlet.” The shortened English version, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” omits the reference to Eliot.

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8

While Rose likewise sees the “proximity” between Lacan’s reading of Hamlet and the Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as “truly striking” (“Sexuality” 115), she does not develop it in any way and completely ignores Lacan’s reference to Eliot.

Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. La Condition critique: Articles 1945-1998. Ed. Christophe Bident. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. —. The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1962. —. Textos cautivos. 2nd ed. Madrid: Alianza, 1998. —. Textos recobrados 1931-1955. Barcelona: Emecé, 2002. Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Brlek, Tomislav. “Polyphiloprogenitive: T. S. Eliot’s Notion of Culture.” TRANS: Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15 (2004). Web. Brooker, Jewel Spears. Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. Cabanès, Jean-Louis. Critique littéraire et sciences humaines. Toulouse: Privat, 1974. Cain, William E. The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Chinitz, David E. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Clark, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. Compagnon, Antoine. Literature, Theory, and Common Sense. Trans. Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Cusset, François. French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2003. Davidson, Harriet. T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Janis Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. —. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Foreword. Trans. Barbara Johnson. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. xi-xlviii. —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. —. Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. —. “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms.” Trans. Anne Tomiche. The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse. Ed. David Carroll. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 63-94. —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic, 2003. Edwards, Michael. Eliot/Language. Breakish: Prospice, 1975. Eliot, T. S. “A Commentary.” Criterion 13.52 (April 1934): 451-54. —. Essays Ancient and Modern. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. —. “A Message to the Fish.” Horizon 3 (1941): 173-75. —. “Prose and Verse.” Chapbook 22 (1921): 3-10. —. “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II.” The Egoist 4.9 (1917): 13334. —. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1928. Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Giocanti, Stéphane. T. S. Eliot ou le monde en poussières. Paris: Lattès, 2002. Habib, M. A. R. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. —. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

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Jay, Gregory S. T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Kearns, Cleo McNelly. “Negative Theology and Literary Discourse in Four Quartets: A Derridean Reading.” New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. 13157. —. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Kermode, Frank. The Romantic Image. London: Collins/Fontana, 1970. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Literature and Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Hulbert. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 11-52. —. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. —. “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein.” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault 52 (1965): 7-15. —. “Le séminaire: Hamlet.” Ornicar 25 (1982): 13-36. —. My Teaching. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 2008. Lamos, Colleen. Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Leitch, Vincent B., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. —. Criticism and Social Change. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Marx, William. Naissance de la critique moderne: La littérature selon Eliot et Valéry. Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2002. McCue, Jim. “Editing Eliot.” Essays in Criticism 56.1 (2005): 1-27. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Philosophy in Kinkanja: Eliot’s Pragmatism.” Glyph 8 (1981): 170-202. —. “The Interpreter’s Self: Peirce on the Cartesian ‘Subject.’” ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 185-200. Morrison, Paul. The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction and the “Unfinished” Project of Modernity. London: Athlone, 2000. —. Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. O’Hara, Daniel. “‘The Unsummoned Image’: T. S. Eliot’s Unclassic Criticism.” boundary 2 9.1 (1980): 91-124.

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Pachet, Pierre. “Goût et mauvais goût de Jacques Lacan.” Lacan et la littérature. Ed. Éric Marty. Houilles: Manucius, 2005. 89-98. Payne, Michael. Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Perl, Jeffrey M. Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature. London: Palgrave 2001. —. Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” London: Macmillan, 1986. —. “Qui jouit de la joie de Joyce?” Lacan et la littérature. Ed. Éric Marty. Houilles: Manucius, 2005. 157-180. —. The Future of Theory. London: Blackwell, 2002. —. “Tradition and T. S. Eliot.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 210-22. Rainey, Lawrence, ed. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. —. “Eliot’s Poetics: Classicism and Histrionics.” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David E. Chinitz. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 301-10. —. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Raval, Suresh. Metacriticism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981. Richards, I. A. “A Background for Contemporary Poetry.” Criterion 3.12 (July 1925): 511-28. —. Poetries and Sciences. New York: Norton, 1970. Riquelme, John Paul. Harmony of Dissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Rose, Jacqueline. “Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London: Methuen, 1985. 95-118; 229-231. Revised as “Hamlet—the ‘Mona Lisa’ of Literature.” Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986. 123-40. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. —. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. —. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. —. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996. —. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Shusterman, Richard. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Spanos, William V. “Hermeneutics and Memory: Destroying T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Genre 11.4 (1978): 523-73.

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—. “Repetition in The Waste Land: A Phenomenological De-struction.” boundary 2 7.3 (1979): 225-85. Steiner, George. Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York: Atheneum, 1971. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Morals of History. Trans. Alyson Waters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. Waugh, Patricia. “Legacies: From Literary Criticism to Literary Theory.” T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 381-94.

CHAPTER ELEVEN IT SOUNDS LIKE WRITING TO ME: SPEECH, THE AUDITORY IMAGINATION, AND ELIOT’S RADIO BROADCASTS FABIO VERICAT

In 1929, Eliot began broadcasting his critical works over the radio. Performing in a new medium catalyzed Eliot’s search for the meter of dramatic poetry in ways that his previous work as a modernist poet may have not. The radio, in particular, played a key role in Eliot’s increasing awareness of the text as a performed sound script. The experience of working for the radio helped him to understand that when the prose of his criticism was subjected to the spoken register demanded by a radio broadcast, it could attain unsuspected poetic heights. It is the performed prose of his criticism that may have offered an unlikely method for evoking the verbal sounds with which to rethink the metrical qualities of modern poetry. To do so, Eliot had first to reconcile himself with his ideologically inflected suspicion of mere sound, not only in the form of the ineffable music of a blind Puritan poet, John Milton, but also in the form of the “Inner Voice”—as he dismissively termed the subjective excesses of that phenomenon in “The Function of Criticism” (SP 73). His initial management of such phonophobia had tended to establish how seeing what we read on the page might be separated from hearing what we read there, but he was later to admit that the two were intimately connected— that there might be something akin to the “sound of the sense of the word” (VMP 130), as he would put it in the Clark Lectures. I contend that radio broadcasting helped Eliot to pinpoint legitimate poetic sounds by understanding writing as inherently performative as speech, and ultimately to reconcile with Milton’s auditory imagination. Crucially, his broadcasts also allowed him to address his recurring, unresolved intuition that there may not be an absolute difference between verse and prose. Nevertheless,

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even as the sounds of performed prose seem to promise the metrical salvation of poetry, Eliot, hard as he tries, is never quite able to define the prosody of conversational speech. It is perhaps because the sound of poetry is not that of an actual voice after all, but that of the writing itself.

I One of Eliot’s critical touchstones is the auditory imagination, which condemns in no uncertain terms the kind of poetry that exalts the ear at the expense of the eye. Swinburne often comes in for a drubbing on such grounds, but Eliot’s main culprit is the blind poet of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who is further to blame for a dissociation of sensibility between thought and feeling—“from which we have never recovered” (SP 64). But in spite of his own privileging of the eye, Eliot had been interested, since his earliest published essays, in the issues of prosody and sound. His appreciation of the acoustic elements of poetry gain ground in the later essays, as suggested in his memorable statement that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” (SP 206), even when the context is Dante, his favorite visual poet. Eliot is here referring to his experience of reading Dante before he knew Italian well. His comments seem to imply that poetic language has its own aural selfsufficiency, a quality that becomes especially obvious to a reader who has no way of knowing a foreign word’s equivalence, and sound alone becomes the autonomous transmitter of meaning. Dante makes us see, and therein lies his universality and Eliot’s praise. The difficulty, though, is that there is no way that the verbal can project the visual without first making, or implying, sound. In fact, Eliot had always been sensitive to the acoustic protocols of literature, even as he (sometimes) played coy about its allure. From the start, Eliot was ever ready to be suspicious of the invisible airways of literature, whether channelled through the rhetorical or musical registers. This suspicion is a recurrent obsession that gives away Eliot’s ideological investment in such sensorial bias. It is no coincidence that John Milton is not only blind but a Puritan. Eliot’s pejorative take on the auditory imagination is an inevitable consequence of favoring the Catholic hermeneutics of visual intermediality of truth versus the Protestant preference for the ineffability of aural immediacy. The denunciation of such Protestant “enthusiasm” is already implied in Eliot’s pre-conversion description of the Inner Voice in “The Function of Criticism” (1923) which links radical aurality with Whiggery and mob psychology.

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It is no small irony, however, that Eliot’s most explicit expression of allegiance to the imagistic poetics of Dante in 1929 coincides with the beginning of his lifelong collaboration with the BBC.1 Indeed, to listen to a radio broadcast is to be blinded by the medium. The first thing we lose sight of is the writing, as words seem to adopt a purely acoustic existence. At least up until 1936, Eliot was still resisting a total reconciliation with literary acoustics, arguing in his first Milton essay that under blind conditions poetry may become merely rhetorical and musical, with disastrous effects for the English language. But at the same time, Eliot’s critical output was gradually migrating to the oral medium. As he admits in the preface to On Poetry and Poets (1957), which selects criticism published between 1926 and 1956, Eliot increasingly turned from the literary mode of the journal publications that had been contained in Selected Essays (1932) to the oral address: “Of the sixteen essays which make up [On Poetry and Poets],” Eliot informs his reader, “ten were originally addressed directly to audiences; an eleventh essay, that on Virgil, was a broadcast talk” (xi). As a collection, On Poetry and Poets does not contradict his early wariness of sound; rather, it attempts to map the sort of sound he is prepared to encourage in literature. As we will see, by searching in literature for an acoustic register other than that offered by music, Eliot opens the door to accepting the sounds of prose as potentially poetic. And he wonders whether that alternative register might be speech sounds. In “The Music of Poetry” (1942), Eliot notes that “if you object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective ‘musical’ can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense” (OPP 26). Here Eliot is struggling with what it may mean to talk about a “musical poem.” What comes across is that, if there is such a thing as a musical poem, it must be understood in terms other than the absolute acoustics of music. Eliot is not rejecting sound but effectively looking for an alternative acoustic model. One clue as to what Eliot is getting at is his suggestion that literature only resonates legitimately when sound and sense converge in language, an idea he had expressed in the Clark Lectures (1926) as “the sound of the sense of the word” (VMP 130). What that phrase might mean is what concerns us here. It will be worth framing Eliot’s ambivalence towards poetic sound in terms of recent approaches to literary acoustics as theorized by Wai Chee Dimock. Her theory of resonance considers that the acoustic imbrications in the production of literary meanings are time bound:

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In Dimock’s telling, all reading is an acoustic experience. For an individual reader, that acoustic experience—what Garrett Stewart calls “evocalization” or silent textual sounding—is located “in the conjoint cerebral activity and suppressed muscular action of a simultaneously summoned and silenced enunciation” (Stewart 1). Like Stewart, Dimock challenges the historical idealism that has traditionally dominated literary acoustics (1061). For Dimock though, literary interpretation is subject to the acoustic reception of a text, which varies depending on the temporal positioning of its reader. There is nothing of music’s absolute acoustic value in the sounds literature makes. Rather, even while we are reading to ourselves, the inner ear acts as an antenna attuned to the resonance of the literary airwaves as they emanate from the page. And all of these sonic emanations, Dimock argues, are triggered by varying contexts—both those of the reader and of the writer. The “historical sense” which Eliot describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” may smack of the synchronic historicism against which Dimock argues, but only if we fail to engage with the issues that Eliot’s discussion leaves suggestively unresolved. How exactly does synchrony (tradition) remake itself every time something new (individual talent) comes along the diachronic axis? Eliot’s historical idealism is, in fact, only skin deep. In his famous essay of 1919 he is still struggling to articulate the nuance of an ideal order that is also in constant mutation. The complexities of this historicism become even clearer when we consider the acoustic sounds of literature that Eliot was trying to puzzle out. By 1942, his expression of the problem is closer to Dimock’s theory of resonance: here Eliot admits of no universal rules of classical prosody to which one could unquestionably adhere, namely because we can only guess what those rules sounded like at the time, particularly when Latin was arguably “overlaid by the influence of a very different language—Greek.” Eliot suspects that to the cultivated audience of the age of Virgil, part of the pleasure in the poetry arose from the presence in it of two metrical schemes in a kind of counterpoint: even though the audience may not necessarily have been able to analyse the experience. (OPP 20)

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Conscious adherence to one abstracted system of prosody leads only to artificiality. As a consequence, Eliot praises the unconscious misreading of past literary forms as the only way of doing justice to a complex, multilingual heritage. This desirable sort of misreading is infected by the unpredictable acoustics that result from texts written in the past and read now. In this case, to misread is literally to mispronounce. As an idea, Eliot’s “historical sense” flourishes when he starts to identify the literary text as a sound object irreducible to written rules of prosody. Because reading is always an acoustic experience—even if only in one’s head—it inevitably implies a textual performance potentially at variance with elocutionary rules putatively used in that text’s original production: The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association. (OPP 25)

Eliot uses the word “music” here, but he does so tentatively (“so to speak”) because he is fumbling to express the register of literary acoustics. If the ear plays an important part in literary cognition, how do we best explain what we have heard? By his own admission, there are no easy equivalents to music in literature. In fact, “The Music of Poetry” is not really about music and poetry; that topic he leaves “to those who have had a musical education” (OPP 32-33). Eliot was certainly not ignorant of the art of music, but the danger he sees in the analogy of music to poetry is that it might deafen us to other, more significant sounds that are inescapably literary. A primary goal of Eliot’s in this essay is to emphasize the sound of the voice as a corrective to criticism that relies on poorly thought-out analogies to music: “however far it may go in musical elaboration, we must expect a time to come when poetry will have again to be recalled to speech” (OPP 33). Unlike music, speech suggests a contextual approach to literary acoustics by always implying the time and place of a voice speaking, as well as that of a listener.

II In 1926, Eliot had warned in the Clark Lectures that “[a]ny literary mode is a development out of speech; sometimes it gets too far away from speech” (VMP 129). Later, in his first Milton essay (1936), Eliot implicitly

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urges writers “to attempt to follow actual speech or thought” (OPP 161). This rule of thumb is suggestive, if puzzling, as he offers no further explanation of how this agenda might be accomplished, or how it might be differentiated from other modes of writing. As he does elsewhere, Eliot here returns to the acoustic formula of ordinary speech with no other justification than its self-evidence. By 1942, in “The Music of Poetry” he is still unable to put his finger on those limits, admitting that the “immediacy of poetry to conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down exact laws” (OPP 23). It is all very vague, yet there might be a way to understand the context of Eliot’s intuition if we turn to his experience as a BBC broadcaster. Radio technique may, in fact, have guided Eliot by helping him to find a voice—figuratively and physiologically—on which to base his search for a modern prosody. If pressed to assign a date, I would argue that a shift in Eliot’s thinking is catalyzed, rather than caused, by his first walking into a radio studio in 1929. There is a happy coincidence between Eliot’s speculation about speech models for poetry in his written criticism and the performance the radio actually demanded, as that criticism was first spoken on air as broadcast talks and later as recorded lectures. In May of 1929, as Michael Coyle notes, just after Eliot’s first tests at the BBC and before his inaugural broadcast in June, Charles Siepmann of the Adult Education Department wrote to Eliot reassuring him that “you have on the whole succeeded admirably in giving the impression of conversation” (qtd. in Coyle, “This rather” 35). Siepmann’s advice about the radio talk confirmed Eliot’s own intuition about speech as an acoustic model for poetry. It provides an alternative acoustic measure for literary texts that effectively brings prose and verse closer together; they are no longer separated by prescriptive forms, hence offering the paradoxical opportunity for prose to have something to say about the prosody of modern poetry. Even if the conversational style in poetry is not reducible to prose rhythms, yet “it remains, all the same, one person talking to another” (OPP 23). The prose of conversation must be somehow contiguous with the music of poetry. As Michael Coyle has shown, Eliot was no casual contributor to the radio, making at least eighty-one broadcasts between 1929 and 1963 (“Eliot on the Air” 143). Eliot counteracted the dehumanizing side effects of this incipient mass media, Coyle argues, by exploiting the radio’s sense of “immediate presence,” his attempt “to project pure voice—speech unmediated by writing”—into the listener’s own home (144). For Coyle, the sense of conversational immediacy belongs to the genre of the radio talk as opposed to the formality of the broadcast lecture. While Coyle regrets that Eliot would increasingly turn to the latter (“This rather” 33),

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what I find interesting is the way in which a broadcast “talk” cannot be dissociated from a formal lecture: both are prescribed by writing, scripted or otherwise. Neither is immediate, or “pure voice—speech unmediated by writing,” in Coyle’s description. Speech is inevitably prescribed by the written text just as reading is the performance of a text even when it is silently enunciated. The radio talk falls precisely at this juncture between vocalized writing and heard speech; it is never merely live. Thus, the distinction between the written and the spoken inevitably collapses. But Coyle is not to blame here, for Eliot himself fudges the distinctions. As Eliot explains about the oral addresses and one broadcast collected in On Poetry and Poets, he had not attempted, when he published them, “to transform them into what they might have been if originally designed for the eye instead of the ear” (OPP xi). Eliot must mean that he published these addresses in the same form in which he had at first scripted them: texts meant to be spoken aloud rather than read silently. But one wonders: what rules would come into play, what subtle rhetorical gestures would be inserted or reworked to make the lecture appeal to the eye rather than the ear? And would the printed lectures have looked any different than they do now? Should their sentences or phrases have been broken in lineation in order to reveal to the eye how they should sound to the ear? This is not a rhetorical question, and it becomes more important in considering the way poetry is set on the page. Significantly, in his introduction to On Poetry and Poets, Eliot is not talking about poetry but about his own critical writings. Take this extract from “Virgil and the Christian World,” first aired on the BBC’s Third Programme on 9 September 1951, and the only radio broadcast in the collection: Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. (OPP 144)

It could be argued that silently reading this extract misses some of the acoustic nuances that become apparent when we listen to a recording of the lecture. Perhaps that acoustic performativity should be reflected in verse form: Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster.

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By redesigning this passage for the eye instead of the ear, I don’t intend to reinscribe the very binary of speaking/writing that I have been trying to break apart. But making the lineation visible reveals how this prose extract has its own prosody, a prosody capable of reaching poetic heights—which is not to say that Eliot’s criticism strives for such heights nor that it need be published in verse formatting. Rather, what I am getting at—and I fear I am doing no better than Eliot—is that he had at first attempted to identify how seeing what we read might be separated from what we hear with our ears, only to realize later that the two are intimately connected. Eliot was deeply haunted by the relation between speech and writing, a logic he intuited existed but could never quite uncover. As a writer of poetry and prose, and as a public speaker in both genres, Eliot’s increasingly numerous forays into the new media—in which an unseen public awaited his voice—challenged him to renounce the dichotomy he had previously believed in: the difference between the eyes and the ears, the broadcast lecture and the radio talk. It is worth remembering that since its foundation in 1922, the BBC would broadcast live. This practice was partly a consequence of their lack of an adequate technology for making and archiving recordings. When Broadcasting House, the current site and headquarters of the BBC, first opened its doors in 1932, for example, there were so few recordings that they had difficulty putting together a ten-year anniversary program. Another reason that the BBC initially declined to record its programs was due to the sense of authenticity that attached to the live broadcast, a sense that a prerecorded voice would necessarily sound false because it would not be conversational enough, that it would sound like a lecture read out loud. In hindsight, our familiarity with recorded media leads us to conclude that a recorded lecture does not need to sound stuffy or artificial; neither does live broadcasting necessarily ensure acoustic immediacy. Addressing this very phenomenon, Coyle gives an excellent account of Eliot scripting and rehearsing his radio talks. They were not merely live; they were polished and practiced to give them an air of off-handedness. That is to say, Eliot did not “read” (or merely read) his radio talks; he performed them as scripts, having composed them to sound conversational, a practice he continued even when he started prerecording in 1936 (“This rather” 34). Eliot would write them, that is, for the ear, but with an eye always on the text that produced the sound in the first place. With such an artificial and practiced sense of conversational immediacy, the experience of Eliot’s radio talks could never have been merely immediate, a “hyper-presence” as Coyle argues (35). They were always theatrical.

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Coyle notes that in the last twenty years of Eliot’s life, it “would become increasingly common for the BBC to broadcast his public lectures and for public lectures to be refigured as broadcasts” (“This rather” 38). Such an increase suggests an inevitable cross-fertilization between Eliot’s broadcasts and the more formal lecture. Note, for example, the hybridity of these presentations: “American Literature and the American Language” was originally a lecture first broadcast live from Washington University, St. Louis, on 9 June 1953; “The Three Voices of Poetry” was a recording of the eleventh annual lecture of the National Book League at Central Hall, Westminster, broadcast on the Third Programme on 23 December 1953; and “The Aims of Poetic Drama” was a broadcast reading based on an address to the Poet’s Theatre Guild for Christopher Marsden’s Wednesday Book Programme. To modern listeners, the broadcast lectures may strike us for their literary formality even though they were recorded live, while the apparent conversational spontaneity of the address to the Poet’s Theatre Guild belies the fact that it was prerecorded two days before its broadcast on 24 August 1949. It might be concluded from these disjunctions that the conversational style is the idealized aural effect of a particular kind of scripting. In other words, the style is achieved by writing with a view to its performance from a script; it is thus not “natural” but following its own rhetorical conventions of delivery and performance. Still, Eliot could never quite muster a definition of the prosody of conversational style, precisely because the point of the exercise was to happen upon it. As with an athletic skill or instrumental technique, it points up the vexing problem of doing something right without knowing how it got done that way. Eliot’s prosody, whether of prose or verse, is thus subject to definition after the fact and is a matter of some interpretation, which accounts for the myriad meters that have been attributed to Eliot throughout his career.2 All that Eliot could be sure about was that the effects of prosody were dramatic. In fact, he had always sensed it, as testified by his numerous essays devoted directly or indirectly to dramatic poetry from the very beginning of his career. 3 Eliot would soon be ready to put himself to the ultimate test, the theater.

III Prior to his radio days, Eliot had not fully considered the role of speech in the production of poetic form. He had instead yearned for the drama he could not achieve in his verse. His early poetry was as a consequence more diagnostic than cathartic, precisely because of that performative impasse, where he was stuck in the false consciousness of an unconvinced

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ventriloquism. “Portrait of a Lady,” for example, is not only about a hypocritical, mannered society, but about the disconnection between voice and performance. The chattiness on the surface belies paralysis and miscommunication, as words are reduced to failed music: The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune Of a broken violin on an August afternoon: “I am always sure that you understand My feelings, always sure that you feel, Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.” (CPP 19)

What Eliot eventually came to theorize was the possibility of conversation reaching sufficient intensity that it would break into true poetic drama, retroactively mutating what may have first been conceived in plain prose. As Eliot puts it in “The Music of Poetry”: “The poem comes before the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something” (OPP 31).4 (If Eliot’s early poetry stages anything, it is the failure to precisely strike conversations in which something is said.) What that dramatic form might be, however, Eliot does not specify. He can identify it when it happens but not define it as an abstract principle that can be followed systematically. Consider, for example, this exchange from an interview with Leslie Paul for the European Service of the BBC: Paul: Do you feel that in the Quartets and in the plays you succeeded in a personal prosody? You were always interested in forging a loose, flexible, and accentual line instead of a heroic line…. Eliot: … I felt it was necessary to find a metric which was as far removed as possible from the iambic pentameter. That’s what I hammered out for myself in The Family Reunion and have used since. You asked if it was a personal prosody: it may be too personal a prosody. What I mean is that I should like—my ambition would have been—to start a prosody which would be an impersonal one, so to speak, useful to other dramatists—poetic dramatists—coming after me. (Paul 19-20)

Looking back on his disappointing fourth play, The Family Reunion (1939), Eliot had resigned himself to wondering “whether there is any poetry in the play at all” (OPP 91). The problem remains: at what point does ordinary speech attain the required intensity to become poetic? This was the problem that occupied Eliot’s writings for the stage. Eliot articulated the problem again in his Presidential Address to the Poet’s Theatre Guild, “The Aims of Poetic Drama” (1949): This is not an age of a common style or metric among poets: it is a period of considerable variety of individual styles, a period in which each poet

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must devise his own prosody. This is a wasteful process, but it cannot be helped. In an age of such diverse versification, nobody can afford to take over a kind of versification ready made. (6-7)

Under such circumstances, what Eliot found is that he could apply what he had learned about voice from the radio to the writing of his plays, because his broadcasts both theorize and enact the poetic acoustics of ordinary speech. As a result, Eliot’s broadcast prose criticism may be said to approximate the condition of a literary sub-genre, ultimately providing the blueprint for a new prosody born out of his experience with the vocal performance of prose scripts, whether formal lectures or mere talks. What he learned from the radio was to imagine the prosody of speech in the darkness of its visual deprivation. Ironically, it is here that Milton, the blind poet, comes to the rescue of Eliot. As far back as his 1917 essay “Reflections on vers libre” Eliot had argued: “[r]hyme removed, the poet is at once held up to the standards of prose” (SP 36). And these standards of prose are precisely the ones Eliot wants later to elevate to the standards of poetry, even if such a prose-prosody cannot be understood as verse. Whatever it is, the standard of prose cannot simply be free as in vers libre—which, Eliot is at pains to insist, cannot possibly be free anyway; indeed, there is no such thing as vers libre in his reckoning. But neither does Eliot wish to resurrect blank verse, because its rhythm had by the nineteenth century “become too remote from the movement of modern speech” (OPP 85). Stuck without a solution, Eliot keeps hoping that speech would somehow come to the rescue of rhymeless poetry instead of falling prey to the false pretensions of vers libre. Yet, by the time Eliot writes his second Milton essay in 1947, he is ready to at least reconsider blank verse as a poetic reference, but only in the context of the seventeenth-century practices of Milton. That poet’s blind aurality turns out to be the natural antidote to Imagism’s deafness (perhaps best exemplified by Pound’s scopic obsession with silent ideograms). When Eliot quotes a critic’s pronouncement that blank verse “seems to be verse only to the eye” (qtd. in SP 271), he is considering Samuel Johnson’s opinion that Milton had killed poetic sound. But Eliot turns Johnson’s criticism on its head by suggesting that if Milton’s prosody is un-poetic, it is only by the measure of Johnson’s deafness to poetic sounds other than rhyme. Johnson had “a specialized ear, for verbal music” (SP 271), but not for speech sounds. When Eliot first came up with the concept of the auditory imagination, he may have been caught in the dualism of Johnson’s characterization of Milton’s blank verse: Johnson thought it only looked like verse; Eliot thought it only sounded poetic. With his second Milton essay, Eliot has

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identified a third way: Milton’s gift is his ability to glimpse the prosody in the sound of the human voice thanks precisely to his blindness. The auditory imagination, Eliot concludes, opens the door to just such an acoustic corrective: a new prose-prosody unrelated to musical models based on stiff poetic formalism. In so doing he is retracting his earlier condemnation of the auditory imagination. By implication, vers libre must recover the acoustic register of ordinary speech if there is going to be any hope for modern prosody. Thus, Eliot senses that he needs Milton as much as he deplores him, that there is vision in the blindness of Milton. Eliot rediscovers this acoustic vision thanks to the radio. In the studio, Eliot learned to see with his ears, to see, that is, the verse rise out of the darkness in the acoustic performance of prose writing. Absent Dantesque visions or a theater stage, this performed prose could turn into legitimate poetry even if his radio broadcasts did not rhyme or scan in regular feet. The “poetic drama” of his later prose is what is missing in Eliot’s early criticism, even if he could not stop writing about it. Eliot himself admits of just such a shift (which we have tentatively placed in 1929) towards the performed word in his criticism, not only in the introduction to On Poetry and Poets (1957) as noted above, but more explicitly in “To Criticize the Critic” (1962). Eliot divides his “critical writing roughly into three periods,” the last of which is “for one reason or another, one of public lectures and addresses rather than articles and reviews” (18). Eliot gives no date for the beginning of this last period, but it starts after a stretch of periodical publications, mainly for the TLS (17), which tapered off after 1929, when Eliot’s broadcast transcripts begin to be published in the BBC’s The Listener. Eliot’s early prose style is heavily inflected by the tensions between the philosophical prose he had practiced while writing his doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley’s neo-idealism and the scientific transparency he was hoping to import from the new analytical philosophy of the likes of Bertrand Russell (under whose influence he had come after remaining in London). Take, for example, the objective correlative: in spite of being a completely unworkable principle, it has proved indestructible as a critical theory. Here is its memorable formulation, from “Hamlet” in 1919: “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (SP 48). As with other critical dicta decreed by the young Eliot, it rolls off the tongue, but the sound of the words disclose little sense. The acoustic success of the phrase stands in acute tension with Eliot’s scopic agenda: “the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience.”

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The emphasis on the senses here belies a dualism between eye and ear, a telling irony given Eliot’s preference for visual images of scientific experiments, while the reader is hypnotized by high-sounding prose. He was an unsuspecting victim of the very auditory imagination he would claim to repudiate. Almost ten years after “Hamlet,” “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” (1928) evidences Eliot’s desire to approach the register of speech by casting the prose of his criticism in the form of a dramatic script, acting out the very subject of the writing. But the essay is not all that dramatic because it was artificially pre-cast as a Platonic dialogue structured upon argument rather than speech. Indeed, this attempt was written the year before his first radio broadcast, before he began learning to manage the drama of the spoken voice as a producer of literary form, an experience that would ultimately put him in a position to write for the theater.

IV The shift that had started in 1929 appears to come to completion some ten years later. In a lecture to the National Book League, published as “The Three Voices of Poetry,” Eliot seems to suggest that he had reached a poetic turning point during the composition of what was going to become The Family Reunion: “[i]t was in 1938, then, that the third voice began to force itself upon my ear” (OPP 99). The “third voice” appears the moment the dramatist learns to sound not as himself but as somebody else, as with a character on stage. What is interesting is that the essay itself dramatizes this poetic shift. There is, in fact, very little difference between the published version of “The Three Voices of Poetry” and Eliot’s recording of it now housed at the British Library. The only notable change is that in the lecture he addresses the listener as “you,” which becomes “the reader” in print. Even with this slight revision, the reader of the text is still encouraged to adopt the pose of a listener, just as the listener in the audience is addressed as a “reader of poetry”: The reader may well, by now, have been asking himself what I have been up to in all these speculations…. Well, I have been trying to talk, not to myself—as you may have been tempted to think—but to the reader of poetry. (OPP 111)

While the “reader” is paradoxically “talk[ed]” to, the writer/speaker casually hems and haws, doubling back and self-correcting, performing a disappearing act in the exchange between script and performance. We can

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no longer be sure whether we are reading or listening, perhaps only hearing the writing we end up visualizing. Eliot continues to suspect his own inability to write as a speaker and speak as a writer, trapped in the insincerity of an adopted mask—that of the “second voice” or the speaker in “Portrait of a Lady”—or worse, merely talking to himself or to those like himself—the “first voice.” Drama may not guarantee an escape from personality, but the performance epitomized by the theater is posited as Eliot’s last hope for delivering the impersonal prosody he would later describe for his interviewer Leslie Paul: The final handing over, so to speak, of the poem to an unknown audience, for what that audience will make of it, seems to me the consummation of the process begun in solitude and without thought of the audience, the long process of gestation of the poem, because it marks the final separation of the poem from the author. Let the author, at this point, rest in peace. (OPP 109)

The predisposition of the written word to be repossessed by the audience/reader is what makes a text dramatic. Texts must capitalize on the fact that they are inevitably performed, whether in one’s head or in the voice of a speaker or actor. Truly impersonal drama is produced as a collaborative effort between the author and its recipients. The only casualty in such a performance is the author’s own voice.5 It may be true, as Eliot puts it in the Clark Lectures, that “[a]ny literary mode is a development out of speech” (VMP 129), but such a claim leaves unanswered the what, who, and how of these modes and developments. For an American Anglophile such as Eliot, wrestling with the impersonal sound of the English language carries a further burden: how the particular accent of an individual speaker relates to the presumed standards of speech. It is not surprising that he would turn his attention to Henry James, a compatriot caught in similar circumstances. In “Milton I,” Eliot notes that in the novels of Henry James, the “sound, of course, is never irrelevant, and the style of James certainly depends for its effect a good deal on the sound of a voice, James’s own, painfully explaining” (SP 261). In this 1936 essay, Eliot has a sense that voice is the alternative to the musicality to which he objects in Milton, but he is still unsure of how that voice relates to the ordinary speech of a particular speaker. Eliot’s way around the problem is suggested a few years later in “The Music of Poetry.” There he notes that the success of Shakespeare’s verse is precisely that “it remains the language, not of one person, but of a world of persons” (OPP 26). But this solution only raises a further question: how far does a world go?

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Eliot implies here a problematic sociolinguistic economy that includes individual speech utterances only insofar as they comply with a common standard. It is a dangerous balancing act, as non-English speakers of the language of Shakespeare, such as the Scots, are encouraged to join the gold standard of English literature because they lack “the continuity of the language” (“Scottish Literature” 8). Eliot’s reasoning is that it is not enough to use a language for communicating with one’s neighbors; one has to write literature with it as well. Just as the music of poetry must be “latent in the common speech of the poet’s place” (OPP 24), there is the further implication that any such utterance must itself be subordinated to a greater whole, that of the phonemic standards of written texts. In considering BBC English, for example, back in 1929, Eliot had himself “undergone thorough voice testing at the BBC in preparation for his series of talks on Tudor Prose at a time when the BBC itself was heavily engaged in standardising the pronunciation of its announcers” (Micakoviü). Speaking good English is not in principle about learning a particular living accent (though in practice, standards of speech follow sociolinguistic boundaries such as RP in England), but about conforming to the correct standards of enunciation of a text. In this sense, elocution entails the application of standards to speech, standards derived from written texts that effectively stand as phonemic scripts. That is precisely the reason for developing a “radio voice” in order to succeed in broadcasting. The radiophonic voice is precisely impersonal in that it aims at sounding not like an individual person, but as the abstract sonic embodiment of writing on the page. Even though Eliot falls just short of positioning himself in favor of such standards by saying that it “would not be to my present purpose to inveigh against the ubiquity of standardized, or ‘BBC’ English” (OPP 24), it still strikes a false note coming from someone whose English accent was not merely impersonal but allegedly pretentious. Or so thought those Americans who welcomed Eliot back to Boston for a visit in 1932: “His accent is an obvious pose,” remarked a journalist from the Boston Herald (qtd. in Ackroyd 194). Eliot lost his Southern accent when he left St. Louis for New England but never gained an identifiably new one. And it was not just Americans who were put off by the accent. Even native Britons were perplexed by his Englishman pose. As Richard Badenhausen summarizes the matter, “the flat, clipped, slightly British enunciation that has surprised so many on first listening to Eliot’s voice on a Caedmon recording possesses a hauntingly rootless quality” (34). The perplexity into which many were thrown regarding the geographical location of Eliot’s later accent might be resolved by giving Eliot more credit for his consciously cultivated radio voice.

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There is a striking moment in the recording of the broadcast talk published as “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951). In Eliot’s delivery of a long quotation from The Aeneid, the Latin blends smoothly with the rest of the prose spoken in English; the flat monotone so characteristic of his later recordings is wholly unruffled by the switch between languages.6 If one were not listening carefully, one might be forgiven for confusing the Latin with English. A traditional explanation would be that Eliot reads the Latin with an English accent. But given the vexed issues of identity that are bound up in accent, dialect, language, and speech, it is more likely that Eliot—who always thought of himself as an outsider—inadvertently reveals himself as reading English as if it were a foreign language. As we noted earlier, Eliot had concluded that a modern reader cannot be expected to do justice to the sound of Latin poetry any more than the Romans could detect the influence of Greek poetry on their own language. What this brief moment in Eliot’s broadcast reveals in miniature is part of the larger argument I have been making here: one cannot simply impose a particular spoken accent (say, English or Latin) on a text. The prosody of speech is not ascertained from the transcribed conversations between two geohistorically situated speakers, but from letting the writing tell us about itself. The best delivery of a text involves releasing the various layers of languages of which it is constituted; that is, to recite it as if it were not our first language even when it is our mother tongue. Eliot has described his coming to voice as a writer in exactly these inter-linguistic terms: “The kind of poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French” (OPP 295). Whether or not the resulting poetry actually sounds like spoken English is precisely the point, if, indeed, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” (SP 206).

Notes 

1

Eliot’s first contribution to the BBC radio programming was “The Tudor Translators,” broadcast by the London and Daventry Service on 11 June 1929 and published the next day in the BBC’s weekly magazine, The Listener. 2 See Finch 81-82. 3 Almost half the essays in Eliot’s first collection of critical writings, The Sacred Wood (1920), deal with dramatic poetry. 4 Henry James struggled with the very same problem in “The Art of Criticism”: the difficulty of creating a literary form whose structure only becomes apparent after the fact. In its organic approach to form, Eliot’s poetic theory leans toward the romantic but maintains the benefits of classical formalism.

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5

If Four Quartets inaugurates the birth of Eliot’s non-theatrical poetic drama, it does so thanks to his experiments on the stage, preceded by his training as radio broadcaster. It is no coincidence that the opening of Burnt Norton recycles discarded lines from Murder in the Cathedral. 6 This later monotone is not necessarily characteristic of unrecorded deliveries, such as Eliot’s reading of The Waste Land at a party at Virginia Woolf’s house in 1922. Woolf notes in her diary: “He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it” (178).

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Badenhausen, Richard. T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Coyle, Michael. “T. S. Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenges of Mass Communication. T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. London: MacMillan, 2001. 141-54. —. “‘This rather elusory broadcast technique’: T. S. Eliot and the Genre of the Radio Talk.” ANQ 11.4 (1998): 32-42. Dimock, Wai Chee. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112 (1997): 106071. Eliot, T. S. The Aims of Poetic Drama: The Presidential Address to the Poet’s Theatre Guild. The Poet’s Theatre Guild, 1949. —. “Was There a Scottish Literature?” Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939. Ed. Margery Palmer McCulloch. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004. —. “The Tudor Translators.” Listener 1.22 (12 June 1929): 833-44. Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Micakoviü, Elizabeth. “Purifying the Dialect of the Tribe: T. S. Eliot and the ‘Amurrican Language.’” Peer Seminar: Sound in Eliot’s Poetry. T. S. Eliot Society Annual Conference, St. Louis, USA. 28 Sept. 2012. Nicolosi, Robert J. “T. S. Eliot and Music: An Introduction.” Musical Quarterly 66.2 (1980): 192-204. Paul, Leslie. “A Conversation with T. S. Eliot.” Kenyon Review 27 (1965): 11-21. Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. U of California P, 1990. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2: 1920-24. New York: Penguin, 1981. 



CHAPTER TWELVE “A PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY”: ELIOT’S CRITIQUE OF EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY BENJAMIN G. LOCKERD

While T. S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of Darwin’s theory that exaggerated its explanatory power and extrapolated from it into metaphysical, moral, historical, and socio-political spheres where, in Eliot’s view, it had no authority. Two such popularizers concerned him especially: Herbert Spencer and H. G. Wells. Eliot grew up in an intellectual atmosphere dominated by the evolutionary sociology of Spencer but became an opponent of that way of thinking. In his later criticism of Wells’s evolutionary approach to history in Wells’s popular Outline of History, Eliot aligned himself with the Catholic historians Christopher Dawson and Hilaire Belloc. All three deprecated the pseudo-scientific historiography and the progressivism of Wells’s book. I wish to suggest here that Eliot has in mind the historiographic doctrines promoted by Spencer and Wells when he writes these lines in Part II of The Dry Salvages: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has a different pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— / Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy / Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, / Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past” (CPP 186). Both Spencer and Wells, in making evolution the key to the human sciences as well as the biological sciences, reached radically progressive conclusions, ones which indeed became a way of “disowning the past” in the popular mind. I would like to suggest further that when Eliot speaks of a “people without history” in Little Gidding, he is again contemplating the effects of the progressive view that makes the past irrelevant.



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Spencer made it his life’s work to develop a sociological theory based on the principles of biological evolution. He claimed that societies were social organisms that adapted to their environment much the way biological organisms did. He further asserted that this social evolution inevitably brought about positive progress in cultural organization. Wells adapted evolutionary ideas to the study of history in his Outline of History, which begins from the assumption that historical change grows out of biological evolution and results in more complex and efficient social organization as time goes on. Both Spencer and Wells began with materialist assumptions and used evolutionary ideas to support and extend those beliefs. Their conclusions were triumphantly progressive. They were far from alone in these endeavors, but I am highlighting them because of Eliot’s awareness of their work and their popularity. Their conception of human culture and history—materialist, evolutionary, and progressive— was at odds with the Christian one Eliot gradually embraced. The Christian historian tends to believe that human cultures are built up by spiritual forces as well as material ones; that human agency—not only external forces—accounts for much in the cultural order; that history is not necessarily progressive and may at times even be retrogressive; that religion is integral to human culture; that there are certain universal characteristics of human cultures because human nature is fundamentally fixed, not changeable; and that there are crucial events in history—the most important being the Incarnation—that give meaning to all human experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot worked out such an understanding of culture and history, partly under the influence of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. Eliot once remarked that “Herbert Spencer’s generalized theory of evolution was in my childhood environment regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe,” and a critique of Spencer’s belief that biological evolution was the answer to everything was central to his renunciation of his family’s rationalistic Unitarian faith (A Sermon 5). Eliot did not pretend to have the scientific knowledge required to debate Spencer, but as an editor he invited others with greater competence to do so. In an essay in The Criterion, William Harrison points out that “Even the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ as we are prone to forget, was not [Darwin’s], but Spencer’s; and Herbert Spencer, as the ardent disciple, moralized beyond the master’s intentions” (Harrison 786). Spencer’s efforts to come up with a grand synthetic philosophy, Harrison explains, extended the idea of “fitness” into the realm of human society. Spencer argued that social groups developed in the same way as biological organisms, so that human culture moved inevitably toward higher levels of complexity. Spencer’s evolutionary



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view of sociology led him to endorse a laissez-faire doctrine in politics and economics. Though he was against letting the less fit die and believed in private charity for the poor, Spencer’s political views did become associated with what came to be called “social Darwinism,” which was used to support a variety of inhumane programs such as eugenics. Spencer’s high repute among thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century is demonstrated by the fact that Will Durant gives him an entire chapter in his Story of Philosophy (1926), an honor shared only with Nietzsche. Durant’s excellent synopsis introduces Spencer as a disciple of the French positivist Auguste Comte, who bequeathed to Spencer “the idea that social, like physical phenomena, might be reduced to laws and science” and who concocted a “Religion of Humanity” in whose calendar “the names of pagan deities and medieval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress” (Durant 382-83). It is precisely this combination of scientific reductionism and progressive faith that Eliot resists. He himself connected Comte and Spencer in 1916, in a short notice of the book Social Adaptation: A Study in the Development of the Doctrine of Adaptation as a Theory of Social Progress, by L. M. Bristol. Eliot calls Comte and Spencer “pioneers of sociology,” and he summarizes without comment Bristol’s conclusion, which is a restatement of Spencer’s main idea: It is an attempt to harmonise “self-development” with “social efficiency,” the “supreme worth of the individual” with the “social goal of functioning in a more inclusive unit,” a unity which shall end by embracing the whole of humanity. (Rev. of Social Adaptation 405)

Though Eliot makes no overt judgment here, he emphasizes the grandiose utopian thinking of the progressive thinkers. Spencer first enunciated his version of the idea in 1857, in an essay entitled “Progress, Its Law and Cause,” where he put forward (as Durant says) a “general principle of history and progress,” seeing himself as “the philosopher of universal evolution” (392). In his groundbreaking book The Study of Sociology (1873), Spencer demonstrates what Durant calls his “habit of rushing into generalizations” when he claims that society is an organism, one which adapts to its environment exactly as biological organisms do, gradually developing greater complexity and integration—thus inevitably becoming more effective (Durant 410). Spencer saw a trend in history away from medieval militarism and toward modern industrialism, which, he believed, would put an end to war and want (Durant 412-13). He put his faith ultimately, as Wells was to do also, in the captains of industry. But such was not to be Eliot’s faith.



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Perhaps it was in George Santayana’s 1909 graduate class that Eliot first heard his family’s confidence in Herbert Spencer questioned, for as Herbert Howarth points out, Santayana “detested Herbert Spencer” (Howarth 84). It could also have been another of his professors who brought him to question Spencer’s wisdom, for Josiah Royce had written a book entitled Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review (1904), which offered a withering critique: “In sum, Spencer appears as a philosopher of a beautiful logical naïvete. Generalization was an absolutely simple affair for him. If you found a bag big enough to hold all the facts, that was an unification of science” (115). Likely having read or at least heard his professors’ critiques of Spencer, Eliot spent the 1910-1911 year in Paris, where he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, who had recently published Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice), a work that also argues against the mechanistic interpretation of evolutionary theory. In this book, Bergson especially takes Spencer to task. In his introduction, he outlines the approach he will take, claiming that he will avoid “the false evolutionism of Spencer— which consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained” (Bergson xiii-xiv). Thus, he asserts that Spencer’s is a circular argument that starts from the evolved whole, assuming that it is made of a large number of parts without showing how the parts come together to form that whole. Later, in discussing the evolution of intellect, Bergson speaks of the need to avoid being “dupes of an illusion like that of Spencer, who believed that the intellect is sufficiently explained as the impression left on us by the general characters of matter” (153). This illusion is simply the materialist assumption that all mental activity is merely an epiphenomenon of material substances and forces. At one point Bergson again gives Spencer as an instance of the materialist position, comparing him with Fichte, who exemplifies what he called the finalist approach: “Fichte takes thought in a concentrated state, and expands it into reality; Spencer starts from external reality, and condenses it into intellect” (189-90). Both approaches are, according to Bergson, mistaken. In the course of this book, Bergson takes up arguments with nearly every major philosopher, but he ends with several pages devoted to a final attack on Spencer. Again Bergson accuses Spencer of having talked much of evolution without having truly considered evolutionary process: “His doctrine bore indeed the name of evolutionism; it claimed to remount and redescend the course of the universal becoming; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming nor with evolution” (364). Writing just after Einstein published his theory of



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relativity in 1905, Bergson alludes to the fact that the physical sciences themselves have called into question the solidity of matter: “The more physics progresses, the more it shows the impossibility of representing the properties of ether or of electricity—the probable base of all bodies—on the model of the properties of the matter which we perceive” (365). The new physics was indeed undercutting the fundamental assumptions of the strictly mechanistic approach, which relied on the existence of simple, unsplittable bodies or atoms, behaving according to the laws of Newtonian physics in empty space. Although the young T. S. Eliot began to distance himself from Bergson as soon as he returned from his year in France, Bergson had shown him the hollowness of Spencer’s evolutionary theory, which would never again be regarded by Eliot as “the key to the mystery of the universe” and would instead be examined critically in Eliot’s writings. There are few later references to Spencer in Eliot’s essays. One passing reference, in his piece “Arnold and Pater” (1930), is telling, however. In one passage of Arnold’s religious writings, Eliot observes, “He girds at (apparently) Herbert Spencer for substituting Unknowable for God; quite unaware that his own Eternal not ourselves comes to exactly the same thing as the Unknowable” (SE 435). Thus, all that Eliot says about Arnold’s rejection of the supernatural in religion becomes applicable to Spencer as well. And I would suggest that he still has Spencer in mind a few pages later when he talks about the tendency of Arnold, Pater and many thinkers of their era to mix different ways of thinking in confused ways. He calls Pater’s Marius the Epicurean “a document of one moment in the history of thought and sensibility in the nineteenth century,” and goes on to say that “[t]he dissolution of thought in that age, the isolation of art, philosophy, religion, ethics and literature, is interrupted by various chimerical attempts to effect imperfect syntheses” (SE 442). Surely when he speaks of “imperfect syntheses” he has in mind Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy,” an attempt to combine all disciplines within the scientific paradigm of evolutionary biology. The result of this blurring of boundaries, Eliot says, was that “[r]eligion became morals, religion became art, religion became science or philosophy; various blundering attempts were made at alliances between various branches of thought” (SE 443). All these syntheses had the aim of absorbing religion into some other category: for Arnold, morals; for Pater, art; and for Spencer, science. Much of Eliot’s work sought to oppose this secularization. In his early poems, Eliot depicts human beings as they are conceived by the mechanistic evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and others. Human beings become creatures such as “Apeneck



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Sweeney,” or the woman who makes a “Gesture of orang-outang” (CPP 56, 42). In some of the early poems there are images of isolated body parts, and no sense that there is a whole person who is greater than the sum of those parts. This technique resonates with mechanistic views of humanity and calls to mind Bergson’s description of Herbert Spencer’s method as “cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments.” In Eliot, there are the “muddy feet that press / To early coffee-stands” and the “hands / That are raising dingy shades” in “Preludes” (CPP 22). In “Sweeney Erect,” “Morning stirs the feet and hands” (CPP 42). And in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: “the hand of the child, automatic, / Slipped out and pocketed a toy”—the mechanist’s view of the human hand, which is closely connected in traditional thought with human agency (CPP 25). Man the maker has been replaced by man the machine. Eliot’s aim seems to be to show us how little we would like to be such creatures, and how squalid the human world becomes as we begin to see ourselves in that way. He never denied that there was some sort of evolutionary development in life on earth, but he did reject the narrowly materialist interpretation of the process. Much later in life, Eliot explicitly states his opposition to making evolution the central principle of the human sciences, in the lines from The Dry Salvages which I am glossing: It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. (CPP 186)

By this time, Eliot had been influenced in his critique of Spencer and of progressivism in general by the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, whose works he read himself and had reviewed by others in The Criterion from the late 1920s on, and who was, as Russell Kirk has said, the most important influence on Eliot’s social thought (Kirk 235). In the opening chapter of Progress and Religion (1931), Dawson gives an overview of the history of progressivism, one in which Spencer features prominently: Above all the progress of biological studies and the rise of the doctrine of evolution had a powerful influence on social thought. This is especially characteristic of the work of Herbert Spencer, perhaps the most representative sociologist of the 19th century. The doctrine of Evolution is the key-note of his whole philosophy. He regards social progress as one



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Pointing to Spencer’s essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Dawson contrasts its assumptions with those of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, even when they were materialists, placed man in a category above and apart from the rest of nature, and hypostatized human reason into a principle of world development. But the new evolutionary theory put man back into nature, and ascribed his development to the mechanical operation of the same blind forces which ruled the material world. (19)

The problem with Spencerian progressivism, in Dawson’s analysis, is not just that it cuts humanity off from the past but that it offers a purely materialistic concept of human society in which cultural change is completely determined by natural laws—leaving out human agency. Eliot addresses what he regards as another harmful effect of this way of thinking in his essay on “Religion and Literature” (1935). Having held out for certain principles of traditional wisdom, he anticipates a response from modern thinkers who “are convinced that only by what is called unrestrained individualism will truth ever emerge. Ideas, views of life, they think, issue distinct from independent heads, and in consequence of their knocking violently against each other, the fittest survive, and truth rises triumphant” (SE 397). He implies that if we consider human thought a purely mechanical competitive process whose results are determined by Spencerian survival of the fittest, we cut ourselves off from the sources of truth. His own vision of the winnowing of ideas is not one of evolutionary competition but rather one of wisdom arising from ancient cultural traditions. As Eliot puts it in “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”: “Our problem being to form the future, we can only form it on the materials of the past; we must use our heredity, instead of denying it” (SE 473). The lines in The Dry Salvages that I am attempting to contextualize raise a fundamental question about how one should view history. Eliot is challenging the idea that the past is “a mere sequence / Or even development,” and he is suggesting that such an interpretation of history arises from a misapplication of evolutionary concepts to human culture. Eliot is thinking here not only about Spencer but another writer who also extrapolated ideas of mechanistic evolution into cultural interpretation: H. G. Wells. The primary motive of Wells’s Outline of History (1919) was to offer a scientific account of human history, beginning with the evolution of primitive organisms. Here are the titles of the early chapters of the book:



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The Earth in Space and Time The Record of the Rocks Natural Selection and the Changes of Species The Invasion of the Dry Land By Life The Age of Reptiles The Age of Mammals The Ancestry of Man

Wells suggests that history has previously been inadequate because it began with recorded history—or at best with a glance at prehistoric human cultures. His history, by contrast, begins with the origins of the cosmos and of life, and his claim is that this evolutionary viewpoint offers a superior explanation of history. The epigraph to the book is from Friedrich Ratzel, a nineteenth-century professor of geography and author of a book on Darwin, Sein und Werden der organischen Welt [Being and Becoming of the Organic World]: A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from 1 beginning to end upon one identical law. (qtd. in Wells, Outline v)

It is clear that both Ratzel and Wells regard evolution as the “single conception” and the “one identical law” that will produce the first valid history. Once mankind is seen as just another species ruled by the same one law that governs all other creatures, it becomes possible to write a Plain History of Life and Mankind (the subtitle of the book). Another aim Wells had when composing The Outline of History was to write a lively and readable history for a large audience, and in this he succeeded, for the book was a popular success. Wells effectively influenced the “popular mind” about which Eliot is concerned in Four Quartets, and he influenced it in the direction of progressivism, for his contention throughout is that progress is inevitable, especially since science had won out over religion. Wells did not agree in all respects with Spencer, but his fundamental assumption is the same: social evolution is governed by the same law as biological evolution, and consequently social evolution moves inevitably to larger and more complex social organisms. In his concluding chapter, “The Next Stage of History,” Wells confidently predicts that there will eventually be a “world order” bringing “one universal law of justice,” “the elimination of drudgery,” and “the disappearance of war” (1096). In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot will speak skeptically about plans



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to bring about a “world state” and a “world culture” (122). He consistently regarded utopian visions such as this one as foolish fantasies. Wells looks back over his work and points out to the reader that he has examined two basic types of society: one originally arising in “the warmer alluvial” areas and creating “fecund systems of subjugation and obedience”; the other arising in the deserts, “the nomadic peoples.” He says, “Our history has told of a repeated overrunning and refreshment of the originally brunet civilizations by these hardier, bolder, free-spirited peoples of the steppes and desert.” It is quite clear where Wells’s sympathies lie: We have pointed out how these constantly recurring nomadic injections have steadily altered the primordial civilizations both in blood and in spirit; and how the world religions of to-day, and what we now call democracy, the boldness of modern scientific inquiry and a universal restlessness, are due to this ‘nomadization’ of civilization. The old civilizations created tradition, and lived by tradition. To-day the power of tradition is destroyed. The body of our state is civilization still, but its spirit is the spirit of the nomadic world. It is the spirit of the great plains and the high seas. (1097)

Thus, everything having to do with tradition is swept away by the noble, free-spirited modern nomads, riding across the prairies and sailing the high seas to free humanity from the bondage of tradition. Wells is indeed looking forward to the advent of what Eliot calls in Little Gidding “a people without history.” Wells’s heroes are precisely those who, in Eliot’s view, are “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans” (Notes 111). Not surprisingly, many other writers found the evolutionary progressivist dogma of The Outline of History extremely problematic. The most vociferous critic was the Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc. In a series of articles published in 1925 and 1926 in various Catholic journals, Belloc attacked The Outline of History relentlessly and in very personal terms, accusing Wells (among other things) of ignorance, childishness, antiCatholic bias, and provincialism. Wells responded to Belloc in a small book entitled Mr. Belloc Objects to “The Outline of History,” and Belloc replied quickly with Mr. Belloc Still Objects, following that up by collecting his earlier essays in A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.” Belloc attacks many of Wells’s specific points—catching him out on a fairly large number of simple errors. More significantly, Belloc accuses Wells of “entertaining unreasoning reactions” and tellingly identifies the



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root of his knee-jerk responses: “They are all provoked by anything traditional” (Companion 17). Belloc notes that the aim of establishing the mechanistic theory of natural selection as the sole cause of speciation is to remove any notion of design from the equation, and thus “to get rid of the necessity for a Creator” (31). He attacks with particular vehemence Wells’s treatment of priests, his contention that the Priest came first when man was inferior and was at last ousted, as man advanced, by the King—the innuendo being that the power of the Priest essentially belongs to an earlier time, and therefore to a more degraded period in human History; for to the man who believes in a childishly simple theory of ‘Progress’ (as Mr. Wells believes in it, and as do the great majority of his readers), whatever is earlier must be worse than what comes later. (114)

Near the end, Belloc insults Wells’s “provincialism”: “We are reading in this Outline of History the work of a mind closely confined to a particular place and moment—the late Victorian London suburbs. Such a mind has an apparatus quite inferior to the task of historical writing” (227). This is mud-slinging indeed, but as we will see, Eliot echoes the most damning assertion, namely that Wells has a mind ill-equipped for writing history. In his relatively short rebuttal, Wells explicitly acknowledges the dogma that guided his writing of history: he accepts a “modern conception of life, as a process of progressive change” and asserts that “We can realise now, as no one in the past was ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social and economic animal” (Belloc Objects 53). Where Belloc insists on a fixed human nature, Wells denies any such fixity. In the process of biological and social evolution, religion has, he acknowledges, played an important role in helping human beings to exercise self-control, but at this point “It may be better to admit frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind is now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing out of the idea of Deity” (54). Again, this perspective on history is just what Eliot has in mind when he speaks of “A people without history,” for the progressive historian writes history only to show that all that has happened is quickly becoming irrelevant to the evolved human species and its evolved social organization. The immense popularity of the Outline guaranteed that its progressive ideas would in fact have a great impact on “the popular mind.” Eliot wades into this dispute in the May 1927 number of The Criterion, where his brief review manifests distrust of both writers: “Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc undertake to show each other up in their knowledge of sciences in which both are amateurs. Both seem to the uninstructed reader to have



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succeeded.” However, he follows this amused response with words highly critical of Wells: Mr. Wells has not an historical mind; he has a prodigious gift of historical imagination, which is comparable to Carlyle’s, but this is quite a different gift from the understanding of history. That requires a degree of culture, civilization and maturity which Mr. Wells does not possess. (Review of A Companion 253)

Though he remains wary of Belloc, Eliot clearly sides with him, virtually echoing Belloc’s judgment that Wells has a mind “quite inferior to the task of historical writing.” What Wells has written, in his view, is not really a work of history in the proper sense of the word. In the years to come, Eliot would make several disparaging comments in passing about Wells as a thinker (though admiring his romances). For instance, while reviewing Arthur Symons’s translation of Baudelaire, he compares Shaw, Wells, Strachey and Hemingway unfavorably with Baudelaire and the decadents, and in a note he adds, “Of course Mr Shaw and Mr Wells are also much occupied with religion and Ersatz-Religion” (“Poet and Saint” 426n). The substitute religions of socialism and progressivism offered by these two inspire only ridicule. In “Thoughts After Lambeth,” he notes archly the tendency of Wells (inherited from Spencer) to subject all thought to the findings of one discipline: I suspect that there is some taint of Original H. G. Wells about most of us in English-speaking countries; and that we enjoy drawing general conclusions from particular disciplines, using our accomplishment in one field as the justification for theorizing about the world in general. (SE 371)

Eliot’s scattered passing comments on Wells consistently show respect for his novels and disdain for his attempts at philosophical and historical thought. In his review of the controversy between Belloc and Wells, Eliot does not discuss G. K. Chesterton’s response to The Outline of History, but he must have been aware of it, and a glance at it offers further insight into the debate over evolutionary historiography. Rather than reacting directly to Wells’s history as Belloc did, Chesterton integrated his responses into a work of greater breadth, The Everlasting Man (1925). In the first chapter, “The Man in the Cave,” Chesterton denies the claim that humans are just another species of animal, focusing on the art in Stone Age caves: Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution…. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most



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primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man. (Chesterton 27, 34)

Here is the crux of the debate, for if Wells is right, human history is robbed of its humanity. Where Wells labors to show that mankind developed very slowly (even suggesting absurdly, as Belloc points out, that the Neanderthals did not have human language), Chesterton asserts that the cave man was clearly fully human. He goes on to say that “every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians” (35-36). This statement identifies the problem with extrapolating scientific ideas into sociology and history and summarizes Chesterton’s fundamental disagreement with Spencer and Wells. History begins with the earliest human beings, not with the origin of the species. Chesterton also takes Wells up on his theory about the evolution of religion, which, according to the latter, grew out of fear of the chief, the Old Man. Chesterton mocks this notion good-humoredly: I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. (59)

Though the tone is more amiable than Belloc’s, he makes his point, which is that as far back as we find definite signs of human beings, we find art and religion—calling into question the notion that people gradually developed religious beliefs. “Touching on this matter of the origin of religion,” he writes, “the truth is that those who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away” (53). Chesterton is eager that his critique not be read as a condemnation of modern methods of historiography in general, but only of some of its assumptions, especially the ones that have been facilely extrapolated from evolutionary biology and accepted by a credulous public: I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from



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It seems to me that this passage could, by itself, stand as a gloss on the lines from The Dry Salvages which I have been attempting to elucidate. Eliot and Chesterton both critique a developmental view of history, heavily influenced by evolutionary biology, that has permeated the “popular mind,” making history a means, not of exploring the past, but of rejecting and ignoring it. As Wells developed his progressivist program, he turned (as had Spencer) to the leaders of business as the heroes of the new world order he envisioned. Such is the burden of The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1931), which receives two critical reviews in The Criterion. The first is by a Marxist, D. S. Mirsky, who judges that the book is “surprisingly badly written,” primarily because “Mr. Wells is unable to think” (4). The book also displays, he tells his readers, “a profound philistinism, a self-satisfied ignorance, and a hatred of democracy” (5). He concludes that “Wells is nothing more but the ideologist of the ‘nouveau riche’—he has the greatest admiration for Mr. Henry Ford” (8). This review reveals an interesting agreement between Marxists and traditionalist conservatives such as Belloc and Eliot. For different reasons, both groups question the values of the large-scale industrialized economy. On the other side of the question, Spencer and Wells saw the great financiers and industrialists as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. The other review is by Christopher Dawson, who points out that in his earlier writings, especially his utopian novels, Wells had been a dualist who set up a “contrast between the inhuman monstrosity of scientific invention and the common humanity of his cockney heroes.” But Wells became a “monist,” preaching a doctrine of scientific and economic progress that regards the common man as nothing but a problem. Interestingly, Eliot had remarked Wells’s turning against ordinary humans years earlier, speaking of how, in his novels, “Wells knows the commoner (whom he has lately abandoned)” (“London Letter” 329). Dawson quotes Wells as saying that the peasant is “the most obdurate obstacle to the effective modernization of the world” (qtd. in “Wells and History” 10). Dawson sums up Wells’s creed thus: Against the peasant, bound to his meaningless round of toil and dominated by crass and bloodthirsty superstitions, Mr. Wells set the ideal of the world organizer, the modern economic superman; and some of the most



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interesting pages of his book are devoted to the life-history of the giants of industry and finance, such as Rockefeller, Edison, Ford, Pierpont Morgan and Alfred Lowenstein. These are Mr. Wells’s heroes, and he is ready to overlook a considerable amount of unscrupulous acquisitiveness, if it is accompanied by the capacity to plan and organize economic life on a grand scale. (“Wells and History” 11)

This is the particular model of progress to which Wells’s evolutionary ideas led him, and it evinces a definite similarity to Spencer’s political views. Having rejected religion as “crass and bloodthirsty superstitions,” Wells instead devotes his faith to the worship of these crass and materialistic heroes of manufacturing and finance. Dawson concludes that Wells “does not seem to take account of the possibility that human nature itself may prove recalcitrant and that men will revolt against excessive organization, unless they can find in it some satisfaction for their spiritual needs” (14). Dawson’s review could serve as a gloss to Eliot’s description of the peasants in East Coker, “dancing around the bonfire” in their eternal round, “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing / As in their living in the living seasons” (CPP 177-78). It is this sense of time and history, with its eternal round of toil and celebration, its adherence to the ways of the past, that Wells rejects and Eliot reaffirms. It is not only the passage about “superficial notions of evolution” but the entire poem that asserts a sense of history that is not “a mere sequence— / Or even development” (CPP 186). All of Four Quartets immerses the reader in an awareness of time as recurrence and return: “In my beginning is my end” (CPP 177). It is the time of the seasons and of the tides, of peasants and sailors who are in communion with nature rather than dominating it with scientific or economic power. It is a sense of time that includes the ghosts of the past, the peasant ancestors still dancing in the field, and the “familiar compound ghost” of previous writers (CPP 193). It is near the end of Four Quartets when Eliot speaks of a “people without history,” the people educated by progressive historians such as Wells, who write history in order to write it off: A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England. (CPP 197)

A particular moment and place matter because they are connected to other moments and places in a meaningful pattern. History is not an



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evolutionary movement away from the past but a return: “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (CPP 197). Here is Eliot’s final and most positive answer to the evolutionary conceptions of human society and history developed by Herbert Spencer and H. G. Wells.

Notes 

1

Ironically, Ratzel also coined the term Lebensraum, which was eventually adopted by the Nazi leaders to justify their aggression.

Works Cited Belloc, Hilaire. A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.” London: Sheed and Ward, 1926. —. Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.” London: Sheed and Ward, 1926. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Holt, 1911. Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. New York: Image, 1955. Dawson, Christopher. “H. G. Wells and History.” Criterion 12.46 (1932): 10-14. —. Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry. London: Sheed and Ward, 1931. Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. Rev. ed. New York: Garden City, 1933. Eliot, T. S. “London Letter: The Novel.” Dial 73.3 (1922): 329-31. —. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt, 1949. —. “‘Poet and Saint….’” Dial 82.5 (1927): 424-31. —. Rev. of A Companion to Mr. Wells’ “Outline of History,” by Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Belloc Objects, by H. G. Wells. Criterion 5.2 (1927): 253. —. Rev. of Social Adaptation: A Study in the Development of the Doctrine of Adaptation as a Theory of Social Progress, by L. M. Bristol. New Statesman 7.173 (29 July 1916): 405. —. A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948. Harrison, William. Rev. of Charles Darwin: The Fragmentary Man, by Geoffrey West. Criterion 17.69 (1938): 784-85. Howarth, Herbert. Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964.



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Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008. Mirsky, D. S. “H. G. Wells and History.” Criterion 12.46 (1932): 4-8. Royce, Josiah. Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904. Wells, H. G. Mr. Belloc Objects to “The Outline of History.” London: Watts, 1926. —. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. New York: Macmillan, 1920. 



CHAPTER THIRTEEN “THE WASTE LAND WAS MADE OUT OF SPLINTERS”: T. S. ELIOT, EDWIN MUIR, AND CONTRASTING INFLUENCES MARGERY PALMER MCCULLOCH

The American-born T. S. Eliot and the Orkney-born Edwin Muir had significant reputations among their peers as critics and poets in the early decades of the twentieth century, even though Muir was initially better known as a critic than as a poet. Both were interested in the “mind of Europe”; Eliot accessed that world through French poetry and the classics, whereas Muir was drawn towards German literature. The poetry of Goethe and Hölderlin were Muir’s touchstones, and the fiction of Kafka and Broch were first translated into English by Muir and his wife. Muir’s earliest reviews and critical works, such as We Moderns (1918) and Transition (1926), caught the exhilarating yet destabilizing spirit of the new age and were among the first to identify the importance of writers such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. This essay will explore the relationship between Eliot and Muir as critics and poets, and the factors in their personal and educational backgrounds which may have influenced their respective responses to modernity and European culture. Edwin Muir was much preoccupied in his criticism and early poetry with the theme of human time in relation to modernity, a preoccupation that drew him towards writers such as Woolf and Joyce, even though their creative work was very different from his own. In his first book, We Moderns, he speaks of being “caught in the whirlwind of modern thought” (91), a phrase that captures both the excitement and the destabilizing turbulence of the early twentieth century. Yet for Muir himself, the obsession with time was more deep-seated and was related to his personal

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transition—or what Muir called a “time-accident”—from the pre-industrial Orkney Isles to industrialized Glasgow, his farming family having left Orkney to try their luck in the city. They had no luck, however, and within five years his parents and two brothers were dead. At the age of eighteen, Muir found himself alone in the city, in poor health, and without satisfactory education or employment. He wrote of this disastrous transition: I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two days’ journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time.

He added: “No wonder I am obsessed with Time” (The Story 263). And so, when T. S. Eliot was spending an influential post-graduate year in Paris in 1910-11, Edwin Muir was working as a clerk in a bottling factory in Glasgow, “settling the accounts of the lorry-men and answering the gibes of the slum boys” (The Story 133), and struggling to educate himself by reading A. R. Orage’s The New Age. Orage proved to be helpful to Muir, who, apparently out of despair, had written to him for advice around 1912. Orage recommended the study of a writer or work of importance, suggesting the Mahabharata, which he himself was then studying. Muir, however, chose the German philosopher Nietzsche whose will to power and exaltation of suffering seemed to fit Muir’s need to overcome the disasters that had destroyed his family. And although his study of Nietzsche proved to be a short-term prop, his correspondence with Orage had more lasting effects. In 1913 Muir himself became a contributor to The New Age; his book We Moderns began its life as a series of aphoristic essays in the magazine. The success of the American edition, published in 1920 with an introduction by H. L. Mencken, led to a job with an American magazine, The Freeman, whose contract allowed him to travel and live in Europe between 1921 and 1924 (a decade later than Eliot’s Paris year). This opportunity paved the way to a future career as a professional writer and translator, with his wife Willa, of German fiction. It was We Moderns that also brought Muir into contact with T. S. Eliot. Eliot was looking around for new contributors to The Criterion in 1924, and Sydney Schiff (publishing under the name of Stephen Hudson) had apparently sent him some manuscript poems by Muir. The poems, very different from Eliot’s own poetry at the time, did not appeal to the editor of The Criterion. But Eliot wrote to Schiff on 13 July 1924 that he had

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been “much interested by the two books you lent me,” adding: “I should very much like to meet him when he comes to this country” (L2 465). Muir was then living in Germany, and the two books which interested Eliot were We Moderns and Latitudes, a collection of essays based principally on work he had originally published in The Freeman. Some months later, in October of 1924, Eliot was still talking of Muir as a possible contributor to The Criterion, this time in a letter to Herbert Read, but he was now worrying a little “that his mind has been fed too exclusively on contemporary and on German literature: that his culture, in other words, is too shallow” (L2 515). And he asks for Read’s opinion. Eliot himself had travelled to Germany at the end of his Paris year in 1911 and had spent a few weeks of 1914 in Germany before beginning his Sheldon Travelling Fellowship at Oxford. While the influence of French literature and thought on Eliot has been well documented, there is less explicit information about his responses to his travel in Germany. It is tempting to speculate just what it was in Eliot’s own contact with German culture that led to his concern about its possible negative effects on Muir. Nietzsche’s well-known injunction to “become what you are” (which temporarily influenced Muir) was certainly at a far remove from Eliot’s worldview. But in considering Muir as a potential contributor to The Criterion, it is more likely that it was Muir’s lack of a specialized university education, of the kind enjoyed by his middle- and upper-class literary compeers, that troubled Eliot rather than Muir’s involvement with German literature per se. Whatever the source of his hesitation, by June 1925 Eliot seems to have shifted his opinion, writing to Muir himself and thanking him for his “very thorough and convincing criticism” of some adaptations from the work of the German poet Hölderlin which Eliot had asked him to read. He adds: Your letter has so impressed me that I am inclined to ask you whether you are interested yourself in translating some of Hölderlin into English. If you would, I should like to publish some of them in the Criterion, and I think it probable that I could find a good publisher for a volume of such translations by you, together with an introductory essay by you. Does this appeal to you? (L2 674)

He also asks if Muir’s existing essay on Hölderlin has been published, commenting that if not, “I should like to have the opportunity of working it into the Criterion next winter” (L2 674). Unfortunately, this essay, which first brought the work of Hölderlin to the attention of an Englishspeaking public, had already been published in MacDiarmid’s little magazine Scottish Nation in 1923. Though nothing further came of the

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translation project, Muir did publish two further essays on Hölderlin in the 1930s, later collected in his Essays on Literature and Society (1949). Around the same time as this correspondence between Muir and Eliot, Muir was also involved in writing the essays that would be published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1926 as Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature. The book included a chapter on Eliot. Just as Eliot had privately claimed that Muir’s “vehicle is much more philosophic prose than verse” (L2 465), so Muir at this point was much more interested in Eliot’s criticism than his poetry, writing in the Transition essay that as a poet “Mr. Eliot lacks seriousness. He is bitter, melancholy, despairing, but he is not serious” (141). He finds that Eliot’s poetry “expresses an attitude to life, not a principle of life” (140). He also levelled this charge against the novels of Aldous Huxley, finding Huxley to be “our best example of the fashionable writer” (14) whose disillusionment is “a thing which, with trifling variations, may be found among half the writers in London and Paris” (12-13). What comes across clearly in Muir’s account of contemporary writing is his belief that writers of significance are ones who wrestle with their age as opposed to embracing it without reservation, succumbing to its negativity, or escaping from it through a retreat to the past. As he writes in his introductory chapter “The Zeit Geist,” For all great writers are of their time, though they sometimes think of themselves as outside and against it; and when they attain expression in art the age is interrogating itself, is being differentiated for the purpose of self-realization. Without this hostility against itself the spirit of no age could come to realization; it would remain undifferentiated and unawakened; it could never be objectified, for all objectification implies separation. (Transition 5)

For Muir, therefore, there are “two ways in which the writer may avoid being assimilated by the age; one is by struggling with it, the other is by escape…. [B]ut it is he who wrestles with the age who finally justifies both it and himself” (7). This kind of wrestling, unfortunately, Muir does not find in Eliot’s poetry: Mr Eliot’s poetry is in reality very narrow, and in spite of its great refinement of sensibility, very simple. In the main it is a statement of two opposed experiences: the experiences of beauty and ugliness, of art and reality, of literature and life…. [T]heir attributes remain constant; they never pass into one another; and there is no intermediate world of life connecting and modifying them. The plan of the early Sweeney Among the Nightingales is the same as that of The Waste Land. The raw fact and the remembered vision, the banal and the rare, the crude and the exquisite,

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Muir acutely senses a duality of response in Eliot’s imagistic scenarios, especially in a poem such as The Waste Land, where an expression of distaste can seem mingled with fascination. In his early, difficult Glasgow days, Muir himself had experienced something similar in his addiction to Heine’s poetry, commenting in his autobiography: “I battened on tombs and shrouds” (144). Heine’s ironic expressionism was, however, very different from Eliot’s impersonal poetic mode and its French-influenced modernist irony. It may be that Muir’s problem with Eliot’s poetry was also a formal one, in that the dominance of Eliot’s stylistic innovations inhibited Muir’s ability to recognize a theme which would relate (even implicitly) to human experience, thus linking art with life as opposed to impersonally separating it from life. Perhaps surprisingly, Muir did not have the same problem with MacDiarmid’s modernist poetry in “synthetic Scots”—MacDiarmid’s term for the literary form of Scots he promoted—a poetry that was equally disruptive of traditional forms; and indeed, Muir was probably the most perceptive critic of MacDiarmid’s new poetry. Similarly, Muir wrote perceptively about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses, neither of which could be considered traditional in form. On the other hand, all three of these writers— MacDiarmid, Woolf, and Joyce—also communicate through their images and narratives a strong sense of lived experience, the continuity of time, the connectedness of human experience, and the importance of imaginative thought. These were all qualities that Muir considered essential in life and art. Eliot’s early poetry perhaps appeared too abstract and fragmented to him, too dependent on literary references whose tenuous connections were, on the one hand, accessible only to the highly educated and, on the other, too accepting of human dislocation. Muir was later to modify his early opinion of Eliot’s The Waste Land, writing in 1936 that it was “no doubt his greatest work,” one that had influenced both the “form” and “attitude” of poetry by turning it away from the “purely lyrical” and by exercising “the historical sense” (The Truth 61, 63). Nevertheless, Muir claims that, compared with Eliot’s later work, there remains in the poem “a certain blindness both in the despair it expresses and in turning away from despair at the end” (61). In this same review of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1935, Muir enthusiastically praises the recently published Burnt Norton:

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“Burnt Norton” is surely one of the best poems that Mr Eliot has ever written. Its subject is Time and its main text a quotation from Herakleitos to the effect that the road upwards and downwards is one and the same road…. It alternates between the most close argument and the most vivid imagery expressing the contradiction of Time, a contradiction implicit in the recurring phrase, “At the still point of the turning world.” (62)

While Burnt Norton shares the sense of the “fabulous” with The Waste Land, Muir finds that in the later poem “both the thought and the imagery are intensely concentrated, and gain immensely from the development.” And he senses that in this poem Eliot has moved “away from the Elizabethans, by whom he was so much influenced at the beginning, towards Dante” (The Truth 62). In contrast to his hesitations about Eliot the poet, Muir’s praise of Eliot the critic was unequivocal, and he was particularly influenced by “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Metaphysical Poets,” whose arguments later fed negatively into his own analyses of literature in Scotland. Muir was never entirely at home in the culture of Lowland Scotland. As an Orkneyman, he described Scotland as his “second country” (“Nooks” 120); and unlike MacDiarmid, Muir did not adopt or adapt the Scots language as his medium for poetry, preferring to use English. As a consequence, he was particularly receptive to Eliot’s idea of tradition and the importance of a unifying language in a nation’s literary tradition—a view that challenged the diversity of Scotland’s language situation. Muir drew on Eliot’s views of tradition in his Scott and Scotland, a 1936 analysis of the future of Scottish writing. MacDiarmid was understandably alienated by Muir’s contention there that ambitious writers in Scotland must adopt not only the English language in their writing, but also the English tradition. On a more personal level, Eliot’s theory of impersonality—which insists on the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (SP 41)—mattered greatly to Muir in his early poetry. There, Muir’s psychological instability is concealed in imagery of the biblical Fall and the search for a lost Eden. These impersonal journeys came to no ending; the places provided no stable home. We now know, as a result of biographical research, that Eliot’s theory of impersonality concealed the fact that The Waste Land and its cryptic imagery contained the very personal story of his own desperately unhappy and neurotic marriage. Eliot wrote to Middleton Murry in 1925: In the last ten years – gradually, but deliberately – I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately – in order to endure, in order not to feel – but it has killed V[ivien]. In leaving the bank I hope to become less

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Chapter Thirteen a machine – but yet I am frightened – because I don’t know what it will do to me – and to V. – should I come alive again. 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. What will happen if I live again? … But the dilemma – to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive? Is it best to make oneself a machine, and kill them by not giving nourishment, or to be alive, and kill them by wanting something that one cannot get from that person? (L2 627).

Although the circumstances which brought about their psychological and emotional traumas were different, it would appear that Muir and Eliot were closer in their personal troubles in these early years than either of them would have suspected. Eliot was only luckier in his greater talent and in his capacity for illuminating the anxieties of modernity: two qualities that helped him to conceal his personal dislocations. But though he was the less famous poet, Muir also had his finger on the pulse of modernity, and perceptive critics noted this. Reviewing Muir’s poetry collection The Narrow Place in 1942, the Scottish novelist Neil M. Gunn commented that Muir’s poetry “has caught a flame from the fire that is burning the world” (163). It is certainly true that this wartime collection exhibited a poetic maturity absent from the early poetry, with its lost lands and inconclusive journeys. In the interwar period, Eliot’s review of Joyce’s Ulysses had commented on “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (SP 177); now Muir took up the related theme of “the single, disunited world” (Autobiography 194) in his World War II poetry. This theme is especially evident in his 1949 collection The Labyrinth, written mostly between 1945 and 1948, during his time as Director of the British Institute in Prague, where he witnessed the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia after its brief moment of freedom from Nazi occupation at the end of the war. Writing of Muir’s late poetry, Seamus Heaney calls Muir a “European” poet whose Prague poem “The Interrogation” “anticipates by a couple of decades the note which would be heard when A. Alvarez began to edit his influential Penguin Modern European Poets series in the late 1960s” (9). Heaney also remarks that Muir’s “two postwar volumes, The Labyrinth in 1949 and One Foot in Eden in 1956, are not like anything that was going on just then on the home poetic front” (8). Heaney contrasts Muir’s Prague poetry with Eliot’s Little Gidding which he saw as putting forward “imaginary proof that an ordained and suprahistorical reality persists, and it is of course one of the poetry’s triumphs to make such a faith provisionally tenable” (13). By contrast, Heaney finds that it is the European persona in Muir’s “The Interrogation” “who seems to be more truly our representative, stunned

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and ineffective at the center of a menacing pageant, what Eliot called the vast panorama of violence and futility which is contemporary history” (13). When Muir’s Collected Poems was being prepared for publication at Faber in the late 1950s, Eliot commented on how he was “struck, as I had not been before, by the power of his early work,” while believing that “it is still his late work which seems to me the most remarkable” (“Preface” 10). It was Eliot who had persuaded Muir to accept the title One Foot in Eden for his collection of 1956, as opposed to Muir’s own suggestion, The Succession. The former title is the more striking and marketable, but the more prosaic The Succession comes closer to Muir’s sense of the human story as it unfolds through time. The biblical resonance of the title One Foot in Eden has at times encouraged an overreligious interpretation of Muir’s late poetry, something that was probably close to Eliot’s heart but not necessarily to Muir’s. “I can’t accept any religious explanation that I know of,” Muir writes to Stephen Spender. “I would rather have the problems themselves, for from an awareness of them and their vastness I get some sort of living experience, some sense even of communion, of being in the whole in some way” (Selected Letters 137). He was not averse to the spiritual dimension of human existence, writing in his autobiography: “Our minds are possessed by three mysteries: where we came from, where we are going, and, since we are not alone, but members of a countless family, how we should live with one another” (56). Thus, while Eliot in his later poetry and drama turned increasingly towards religious and philosophical thought, Muir’s late poetry is marked by that public and social concern about “how we should live with one another.” He was one of the first poets to write about the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s in poems such as “The Horses” and its negative companion “After a Hypothetical War.” Outstanding among his posthumous poems is “The Last War.” In 1958, the year before his death and the same time as he was working on this poem, Muir wrote to the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig: “I keep seeing poems by you everywhere, with friendly envy.” Referring to his own frustration in piecing together unfinished fragments for a “longish poem,” he adds: “that may be what they are best suited for. Time will tell. The Waste Land was made out of splinters” (Selected Letters 20203). Muir’s own splinters eventually took shape as “The Last War,” a work that surveys the waste land of the Cold War era. But unlike Eliot’s interwar poem, “The Last War” proposes different philosophical assumptions and formal scenarios. Muir’s poem in five sections foresees an ending of human civilization brought about not by a deliberate decision to retreat from life—as with the inhabitants of Eliot’s poem—but by the

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fact that the self-absorbed pursuit of our own ends has not allowed us to live with one another in a positive, co-operative way. In the context of nuclear annihilation, going to war to achieve our own ends means the end of all human life: “No place at all for bravery in that war … No way to save / By our own death the young that they might die / Sometime a different death” (Complete Poems 256). In “The Last War,” images of the end of nature and of human life function both metonymically and metaphorically: “a tree thin sick and pale by a north wall, / A smile splintering a face”; “bird and tree / Silently falling” and “our bodies buried in falling birds.” Human life is reduced to “the lexicon of a dream” (Complete Poems 256-57). In his preface to Muir’s posthumous Selected Poems (1965), Eliot wrote that, unlike his own early poetry, Muir’s technique was never “a primary concern” of the author’s. Muir “was first and foremost concerned with what he had to say” (10). Yet Eliot also recognized that “under the pressure of emotional intensity, and possessed by his vision, he found, almost unconsciously, the right, the inevitable way of saying what he wanted to say” (10). Proof of Eliot’s claim that Muir’s poetry reveals an intense, visionary quality may be found in Muir’s earlier poetry up to World War II. But such a claim does not quite describe his later work, the formal maturity of which shows the experience and influence of his interwar writing and of his translations of Broch, and of Kafka in particular. Muir differed from Eliot and from the dominant French influence in early modernism in that his interests and his influences came predominantly from German culture. As a young man, he had a fascination with Heine, and he maintained a lasting interest in Goethe, begun even before he travelled to Germany and learned to read German. In Hellerau he discovered Hofmannsthal and Hölderlin, whose poetry, as with Goethe’s, matched his own belief that the ideas particular to romanticism were still alive and relevant to modern thought. His important Freeman essay “The Meaning of Romanticism” argued that romanticism was most organic in Germany, and even in his own early poetry of loss and displacement one has a sense that, as he found in Hölderlin, there is a way of integration to be found. He described this metaphorically in An Autobiography as a world where “the sky fitted the earth and the earth the sky” (33). As with his own unfashionable attraction to German literature, characterizations of modernist art as being primarily concerned with formal innovation as opposed to social concerns would appear to have removed Muir to the periphery of literary modernism, relegating him to Scottish literary traditions, where unfortunately he also found himself

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something of a misfit. It is to be hoped that as critical boundaries in a new century expand to include a less narrowly defined history of literary modernism which can accommodate the national and transnational as well as gender, social and ideological issues, then Muir will once more be recognized as taking his place alongside Eliot as an important European contributor to the narrative of modern writing.

Works Cited Eliot, T. S. “Preface.” Selected Poems of Edwin Muir. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. Gunn, Neil M. Rev. of The Narrow Place, by Edwin Muir. Scots Magazine 39.2 May 1943: 163-64. Heaney, Seamus. “The Impact of Translation.” Yale Review Autumn (1987): 1-14. Muir, Edwin. An Autobiography: London: Hogarth, [1954] 1980. —. Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. Ed. Peter Butter. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1991. —. “Nooks of Scotland.” Listener 16 Jan. 1958: 120. —. Rev. of Collected Poems 1909-1935, by T. S. Eliot. Spectator 3 April 1936: 622. —. Selected Letters of Edwin Muir. Ed. P. H. Butter. London: Hogarth, 1974. —. The Story and the Fable. London: Harrap, 1940. —. Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature. London: Hogarth, 1926. —. The Truth of the Imagination: Some Uncollected Reviews and Essays by Edwin Muir. Ed. Peter Butter. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1988. — [Edward Moore, pseud.]. We Moderns. London: Allen and Unwin, 1918.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN T. S. ELIOT’S EXPRESSIONIST ANGST JOYCE WEXLER

In 1914 Ezra Pound launched a campaign to persuade Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, to publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He told her that it had been written by the only American he knew who had “actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own” (Selected Letters 40). But it would be more accurate, if less superlative, to say that T. S. Eliot had been “modernized” by his contact with the European avantgarde. He wrote most of “Prufrock” in Munich during the summer of 1911, and the poem is saturated with that city’s international aesthetic currents. Although critics familiar with German literature have compared Eliot to expressionist poets, the influence of Jules Laforgue and other French Symbolists is much more widely recognized. Reviewing Prufrock and Other Observations for Poetry, Pound, for example, proclaimed that Eliot was as good as anyone writing in “French, English, or American since the death of Jules Laforgue” (Review 264). He added, “I would praise the work for its fine tone, its humanity, and its realism; for all good art is realism of one sort or another” (267). By the time Eliot discovered Laforgue and other Symbolists in 1908, however, European artists and writers had abandoned realism and lost confidence in Symbolism. In contrast to Pound’s Imagist ideal of “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’” (“Retrospect” 3), the European avant-garde distorted things in an effort to “express” subjective experience. Eliot became a poet during the transition from Symbolism to expressionism in Central Europe, and “Prufrock” is more cosmopolitan than French or English and more expressionist than realist or Symbolist. In 1909 Eliot began a private notebook (published much later as Inventions of the March Hare) just as the expressionist movement was coalescing. Like European painting and writing of this period, his early poems can be read as confessions of personal anguish and as

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representations of cultural angst. Jayme Stayer, for example, finds biographical evidence of Eliot’s early religious leanings, the sexual inhibitions produced by his class and upbringing, and racism (112-13). Yet Eliot’s early work—with the possible exception of the Bolo poems—can also be read as part of the avant-garde campaign for secular meaning, new sexual mores, and principled tolerance. While private and public meanings are always present in art, expressionists believed that the source of both kinds of meaning was subjective. Although subjectivity seems personal, the turn inward leads outward. Like expressionist art, Eliot’s canonical texts of this period, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” probe private experience in search of public meaning. Eliot had studied German since boyhood and was well prepared to enter the cultural life of Central Europe. After graduating from Harvard, he lived in Paris the academic year of 1910-11, and he spent the summer of 1911 in Germany. His enthusiasm for German culture surprised his French friends. Replying to a letter that Eliot had sent from Munich in 1911, Alain-Fournier remarked: “I am greatly interested by what you say about the Germans. Although I was an internationalist only four or five years ago, I would now very willingly march against them. And I think the majority of Frenchmen are like me” (L1 27). In a recent biography, James Miller speculates that Eliot joined his friend Jean Verdenal in supporting Charles Maurras and the Action Française (Making 118), but Eliot’s letters suggest that he was immune to nationalist chauvinism. While on vacation in Germany in 1914, he sent Conrad Aiken an exuberant report: “I find that I like German food! I like German people! and we have five meals a day. I stuff myself; the Frau Pfarrer thinks I don’t eat enough. Then I swim (there are baths) or walk (there are beautiful walks among the woods) but not far, because I must always be back in time for the next meal” (L1 48). He embraced a comprehensive idea of Europe rather than any national identity, and he adhered to this commitment throughout his career. 1 Despite the bitter divisiveness of the First World War, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) Eliot advised the aspiring poet to become familiar with the “mind of Europe” as well as the “mind of his own country” (SP 39). In the first issue of The Criterion in 1922, Eliot included Hermann Hesse’s essay on “Recent German Poetry.” European culture— past and present, French and German—was Eliot’s lodestone. Like others of his generation, Eliot came to expressionism via Symbolism. He discovered avant-garde poetry through Arthur Symons’s turn-of-the-century book about Symbolism and spoke of this event as if it were a religious epiphany: “if we can recall the time when we were

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ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation” (SP 52). He became Laforgue’s disciple: “I remember getting hold of Laforgue years ago at Harvard, purely through reading Symons…. I do feel more grateful to him than to anyone else, and I do not think that I have come across any other writer since who has meant so much to me as he did at that particular moment, or that particular year” (L1 212). Although Eliot called attention to French poets, Symons considered Symbolism a European phenomenon. He dedicated his book to W. B. Yeats as the chief Symbolist writing in English, explaining that he had focused on French literature only because “France is the country of movements” (v). “In Germany,” Symons observed, Symbolism “seems to be permeating the whole of literature” (v). The unifying aim in this diverse and widespread movement was the fight “against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition” (8-9). In Symbolism “the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream” (4). While Symbolism provided a secular alternative to religious representations of non-empirical experience, Symons claimed that this literature performed a religious function: “in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, [literature] becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual” (9). Despite Symons’s hope that the Symbolist Movement could be a new religion, belief in the power of art to replace faith in God did not last. After the turn of the century, artists and writers in Central Europe continued the Symbolist fight against materialism, but they were less certain of victory. Unable to discover an unseen world beyond visible reality, they sought meaning in subjective experience. Laforgue himself illustrates how Symbolist aims could lead to expressionist means. Although his poems project the persona of a cynical sophisticate who ridicules bourgeois ideals, he cannot stifle his feelings. Symons hears strains of self-pity (108) in Laforgue’s “balanced, chill, colloquial style” (105), and Graham Dunstan Martin, a recent editor of Laforgue, also finds self-pity beneath the irony (xiii). Martin provides contemporary corroboration for this view from Jacques Rivière, reputed to be “a great literary opinion-former,” who thought that Laforgue was “‘pleurard et pédant’ (snivelling and over-learned)” (Martin xiii). Rivière was the secretary of La Nouvelle Revue Française, which had been founded in 1909 to publish post-Symbolist writers (Miller, Making 118). Since he was the brother-in-law of Eliot’s friend Alain-Fournier, Eliot probably heard

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such negative opinions of Laforgue while in France. For Symons and Rivière, Laforgue was less a detached flâneur than a latent expressionist. Expressionism absorbed the anti-materialist aim of Symbolism but was far more turbulent. The art historian Peter Selz describes expressionism in terms that echo Symons’s account of Symbolism as a response to religious doubts: The expressionist movement may be seen in part as a reaction against the prevailing values of the deceptively stable society in which the artists grew up. In their reaction against materialism and rationalism they were attempting to affirm the values of the spiritual. Frequently they turned to religious subjects, or used art as a spiritual substitute for religion. (vii)

But Selz emphasizes a difference in tone that indicated a new attitude: “Frequently, where symbolism merely suggests and understates, expressionism exaggerates and overstates” (Selz 64). This intensity deprives expressionism of the religious functions Symons attributed to Symbolism. As Thomas Harrison argues in 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, “Expressionist art expresses more of the tension than the unity of ecstatic experience. Where ecstasy is presented as mystical union or transport we have symbolism rather than expressionism” (203). Harrison’s distinction emphasizes the subjective orientation of expressionism. Extremes of emotion ranging from self-pity and erotic desire to outrage at injustice are felt subjectively, even though external conditions are the source of these feelings. Kurt Pinthus, an early supporter of expressionist poetry, recalls that “the over-stimulated and over-sensitive nerves and souls of the poets were already clearly perceiving on the one side the dull advance of the proletarian masses robbed of love and joy, and from the other side the imminent collapse of a humanity that was as arrogant as it was indifferent” (32). For this generation, ordinary life was unbearable. Lower-class ugliness and upper-class emptiness were equally contemptible, and no vocation seemed worth pursuing. Young people blamed their distress on social disorder. They saw signs of a secular apocalypse wherever they looked, as illustrated by “Weltende” (End of the World), written by Jakob van Hoddis in 1911. Both catastrophic and mundane events are portents of disaster: The burgher’s hat flies off his pointed head, Everywhere the air reverberates with what sounds like screams. Roofers are falling off and breaking in two, And along the coasts—the paper says—the tide is rising. The storm is here, the wild seas are hopping

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This poem came to typify the movement (Weissenberger 187). Its juxtaposition of disparate images was known as Reihungsstil (paratactical style) or Simultangedicht (simultaneous poem) (Sharp 139). Its incongruous images are ironic because levity deflates gravity, yet they also signify that danger is ubiquitous. The poem is an example of Neil H. Donahue’s observation that “Expressionist subject matter seems to fluctuate wildly between the antipodes of rural idyll and metropolitan alienation, between tranquility and catastrophe” (12). The same formal and thematic characteristics also appear in Eliot’s early poems. The parallels between losing a hat and falling off a roof, between a cold and a train wreck, resemble Eliot’s use of parataxis to locate ominous meanings in ordinary things, as in “Goldfish”: And the waltzes turn, return, Float and fall, Like the cigarettes Of our marionettes, Inconsequent, intolerable. (IMH 26)

Even the “Inconsequent” is “intolerable.” Similarly, in a deleted section of “Prufrock,” dawn spreads not light but a miasma: “And when the dawn at length had realized itself / And turned with a sense of nausea, to see what it had stirred” (IMH 43). After a night of insomnia, the speaker imagines his world collapsing: I fumbled to the window to experience the world And to hear my Madness singing, sitting on the kerbstone [A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, With broken boot heels stained in many gutters] And as he sang the world began to fall apart … (43)

The speaker has seen “the world roll up into a ball / Then suddenly dissolve and fall away” (44). By the end of the poem, he is no longer alone. The plural pronoun of the opening lines returns: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (46). Like van Hoddis, Eliot writes about life as if the world is ending. Pinthus chose “Weltende” as the opening poem in his 1919 anthology Menschheitsdämmerung [Dawn of Humanity], which has been credited with defining the expressionist canon. 2 He organized his selection of

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poems as a “symphony” in four movements to demonstrate the range of themes, moods, and forms in expressionism (28). The ambiguity of dämmerung, which means “half-light,” and the tonal range of music are as significant in this collection as they are in Inventions of the March Hare. Two of Eliot’s “Preludes” have German titles that resemble Pinthus’s title: “Morgendämmerung” [Dawn] and “Abenddämmerung” [Dusk], and images of dusk convey intense but indistinct feelings in Eliot’s poems as they do in expressionism. As Russell E. Brown observes, Ernst Stadler, Georg Trakl, and Georg Heym use dusk as a general trope for personal and social decline (20). The musical allusion of “Preludes” reprises Stadler’s 1905 volume Praeludien, and the malaise in Eliot’s poems fits Francis Sharp’s account of expressionist discontent: “Characteristic of Heym’s verse as well as Stadler’s is a dissatisfaction and impatience with the staleness, the unheroic quality, and the lack of vitality in his times, a widely shared attitude that found popular expression in the enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of the First World War” (143). Eliot’s poems voice similar complaints about everyday life. For example, in “Prelude in Dorchester (Houses),” written in 1910, residents of a modest neighborhood endure “The burnt-out ends of smoky days” (IMH 334), as if their lives were as sordid as their surroundings. The speaker in “First Caprice in North Cambridge” bemoans “The yellow evening flung against the panes / Of dirty windows” and the “Bottles and broken glass,” yet he mocks the intensity of his reaction in the last line: “Oh, these minor considerations!” (IMH 13). Like his European counterparts, Eliot portrays a society that demands too much and offers too little. This generation felt that its desires—aesthetic, erotic, and spiritual— were blocked at every turn. As Pinthus writes: The young people of this generation found themselves in a time from which every trace of ethos had disappeared…. The aggregate of hedonistically pleasurable things had to be as extensive and varied as possible; art was measured completely by an aesthetic yardstick, life completely by a materialistic, statistical yardstick; and the human being and his spiritual activity seemed only to exist in order to be observed psychologically, analytically, to be defined in accordance with historical maxims. (31)

Outrage at these conditions led to extreme protests. Gottfried Benn, the expressionist poet most often compared to Eliot, recalled the violence of the poetic outcry: “A revolt with eruptions, ecstasies, hate, longing for a new humanity, with the dashing of language in order to dash the world” (qtd. in Pinthus 13). Similarly, Walter Sokel, in his classic study of expressionism The Writer in Extremis, notes that poets emitted a “cataract

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of highly charged emotional words” (Sokel 111), suggesting the “apocalyptic extremity” of a “formless shriek” (4). 3 This intensity is a fundamental element of expressionism, but shrieking is not the only form it takes. Artists and writers cast themselves as martyrs to their ideals. Harrison lists visual examples such as “Schiele’s Saint Sebastian, Schoenberg’s martyrs and haunted faces, Kokoschka’s and Nolde’s Christ—figures all nailed to a cross” (197). The figure of the secular martyr also appears in one of Eliot’s miscellaneous quatrains: He said: “this crucifixion was dramatic He had not passed his life on officechairs They did not crucify him in an attic Up six abysmal flights of broken stairs.” (IMH 71)

In “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” which Eliot wrote while in Germany in 1914, martyrdom acquires erotic and sadomasochistic motives4: You would love me because I should have strangled you And because of my infamy; And I should love you the more because I had mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me. (IMH 78-79)

While such imagery invites biographical interpretation, martyrs are so common in expressionist art and writing that they begin to seem more conventional than confessional. From the perspective of later events, the expressionist response to bourgeois life may seem excessive, especially because it produced more art than action. As Eliot asks in “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse”: Among such scattered thoughts as these We turn the corner of the street; But why are we so hard to please? (IMH 14)

Unable to answer this question, the expressionist generation represented its distress as disintegration. In Theorizing the Avant-Garde, Richard Murphy characterizes expressionism in terms that fit “Prufrock”: “the avant-garde text stages subjectivity as fragmented and discontinuous, for example as a constellation of personae, a series of mutually conflicting and contradictory roles played out by seemingly separate figures in the texts” (18). Nevertheless, Murphy excludes Eliot from the expressionist avantgarde, though his argument is based on The Waste Land and “Ulysses,

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Order and Myth.” Whereas Benn’s “longing for a mythical order” was “problematized as a regressive and nostalgic turning-away from modernity” (102n50), Murphy claims that Eliot believed in “the existence of a separate, transcendent and self-sufficient world of art” as a source of order (256-57n16). In 1914, however, Eliot was as inclined to “parody” and “de-aestheticize” received ideas as anyone else in the avant-garde (256). When Prufrock says, “Let us go then, you and I,” he could be walking through Berlin or Munich, manifesting the fragmented subjectivity Murphy describes. Another expressionist analogue for Prufrock is the Prodigal Son in Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Harrison interprets the parable of the Prodigal Son in relation to the expressionist generation: In Malte’s version, the Prodigal Son is the story of a person who left home because he did not want to be loved. At home, where everyone doted on him, he was oppressed by a feeling that “most things were already decided,” decided rhetorically, that is, within a system of familiar and reciprocal interest…. “[O]ne was the person for whom they took one here; the person for whom, out of his little past and their own wishes, they had long fashioned a life.” (Harrison 207)

Such a life of domestic oppression, social rounds and trivial decisions is the very situation that paralyzes Prufrock: And I have known the eyes, I have known them all The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase And when I am formulated sprawling on a pin 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? (IMH 40)

Prufrock, like the figures that Pinthus and Rilke portray, resents being objectified and measured, yet he is unable to show others that he is more than they perceive. Sokel groups Eliot with German writers for whom “cerebralism” was “the chief existential problem”: only “[a]esthetic cognition, the universe of memories and irony, saves them” (119). Sokel detects this expressionist syndrome in Prufrock’s wish that “he could be ‘a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’” (96). Whereas Christopher Ricks’s long note for these lines mentions sources as various as Darwin’s Descent of Man, the “Crab Louse” associated with venereal disease, a scene involving crabs in Turgenev’s Smoke, and The Ancient Mariner

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(IMH 187-88), Sokel finds Prufrock’s “longing for retrogression to a simpler, less inhibited way of life” characteristic of expressionism (96). The German context seems at least as relevant as Ricks’s references. Like Sokel’s examples of cerebral poets, Prufrock conveys the depth of his feelings by attempting to escape them. The lassitude of “And would it have been worth it, after all” defends against anxieties about mortality and mockery, which seem equally threatening: “And I have seen the eternal FOOTMAN hold my coat, and snicker— / And in short, I was afraid” (IMH 45). The servility of “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous” suggests suppressed ambition, while the selfdeprecation of “Almost, at times, the Fool” (IMH 46) masks intellectual pride. Such feelings were not merely Eliot’s; they were characteristic of the expressionist generation. Although expressionist writing is often strident in its sincerity, it can also be ironic. Its extreme disparities between tone and implied feeling produce irony. James Rolleston perceives irony in expressionism’s effort to replace the individual lyric voice with a collective, “choric” presence. For example, “Benn speaks with an authentically choric, deindividualized consciousness, inspecting the still-smouldering ruins, but his tone is fundamentally ironic….” With the critique of language as a transparent means of communication, there was a shift to thinking of language as an autonomous system that “conditions Benn’s speaking” (176). Rolleston also detects irony in Benn’s use of “consciously hermetic” language (176), “fragmentation,” and “citation” (179). 5 Although these qualities are commonly associated with postwar modernism, they first appear in prewar expressionism and Eliot’s early poems. Calling attention to Eliot’s affinities with expressionist poets, Sokel notes the importance of irony to both Benn and Eliot: This poetry is at once ironic and elegiac; and this combination, plus Alexandrian learning and musical artistry, relates Benn to Eliot, a kinship which Eliot acknowledged when he paraphrased Benn at length in his “Three Voices of Poetry.” Like Eliot, Benn looks at the cultural-social reality of Western man in his period of decline and contemplates the constancies and contrasts, the eternal pattern of myth and the sterilized vulgarity of the technological era side by side. (Sokel 114)

Benn’s mockery of vulgar seduction in “Nachtcafe” [Night Café] (1912) resembles Eliot’s use of derogatory physical descriptions and cheap urban settings to convey the degradation of modern life. In the third section of “Mandarins” Eliot demeans the entrenched elite:

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The eldest of the mandarins, A stoic in obese repose, With intellectual double chins, Regards the corner of his nose (IMH 21)

Benn’s synecdoches are more severe: Young goiter is sweet on saddle-nose. He treats her to three beers. Sycosis buys carnations to mollify double chin. B minor: sonata op. 35. A pair of eyes roars out: Don’t splash the blood of Chopin around the place for this crowd to slouch about in! (Benn 219)

In “Portrait of a Lady” Eliot also measures contemporary decline against Chopin: We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger tips “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” (IMH 327)

Just as Eliot irreverently compares the evening to a “patient etherized upon a table” in “Prufrock,” Benn describes a prank in a morgue in “Little Aster” (1912): A drowned beer-truck driver was lifted on the slab. Someone had stuck a dark-bright purple aster between his teeth. (Pinthus 75)

The incongruous mixture of the serious and the trivial, the sincere and the ironic, flouts decorum, undermining conventional standards of art and behavior. Such affinities between the March Hare poems and expressionism reflect a widespread cultural crisis. The similarities between Eliot’s early poems and expressionism expand their significance. Instead of regarding them as sui generis portents of greatness, we can see how they reflect contemporary social conditions. Although many examples of expressionism

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seem to be the one-note cri de coeur of a solitary being, the movement was a communal response to the collapse of the nineteenth century’s cultural consensus. As Benn wrote, “1910, that is indeed the year when all scaffolds began to crack” (qtd. in Harrison 1). Even the return of Halley’s comet that year seemed to give cosmic validation to anxieties about collective “doom and degeneration” (Harrison 2). Neither expressionism nor Eliot’s poems were private complaints. In the wake of Symbolist claims that art was a secular replacement for religion, expressionists also hoped to reveal a human essence that was inaccessible to sensory perception. The urgent need for alternatives to materialism led them to abstraction. Wassily Kandinsky, in his manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), diagnosed the same crisis of belief that others perceived at this time: Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. (1-2)

The usual antidotes for this infection were no longer effective: “When religion, science, and morality are shaken, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself” (qtd. in Harrison 15). Kandinsky thought that art was a cure, because it provided “material expressions of the soul” (Kandinsky 41) in response to “the inner need” (35). Whereas Symbolists posited correspondences between the visible and invisible, Kandinsky claimed that abstraction was the way to represent spiritual meaning, and the “more obvious is the separation from nature, the more likely is the inner meaning to be pure and unhampered” (50). Like so many other expressionists, he believed that music, more than other arts, approached this ideal: “A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end” (19). He alluded to musical forms by giving many paintings titles such as Improvisation and Composition (Selz 205). Comparing Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Harrison argues that by 1910 two kinds of expressionist art had emerged: If the Munich school of Kandinsky and Marc gives an intellectual, metaphysical face to this self-expressive discord, painters in Vienna, Dresden, and later Berlin are more struck by the toll it takes on the psyche. Schoenberg is as pivotal a figure here as he is in Munich…. While his

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atonal music is analogous to the abstractions of Munich, his pictorial work is closer to the tortured figural representations produced in other Germanic cities. (60)

Harrison formulates the paradox of subjective feeling leading to impersonal knowledge in relation to Schoenberg’s The Red Gaze (1910). As in many other expressionist paintings, wide-open, staring eyes dominate a disembodied face with indistinct features. Harrison asks, “What is the affliction from which his face suffers? Is it personal or communal in nature?” (1). Harrison’s answer is that a communal crisis of belief caused “that new twentieth-century emotion called angst—as ancient, no doubt, as existence itself, but collectively perceptible only in the new cultural conditions” (Harrison 111). Schoenberg’s tormented face may seem far more personal than Kandinsky’s vague shapes and colors, but both painters reflect the expressionist assumption that subjective experience was the source of impersonal meaning. To meet the spiritual needs of a secular culture, Kandinsky and other expressionists cut away the incidentals of personality to expose an impersonal core. Responding to the demise of religious faith, artists tried to represent communal, if not universal, meaning. Whether striving for universal spirituality like Kandinsky’s abstractions or evoking contemporary angst like Schoenberg’s martyrs, the movement was unrelentingly subjective. Pinthus includes both personal and impersonal forms of this subjectivity in the four symphonic movements of his anthology. Poems about private feelings appear in “Crash and Cry” and “Awakening of the Heart,” and poems about communal bonds appear in “Call-to-Action and Revolt” and “Love to Human Beings.” In a 1959 commentary, Pinthus attributes the characteristic intensity of both kinds of poems to social forces: And time and again it must be said that the quality of this poetry rests in its intensity. Never before in world literature did there resonate as loudly, piercingly, and stirringly cry, crash, and longing of an age as from the wild band of these forerunners and martyrs, whose hearts were pierced not by the romantic arrows of Amor or Eros but by the tortures of an accursed youth, a detested society, the murderous years they were forced to endure. (36)

Sounding the theme of martyrdom, he indicts society for the “tortures of an accursed youth.” Although the pain was felt individually, poets claimed that it had a communal meaning: “Thus social aspects are not presented in realistic detail, are not depicted objectively as, e.g., slum art (like the kind

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in vogue around 1890), but they are always totally directed toward the universal, toward the great ideas of humanity” (35). Like Pinthus, Sokel emphasizes the subjective foundation of both intellectual and emotional types of expressionism: “Expressionism as abstract form, as part of the modernist movement, and Expressionism as formless shriek, arise from the same factor—subjectivism” (4). He notes that in addition to the more familiar “fundamental qualities and devices of Expressionism—the tense urgency, the extremism and violence, the need for the outcry, for the breathless condensation, the hectic hyperbole, the metaphoric visualization” (Sokel 226), some poets “developed the possibilities of linguistic condensation and abstraction” (111). Herwarth Walden, who founded Der Sturm in Berlin in 1910, also pinpointed the impersonal effect of subjective art: “Expressionism is the intellectual movement of a time which places the inner experience above external life. But this inner experience is not personal; the artist is the involuntary (blind) servant of the ‘Never experienced’” (Schultz 13-14). Claiming that the intensity of feeling in expressionism transcends the individual poet, Walden explains how impersonality can be subjective. Eliot also takes up the question Harrison poses: does expressionism portray private anguish or communal angst, a psychological condition or a social situation? Eliot’s answer appears in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). By balancing subjective feeling and public meaning, Eliot asserts, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (SP 43). This definition of poetry is almost identical to Sokel’s description of expressionism: “The continuous personality of the artist, his experiences, his individuality, his ‘soul’ command no interest. The artist is to be nothing more than an executive organ for the record production [sic] of works” (106). For expressionists, sensory perception was merely a source of objective knowledge, useful for discerning physical distinctions; only subjective feelings and thoughts could reveal underlying commonalities among individuals. In this context, Eliot’s assertion that the “emotion of art is impersonal” (SP 44), is more theoretical than self-protective. His sardonic aside—“only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things”—perfectly states the expressionist conviction that the source of both personal and impersonal meaning was subjective. Whether expressionist form was abstract or distorted, the tone sincere or ironic, the goal was not to give vent to personal feelings, but to reveal a fundamental human essence. Since this

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essence was thought to be inaccessible to empirical examination, poets turned inward, assuming that subjectivity produced impersonal knowledge. After the war, the aesthetic current shifted from expressionist subjectivity to post-expressionist objectivity, carrying Eliot along with it. Reacting against spiritual justifications for the war, people came to distrust appeals to transcendent experience as a source of social unity.6 To reduce the ambiguity of indistinct and abstract forms, the postwar movement called Neue Sachlichkeit attempted to ground meanings in particular cultural settings. This change is apparent in the contrast between the prewar abstraction of Kandinsky and the postwar specificity of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Christian Schad. Although Grosz’s Gray Day, for example, is not realistic, it does refer to a recognizable world. The differences between “Prufrock” and The Waste Land register the impact of the war in a similar way. Eliot replaced the subjective perspective of a single speaker in “Prufrock” with a wide range of social and cultural voices. The speakers of The Waste Land are presented objectively as distinct individuals tied to particular social positions. 7 “Prufrock,” in contrast, presents a single speaker, but his identity and situation are generalized. Quotation marks indicate when the speaker is referring to someone’s spoken words. The use of metaphor, allusion, and discursive reflection rather than speech makes the speaker’s subjectivity seem impersonal. Having assimilated the angst of his generation before the war, Eliot later joined his cohort’s return to empirical reality, tethering postwar desolation to specific circumstances. The similarities between the March Hare poems and expressionism reinforce Eliot’s claim in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that no poet “has his complete meaning alone” (SP 38). While the spiritual yearning in these poems may anticipate his later religious faith, we can contextualize this longing as part of the expressionist generation’s quest for secular meaning. While the extreme images of the early poems may be signs of sexual repression, we can compare Eliot’s emotional turmoil to that of other young men throughout Europe who were unwilling to conform to social expectations. Rejecting the religious and political beliefs of their elders, they sought meaning within themselves, but like Eliot, they soon found that they needed more than inner knowledge to create art about contemporary life. The combination of personal feelings and impersonal ideas in expressionism also characterizes Eliot’s early poems. They are statements of social angst as well as private anguish. “Prufrock” and the other March Hare poems are legible as part of the expressionist movement. In the context of the European avant-garde, the subjectivity of

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Eliot’s early poetry is part of his generation’s search for impersonal meaning in emotion. Eliot did not turn to art as an escape from social disruption but as a way to reveal it.

Notes 1

Leon Surette claims that Eliot probably first read Charles Maurras in 1911 but never adopted Maurras’s nationalism. Although Eliot “clung to the Action Française fantasies of a Christian, Royalist polity” (161), his vision of “panEuropeanism” was a constant in his career (185), and it was responsible for deterring him from fascism: “Eliot’s Arnoldian instincts led him toward a ‘European’ culture—as opposed to a British, French, German, or Italian—so it was natural for him to choose trans-nationalism as the carrot to draw Europeans toward Christianity. Hitler’s instincts were the reverse” (260). 2 In his 1971 introduction to a new edition, Pinthus cites this tribute to the importance of the anthology: “Kurt Batt, one of East Germany’s most recognized critics, not only calls Menschheitsdämmerung an ‘exemplary selection of characteristic poems worth handing down,’ but proclaims: ‘The fame and influence of this literary movement were based, not least, on Menschheitsdämmerung; indeed, it may be seriously doubted whether without this anthology Expressionism would be seen as what it is in the consciousness of posterity’” (60). 3 His description evokes Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting Der Schrei, an image of unmistakable emotion in a highly generalized time and place. 4 Symons’s discussion of Maeterlinck’s Le Tragique quotidien mentions a similar example of erotic violence: “I have come to believe that this motionless old man lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the husband who ‘avenges his honour’” (156). 5 Another example is Alfred Kubin’s dystopian novel The Other Side (1908). The story is a fantasy of a “Dream Realm” that ends as a nightmare, not a nightmare of materialism but of dissolution. Primarily a visual artist, Kubin was a member of Kandinsky’s circle in Munich, and his novel satirizes avant-garde art as well as many other aspects of contemporary society. The narrator records his initial reaction to a potential rival, the artist Castringius: “Before I arrived Castringius had his simplest period. Three or four lines and the picture was finished. He called it ‘Greatness.’ His most important works had titles such as The Head, He, She, Us, It! They placed no limits on the imagination. For example, a head in a flower vase—it could mean anything” (87). Kubin’s irony targets the expressionist use of abstraction to represent a spiritual essence purified of particulars. His narrator suggests that instead of everyone finding a common transcendent meaning, each viewer projects a personal interpretation. This critique, as Harrison shows, continues to shape debates about expressionism. The tension between psychology and social commentary contributes to the irony of the text. I am grateful to Marianne Thormählen for directing me to this work.

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6

See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Eksteins argues that prewar German Kultur made “symbol and myth” the “essence of existence,” producing a widespread willingness to ignore empirical reality for the sake of spiritual unity (77). Belief in “eine innere Notwendigkeit, a spiritual necessity,” extended throughout the population and stirred enthusiasm for the war (92). 7 Later Eliot described The Waste Land as a “piece of rhythmical grumbling” that he had written to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (WLF 1). Although James Miller cites this comment to justify biographical readings of the poem (Personal 9), Eliot’s self-deprecating remark is consistent with the relationship between private feeling and public experience articulated in expressionist texts and “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

Works Cited Benn, Gottfried. Primal Vision: Selected Writings of Gottfried Benn. Ed. E. B. Ashton. New York: New Directions, 1971. Brown, Russell E. “Time of Day in Early Expressionist Poetry.” PMLA 84 (1969): 20-28. Donahue, Neil H. “Introduction.” A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Ed. Neil H. Donahue. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. 1-35. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Harrison, Thomas. 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. M. T. H. Sadler. New York: Dover, 1977. Kubin, Alfred. The Other Side. Trans. Mike Mitchell. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2000. Martin, Graham Dunstan, ed. Selected Poems: Jules Laforgue. New York: Penguin, 1998. Miller, James, E. T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005. —. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1978. Murphy, Richard. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Pinthus, Kurt, ed. Menschheitsdämmerung, Dawn of Humanity: A Document of Expressionism. Trans. Joanna M. Ratych, Ralph Ley, and Robert C. Conard. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994.

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Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. 3-14. —. Rev. of Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. Poetry 10:5 (1917): 264-71. —. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971. Rolleston, James. “Choric Consciousness in Expressionist Poetry: Ernst Stadler, Else Lasker-Schüler, Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn.” A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Ed. Neil H. Donahue. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. 157-83. Schultz, H. “German Expressionism: 1905-1925.” Chicago Review 13 (1959): 8-24. Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Sharp, Francis Michael. “Menschheitsdämmerung: The Aging of a Canon.” A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Ed. Neil H. Donahue. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. 137-55. Sokel, Walter H. The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in TwentiethCentury German Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1959. Stayer, Jayme. “Searching for the Early Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare.” A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. David E. Chinitz. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 107-19. Surette, Leon. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2011. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Constable, 1908. Weissenberger, Klaus. “Performing the Poem: Rituals of Activism in Expressionist Poetry.” A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Ed. Neil H. Donahue. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. 185-228.

AFTERWORD WHERE WE START FROM: TRADITION AND THE T. S. ELIOT SOCIETY DAVID E. CHINITZ

The papers comprising this volume had their start in the 2011 meeting, held in Paris, of the T. S. Eliot Society. Founded in the 1980s as “a living and continuing memorial” to Eliot, the Society has about 180 members, two thirds of them from North America, the rest from twenty countries from the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Japan and South Korea, with intermediary stops in Eastern Europe, India, and the Middle East. Though based in the United States, the Eliot Society had an international dimension from its beginning. The Society originated in the determination of a talented and enthusiastic immigrant, Leslie Konnyu, to have a monument to Eliot erected in the city of the poet’s birth. Born Könnyü László in Tomási, Hungary, Konnyu (1914–1992) had fled the Soviet occupation of his homeland and had been living in St. Louis since 1949, drawn to the city both for its immigrant community and because of his partiality for Eliot.1 Originally a teacher, he made his living in the United States as a cartographer; he was also a published poet and the author of books on Hungarian and Hungarian-American literature. Although he commissioned, at his own expense, a sculpture of Eliot by fellow immigrant Andrew Osze, hoping to persuade his adopted city to accept this tribute to Eliot as a gift, his efforts were repeatedly thwarted by bureaucratic indifference. In 1983, however, Konnyu’s activities yielded unanticipated results when they came to the attention of Jewel Spears Brooker through a short article in the Tampa Tribune. Her interest piqued by the story of his frustrated exertions, Brooker, who taught in the English Department at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, reached out to Konnyu. She discovered that for several years he had been leading a discussion group of local— which, for Konnyu, meant international—friends who met annually in his

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living room to discuss Eliot’s work. After examining her scholarship, Konnyu invited Brooker to join this group (in which membership was then conferred by invitation) and to deliver the 1984 keynote. Following her address, which was given in the public library, a Hungarian pianist of Konnyu’s acquaintance entertained the audience with tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, then a brand-new musical, and Konnyu took up a collection to pay Brooker’s plane fare. Joining forces with Konnyu, Brooker energetically built up the St. Louis group into a large and vibrant society, using her own money and contacts to send out notices and personally recruiting Eliot scholars such as Grover Smith and Ronald Schuchard as well as younger academics. Over the next several years she courted major scholars for the annual keynote address (officially the “T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture”) and worked with the St. Louis group to formalize the association. The T. S. Eliot Society was legally incorporated on December 2, 1986. Its beginnings in a collaboration between an aficionado and a scholar established a pattern for the Society that has persisted for three decades.2 In 1988 the Society put on a major international program to mark Eliot’s centennial. Without grants, and with minimal institutional support, Brooker and Konnyu managed to bring together exhibits, musical and dramatic performances, poetry readings, and presentations by Cleanth Brooks, Michael Yeats, Russell Kirk, A. D. Moody, George Bornstein, and many others. When a star for Eliot was added to the St. Louis Walk of Fame the next year, Konnyu accepted the recognition on the poet’s behalf. He died three years later and did not live to see his original dream fulfilled with the erection of a bust of Eliot (by another immigrant sculptor, Vlad Zhitomirsky) at the corner of Euclid and McPherson. The Writers’ Corner established there by the Central West End Association commemorates two other denizens of the neighborhood, Tennessee Williams and Kate Chopin, together with Eliot. The T. S. Eliot Society contributed to the Eliot sculpture using monies that had been set aside at its founding and earmarked for just such a use. The Society has in fact maintained Konnyu’s tradition by supporting the establishment of public memorials several times, lobbying successfully in 1998 for a historical plaque at 4446 Westminster Place, Eliot’s adolescent home in St. Louis, and funding the restoration in 2007 of the northwest window in St. John’s Church, Little Gidding. For its first decade and more, the Eliot Society met annually in St. Louis on the weekend closest to the poet’s September 26 birth date. The first break in that pattern came in 1999 with a meeting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the young Eliot had passed the summers with his

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family. This successful visit to the site of the Dry Salvages led naturally to an ambitious plan to bring the Society across the Atlantic to tour the scenes of the remaining three Quartets. In June 2004, the annual meeting convened for a week in London, with excursions by bus to Burnt Norton, East Coker, and Little Gidding. Proximity drew to this London meeting British and continental scholars who had never ventured to the American Midwest. One of these, the French modernist scholar William Marx, joined the Eliot Society again in St. Louis the following year and suggested the idea of a future meeting in Paris, which he generously volunteered to host. This invitation created an irresistible opportunity to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Eliot’s formative year in Paris, 1910–11. A July 2011 meeting in La VilleLumière eventuated, from which the essays published in the present collection have been derived. As it has since the days of Jewel Brooker’s leadership, the Eliot Society takes seriously its mission to encourage scholarship on Eliot. An allied organization of the Modern Language Association, the Society has sponsored panels at the MLA’s annual convention on such topics as “Eliot and Transnationalism,” “Eliot and Violence,” and “Eliot, H.D., and New England.” The Society has likewise been active in organizing panels at the American Literature Association’s annual conference and at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. The Society’s own annual meeting provides many opportunities for discussion of Eliot’s life, work, and thought through panels, peer seminars, lectures, banquets, and performances. Attendance is typically between 50 and 60, although the 2011 meeting in Paris drew over 80 participants. The highlight of the annual meeting is the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, given each year by an eminent academic or poet. Past speakers have included, for example, the scholars Michael Levenson, Marjorie Perloff, Jahan Ramazani, and Helen Vendler; the poets Geoffrey Hill and Carl Phillips; and, in Eliot’s own mold, such poet-critics as Robert Crawford and James Longenbach. (A complete list of Memorial Lecturers follows this essay.) The Memorial Lecture remains, as Leslie Konyuu first conceived it, free and open to the public. Time Present, the Society’s newsletter (published thrice annually), includes news, book reviews, abstracts of conference papers, an annual bibliography, and other information of interest to Eliot scholars. The newsletter is mailed to the Society’s members; back issues are archived on its website for public and scholarly use. The website publishes relevant news and information on the Eliot Society and its activities and helps publicize Eliot-related activities taking place around the world—for

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example, the production of one of Eliot’s plays in New York, or the planning of a conference in Edinburgh or Florence. Perhaps Leslie Konnyu’s most lasting bequest to the institution he founded—one that goes back to the early gatherings in his living room—is a pervasive atmosphere of congeniality that endures even now in the Eliot Society’s activities. It is probably because of that warmth that many a serious-minded scholar who intended to come once to the annual gathering in St. Louis has found him- or herself returning regularly for years. Although this quality suffuses the Society’s intellectual proceedings, it shows through especially clearly in such after-hours traditions as the Saturday-night sing-along—at which selections from Cats are now strictly forbidden—and late-night cocktail parties. Rumors of salacious limerick contests associated with a lowbrow contingent known as the Phriends of Phlebas will not be addressed in this essay, except by observing that such activities, if they exist, celebrate a dimension of T. S. Eliot that gets too little attention elsewhere. As the original cadre of St. Louisans in Leslie Konnyu’s circle diminishes, the Eliot Society is undergoing a period of generational transition. Though its practices will inevitably evolve, one hopes that the hospitable and rather boisterous spirit of its early years will continue to pilot the Society through a future in which it finds itself, as Eliot himself counsels, “still and still moving.”

Notes 1 For information on Konnyu’s life and the early years of the Eliot Society, I am generally indebted to the two cited sources and to a personal interview with Jewel Spears Brooker (12 July 2010). 2 Also instrumental to Brooker and Konnyu’s efforts at this stage was the generous cooperation of the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, the congregation established in 1834 by the poet’s eminent grandfather. To that ongoing relationship the Society in recent years has added one with another institution founded by William Greenleaf Eliot: Washington University.

Works Cited Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Winking Back at the Stars.” T. S. Eliot Society News and Notes 16 (1992): 1. “ÉletmĦ.” Könnyü László hagyatéka Tamásiban [Legacy of Leslie Konnyu in Tamási]. Tamási Cultural Centre, 2003. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.



MEMORIAL LECTURERS OF THE T. S. ELIOT SOCIETY 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980



Sarah Cole Jahan Ramazani Daniel Albright Jean-Michel Rabaté Michael Levenson Ronald Bush Grace Schulman George T. Wright William Blissett Robert Crawford Craig Raine Leon Surette Marjorie Perloff Geoffrey Hill Carl Phillips Helen Vendler Charles Altieri James Longenbach Marianne Thormählen Louis Menand William Harmon Christopher Ricks Denis Donoghue Cleo McNelly Kearns Shyamal Bagchee Leonard Unger A. David Moody James Olney Grover Smith Ronald Schuchard Jewel Spears Brooker Earl K. Holt, III Charles Guenther Robert C. Roach Marcella Holloway



ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR WORKS BY T. S. ELIOT

ASG

After Strange Gods. London: Faber, 1934.

CPP

The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1969.

FLA

For Lancelot Andrewes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929.

IMH

Inventions of the March Hare. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

KE

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. New York: Columbia UP, 1964.

L1

The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. I: 1898-1922. Rev. ed. Ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber, 2009.

L2

The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. II: 1923-1925. Ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber, 2009.

OPP

On Poetry and Poets. New York: Noonday, 1961.

SE

Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. 3rd ed. London: Faber, 1951.

SP

Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

TCTC

To Criticize the Critic. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.

UPUC

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.



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VMP

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Ronald Schuchard. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

WLF

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Parisian Male Fashions, 1911 .................................................... 51 Figure 2: Moriss, “Élégance” .................................................................... 53 Figure 3: Vaslav Nijinsky as Petrouchka................................................... 54 Figure 4: Postcard of the Decapitation Act at a Paris Street Fair .............. 56





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank David Chinitz, president of the T. S. Eliot Society at the time of our Paris conference, and William Marx, our indispensible and indefatigable host in Paris. Many thanks to the Society’s Paris organizing committee and others who lent their talent, expertise, and time: Chris Buttram, Michael Coyle, Frances Dickey, Nancy Hargrove, John Morgenstern, Cyrena Pondrom, Miranda Crispin, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Andrzej Gasiorek, Jason Harding, Kinereth Meyer, and the Board of Directors of the T. S. Eliot Society. I am also grateful—as is the Eliot Society—to the institutions that co-sponsored our conference: the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, the Institut Universitaire de France, and the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Thanks are due as well to the many others who helped, in ways small and large, with the preparation of this volume, especially Paul Douglass, Donna Sabo, Andrew Powers, Jim McCue, Luke Reader, Patrick Query, and Anthony Cuda; Carol Koulikourdi, Sam Baker, David Luscombe, and Amanda Millar at Cambridge Scholars; Amron Gravett of Wild Clover Book Services; and my two graduate assistants at John Carroll University, Ellen Kriz and Sean Kirby. Permission to quote poems in Kurt Pinthus’s Menschheitsdammerung: Dawn of Humanity, A Document of Expressionism has been generously granted by Camden House. Permission to quote manuscripts in the E. E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University is granted by Peggy L. Fox. Permission to quote from the published poetry of E. E. Cummings is granted by the E. E. Cummings Trust and Liveright Publishing Corporation. Benjamin Lockerd’s essay in this volume is a revision and expansion of an earlier article, “‘Superficial Notions of Evolution’: Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary Historiography,” that appeared in Religion and Literature 44.1 (Spring 2012); reprint permission is granted by the University of Notre Dame. Nancy Hargrove’s essay expands and reorganizes some material from her book T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year; reprint permission is given by the University Press of Florida.





NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

William Blissett, Professor Emeritus of English at University College, University of Toronto, is the former editor (1965-76) of the University of Toronto Quarterly. He is the author of The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones (1981) and other works on modern literature, the most important of which are listed in Craft and Tradition (1990), a festschrift edited for him by H. B. DeGroot and A. Leggatt. He is the author of essays on Renaissance figures, including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare, and on such modern figures as Wagner, Pater, Eliot and Jones. Tomislav Brlek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He coedited, with an afterword, a volume of Croatian translations of Eliot’s poems and selected writings, Pusta zemlja i druga djela (2009). Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita, Eckerd College, has held numerous visiting appointments, most recently at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Merton College, Oxford. She has published scores of essays and is the author or editor of nine books, including Reading The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot and the Limits of Interpretation (1990), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004). She is the co-editor of T. S. Eliot: Apprentice Years 1905-1918 (2014), volume 1 of Eliot’s Complete Prose and is co-editing volume 8. Professor Brooker has served as President of the South Atlanta MLA and the T. S. Eliot Society and as a member of the National Humanities Council of NEH. She is now finishing a book on Eliot’s disjunctive imagination. David E. Chinitz is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) and Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes (2013), the editor of A Companion to T. S. Eliot (2009), and coeditor of both A Companion to Modernist Poetry (2014) and the forthcoming Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 6: 1940–1946. He served as president of the T. S.



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Eliot Society from 2010 to 2012 and as president of the Modernist Studies Association in 2013-2014. Elisabeth Däumer is Professor of English and American literature at Eastern Michigan University, with specialties in twentieth-century poetry and literary theory. She has published essays on T. S. Eliot, Muriel Rukeyser, and feminist theory. She coedited, with Shyamal Bagchee, The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (Continuum 2007) and recently served as guest editor of a special issue of Journal of Narrative Theory (2013) devoted to Muriel Rukeyser. Däumer has also established a digital archive for the study of Rukeyser’s life and work: murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org. Nancy D. Hargrove is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University. She is the author of two books on T. S. Eliot and a book on Sylvia Plath, has published over fifty essays, and has given over two hundred papers in the U.S. and abroad. She is the recipient of five Fulbright awards, including the Distinguished Chair Award at the University of Vienna. Among her other teaching and research awards are the MSU Outstanding Faculty Award, the Outstanding Humanist Award, the John Grisham Master Teacher Award, and the Mississippi Professor of the Year Award. She has served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and on the Board of Directors of the T. S. Eliot Society. Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec is Associate Professor of English at the University of Caen in Normandy, France, and also teaches at the Catholic University in Paris. Her research and publication over the past decade have focused primarily on contemporary and modernist poetry. She has coedited several critical works about poetry: La Poésie de Geoffrey Hill et la Modernité (L’Harmattan 2007), Selected Poems from Modernism to Now (CSP 2012), and Poetry & Religion: Figures of the Sacred (Lang 2013). As Vice-President of the Amitié Charles Péguy, she guest-edited a special English issue of the association’s bulletin: Péguy Alive: 140 Years and Beyond, L’amitié Charles Péguy 142 (April-June 2013). She is also coeditor of the online periodical Arts of War and Peace. Benjamin G. Lockerd (BS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Toronto; PhD, University of Connecticut) is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, where he has received the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Educator Award. He is the author of The Sacred Marriage:



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Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene” (Bucknell, 1987) and Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics (Bucknell, 1998), as well as articles on Eliot and on Renaissance literature. He also wrote the introduction to a new edition of Russell Kirk’s book Eliot and His Age. He has served as president of the T. S. Eliot Society. Recently, he edited a collection of essays, T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014). William Marx (former fellow of the École normale supérieure; PhD, University of Paris-Sorbonne) is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, an Honorary Fellow of the Institut universitaire de France and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin, Germany). His books, whose translations have been published in many languages, include Naissance de la critique moderne: la littérature selon Eliot et Valéry (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2002), L’Adieu à la littérature: histoire d’une dévalorisation (Paris: Minuit, 2005), Vie du lettré (Minuit, 2009)—for which he was awarded the Montyon Prize of the Académie française—and Le Tombeau d’Œdipe: pour une tragédie sans tragique (Minuit, 2012). He edited, among other collections of essays, Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 2004; new ed. 2008), and also coedited eight volumes of Paul Valéry’s Cahiers 1894-1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997-2014). Margery Palmer McCulloch’s books include Modernism and Nationalism: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance (2004), and Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959 (2009). Her coedited Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish and International Modernisms: Relationships and Reconfigurations were published in 2011. She is currently Leverhulme Emerita Fellow at the University of Glasgow, researching the Scottish and international contexts of the writers Edwin and Willa Muir. She was coeditor of the scholarly journal Scottish Literary Review from 2005 to 2013. Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, co-founder of Slought Foundation, and coeditor of the JML. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy and writers such as Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. He has recently edited A Handbook of Modernism



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Studies (2013). Other recent works include Crimes of the Future (2014) and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2014). Jayme Stayer, Assistant Professor of English at John Carroll University, has held faculty posts at Texas A&M University-Commerce and Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador. He has published broadly on rhetoric, music, and literature, including a recently published rhetoric textbook, Think About It: Critical Skills for Academic Writing (Cengage 2014), written with co-authors John Mauk and Karen Mauk. Stayer is currently working on another book manuscript, Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in “Inventions of the March Hare.” His personal essays have appeared in The Hudson Review and The Jesuit Post. A professional singer, he has performed with the choruses of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He joined the Jesuits in 2003 and was ordained a priest in 2013. Fabio L. Vericat studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow (UK) and currently lectures in the English Department at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His current research interests focus mainly on intermedial approaches to the literary text in the work of Henry James and T. S. Eliot, with particular reference to the impact of new technologies (radio, typewriters, phonographs) on the acoustic production and reception of the written word. Vericat is also interested in how the reading of sound contributes to the experience of space, as he argues in a forthcoming publication on the television series Breaking Bad. Charlotte Webb is a doctoral candidate at Lund University, Sweden. Her research concerns the concept of the divided self as it evolves throughout Eliot’s oeuvre, ranging from a consideration of Symbolist dédoublement in the early poetry and the divisive effects of self-awareness, to the struggle between the timeless and temporal selves in the later poetry and plays. Michael Webster is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, where he teaches American literature and courses in nature writing, modernism, and mythology. He has published Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism (1995) and has written numerous articles on Cummings, as well as poetic iconicity, visual poetry, and T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire. He is also coordinator of the E. E. Cummings Society and editor of SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society.



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Joyce Wexler is Professor and Chair of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth and Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence. Her most recent essays are about modernism and violence, and the title of her current book project is “Writing About Violence in a Secular Age.”



INDEX

absolute (term), 4–5 abstractionism, 224–25 acoustics of poetry, 173–75. See also auditory imagination; musicality in literature Action Française, 131, 139 Adelphi, The, 131 aestheticism, xi–xvi, 18, 118, 119–20, 136 After Strange Gods (Eliot), 131, 135 Aiken, Conrad, 52, 215 “Aims of Poetic Drama, The” (Eliot), 179, 180–81 air (element), 99–105, 106–7, 109n8, 110n11 Air and Dreams (Bachelard), 106 air/space dualism, 101 Alain-Fournier, 56, 57, 130, 132–33, 137, 215 Aldington, Richard, 112 alienation metaphors, 70 Altieri, Charles, 75 “American Literature and the American Language” (Eliot), 179 American New Critics, 149, 156, 158–59. See also theory, literary amours jaunes, Les (Corbière), 11–13 androgyny, 122–24 anger and culture shock, 67–70 “Animula” (Eliot), 99 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 78, 118, 130 Appearance and Reality (Bradley), 93, 95 “Approach to Paris, The” (Pound), 129–30 Aragon, Louis, 84 Ara Vos Prec (Eliot), 97 Ariel Poems (Eliot), 98–99 aristocratic readers, Epstein on, 116

Aristotle, 92, 99, 109n8 Arnold, Matthew, xiii “Arnold and Pater” (Eliot), 192 aroma. See smell “Art of the Theatre, The” (Eliot), 57 Asher, Kenneth, xvi Ash-Wednesday (Eliot), 98 Athenaenum, The, 131, 136 Aubé, Jean-Paul, 58 auditory imagination, 171, 172, 181–82. See also acoustics of poetry; musicality in literature; senses automobiles as literary trope, 87, 112, 121, 122–23 avant-garde genre, 114–15, 126n14, 220–21. See also Dadaism; expressionism Babbitt, Irving, 93, 130 Bachelard, Gaston, 105–8, 110n9 Badenhausen, Richard, 185 Bakst, Leon, 57 Ballets Russes, 54–55, 77 Barmen Declaration (1934), 140 Barrès, Maurice, 138 Barzun, Henri-Martin, 130 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 50, 78, 88n4, 130 Bauhaus, xix Bays Are Sere, The (Dujardin), 6–9 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 173, 178, 180, 185, 186n1 Beard, G. M., 117 Becket, Thomas, 21, 138, 140 Beckett, Samuel, 19 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 59 Bell, George, 139, 140

246 Belloc, Hilaire, 188, 196–98 Benda, Julien, 28, 136 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Benn, Gottfried, 219, 221, 222–23 Bergson, Henri: on dualism, 26–29, 31; on durée réelle, 26–27, 29, 34–36; on evolution, 25, 26, 191–92; Hulme and, 131; influence on Eliot, 24–25, 41–44, 59, 92; lectures by, 25–26; Péguy and, 131, 137 Bernanos, Georges, xii Bersani, Leo, 3 biblical references in “Prufrock,” 55–56 Bibliothèque nationale de France, x–xi, 58 Binet, Alfred, 59 biological evolution, 188–89 birds, 99, 102, 106, 108 bisexuality, 12, 15. See also sexuality Bishop, John Peale, 75 Blackmur, R. P., 131 Blanchot, Maurice, 155 blank verse, 80, 181 Blast II, 77 Blissett, William, 92–110, 240 Bloom, Harold, 151–52, 154 body/soul dualism, 27 Bolgan, Anne C., 109n3 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 139, 140 Bonjour cinéma (Epstein), 114 Borges, Jorge Luis, 149, 151, 152 Boston Herald, 185 Boucher, François, 52 boundary crossing (life-death), 15–17 Bowie, Malcolm, 163 Bradley, F. H., 4, 36, 41, 93–95, 109nn2–4 Bristol, L. M., 190 British Broadcasting Corporation. See BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) British Library, 183 Brlek, Tomislav, 146–66, 240

Index broadcast talks by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., radio broadcasts Brooker, Jewel Spears, 24–37, 48n13, 231–32, 233, 240 Brooks, Mel, 67–68 Brown, Russell E., 219 Bubu de Montparnasse (Philippe), 9–11, 60 Burne, Glenn, 115 Burnt Norton (Eliot), 37, 99, 101–2, 106, 108, 187n5, 208–9 Burnt Norton II (Eliot), 135 “Byron” (Eliot), 135 Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Les, 130, 132, 135, 136 Cain, William E., 158 Cambridge Social Dramatic Club, 76 Cambridge University, xix Campbell, James, 52 “Cape Ann” (Eliot), 99 carnival shows, 55–56, 77, 80 Cathay (Pound), 77 Catholic Church, censorship by, 27–28, 57 Cats (Webber), 232, 234 Cattaui, Georges, 138 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, xii Cendrars, Blaise, 114, 116, 121 Cézanne, Paul, 88n7 “Chanson de l’automne” (Gourmont), 78 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 77 Chartres, Bernard de, 3 Chefdor, Monique, 114 Chesterson, G. K., 198–99 Childs, Donald J., 28, 29, 34 Chinitz, David, 75, 231–34, 240–41 Christianity, xii–xiii, 18, 139, 228n1 chute de la maison Usher, La (film by Epstein), 114 cinema and Epstein, 114, 124 Clark, Timothy, 160–61 Clark Lectures, 39, 171, 175, 184 Claudel, Paul, xii, 25, 130

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe clock time vs. durée réelle, 26–27, 29, 34 close reading, 149, 156, 158. See also theory, literary Coeur fidèle (film by Epstein), 114 Collected Poems (Muir), 211 Collège de France, 25, 58, 61n4, 131 Commedia (Dante), 58 common experience vs. self, 45–46 Comoedia, 52, 53 Compagnon, Antoine, 160 Comte, Auguste, 190 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 224 “Confession de la Parisienne, La” (Faivre), 57–58 Confidential Clerk, The (play by Eliot), 19 consciousness: Bergson on, 26–27, 35; Eliot on, 17–18, 36, 41; vs. habit, 28; James on, 32 Conseil de Dante, Le (Maurras), 138 Corbière, Tristan, 2, 3, 11–13, 130 Corbin, Alice, 129 Coriolan (Eliot), 99, 102, 164 correspondences of T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., correspondences Cowley, Malcolm, 84, 89n9 Coyle, Michael, 176–77, 178 “Crayonné au théâtre” (Mallarmé), 13–14 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 25, 26, 191–92 Crime and Pubishment (Dostoevsky), 56 Criterion, The: on Bradley, 93–94; evolutionary theories in, 189, 193, 197–98, 200; founding and management of, 130, 135; Muir and, 205–6; Péguy and, 136; Richards in, 148, 165n1 criticism. See theory, literary criticism by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., as critic Cronin, Vincent, 60 cubism, 59

247

“Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The” (Eliot), 99 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 157 culture shock phenomenon, 66–71, 72n2 Cummings, E. E.: collection of Baudelaire’s works, 88n4; comparison with Eliot, 75–87; on death of the author, 2; Eliot on, 75, 82; essays by, 81, 82–84, 88n2, 88n7; impression of Eliot, 85–86; relationships of, 88n1; sonnets by, 84–85; typography and, 75, 82, 84, 87, 88n5; works by, 78, 79–80, 86, 87 Cynic’s Rules of Conduct, The (Field), 51 Dadaism, xix, 15, 84, 89n9. See also expression; avant-garde genre Dale, Peter, 13 Damon, S. Foster, 77 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 52, 57, 58 Dante (Eliot), 138 Dante Alighieri, xviii, 15–16, 58, 104, 172 Darwin, Charles, 188, 221 Däumer, Elisabeth, 112–27, 241 dawn as literary trope, 218–19 Dawson, Christopher, 188, 189, 193–94, 200–201 death, symbolic, 2-5, 15-21 “Death of Saint Narcissus, The” (Eliot), 12, 48n8 Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, The (Bersani), 3 Debussy, Claude, 57 decapitation, 55, 56 “Decapitator, The” (postcard), 55, 56 deconstruction, 154 “Dedication to my Wife, A” (Eliot), 104–5 dédoublement, 29 De Gourmont, Remy, 25, 78, 88n4, 115, 130 Delaunay, Robert, 59

248

Index

de Man, Paul, 151, 154, 159 De Régnier, Henri, 130 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 147, 152–53, 154, 161, 165 Der Ring des Nibelungen (Wagner), 57 Der Schrei (Munch), 228n3 Descartes, René: Sorbonne and, 105; theories of, 29, 30, 39–40, 45, 92 detachment, 40, 42, 45–46, 48n7 determinism, 26–27, 31, 36, 161 Dial, The, 77, 81 “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” (Eliot), 183 Dickey, Francis, 48n7 digestive tract and poetry, 118, 126n11 “Dimanches” (Laforgue), 3–4, 21n2 Dimock, Wai Chee, 173–74 discontent, expressionist, 218–19 Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Cendrars), 122 Donahue, Neil H., 218 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 56 Dragonetti, Roger, 5 dramatic works. See Eliot, T. S., plays Dreyfus Affair, 136, 137, 138, 139 Dry Salvages, The (Eliot), 103, 139, 188, 193 Dufour, Philippe, 58 Dujardin, Edouard, 6–9 Durant, Will, 190 durée réelle vs. clock time, 26–27, 29, 34–36 Durkheim, Émile, 25 dusk as literary trope, 219 dwarves and giants, 3 Eagleton, Terry, 150, 161 earth (element), 99–101, 107 East Coker (Eliot), 103, 201 Edwards, Michael, 149 Eiffel Tower (Delaunay), 59 Einstein, Albert, 191–92 Elder Statesman, The (play by Eliot), 19–21 “Élégance” (Comoedia), 52, 53

elements, four, 99–108 Eliot, Charles William, 76 Eliot, Charlotte, 64–65, 69 Eliot, Henry, 27 Eliot, Samuel Atkins, II, 76 Eliot, T. S.: on absolute (term), 4–5; academic philosophy and, 27, 93–94, 146–47; academic studies of, xix, 25, 93, 130, 215; accent of, 185; on Baudelaire, 3, 78; on Bergson, 24–26, 35–36; Christian faith of, xii, 18, 139, 228n1; comparison with Cummings, 75–87; on consciousness, 17–18, 36, 41; on Corbière, 2, 3, 11; culture shock of, 66–71, 72n2; on Cummings, 75, 82; on death of the author, 2–3; on Epstein, 112; French connections of, xii; gramophone of, 123–24; health of, 112–13, 118; on human history, 188, 192–93, 201–2; on Laforgue, 3, 11, 14, 72n1, 126n15, 216; language skills of, 58, 60, 65–66, 172, 186, 215; lectures about, 232, 233; marriages of, 88n1, 209–10; on maturity, 86; memorials of, 231–32; on method, 154; on “the mind of Europe,” xviii, 215, 228n1; nickname of, 21; Parisian influences on, 50–60; on Péguy, 134–38; on Philippe, 3; on poetry, 226; Symbolist movement and, xix, 4, 15–18, 64, 214–16, 215; on Symons, 215–16; typewriters of, 124; Unitarian upbringing of, 76, 93, 156, 189, 234n2; on Wells, 197–98; Woolf and, 123, 187n6 Eliot, T. S., as critic: “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” 179, 180–81; “American Literature and the American Language,” 179; “Byron,” 135; criticism of, 146–51, 155, 157–60, 164; Dante, 138; “The Function of Criticism,” 171, 172; Hamlet, 156, 161–62,

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe 182–83; Hartman on, 149–50; “The Idealism of Julien Benda,” 137; “The Metaphysical Poets,” 94, 112–14; Milton I, 175–76, 184; Milton II, 181–82; Morrison on, 150; “The Music of Poetry,” 173, 175, 176, 180, 184; Notes towards the Definition of Culture, 195–96; On Poetry and Poets, 135, 173, 177, 182; “Reflections on Vers Libre,” 181; on theory, 150, 151–52, 154, 164–65, 186n4; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 3, 152, 157, 159, 174, 215, 226, 227; “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 210, 220–21. See also theory, literary Eliot, T. S., correspondences: with Aiken, 215; with brother, 27; with Hutchinson, 13–14, 83; with mother, 64–65; with Murry, 209–10; with Read, 137, 138, 206; with Russell, 93 Eliot, T. S., essays and lectures: “Arnold and Pater,” 192; “The Art of the Theatre,” 57; Clark Lectures, 39, 171, 175, 184; criticism of, 147–49; “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” 183; for Harvard Philosophical Club, 25, 28, 34; “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” 194; For Lancelot Andrewes, 156; “The Modern Mind,” 137; Norton Lectures, 77; Oxford Lectures, 37; “Royalism and Socialism,” 133–34; The Sacred Wood, 186n3; Turnbull Lectures, 2–4, 126n15; University Extension Lectures, 133–34; “What France Means to You,” 50 Eliot, T. S., plays: about, 179–83, 187n5; The Confidential Clerk, 19; The Elder Statesman, 19–21; The Family Reunion, 180, 183; Prufrock and Other Observations, xv, 34, 214; Sweeney Agonistes, 17

249

Eliot, T. S., poetry: “Animula,” 99; Ara Vos Prec, 97; Ariel Poems, 98–99; Ash-Wednesday, 98; Burnt Norton, 37, 99, 101–2, 106, 108, 187n5, 208–9; Burnt Norton II, 135; “Cape Ann,” 99; Coriolan, 99, 102, 164; “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” 99; “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” 12, 48n8; “A Dedication to my Wife,” 104–5; The Dry Salvages, 103, 139, 188, 193; East Coker, 103, 201; “First Caprice in North Cambridge,” 70–71, 219; “First Debate between the Body and Soul,” 25; Four Quartets (See Four Quartets (Eliot)); “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse,” 71, 220; “Fragment of an Agon,” 17; “Gerontion,” 29–30, 97, 98; “Goldfish,” 218; The Hollow Men, 39, 45–46, 98, 163; “Hysteria,” 15–16, 43–44; Inventions of the March Hare (See Inventions of the March Hare (Eliot)); Little Gidding, 85, 103, 188, 196, 210; “The Little Passion: From ‘An Agony in the Garret,’” 17; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (See “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot)); “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” 220; “Lune de Miel,” 97; “Mandarins,” 222–23; “Marina,” 99; “Morning at the Window,” 96; “Mr. Apollinax,” 81; Murder in the Cathedral, 130, 138, 139–40, 187n5; Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, x; “Petit Epître,” 12, 21n5; “Portrait of a Lady,” 25, 95, 180, 223; “Prelude in Dorchester (Houses),” 219; “Preludes,” 70, 71, 72n5, 96, 193, 219; quatrain poems, 82–84, 220; “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” 25, 28–36, 44–45, 77, 81, 96; The

250 Rock, 106; “A Song for Simeon,” 98; “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” 83; “Sweeney Erect,” 97, 193; “The Triumph of Bullshit,” 13, 68–70, 71; The Waste Land (See Waste Land, The (Eliot)); “Whispers of Immortality,” 97 Eliot, T. S., radio broadcasts: about, 171–73, 176–79, 187n5; “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” 179, 180–81; “American Literature and the American Language,” 179; first contribution, 186n1; “The Three Voices of Poetry,” 179, 183–84; “Virgil and the Christian World,” 177–78, 186 Eliot, T. S., writing (general): academic studies on, xv–xvi, 64–65; accessibility in France of, x; accessibility in Italy of, xi; After Strange Gods, 131, 135; anti-Semitism in, xii; Bergson lecture notes, 28, 37, 61n4; The Criterion (See Criterion, The); for hostile/uncomprehending readers, 68–71; Paris notebook, 68, 70–71, 72n4; reviews by, 134–35; thesis on Bradley, 93–94, 109nn2–4; translations of, x “Eliot’s Impact on Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Poetry” (Altieri), 75 Ellmann, Maud, 161 elocution, 175, 185 emotions, Epstein on, 115–16, 125n7 Empson, William, 97 English language, standardization of, 175, 184–85 Enormous Room, The (Cummings), 78 Epstein, Jean, 112–20, 125nn7–8, 127n16 eroticism, 6–8, 220, 228n4. See also romanticism; sexuality

Index Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience (Bergson), 25, 26–27, 29, 31, 35 essays by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., essays and lectures Essays on Literature and Society (Muir), 206–7 ethics and form of Philippe, 9–11 Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The (Lacan), 20–21 Everlasting Man, The (Chesterson), 198 evolutionary theory: of Bergson, 25, 26, 191–92; of Chesterson, 198–99; of Darwin, 188; of Dawson, 193–94; Eliot on, 188, 192–93, 201–2; of Spencer, 188–91, 192; of Wells, 194–98. See also progressivism Exercices de lecture: de Rabelais à Paul Valéry (Fumaroli), xiii Exile’s Return (Cowley), 84 expressionism: about, 217–20, 223–27; Eliot’s introduction to, 214–15; in Inventions of the March Hare, 214, 218–23, 227; irony and, 222–23, 228n5; in paintings, 224–25, 228n3; Pinthus and, 219, 228n2. See also avant-garde genre; Dadaism Exultations (Pound), 77 Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals, 135 Faber and Faber, xi, 73, 106, 211 Faivre, Abel, 57–58 Family Reunion, The (play by Eliot), 180, 183 fantôme dans le kiosque, Un (Dragonetti), 5 fashion, Parisian male, 50–52 Favre, Geneviève, 138 Fernandez, Ramon, xii “F.I.A.T.” (Cendrars), 116, 117, 121, 125n8 Fichte, Johann, 191

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Field, Chester, 51 fire (element), 99–101, 105–6, 107 “First Caprice in North Cambridge” (Eliot), 70–71, 219 “First Debate between the Body and Soul” (Eliot), 25 first-person narrative, 78–79 First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, 234n2 Flame of the Candle, The (Bachelard), 105–6, 107 flâneur, 50, 52, 217 fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 78 Fluchère, Henri, xii For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot), 156 form and ethics of Philippe, 9–11 Formation de l’esprit scientifique, La (Bachelard), 105 Fort, Paul, 88n4, 130 Fournier, Henri-Alain. See Alain-Fournier Four Quartets (Eliot): about, 17–18, 30, 101–5; Burnt Norton, 37, 99, 101–2, 106, 108, 187n5, 208–9; The Dry Salvages, 103, 139, 188, 193; East Coker, 103, 201; Little Gidding, 85, 103, 188, 196, 210 “Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse” (Eliot), 71, 220 fragmented self, 41–44, 47n5, 86 “Fragment of an Agon” (Eliot), 17 Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (Bachelard), 106, 108 Freeman, The, 205 free will, 26–27, 31, 36 French literature and culture, x–xiii, 25, 129–30. See also specific elements; specific persons French National Library, x–xi, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 59 Friedman, Norman, 85 Fumaroli, Marc, xiii “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, The” (Lacan), 162–64

251

“Function of Criticism, The” (Eliot), 171, 172 Gallimard, xi Gates of Hell, The (Rodin), 58 German literature and culture, 204–6, 212, 214–15. See also specific persons “Gerontion” (Eliot), 29–30, 97, 98 giants and dwarves, 3 Gibbon, Edward, 67 Gide, André, 10–11, 25, 129, 131–32, 137 Giocanti, Stéphane, 157 “Goldfish” (Eliot), 218 gramophone, 122, 123–24 “Grande Complainte de la Ville de Paris” (Laforgue), 14–15 Grande Revue, La, 130 Grand Meaulnes, Le (Alain-Fournier), 132 Gray, Piers, xvi, 28, 33–34 Gray Day (Grosz), 227 Greene, Edward J. H., x, xv Grierson, Herbert, 113 Grosz, George, 227 Gunn, Neil M., 210 Habib, M. A. R., 28, 146–47 Haigh-Wood, Vivien, 88n1 Hale, Edward, 76 Hale, Emily, 76 Hamlet (essay by Eliot), 156, 161–62, 182–83 Hargrove, Nancy, x, xv–xvi, 50–61, 66, 130, 241 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 24 Harrison, Thomas, 217, 220, 221, 224–25 Harrison, William, 189 Hartman, Geoffrey, 149–50 Harvard Philosophical Club, 25, 28, 34 Harvard University, xix, 76 Heaney, Seamus, 210 Heine, Heinrich, 208, 212 Heraclitus, 92, 109n4

252

Index

Herbert Spencer (Royce), 191 Hesse, Herman, 215 Heym, Georg, 219 Hill, Geoffrey, 133 Him (Cummings), 80, 87 historicity, 17–18 Hoddis, Jakob van, 217–18 Hollow Men, The (Eliot), 39, 45–46, 98, 163 Homer, 24 Howarth, Herbert, 191 Hulme, T. E., 102, 131, 133 human engine, 121–24 human history. See evolutionary theory “Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The” (Eliot), 194 Hutchinson, Mary, 13–14, 83 Huxley, Aldous, 207 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, xii hyperconsciousness, 40–44, 47n2, 47nn5–6 hysteria (concept), 15–16 “Hysteria” (Eliot), 15–16, 43–44 “Idealism of Julien Benda, The” (Eliot), 137 idealism/realism dualism, 35–36 Igitur (Mallarmé), 5 impotence, 14 industrial economy, 190, 200 Inferno (Dante), 58 intensity, 77, 81–82, 88n2 intentionality, 17–18 interiority, 6–7, 39, 59 Inventions of the March Hare (Eliot): creation of, 64, 214; expressionism in, 214, 218–23, 227; “Goldfish,” 218–19; “Petit Epître,” 12, 21n5. See also “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) inversion, 15 involuntary memory, 17–18 irony: by Eliot, 48n7, 70; expressionism and, 222–23,

228n5; by Lacan, 164; in Les lauriers sont coupés, 6–8 Italian literature and culture, xi, 57–58, 120. See also specific persons Jain, Manju, 28 James, Henry, 184, 186n4 James, William, 32 Jammes, Francis, 88n4, 130 Janet, Pierre, 25, 59 Jay, Gregory, 152 Jeanne d’Arc (play by Péguy), 138–39 Jerome, Jerome K., 76 Joan of Arc, 138–39 John of Salisbury, 3 Johnson, Samuel, 181 John the Baptist, 55, 56 Jones, Joyce Meeks, 47n6 Journey to the End of the Night (Céline), xii Jouvre, Pierre Jean, 130 Joyce, James, 82, 147, 204 “Julien Benda” (Pound), 136 Kandinsky, Wassily, 224–25 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 29, 31, 34, 36 Kennedy, Richard, 77 Kenner, Hugh, 42 Kilgore-Caradec, Jennifer, 129–41, 241 kingfisher, 102, 108 Kirk, Russell, 193 Konnyu, Leslie, 231–32, 234 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 19 Krazy Kat cartoons, 85 Kubin, Alfred, 228n5 Labyrinth, The (Muir), 210 Lacan, Jacques, 20–21, 161–64 Laforgue, Jules: on the dandy, 50; on death of the author, 3–4; Eliot on, 3, 11, 14, 72n1, 126n15, 216; Eliot’s introduction to, xix, 64, 130; Pound on, xv; Symons on, 217; works by, 3–4, 14–15, 21n2 Laichter, Frantisek, 136

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe La Matin, 51 lamplight as literary trope, 30–32, 44–45, 71 language, theory in, 162–64 Lasserre, Pierre, 133 Latitudes (Muir), 206 lauriers sont coupés, Les (Dujardin), 6–9 Lawson, Joan, 55 Lazarus, 56 lectures by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., essays and lectures Léger, Fernand, 59 Le Seuil, xi Levi, Primo, 109n7 L’Évolution créatice (Bergson), 25, 26, 191–92 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 25 Leyris, Pierre, xii L’Immoraliste (Gide), 59 Lindsay, Vachel, 129 Listener, The (BBC), 182 literary criticism. See Eliot, T. S., as critic; theory, literary “Little Aster” (Benn), 223 Little Gidding (Eliot), 85, 103, 188, 196, 210 “Little Passion: From ‘An Agony in the Garret,’ The” (Eliot), 17 Little Review (literary magazine), 82, 135, 136 Lockerd, Benjamin, 188–202, 241–42 logic of defeat, 18–19, 28 loisirs de la poste, Les (Mallarmé), 5 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot): expressionism in, 214, 218, 221, 223, 227; hyperconsciousness in, 25, 41–44, 47nn5–6; Parisian influences on, 50–60. See also Inventions of the March Hare (Eliot) “Love Song of St. Sebastian, The” (Eliot), 220 Lowell, Amy, 77, 78, 88n4 Lukács, György, 9–10 “Lune de Miel” (Eliot), 97

253

MacCarthy, Desmond, 97 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 206, 208, 209 machinery, poetics of, 121–24, 127n16 Madness and Modernism (Sass), 40 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 57 magazines, literary, 77 Mahabharata, 205 Mairet, Philip, 135 Maison du veuf, La (Salmon), 130 Maladies of Memory, The (Ribot), 27 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3–6, 8–9, 13–14 “Mandarins” (Eliot), 222–23 Mardis (Wagner), 7 “Marina” (Eliot), 99 Marinetti, Filippo, 119, 121 Maritain, Jacques, 138 Martin, Graham Dunstan, 216 martyrdom, 138–39, 140, 220, 225 Martyre de Saint Sébastien, Le (D’Annunzio), 52, 57–58 Marx, William, x–xiv, 233, 242 Marxism, 200 Matière et mémoire (Bergson), 25, 27–29, 35 Matisse, Henri, 25 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 25, 27–29, 35 Maurras, Charles, xvi, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 228n1 Mayer, John T., xvi McCue, Jim, 158–59 McCulloch, Margery Palmer, 204–13, 242 McGilchrist, Iain, 40, 41, 46, 47n3, 48n9 Medcalf, Stephen, 41 Méditation sur la politique de Jeanne d’Arc (Maurras), 139 Memoirs (Gibbon), 67 memory, 27, 28–33 Mencken, H. L., 205 Menschheitsdämmerung (Pinthus), 218–19, 228n2 Metacriticism (Raval), 149

254

Index

Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Grierson), 113 metaphysical poetry, 118–21, 124, 126n15 “Metaphysical Poets, The” (Eliot), 94, 112–14 Methuen, Alexander, 112 Middleton Murry, John, 37 military service and writers, 67–68, 132. See also war Miller, James, 215, 229n7 Milton, John, 171, 172, 181 Milton I (Eliot), 175–76, 184 Milton II (Eliot), 181–82 mind/body dualism, 29 “the mind of Europe,” xv, xviii–xx, 215, 228n1 mind/world dualism, 25, 29, 31–32 Mirsky, D. S., 200 misprision, 151–52, 154 “Mode Masculine, La” (La Matin), 51 modernity: disorder of, 117, 124, 126n12, 126n14; industry and, 190, 200; music and, 122, 123–24; poetry and, xi, 75, 84, 118–19, 121–24; as response to war, xix, 19; Sass on, 40, 47n1. See also Cummings, E. E. Modern Language Association, 233 “Modern Mind, The” (Eliot), 137 Monist, The, 28 Monroe, Harriet, 129, 214 Moody, A. David, xix, xx moon as literary trope, 32–33, 87 “Morning at the Window” (Eliot), 96 Morrison, Paul, 150, 165n2 “Mr. Apollinax” (Eliot), 81 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 122–23, 208 Muir, Edwin, 204–13 Munch, Edvard, 228n3 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 130, 138, 139–40, 187n5 Murphy, Richard, 220–21 Murry, John Middleton, 131, 135, 137, 209–10

musicality in literature, 7, 30, 173, 175. See also acoustics of poetry; auditory imagination “Music of Poetry, The” (Eliot), 173, 175, 176, 180, 184 Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, Le (Péguy), 130, 131–32, 133, 139 Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pèguy, The (Hill), 133 mystique, 137 Narrow Place, The (Gunn), 210 negative capability, 9, 152 neurasthenia, 117, 118, 121 New Age, The (Orage), 131, 205 New Criterion, The, 135 New Criticism, 149, 156, 158–59. See also theory, literary New Lady Bantock, or Fanny and the Servant Problem, The (play by Jerome), 76 New Statesman, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 107, 110n10, 190, 205 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 54, 55 1910 (Harrison), 217 non possumus, 21 Norman, Charles, 82, 85 Norris, Christopher, 148 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 156, 158 Norton Lectures, 77 Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke), 221 Notes towards the Definition of Culture (Eliot), 195–96 Notre jeunesse (Péguy), 131, 132, 133 Nouvelle Revue Française, La (NRF), 84, 129, 130, 132, 134, 216 Nudes in a Landscape (Légar), 59 object/subject dualism, 39–40, 45–46 odor. See smell Odyssey (Homer), 24 “Old Possum” (nickname), 21

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Eliot), x One Foot in Eden (Muir), 210, 211 one-word line poising, 79–80 On Poetry and Poets (Eliot), 135, 173, 177, 182 On the Treatment of Neurasthenia (Vittoz), 117 optimism, philosophical, 25 Orage, A. R., 205 Orwell, George, 139 Osze, Andrew, 231 Others (literary magazine), 77 Other Side, The (Kubin), 228n5 Our Deportment (Young), 51 Outline of History (Wells), 188, 189, 194–98 Oxford Lectures, 37 Oxford University, xix, 37 Pachet, Pierre, 163 paradox, 15 Paris: culture of, 25, 51; influences on Prufrock (character), 50–60 parody, 11–12, 221 Pater, Walter, xiii Paul, Leslie, 180, 184 Payne, Michael, 163 Péguy, Charles, 130–40 Pelléas et Mélisande (Debussy), 57 perception, qualitative, 35 Periodical Table, The (Levi), 109n7 Perloff, Marjorie, 50, 60 Perloff, Nancy, 55 Perret, Charlotte, 55 Perse, Saint-John, xii Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Twain), 139 pessimism, 19–21 Peterson, Rai, 75–76 “Petit Epître” (Eliot), 12, 21n5 Petrouchka (ballet by Ballets Russes), 54–55 Philippe, Charles-Louis, 3, 9–11, 60 Philosophie pathétique, Une (Benda), 136

255

philosophy, academic, 27, 93–94, 146–47 Picasso, Pablo, 25 Pierrot Fumiste (Laforgue), 14 pimps and prostitutes, 9, 12, 31 Pinthus, Kurt, 217, 218, 219, 225, 228n2 plays by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., plays Poésie d’aujourd’hui, La (Epstein), 112, 113, 114–18, 125n7 Poetics of Fascism, The (Morrison), 150 Poetry (literary magazine), 77, 136, 214 Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, 129 Poetry at Stake (Noland), 127n17 poetry by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., poetry political aesthetics, xi–xvi, 18, 118, 136 Pondrom, Cyrena, xv Pope, John C., 56 “Portrait of a Lady” (Eliot), 25, 95, 180, 223 Pound, Ezra: on Eliot, xv, 21, 66, 82, 214; vs. Eliot, xii; on French literature, 129–30; on Péguy, 135–36; works by, 77; Yeats and, 129 “Prelude in Dorchester (Houses)” (Eliot), 219 “Preludes” (Eliot), 70, 71, 72n5, 96, 193, 219 Principles of Psychology (James), 32 Profundis, De (Wilde), 15 “Progress, Its Law and Cause” (Spencer), 190, 194 Progress and Religion (Dawson), 193 progressivism, 188–90, 193–94, 200. See also evolutionary theory Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, La (Cendrars), 114

256

Index

prosody: plays and, 181–82, 184; radio broadcasts and, 172–75, 176, 179, 186. See also acoustics of poetry prostitutes and pimps, 9, 12, 31 Prufrock, J. Alfred (character), 50–60, 221–22. See also “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) Prufrock and Other Observations (play by Eliot), xv, 34, 214 Psychoanalyse du feu, La (Bachelard), 105 psychoanalysis and literary theory, 162–64 psychological interpretations and Eliot, 40, 47nn1–3 punk (rottenness), 82–83 qualitative perception, 35 quatrain poems by T. S. Eliot, 82–84, 220 Query, Patrick, xix Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 2–22, 161, 162, 242–43 radio broadcasts by T. S. Eliot. See Eliot, T. S., radio broadcasts Raine, Craig, 48n10 Rainey, Lawrence, 88n2, 123, 158–60 Ratzel, Friedrich, 195, 202n1 Raval, Suresh, 149 Read, Herbert, 137, 138, 206 realism/idealism dualism, 35–36 reality vs. theory, 153–54 real time. See durée réelle vs. clock time “Recent German Poetry” (Hesse), 215 Red Gaze, The (Schoenberg), 225 “Reflections on Vers Libre” (Eliot), 181 Reflections on Violence (Sorel), 131 Régnier, Henri de, 88n4 relativity, theory of, 191–92 religion: Bergson vs., 27–28; of Eliot, xii, 18, 139, 228n1; of literature, xii–xiii; origin of, 199; secular

criticism and, 155–56; Wells on, 201 resistance, theory of, 151, 154, 159 resonance, theory of, 173–74 Revue wagnérienne, 7 Rey-Herme, Yves, 132–33 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (Eliot), 25, 28–36, 44–45, 77, 81, 96 Rhythm, 131 Ribot, Théodule, 27 Richards, I. A., 148, 165n1 Richelieu, Cardinal, 105 Ricks, Christopher, 68, 72n1, 221 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 221 Rimbaud, Arthur, 3, 127n17, 130 Ripostes (Pound), 77 Riquelme, John Paul, 159 Rivière, Jacques, 84, 132–33, 134, 137, 216–17 Road from Paris, The (Pondrom), xv Rock, The (Eliot), 106 Rodin, Auguste, 58 Rolleston, James, 222 Romains, Jules, 130, 135 romanticism, 37. See also eroticism Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 122 Rose, Jacqueline, 156 Rousseau, Henri, 148 Rousset, Jean, 152–53 “Royalism and Socialism” (Eliot), 133–34 Royce, Josiah, 93, 109n2, 191 Rubenstein, Ida, 57 Russell, Bertrand, 28, 93, 182 Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), 186n3 sadomasochism, 220 Said, Edward, 146, 147, 149, 155–57 Salmon, André, 130 Salomé, 55 Samain, Albert, 88n4 Sanskrit studies, 93 Santayana, George, 191 Sass, Louis, 40, 41, 43, 47nn1–3 schizophrenia, 40, 45, 47n1 Schoenberg, Arnold, 224–25

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Schuchard, Ronald, 232 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 123 Scott and Scotland (Muir), 209 Scottish literature. See Muir, Edwin Scottish Nation, 206 second culture acquisition, 66–71, 72n2 secular criticism, 155–56 Sein und Werden der organischen Welt (Ratzel), 195 Selected Poems (Muir), 212 self-reflexivity, 39–40, 45–47, 154 Selz, Peter, 217 senses, 94–99, 182–83. See also auditory imagination sensibility (concept), 115, 116, 118, 125n8, 126n9 sexuality, 9–10, 12–13, 15. See also eroticism Shakespeare, William, 165n4, 184 Sharp, Francis, 219 Sherry, Vincent, 136, 141n4 Siepmann, Charles, 176 Sirens, 24 Six French Poets (Lowell), 78, 88n4 smell, 94–99, 103–5 Smith, Grover, xv, 47n6, 232 Social Adaptation (Bristol), 190 social Darwinism, 190. See also evolutionary theory Sokel, Walter, 219–22, 226 solipsism, 46, 109n4 “Song for Simeon, A” (Eliot), 98 Sorel, Georges, 131, 133, 136 Soul and Form (Lukács), 9–10 soul/body dualism, 27 South Congregational Church, 76 space/air dualism, 101 space/time dualism, 26–27, 29–30, 92 Spencer, Herbert, 188–91, 192, 193–94 Spire, André, 130, 136 Stadler, Ernst, 219 Stayer, Jayme, xv–xx, 48n12, 64–73, 215, 243 Stein, Gertrude, 77

257

Steiner, George, 148 Stewart, Garrett, 174 St. Louis Woman’s Club, 69 Story of Philosophy (Durant), 190 Study of Sociology, The (Spencer), 190 Suarez, Juan, 123–24 subject/object dualism, 39–40, 45–46, 162, 227 suffering metaphors, 70 Surette, Leon, 228n1 surrealism, poetic, xi, 15, 84 Svarny, Erik, 50–51 Sweeney Agonistes (play by Eliot), 17 “Sweeney among the Nightingales” (Eliot), 83 “Sweeney Erect” (Eliot), 97, 193 Symbolist movement: on death of the author, 2, 3; Eliot and, xix, 4, 15–18, 64, 214–16; Rivière and, 132; Yeats and, 129 Symbolist Movement in Literature, The (Symons), xix, 78 Symons, Arthur, xix, 4, 7, 78, 130, 215–16 Tailhade, Laurent, 130 Tampa Tribune, 231 Taupin, René, 130 taxicab as literary trope, 87, 112, 121, 122 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, The” (Marinetti), 119 technological advancements, 121–25, 127n16 Tender Buttons (Stein), 77 Terblanche, Etienne, 76 Terre et les rêveries de la volunté, La (Bachelard), 106 Terre et les rêveries du repos, La (Bachelard), 106 Thayer, Elaine, 88n1 Thayer, Nancy, 88n1 Thayer, Scofield, 77, 88n1 theatrical performances. See also Eliot, T. S., plays; Eliot, T. S., radio broadcasts

258

Index

Theorizing the Avant-Garde (Murphy), 220 theory, literary: determinism in, 161; as discipline, 146–47, 154, 160–61; Eliot on, 150, 151–52, 154, 164–65, 186n4; reading vs. interpretation, 162–64; reality vs., 153–54; tradition and, 151–53, 157, 159; of Valéry, 151. See also Eliot, T. S., as critic; New Criticism things/thoughts dualism, 26, 30 “Three Voices of Poetry, The” (Eliot), 179, 183–84 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 25, 26–27, 29, 31 Time Present (T. S. Eliot Society newsletter), 233 Times Literary Supplement, The (TLS), 94, 137, 138, 182 time/space dualism, 26–27, 29–30, 92 Todorov, Tzvetan, 148 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 3, 152, 157, 159, 174, 215, 226, 227 Trahison des clercs, La (Benda), 137 Trakl, Georg, 219 Transition (Muir), 204, 207 travel guides, 66, 72n3 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 57 “Triumph of Bullshit, The” (Eliot), 13, 68–70, 71 T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Asher), xvi T. S. Eliot et la France (Greene), x, xv “T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture,” 232, 233 T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909-1922 (Gray), xvi T. S. Eliot Society, 231–33 T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (Hargrove), x, xv–xvi, 66, 130 T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (Smith), xv T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices (Mayer), xvi Turnbull Lectures, 2–4, 126n15

Twain, Mark, 139 typewriters and typists, 121–22, 124 Tzara, Tristan, 84 Ulysses (Joyce), 103, 208, 210, 220–21 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (Eliot), 210, 220–21 Unitarianism, 76, 93, 156, 189, 234n2. See also Christianity University Extension Lectures, 133–34 Valéry, Paul, xii vaudeville, 77, 80 Verdenal, Jean, 13, 57, 59, 137 “Verger, Le” (Gourmont), 78 Verhaeren, Emile, 88n4, 130 Vericat, Fabio, 171–87, 243 Verlaine, Paul, 3, 78, 129 Victorian Visitors, The (Christiansen), 72n2 Vildrac, Charles, 130 Villon, François, 11, 12, 13 “Virgil and the Christian World” (Eliot), 177–78, 186 visual technology, 114, 124 Vittoz, Roger, 117, 118 Wagner, Richard, 7, 57 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 19 Walden, Herwarth, 226 war: literary response to, xix, 19, 134, 210–12, 227; writers lost in, 132. See also military service and writers Washington University, 234n2 Waste Land, The (Eliot): annotated edition by Rainey, 158–59; criticism of, 208–9, 220–21; Eliot on, 229n7; Lacan and, 162–63; monologue in, 78; performance of, 187n6; themes in, 9, 45, 46, 86–87, 97–98, 121–24, 208, 227 water (element), 99–101, 107 Water and Dreams (Bachelard), 106 Waugh, Patricia, 159

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe Webb, Charlotte, 39–48, 243 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 232, 234 Webster, Michael, 75–89, 243 Wednesday Club, 69 Wells, H. G., 188–89, 194–202 “Weltende” (Hoddis), 217–18 We Moderns (Muir), 204–5 Wexler, Joyce, 214–29, 244 “What France Means to You” (Eliot), 50 “Whispers of Immortality” (Eliot), 97 Wiener, Norbert, 93 Wilde, Oscar, 15 wind, 97–99 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 45 women, 13, 68–69, 80, 121–23

259

Woolf, Virginia, 122–23, 187n6, 204, 207, 208 Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, The (Wells), 200 world/mind dualism, 25, 29, 31–32 Writer in Extremis, The (Sokel), 219–20 Wry-Blue Loves (Corbière), 11–13 Yeats, William Butler, 129, 216 Yorick, Sterne, 160 Young, John H., 51 Zhitomirsky, Vlad, 232 Zuckerman, Solly, 85