LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

DANS LE RESTAURANT is another rough poem with the air of an exercise. Like the previous, it has nothing to offer except the search for a device that was at the time only guessed by Eliot, not yet found. A waiter (waiters and footmen seem to haunt Eliot's imagination), in a restaurant, scratches his fingers, talks French and, in the meanwhile, spits in the narrator's soup. The waiter tells the story of an incident with a little girl and a dog, something that happened when he was barely seven years old. The implications are grimly and precociously sexual. The narrator feels inclined to send this waiter to wash off his wrinkles and take the mud off his ‘skull’. The poem leaves us with a taste of dirt. Besides, like all Eliot's poems in French, it lacks the verbal inventivity known from the poet's use of English. His French is well mastered, but tame and uninteresting. At some time in his life, he confessed that in his youth he had contemplated the idea of settling down in Paris and writing in French. It would have been an uninspired choice for the Eliot we know, no matter how proud he may have felt of his mastery of French. The final stanza of Dans le Restaurant was later translated into English, a little modified and became part IV of The Waste Land:

‘Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,

Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,

Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d'étain:

Un courant de sous-mer l'emporta très loin,

Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.

Figurez-vous donc, c'était un sort pénible;

Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille’.

In between this French poem and its English variant of Death by Water, a miracle seems to have been wrought. A device found. After years of writing and writing bits of poetry which the poet never lost sight of, Eliot had at last lighted upon The Waste Land.