LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

THE FAMILY REUNION (1939) bears the same type of tongue-in-the-cheek title which most of Eliot's poems and plays use. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is anything but a love song. The Portrait of a Lady is rather a blank page, the shadow of a being who has ceased to exist. Ash-Wednesday is a stubborn refusal of ashes, of dust, of the way of all flesh. As far as this Family Reunion is concerned, Eliot does not contradict his likeness for indirectness. The title implies the opposite of what is going on in the play. The family described is never reunited. On the contrary, its final separation is ardently desired by the characters.

Written four years after Eliot's first so-called play, this one does have a plot and characters. Each of those has its weaknesses. The most intense, the most appealing passages are still the poetic ones. Nevertheless, something is going on. The Greek pattern behind the texture of 20th century incidents is and is not visible. In fact, the same as the bookish echoes in Eliot's poetry, it is there for those prepared to find it. What is the whole thing about? A family, of course. Four sisters (Amy, Agatha, Ivy and Violet), two brothers-in-law (Gerald and Charles, brothers of Amy's late husband), Amy's orphan niece, Mary, and Amy's eldest son, Harry. As for her other two sons, they never turn up. In short, Amy, on the brink of death, wishes to bequeath the crown of the family to her eldest son, who comes on the occasion of her birthday. But the story is much more complicated than that. In the tradition of the Stream-of-Consciousness technique, it is revealed in an apparently disorderly, non-chronological order. Eliot has learnt something of the art of dramatic suspense.

Piecing the fragments together, here is what actually happened before the play began. At one time in her youth, Amy got married. While she was pregnant with Harry, her husband was having an affair with her sister Agatha, and went so far as to plan on killing his legal wife. Agatha prevented the murder, which would have killed Harry as well. Two more sons were born, then the husband was disposed of after a while. He left for the Continent, and soon died there. Life went on for Amy and her household. Agatha devoted her life to Harry, as if he were her own son. Mary, the orphan niece, was meant by Amy to be Harry's future wife. We learn all those things disparately, from various memories of various characters. Fact is that, when the play begins, Amy is old and ill. Harry returns after seven years of incessant travels round the world, travels during which his wife (some other woman than the intended Mary) has died, swept off the deck of a ship, during a storm. Harry refuses to settle down and follow in his mother's footsteps. On his departure, she dies.

The actual plot is obviously poor. The richness of the play lies in its symbolism. Everything, from words to incidents and characters, has a hidden meaning. Let us examine a few of the names first. The most important is Wishwood, where Amy lives. A wood of wishes, Eliot means to say. It characterizes Amy's nature, and it reminds us of Eliot's old fear that any wish he makes may turn against him. Indeed, everything Amy wishes brings about her undoing. She wants a family and loses it. She wants Harry to feel bound to their home, and he is dragged away by his wife (a different one, again, from the one his mother had chosen for him), for no less than seven years. Amy is, in short, a very voluntary creature, who even manages to wish herself into death.

There is a character in the play, Harry's driver, Downing, who accompanied him all through his mysterious absence. The name begins with ‘down’, and seems to allude to Dante's very low Inferno. Indeed, Harry's absence seems to have been a hell of pain to him, from the few things we manage to learn. At one time he even says that he is afraid he himself might have pushed his wife off the deck. The pattern of his mother's unhappy marriage was, therefore, repeated with him. Eliot seems to whisper into our ear that the father's murderous designs were passed on to the son. Or, at least, Harry takes it like that when, during the play, he learns this previous story from Agatha herself. As if to prove that, he suddenly becomes aware of the presence of the ‘Eumenides’, a sort of propitiating force, that used to accompany murderers in Greek mythology. He becomes aware of his father's guilt, and feels sure he has inherited it. He also becomes aware of his mother's wish to become a victim, and of her making him constantly feel guilty for what his father had done. Well, the pattern gets more and more complicated as the play unfurls. Finally, what matters is that Harry manages to escape the tragic pattern of guilt, by leaving Wishwood. What is the object of his quest, where does Eliot send him? Those remain unanswered questions.

Let us cast a glance at the poetry in the play. Unforgettable lines are included here. More than in Murder in the Cathedral, as a matter of fact. First, that suggestive pair, Amy and the clock. Life and time. She opens the play with what could constitute a poem in itself:

‘I have nothing to do but watch the days draw out,

Now that I sit in the house from October to June,

And the swallow comes too soon and the spring will be over

And the cuckoo will be gone before I am out again.

O Sun, that was once so warm, O Light that was taken for granted

When I was young and strong, and sun and light unsought for

And the night unfeared and the day expected

And clocks could be trusted, tomorrow assured

And time would not stop in the dark!’

When she dies, she shouts again: ‘The clock has stopped in the dark!’ But, before that, there is still some way to go. Her sisters and her brothers-in-law talk about their present world as best they can. Unanimously, they blame the younger generation for what has gone wrong. Their grumbling must have been meant by Eliot to sound humorous. Maybe, to some it really does. Agatha's remark puts an end to that, anyway. It foretells Harry's forthcoming revelation. She explains to all the others that Harry will meet his younger self at Wishwood again, and will have to come to terms with it. Especially because, she says,

‘When the loop in time comes – and it does not come for everybody –

The hidden is revealed, and the spectres show themselves’.

In Murder in the Cathedral we knew every incident beforehand. Here, Eliot does the opposite. He hides everything. Strange and hard to explain why, this mysteriousness is as artificial as the predictability of the previous play. Maybe because both are overdone. Because Eliot is not yet a firm master of his dramatic devices. On the other hand, The Family Reunion is still a play of absences: the absent characters are the most haunting ones. The king was the haunting shadow in Murder. Amy's husband and Harry's wife are the ghosts of this play. Eliot does not yet plunge into reality. He envelops the incidents in fantasy. What we learn about Harry's dead wife is at first Amy's despising description. Her body was never found (Eliot's old obsession with the bottom of the sea). She may have been drunk at the time of her death, or she may even have committed suicide. She kept dragging Harry all over the world, only to prevent him from settling down in Wishwood. She was ‘below’ him, and pulled him down to her level. The conclusion may be wrong, yet a strong smell of Eliot's first marriage floats about these words. Amy is very harsh:

‘A restless shivering painted shadow

In life, she is less than a shadow in death’.

The same as in Murder, the opening scene is ominous. The chorus of sisters and other relatives feel like actors caught unawares by the raising of the curtain. Eliot preserves here the nightmarish halo of his major poems. Harry detects it as soon as he turns up. He complains he keeps seeing menacing, reproaching eyes, that watch him all the time. Then, he interrupts this weird complaint to greet his mother and family. Reality is clumsily mixed with fantastic impulses. The result is not at all convincing. Harry sounds rude and self-centered. The rest of the characters are like inert puppets, who hardly know what they are going to experience next. Once, a German writer mocked at the characters' recurrent statement: ‘I do not understand’, or ‘You cannot understand me’, or ‘Nobody can ever understand’. If that is so, the German writer commented, then the whole thing must be very clever indeed, if the actors themselves are denied access to that very deep meaning. It is true that such lines often occur in Eliot's plays. Harry himself begins explaining his absence from home by using one:

‘... people to whom nothing has ever happened

Cannot understand the unimportance of events’.

But the admission of inability to understand is not something to be mocked at. Eliot must have meant, by means of it, to suggest the existence of an inexpressible profundity. A depth which renders reality superficial, treacherous, empty. We detect here Eliot's poetic impulse of emptying real shapes, in order to fill them with his own gloomy inner shadows. Which is the case of all major characters in The Family Reunion, as well. Their outward fate is meaningless, unless the symbol Eliot attached to it has been decoded. The play is constantly dragged from the stage behind the scenes, from drama into poetry.

The whole play seems to proceed as a mere pretext for Harry, Agatha and Amy to declaim their various poems. Harry's is a poetry of the nightmare. He senses tragedy behind the commonplace. He does what somebody once remembered that Eliot remarked about a party he happened to be witnessing. Eliot had been asked, ‘Isn't it wonderful?’ He had replied: of course, if you can see the full horror of it. Here is the tone of Harry's very abrupt confession:

‘The sudden solitude in a crowded desert

In a thick smoke, many creatures moving

Without direction, for no direction

Leads anywhere but round and round in that vapour –

Without purpose, and without principle of conduct

In flickering intervals of light and darkness;

The partial anaesthesia of suffering without feeling

And partial observation of one's own automatism

While the slow stain sinks deeper through the skin

Tainting the flesh and discolouring the bone –

This is what matters, but it is unspeakable,

Untranslatable: I talk in general terms

Because the particular has no language. One thinks to escape

By violence, but one is still alone

In an over-crowded desert, jostled by ghosts.

It was only reversing the senseless direction

For a momentary rest on the burning wheel

That cloudless night in the Mid-Atlantic

When I pushed her over’.

The lyrical mood is that of The Waste Land: teeming with repressed fears, which turn into monsters. The mind seems asleep, the nightmare of feelings gets the upperhand. When Eliot objected to Shakespeare's inability of keeping Hamlet (the character) in hand, he most certainly did not foresee he would make the same mistake in a play of his own. Harry is not mad, as the others suspect. He is the prisoner of his own titanic aspirations, fears and doubts. Eliot tries hard to give his character a helping hand. To this purpose, he uses Agatha and Mary. All the others belong to the superficial world, while Harry is an inhabitant of hell. Amy's first care is to bring a doctor with a war-like name, Warburton. She thinks it insane of Harry to believe he has killed his own wife. Her brother-in law, inclined to take Harry's words for granted, tries questioning Downing, the possible witness. Nothing much comes out of this investigation. Except that, from a dramatic point of view, it is carried out quite well. Eliot only gradually discloses the truth. He arouses our pleasure of being taken by surprise. The play is, therefore, stageable, with only one objection. The stageable scenes sound rather annoying, while the unstageable ones (the poetic parts) make the delight of the act, if you happen to be reading, not hearing them uttered aloud. The Family Reunion is still a readable play, more than a spectacle for the open stage.

When the two heroes, Harry and Mary meet, common memories of childhood inevitably turn up. The resemblance of their names, as a sign of Amy's wish to see them together, sounds somewhat clumsy. We learn that Agatha teaches at a college, and that, seven years before the time of the play, she advised Mary, her student then, to leave Wishwood and go on with her studies. Harry and Mary both remember the feeling of a sad childhood. The reason for this sadness is not clear yet. Their only enchanting memory is that of a ‘hollow tree in a wood by the river’. The two of them used to hide there in the evening, to ‘raise the evil spirits’. Until, one summer, coming back home for holidays, they found the tree felled. Amy had had it replaced by a summer-house for the children to play in. They both remember the oppressive, stifling atmosphere of their childhood, but do not understand the real reason, that sense of guilt which seemed to run in the family blood.

In Mary's presence, for the first time, Harry realizes who the ‘sleepless hunters’ of his soul are. He sees those ‘Eumenides’ right outside the window. He tells them:

‘When I knew her I was not the same person.

I was not any person. Nothing that I did

Has to do with me. The accident of a dreaming moment...’

If it is a description of Harry's marriage, it comes very close to a similar one in The Waste Land: ‘the awful daring of a moment's surrender’. The atmosphere which envelops the whole family is artificial, shallow, as if drawn by an inexperienced hand. Yet, a few things in the play go deeper, reaching an autobiographical vein. There, Eliot is at his best, because, from behind the scenes, he sends out lyrical impulses. A sentence uttered by the chorus of minor characters is a remarkable definition of the stream-of-consciousness technique:

‘And the past is about to happen, and the future was long since settled.

And the wings of the future darken the past ...’

Various other lines follow, a weird mixture of believable and ghastly words. A mixture of reality and fantasy, which is still too shapeless to stand upright on the stage.

The image of this partly reunited family is annoying. It is cold, puritanical, formal. There is no love lost between its members. None of them is lovable, as a matter of fact. They almost hate one another. The spectator withdraws in awe, but the story is pressed upon him. The ‘truth’ must be found out. Eliot will not give up the quest so easily. Why did Amy make all her children feel guilty? It is the turn of the vanished father to be remembered now. Harry keeps repeating generously to everyone: ‘You cannot understand me’. To Agatha he says a little more:

‘What matters is the filthiness. I can clean my skin,

Purify my life, void my mind,

But always the filthiness, that lies a little deeper ...’

Then Agatha decides to reveal to him the mystery of this so-called impurity, the source of the all-invading sense of guilt. She retells, in extremely indirect images, her love for Harry's father:

‘There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,

Only a present moment of pointed light

When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand

To the flames. They only come once,

Thank God, that kind’.

The memory of the hyacinth girl burns in Agatha's story. Only Agatha speaks of a mythological kind of ‘sin’. She calls Harry the ‘bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame’, to expiate the sin of his father, of his ancestors. A love story has been turned by Eliot into a dooming deed. Harry now comes to terms with his Eumenides. He manages to understand his sense of guilt. His next move will, of course, be to escape it. All Eliot's plays are imaginary escapes from one mystery or another. As has been said, a quest that ends in a question mark. Harry's destination is not known. Not even to the poet, who is watching the show from back stage.

The only things we are allowed to learn, at the end of this mystery play, is, as Agatha puts it, that we live in a world of ‘fugitives’, and that Harry is in quest of another realm. ‘On the other side of despair’, he calls it. Other heroes of Eliot's writings do the same. The devil of the stairs in Ash-Wednesday, III leads the hero ‘beyond hope and despair’. At least, there the hero turns back in revulsion from the sight. Here, Harry takes himself very much in earnest. So do Mary and Agatha, women between the two worlds, whose only part is to push Harry towards escape. The play is, in conclusion, divided into two worlds. A real, displeasing one: that of Wishwood and its losses, its frustrated wishes. Most of the characters belong to it. They would all like to live there, perpetuating the unknown ‘curse’.

Agatha and Mary are not attached to it. Harry is the only one who rejects the world of Wishwood. His driver, Downing, follows him mechanically. Those who come closer to understanding the realm of escape are only those who, at some point in the story, manage to see the Eumenides. These insubstantial shapes (which have given a lot of trouble to the managers who have attempted to stage the play) are a kind of test. They keep the gate which opens onto another world, the world which Eliot did not manage to invent. A world and a meaning which are far behind the scenes, if anywhere. The quest and question in The Family Reunion are not within our reach.

                                                        *

The other plays Eliot wrote are The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1955) and The Elder Statesman (1959). Their plots are increasingly more complicated, and more cunningly revealed. They are still deficient plays, but the deficiency does not arise from their lack of incidents. Several things actually take place on the stage. The plays are still overwhelmed by poetic memories, of course. Yet, these memories do not manage to make us sympathize with Eliot's characters. Eliot is betrayed here by his inexperience concerning other people's souls. An emotional deficiency of the characters, it might be called.

These last three plays have almost everything in common. First of all, they can be staged. Or, at least, they can be staged more easily than the other two. Then, they are all enveloped in the same highly aristocratic air, which is created half in jest and half in earnest. The étiquette, the dignified manners, even the wealthy background of the three families described were things Eliot himself must have worshipped (or at least his contemporaries say so). Lack of money, the consuming anxiety of earning a living by daily work are not mentioned. Eliot leaves aside his own experience in the matter. The plays, consequently, come out a little superficial and artificial.

On the other hand, there are innumerable humorous incidents which do not fail to trigger laughter. Irony, too, is used generously, often in the very names of the characters. A man who shows the possible way out towards some spiritual life is called Eggerson: the association with egg (preparation of a new being) is obvious. The daughter of a whore is called Lucasta Angel, and so on. The bits of poetry are less and less numerous. They are replaced by more realistic, sometimes agreeably comic dialogues. These are not dialogues which can outline a character, though. Hardly any character is truly alive. The heroes of these plays are shadowed by the obsessions of Eliot's poetry. Eliot the poet still beckons us to follow him back stage. Sometimes he does so in memorable lines. Prufrock suddenly pops up in COCKTAIL PARTY, where we read:

‘... When you've dressed for a party

And are going downstairs, with everything about you

Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen,

Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step

There is one step more than your feet expected

And you come down with a jolt. Just for a moment

You have the experience of being an object

At the mercy of a malevolent staircase.

Or, take a surgical operation.

In consultation with the doctor and the surgeon,

In going to bed in the nursing home,

In talking to the matron, you are still the subject,

The centre of reality. But, stretched on the table,

You are a piece of furniture in a repair shop

For those who surround you, the masked actors;

All there is of you is your body

And the 'you' is withdrawn ...’

A frustrated sensibility drowning in fears lurks in a woman's description of her only moment of love (now lost, of course):

‘I abandoned the future before we began,

And after that I lived in a present

Where time was meaningless, a private world of ours ...’

Again and again, the unfulfilment of the hyacinth garden is uttered in almost the same words used by Eliot when he first coined it. We cannot help noticing that, in these sad interludes, it is always the woman who is let down, while a male eye withdraws, haunted by a painful sense of guilt.

The rending pain of growing old is also reenacted:

‘... only since this morning

I have met myself as a middle-aged man

Beginning to know what it is to feel old.

That is the worst moment, when you feel that you have lost

The desire for all that was most desirable,

Before you are contented with what you can desire;

Before you know what is left to be desired;

And you go on wishing that you could desire

What desire has left behind’.

There is a certain emotional laziness in Eliot's progress as a writer. He sticks to the obsessions of his youth, which were premature obsessions of old age. These early themes, however, build the image of a whole lifetime. Not being able ever to know anything or anyone for certain, ourselves included, is such a theme of all ages, for all seasons:

‘... we die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes be broken’.

Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf amply broke that convention. The stream-of-consciousness novels broke the character into tiny reactions. They shook those reactions together, and then took them out one by one at random.

The dryness of life, the waste land of the soul is reiterated by a girl's complaint:

‘I seemed always on the verge of some wonderful experience

And then it never happened’.

The man she thought had been in love with her replies:

‘There was a door

And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle.

Why could I not walk out of my prison?

What is hell? Hell is oneself,

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from

And nothing to escape to. One is always alone’.

The inert young man who wasted the hyacinth garden experience is enclosed in these words. The young girl is left with the craving:

‘But even if I find my way out of the forest

I shall be left with the inconsolable memory

Of the treasure I went into the forest to find

And never found, and which was not there

And perhaps is not anywhere’.

Soon after lost love, marriage is described, in somewhat milder terms than we remember from The Waste Land:

‘... They may remember

The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it,

Maintain themselves by the common routine,

Learn to avoid excessive expectation,

Become tolerant of themselves and others,

Giving and taking, in the usual actions

What there is to give and take. They do not repine;

Are contented with the morning that separates

And with the evening that brings together

For casual talk before the fire

Two people who know they do not understand each other,

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them’.

Gerontion also reappears, for a short while, in a dying man's words:

‘It's like telling a man he mustn't run for trains

When the last thing he wants is to take a train for anywhere.

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’.

One thing Eliot certainly was not: emotionally inventive. Very direct these quoted excerpts must sound, to readers of Eliot's earlier poetry. We must keep in mind that these words are now uttered by characters who are supposed to be other than Eliot himself. The dramatic ambiguity and conciseness of the poems is abandoned. Eliot no longer hides behind half uttered thoughts. Instead of that, he is now beguiling us to follow him behind the scenes. Which means that writing these plays forces Eliot into finding other dramatic devices than those used in his poetry. A dialogue, an interrupted conversation, the use of a mask (character) to utter private feelings are all preliminaries of a play, not its substance. Therefore, Eliot gradually learned how to resort to plot, suspense and so on. The stage manager with whom he collaborated from his first dramatic attempt (E. Martin Browne), and who staged Eliot's other plays, wrote a whole book about Eliot's dramatic apprenticeship. We must state from the very beginning that Eliot's dramatic findings have a strong taste of poetry about them. An amazingly steadfast character, this writer must have been, to stick to the same topics from youth to old age. Or rather, a man who saw his life slip from season to season, wishing ardently for improvement, but hoping for none. The same as his poetry, his plays are works of hope defeated, hope repressed, yet never ignored.

One dramatic finding Eliot amply made use of is to suggest by various means a parallel between modern times and the calamitous patterns of Greek tragedies. The power of destiny is visible in all his five plays. Something always remains unknown, unexplained. As if the heroes' fates had been settled somewhere above, and the heroes themselves had no access to the minds of ruthless gods. This acceptance of an unknown destiny, which is never revealed, makes Eliot's dramatic works look like question plays. The same as a poem, they are left open to interpretation. Only, here, this open end weakens the dramatism, the quality of the play. The stage fades away every now and then, while the characters, burdened by uncertainty, walk to and fro. The floor shakes a little. An earthquake may begin in this way. Or at least this is the fear Eliot's plays leave inside us. Eliot himself seems to have experienced this inner trembling of his characters (which often turns into shivering, by the way). The fact is obvious if we examine his plots in succession. The first two are already known. In Murder, the archbishop is commended to us for his superhuman wish to dissolve into nothingness, to escape from the stage. In The Family Reunion, Harry, too, is pushed off the stage, only this time we see him leave in somewhat more realistic terms. As for the other three plots left, the need to leave the stage, the superhuman aspiration towards a world beyond, grows weaker and weaker, until it finally disappears. The last play (The Elder Statesman), the same as the Quartets in a way, sticks desperately to the wooden planks of the stage.

The proof that Eliot is becoming more of a dramatist as he goes on practicising is the scarcity of poetic utterances in his later plays. Murder was steeped in poetry. The Family Reunion mixed poetry with half-real dialogues. The Cocktail Party is almost the last play in which the characters allow themselves to hum their fears poetically. Poetry is gradually stifled. Together with a certain poetic dumbness of the plays, the characters' escape into something unthinkable (Eliot's belief in the beyond) also becomes more fragile. The poetry is replaced by symmetry, interruptions, coincidences. These devices become irritating in the long run. Yet, they are a welcome diversion from the poet who thought it was enough for him to put up a stage, feeling sure that any poem uttered there would, all by itself, turn into a play. Eliot is now trying hard to improve plots and characters by placing them in symmetrical positions. The heroes keep taking one another's place, as if the stage were a merry-go-round. Still, their unexpected moves do not take us by surprise. We always feel they are doing something that has already been done before. At the same time, the plot is no longer unfurled directly, smoothly. Eliot places obstacles in front of the story he tells. When we are on the verge of finding out what is to happen next, another character pops up, and interrupts the flow of incidents for a while. The plot very closely resembles an obstacle race which leaves us gasping for breath, yet totally indifferent to what is going on. Can it be, again, because these plays have a deeper deficiency, a restricted range of experiences to disclose? In short, should we infer that Eliot does not have as much to say here as in his major poems? Steadfast, monotonous, uninventive, these are harsh adjectives. Yet, they can hardly be avoided. An author for all seasons, as Eliot undoubtedly was, was bound to pass through the stage of the vacant soul.

Besides irritating interruptions and much too obvious symmetries (of moods, deeds, aspirations), coincidence is another dramatic device which Eliot cannot use to his advantage. People happen to be on stage when they are most necessary to the plot, and their sudden appearance is hardly believable. Eliot brings people together without thinking of life as it really flows. He means to write a play. Like a conscientious craftsman (not ‘the better’, unfortunately), he prepares all the necessary tools beforehand. He never lacks a nail; he never leaves an incident at the mercy of the ‘absurd’ flow of real life. An innovating poet wrote, as we can see, a set of incredibly traditional plays.

Because of the dramatic devices above mentioned, Eliot's last three plays are somewhat monotonous. Let us have a brief look at their plots. The Cocktail Party is the story of a married couple, Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne. The name Eliot finds for his characters are another explanation of their being so unlikable. Some have mockingly aristocratic names, which rank them among the snobs. Others, those privileged, have angelic names, familiar and endearing. They are Eliot's private messengers in the plays, and this private contact with the poet-playwright destroys them as characters. More openly said, Eliot pampers his favourite heroes. Everything turns around these beings. Everything is done to please them, or to place a halo over their heads. They are never mocked at, while all the others are seen as little more than comic insects. The contrast between their earnestness and the irony Eliot uses against the rest is too strong. Such is the case of Celia Coplestone, in The Cocktail Party. The incidents, briefly rendered, are the following: Edward has an affair with Celia, and Lavinia with a young man, Peter Quilpe. The wife is the first to find out her husband's exploits. She is also the first to be hurt: Peter falls in love with Celia, so Lavinia feels abandoned. Celia, on the other hand, is firmly convinced that her love for Edward is the real thing. The cocktail announced by the title of the play does not take place on the stage at all. Here is another instance of the way Eliot mocks at his own titles. He always chooses a title tongue in his cheek. On the night of the cocktail, Edward finds out that Lavinia has left him. We later learn that she has gone to see a psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. This psychiatrist turns up at the cocktail, together with Alex (Alexander MacColgie Gibbs) and Julia (Mrs. Shuttletwaite). These three characters are (like Mary and Agatha, in The Family Reunion) a kind of intermediary puppets. They help Edward and Lavinia get together again. They teach them that a man and a woman cannot live together unless they learn to protect each other, at least in a superficial way. The same three half-mysterious characters send Celia, as a missionary, to a place called Kinkanja. After a conflict between monkey-eating heathens and a minority of Christianized natives, Celia is crucified near an anthill. A horrifying death, which Eliot no longer dares present as a desirable escape. Thomas Becket's martyrdom and Harry's decision to expiate a hereditary curse (by following his Eumenides) were conceived in an intenser mood. Here, Celia is a mere possibility, a dubious (and not at all inviting) way out of life. Peter Quilpe goes to California, to enter the world of Hollywood. If it were not for Celia's suffering when she realizes the loss of Edward (or of her own feeling for Edward), the play would be very dry. The stale marriage of Edward and Lavinia is discouraging. The licentious attitudes of husband and wife concerning their respective extra-marital affairs overtly remind us of Restoration comedy. With the difference that they do not manage to be comic. Anyway, the play ends before the actual The Cocktail Party is about to begin. Edward and Lavinia humour each other as best they can. Peter comes back to England to look for Celia again. He learns, together with the spectators, about her death. Julia, Alex and the doctor are off to another party. Another little saint is on her (or his) way to martyrdom, maybe?

The plot of The Cocktail Party is not particularly bright. Neither are the characters. All of them are self-centred. There is a certain craft of revealing a personality by means of incident, which Eliot does not possess. Although so little happens, in fact, the plot looks intricate. The atmosphere is stifling. Interruptions and coincidences drive us mad. Each character is in quest for something, yet nobody finds anything.