LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

HUMOUR DESCENDING

The self-conscious, sullenly involved and all-fearing T.S. Eliot is far from being a solar poet. On the contrary, the sky of his earlier poems is most of the time overcast. Down below, somewhere in a dim light, preferably evening or night (which reminds one of the feeling in Prufrock that ‘the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table’), shadows of former human beings race the reader into a hell of darkness. On their way there, maddened by the loss of light, these weird shadows gradually let their humanity fall from them like a useless shell. This happens to almost all the masks in Eliot's earlier poetry and to all the characters of his plays. It disappears in the Quartets, though, because those later poems do not make use of masks any more.

Eliot's characters – numberless voices stifled in his poems – hardly have any luminous joy. Apart from the hyacinth girl and the memory of the nightingale in The Waste Land, the forsaken girl in La Figlia Che Piange, the ‘lady of silences’ in Ash-Wednesday and the short poem Marina, female characters are painted in grim colours. Eliot seems even inclined to use pitch. In Portrait of a Lady, for instance, there is a woman who is too old for lust; she seems almost half dead, if we are to judge by the images piled about her. Her room looks like Juliet's tomb, no matter how hard she may have tried to give it the intimate air propitious to a sentimental interlude. She speaks of resurrected souls. She sees life flowing from her interlocutor's body as if she could X-ray him. She recalls her buried life (her youth) in Paris. She even says she has almost reached the end of her journey. Her very last words recorded by the poem are: ‘Perhaps it is not too late’. There is a woman in Hysteria, too, and her mere laughter has the effect of an air-raid. Her throat turns into a dark cavern, which engulfs her male companion, and bruises him to death. Miss Nancy Ellicott (Cousin Nancy) breaks the hills by simply striding across them. Some Princess Volupine (Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleinstein with a Cigar) extends a ‘phthisic hand’, which is ‘meagre, blue-nailed’. In Sweeney Erect, Sweeney's bed partner is no less than an epileptic, and her description is downward repelling:

‘This withered root of knots of hair

         Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval O cropped out with teeth:

         The sickle motion from the thighs

Jacknifes upward at the knees

         Then straightens out from heel to hip

Pushing the framework of the bed

         And clawing at the pillow slip’.

Whispers of Immortality introduces a certain Grishkin (once a well-known ballet dancer). Her ‘uncorseted’ and ‘friendly’ bust ‘gives promise of pneumatic bliss’. Yet, her ‘maisonette’ has a ‘rank feline smell’ all the same. Another woman ‘tears at the grapes with murderous paws’ (Sweeney among the Nightingales), and seems to be ‘in league’ with a female in a Spanish cape, who

‘Slips and pulls the table cloth

Overturns a coffee-cup,

Reorganised upon the floor

She yawns and draws a stocking up’.

The two volumes of poems that precede The Waste Land (1922), one being Prufrock (1917), the other Poems – 1920, abound in such sour descriptions. Few of the short poems are actually successful, besides The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady. Some of them are obscure, some have a certain appealing halo. Even those which do not look very intricate and can be understood, have about them an air of narrow clarity. The poems which require elaborate explanations (of mythological hints or cryptic word combinations) do not reward the hardworking researcher for his efforts, since the latter can never rest assured that his interpretation is faithful to the poet's (hazy) intention. All these poems suffer from an insufficient transcription of the poet's sensibility. They are encumbered with an emptiness, which is not one of the poet's soul, but rather of his ability to turn into poetry what his emotional life provided him with. The same as The Rock, some of these are hollow poems. Only, this time, the cause of their hollowness is different. Eliot is practising in them the tricks that he is going to use in The Waste Land. An alliteration here, an assonance there, lively images, ideas concentrated in only one word (idea-words we might call them, such being the garden, the rock, the rain...) and two-word  self-devouring compounds. These exercises in concentration betray a still shaky hand, which quickly grows tired and stops short of reaching the vital point, that of transferring, of generalizing one of Eliot's private emotions into a memorable line. Narrow indeed these poems are; narrow and insufficient. Hardly meaningful, too, are the characters that inhabit them.

The situation changes in The Waste Land. Light is still absent. Consequently, the characters are overshadowed, mysterious. Yet, on their way down towards the poet's hell of misgivings and pain, they no longer shed their charm, they no longer vanish gradually from our minds, as the poem draws to its end. No less gloomy than most of Eliot's imagined beings, the faces with stifled voices which inhabit The Waste Land are meaningfully, unforgettably alive. Their pitch-like countenance has an explanation behind it, as The Waste Land is no longer an inconclusive exercise. It is a poem which finally conveys Eliot's most characteristic lyrical mood, that of a lightless life. This life, however, is all his heroes have in this world, and to it they cling desperately. The more painful, the more desired. The awkwardness of the previous poems, which were written with an unsteady skill, is replaced by a deft poetic hand, heavy with words loaded with ambiguity. The merely jingling hollowness of the lines is replaced by a probing poetic heaviness, that Eliot discovers in The Waste Land, and which results in a mood of broad, dark, paralyzing despair.

This mood actually revealed a new land, discovered a new America for several generations of poets after Eliot. A despair which is this time amply accounted for: the poem leaves us in the end, as an after-explanation, with Eliot's personal feelings about the images we have passed through. We do not leave The Waste Land empty-handed. On the contrary, our sensibility can hardly bear such a heavy load. The previously exercised verbal concentration (by omissions of explanatory connections between words) is enhanced by a concentration of sensibility. The volcano has burst forth. The poem sounds as if Eliot had crammed into it every emotion, every pain he ever experienced. His feelings go hand in hand with his words. No unnecessary obscurity is allowed. As the saying goes, the style is the man. We might add that the masterful use of words (accessible, though concentrated to the extreme) in The Waste Land is Eliot, Eliot at his best.

Since we started with the female characters, we may as well go on enumerating their representatives in The Waste Land, peeping at various signs of oppressive gloominess in them. Laughter does not come easily to Eliot. As a matter of fact, in his poetry it comes only once, in his delightful book on practical cats. Eliot's main poetic obsessions, although longing after a light humorous tone, always cast upon the poems the black veil of an all-invading sorrow. There is, for instance, an episode written in quite a humorous approximation of how an illiterate English woman is supposed to talk. It is a story about a young mother, Lil (A Game of Chess). In lines spiced with grammar mistakes (from which the intellectual whereabouts of the speaker can easily be guessed), we learn that this Lil, mother of five children and a woman of only thirty-one, already looks ‘antique’. Her husband is to come back home soon after four years in the army (the war, possibly the navy). Before leaving, he gave her money to have her teeth pulled out and get herself a ‘nice set’ of false teeth, because, he said, he could not bear to look at her. The essence of this image, the sordid life of a young woman whose youth is being wasted, drowned in triviality, is tragic. But, since Eliot has learnt that holding out your hand openly begging for pity produces the opposite effect, he envelops tragedy into a glazed paper, painted with masks that may be laughed at. The result is his descending humour. A kind of joyless rejoicing, a tearful smile which never reaches the peal of laughter. His sensibility climbs backwardly down the stairs of feeling, and captures on the way both profundity and sadness, pulling along with it any humorous intention. The failure of humour enhances that sense of frustration which is Eliot's favourite mood.

Besides Lil, Eliot's waste land is populated with quite a number of other female waste lives. A certain Mrs. Porter and her daughter ‘wash their feet in soda water’. A typist makes love almost without realizing the fact and concludes:

‘Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over’.

Some other unnamed girl raises her knees ‘supine on the floor of a narrow canoe’. If Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats had not been written, we might have concluded from the rest of Eliot's poetry that he could only produce instances of abasing humour. People who once knew him stated that he did know how to tell a joke, and thoroughly enjoyed the telling of it himself. Then how come that humour is always so vulgar, so heavy and depressing, so humourless in fact, in most of his poetry? The reason is that humour was the wrong music for the tragedies Eliot perceived. The result was shrill. Eliot's hope was that humour would conceal his own sad fragility and awkwardness. He tried to hide inside hopefully funny lines, as in a cupboard which was too short for him. At the end of each so-called joking fragment, behind the wooden doors left ajar, we hear the ‘clatter and the chatter’ of dead bones within. Sadness is the skeleton in Eliot's poetic cupboard.

The list of lost women is long. Amusement goes hand in hand with a concealed disparaging intention, which is another cause for the inadequacy of Eliot's humour. Most of the female characters are indirectly accused of having chosen to empty, to waste their lives themselves. They willfully ignore the essential feeling of love. They are dry, as dry as the dead bones. In order to render them amusing, Eliot makes these women live only superficially. They are rather dead masks that mimic life. When Eliot's presentation goes beyond such masks, tragic and unforgettable figures are born, such as the hyacinth girl, or the girl in La Figlia Che Piange.

Luckier than the women, the men are seldom discarded. On the contrary even, male characters are more often than not pitied, viewed with wailing sympathy. Sometimes, like the females, they are emptied of their humanity, and consequently mocked at. Such is the typist's companion, the young man carbuncular in The Waste Land:

‘One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference’.

Another of the kind is the recurrent character called Sweeney. In Sweeney Erect for instance, while his bed partner is having an epileptic fit, the man does not even interrupt his shaving to turn round. He simply

‘knows the female temperament

And wipes the suds around his face’.

Otherwise, the males are less of a grinning mask. They wear on their faces the sad smile of misgiving and powerlessness. Consequently, they are more meaningful. Sometimes they are even aggressed by the women and must run away to hide, are in bad need of a refuge. Such is the case of Prufrock, seen ‘pinned and wriggling on the wall’ (his ordeal is implicitly a feminine doing). He consequently wishes he had been

‘a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’.

The narrator in Portrait of a Lady, a young man who will not begin a love affair with an older woman, feels, on entering her flat, as if he had ‘mounted on his hands and knees’. Another man's soul is ‘trampled by insistent feet’ (Preludes). Mr. Appolinax's head is

‘rolling under a chair

Or grinning over a screen

With seaweed in his hair’.

The confused gentleman in Hysteria feels imprisoned in his female-companion's throat, while she is laughing and laughing hysterically. Awkwardness and prophetic fear are the main features of Eliot's male heroes. In most of his poems, Eliot conjures up a masculine world stamped by isolation: a waste land wherein helpless, well meaning men are hunted to destruction by non-angelic, aggressive women. Quite the reverse of the generous ancient myth of Orpheus descending.

The loss of light (of emotion, of something essential to the joy of life) seems to begin in the very mind of all these contorted characters. They try to empty their thoughts, to leave something behind, to forget what was once too clearly seen. Prufrock, for instance, wonders, ‘would it have been worth it, after all?’ Rhapsody on a Windy Night advises, ‘Sleep, prepare for life’. It sounds as if this light of life were guilty. The poems constantly acknowledge this sense of guilt. The guilt (or the revolt) of being alive, because from being alive all pains stem forth. Tired with the pain of living, which makes them constantly run away, Eliot's characters would like, if possible, to sit still, motionless, mimicking (in a magical way) death. This is a trick which Eliot will never renounce, this apparent, self-imposed inertness of the mind and soul, which wears various masks: an awkward laughable countenance in his earlier poetry, then a sternly concentrated expression of renunciation and, finally, an air of beatitude attained, of peace of mind late acquired. They are all untrue, these appearances of sleepiness, of calm. In the non-solar atmosphere of this poet's world, storms blow endlessly, the cold is never tamed. More often than not, it is raging winter in Eliot's soul.

The heroes' untimely descent into death, their willful jump into the dark terror is however made with clearly perceptible revolt against the fatality of night, which Eliot ‘chose’ but opposed, as it seems. His poems are an unwilling surrender. All of them follow a falling line. Grotesque, tragic, angelic masks tumble head over heels into a hell of pain. Sometimes, to relieve their torture, Eliot views them as ridiculous, lightly funny. For a short moment, while this fit of sweetening mockery lasts, the fall is suspended. The reader can relax into a smile. Here and there, when least expected, a redeeming humour lights the sky of this non-solar poet. A sense of well-being, that descends on Eliot's traces, into his night, trying to pull him out towards the light of day, the same as Orpheus tried to recover his Eurydice. From behind the sombre clouds of discontent, short rays of mocking tenderness flash out, but are promptly extinguished. Such an example is a fragment uttered by Prufrock. The words bring the hero close to our sympathy by making him jest at his own gravity (in the manner of Shakespeare's Polonius):

‘No! I am not prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

Almost, at times, the Fool’.

Such joking interludes are however rare. Eliot's sensibility can either passionately rage or passionately reprove. It only too seldom dances on the rope of jesting tenderness.

Lighter than the rest, is the tone of THE HOLLOW MEN, a poem made up out of bits left over from The Waste Land. Its broken, wavering meaning shows it:

‘We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!’

They are still in ‘death's dream kingdom’, imagined kingdom, that is. All along the poem they ‘foresuffer’ (to use Tiresias' word) the horror of the ‘final meeting’ in ‘death's other kingdom’, the real one, allegedly. They utter their dismay by repeating fragments of the Lord's Prayer:

‘For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the’

Between these two worlds or, as the poem goes,

‘Between the essence and the descent’,

before the world is said to end

‘Not with a bang but a whimper’,

these hollow men look and look at themselves, and what do they see?

‘Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning’.

Eliot's humour is here neither bitter, nor reproving. It is what humour should be: a serene mental hold on deep emotional turmoil. But that is a state of mind which Eliot, when dealing with his fellow-beings, cannot manage to experience for long.

                                             *

                        The motif of darkness translated from Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. 

            The motif of darkness, concrete rendered abstract, is a Desperado motif avant la lettre when we analyse it in Robert Browning’s Victorian long poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which is unanimously considered the forerunner of The Waste Land. An interior monologue, the poem, written in the first person, addresses the reader just like Eliot, who, half-shy, half-Desperado (intertextuality), resorted to Baudelaire in the line, ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable, -- mon frère!’. The huge dark, timeless and pathless field Childe Roland crosses  on his way to finding the reputed Dark Tower is as depressing as Eliot’s five-part description of loveless cities, rooms and beings, but much more impetuous. In spite of the frightening sights Childe Roland encounters, in spite of the long line of dead people watching him from within a ‘sheet of flame’ to see his failure, he manages to become aware of the Dark Tower and makes his triumph known to the reader. Darkness, with Robert Browning is in fact the opposite of awareness (be it of death, nothing can scare the poet or his persona), and when Browning's hero blows his horn and ends the poem by telling everybody alive, ‘’Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’ ‘, we feel confident that the mind has won and we are safe, death has been defeated. Just like Yeats, who was very much his follower, Browning feels that what can be contemplated by the mind  is another country for life. The end has been smashed to tiny bits of darkness, and the light of inner energy and trust in the intellect is shining. Browning kills darkness before darkness has time to kill him.

            With Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a writer caught between tradition and the Stream-of-Consciousness and unaware of both, Heart of Darkness (1902) is the core of the unknown subconscious, with all its horrors, which Eliot prolongs by quoting as a motto to his Hollow Men, ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’, and we remember that Kurtz bequeathed to the reader his ultimate truth: ‘the horror! the horror!’

            Though contemporary with Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad seems to belong to a totally different age, and it is the age foretold by Browning, actually, through the latter’s use of dramatic monologue. Conrad’s prose is earnestness itself. Some critics see in Conrad the best stylist of a language he only learnt when he was eighteen. His sentences convey the determination of a thinker who must make room for his thoughts, who feels stifled if he does not set free in words the world of his soul. It is a world of solitude at sea, a space of inner mists, inner darkness,   which we descry while going down the paths of experimental literature, which both Browning (avant la lettre) and Eliot did. Without much ado, Joseph Conrad lands at last in the stream-of-consciousness. His heroes make confessions in the first person, then they are watched by other heroes and understood in various ways. A chain of images ensues, which makes us see there is no final truth about anyone, the text is left like a dark hole, sucking in all interpretations and gratifying none.

            The author, who left native Poland at the age of fifteen, as a sailor on a French ship, confesses that he was adopted by the English language and, had this not happened, he may never have written anything at all. He is not the first displaced writer to be adopted by England (which shows that displacement does not begin with Postmodernism). He joins T.S. Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, G.B. Shaw and many others. As a grown up, he rejects the language of his unhappy childhood, a time which is another spot of darkness. Conrad’s books never deal with childhood. His roots strike the English soil and go deep into it. He achieves a truly refined style, a halo of light, as opposed to his Polish burden, never uttered as such. His words are extraordinarily varied and many. The numerous books he read while a sailor lend all his sentences a music of earnest English literature. Well remembered echoes of Shakespeare steal into the pages of this stylist who has got estranged from his native tongue, who has tied himself so well to the mast of his adoptive language that no mermaid of memory can drag him back into the motherland of his soul and words. It is also the case of T.S. Eliot, for whom America and his childhood and youth are also absent from poetry. It is the turn of the past to lend meaning to the darkness.

A lot has been said about tradition and innovation in Conrad’s novels. One thing is certain: he did want to change something, to revive the narrative. His changes look more like research than victory, though. Conrad is not eager to find tricks, although he does find some. What he ardently wishes for is new heroes, which is as much as to say that he values the truth (life) of the novel more than its surprising strategy. The same as Proust, Henry James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf and the rest, he lets us know (though with more unobtrusive gentleness) that the hero has ceased to exist, he has turned into a chamber full of mirrors. Each mirror reflects just one feature or one age. It is up to us to connect then or let them flow at large. The author withdraws, but not completely. He watches us from a distance, careful lest he should be seen. We grope following his tracks, we wonder what he thinks of one character or another,  and his work haunts us with this interrogative mood, which, again, is a face of darkness. The true experimental novel had an air of enigmatic eloquence. Conrad’s novel is silent, obstinately dark. The architecture of incidents is not complicated. The wish to see us at a loss (cherished by Browning and Eliot alike) is alien to Conrad. He merely gazes at his predecessors’ works and tries to devise his own, different manner. That is why he begins by telling us the end of his plot, why he mixes up before and after, and often gives way to lyricism (symbols, long poetic descriptions). Laconic and lyrical, Joseph Conrad is a novelist adopted, even claimed by England, stream-of-consciousness and the élite of stylists.

            Heart of Darkness is probably his best known short story. The implication of ‘The horror! The horror!’ by Eliot’s The Hollow Men, conveys the oppressive burden of lyricism (read ‘soul’) of the narrative. Unlike Joyce and the rest, Conrad is very keen on protecting the dark core of his heroes’ inner lives. He uses the character-narrator Marlow, who mediates the relationship reader-writer, concealing the author’s withdrawal from the text. Conrad refuses to be in direct touch with his heroes, he is unwilling to pass judgment. He leaves all verdicts and absence of light (darkness) to us, and the narrator invented by him does the same. The difference between tradition and innovation lies in a certain punctuation of the spirit: the traditional novel uses a full stop after the word end, while the new novel chooses the question mark, denying the end as such. Once we have finished reading a novel by Dickens, we feel banished from the narrative and we resent the bolted door. We feel like prowling round the work a little longer, we have been taken by surprise by our exile out of it. Our pride suggests that it could be rewarding if we could be the masters for a change, and prolong the plot. Conrad teaches us both humility and strength. The work haunts us with its dark (unexplained) spots. We flee from it but we never feel free again. Is it the ‘horror’ of darkness (the substance of the work) that haunts us, or the writer’s consistent interrogation (his manner of writing the work)? We may forget all incidents, but the feeling of unrest is forever with us. This is Conrad’s lasting message: the horror that we are unable to understand, which is just the meaning that Browning attributed to his tower of darkness. Browning was a victor. Are we today?.. Darkness (to say nothing of obscurity) was the mood of most early 20^th century prose writers, and nobody can deny that Conrad was earnestly in the dark in his mood and words.

            In 1902, Conrad described his hero, Mr Kurtz, who died after communing with unspeakably dehumanizing rites in the dark jungle, as ‘hollow at the core’, which is the reason why he was swallowed by darkness, instead of mastering it, just as Conrad the writer masters the darkness of fiction writing. Shakespeare himself mentioned some ‘hollow men’ in Julius Caesar. In 1925, Eliot published his poem, The Hollow Men, which concludes, ‘This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper’. The modernist poem, drastically innovated by Eliot, actually ends the idea of poetry. As Joyce mentioned in his diary, ‘Eliot ends idea of poetry for ladies.’ Hybridization builds a monster, amalgamating fiction, drama, essay, literary criticism into lyricism, and the poet turns against himself, eating at the tail of poetry. Taking from symbolists the love of  the disgusting, Eliot overturns the poetic situation, investing with meaning whatever is most shockingly disagreeable. The poem is  now ‘the prickly pear.’

            Within the hollow men there is the darkness, the horror, the kingdom of death, the broken Lord’s Prayer. Eliot the poet writes in and about darkness, and feels that an even greater darkness surrounds his very obscure world. Between reader and writer, between many other pairs of irreconcilable poles, ‘Falls the Shadow.’ If Browning is a victor, if Conrad is strong enough to look death in the face, Eliot chooses the whimper and makes poetry out of what is left after the feast of traditional poetry: aborted images, contorted meanings, and, moreover, understatements of oversized fears. All his images are depressingly ugly. We feel powerless while reading this poet whose strength is his weakness, so to say. We share his confusion and the darkness of his imagination is welcoming. Once we have followed him into the poem and learned how to fill in the blanks, we partake of the new status of the reader. Both Browning and Conrad kept company with a traditional reader (maybe Conrad attempted the beginning of a change). Eliot requires the reader to write the poem alongside with him. Darkness shared becomes intriguing and ends as a drug we can no longer do without. Could we go back to Dickens, and read texts that give us the meaning on a platter? We have become too complicated, too Postmodern, too Desperado for that. The clarity of writing and of reading is gone. We are left with the darkness of a self-consuming text.

            The motif of darkness has obviously migrated from Browning’s Dark Tower, through Conrad’s ambiguous (both text and reading) Heart of Darkness, to Eliot’s love of the dark text. Darkness is no longer a motif in a poem with Eliot. Darkness is the poem. Darkness is the poet and the reader. Darkness has swallowed the entire world, with literature in it, and... are we waiting for the bang or the whimper?

                                                            *

With cats as characters, instead of people, it is an altogether different matter. Unbelievable but true, the frowning Eliot can smile. He can forget his misgivings, his nightmares of a waste land inhabited by failed beings. He leaves aside his ambiguity, symbols, enigmatic quotations, unusual highbrow musicality, and chats about cats with joyfully rhythmical, cleverly rhymed friendliness:

‘The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore:

When you let him in, then he wants to be out;

He's always on the wrong side of every door.

And as soon as he's at home, then he'd like to get about.

He likes to lie in the bureau drawer,

But he makes such a fuss if he can't get out.

Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat –

And it isn't any use for you to doubt it:

For he will do

As he do do

And there's no doing anything about it!’

OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS is a carefree picture of the world seen through the eyes of a grown up, who tenderly watches a child who, in his turn, amazed and immensely amused, listens to tales about cats. Eliot's chronic discontent is replaced here by a parade of nonsensical, highly resourceful and entertaining cat-like thoughts. Eliot's humour opens unexpected doors. Language is no longer ‘dislocated’ into his meaning. No syntactic rule or lexical law is violated. Eliot's gravity having withdrawn, the words no longer (as Burnt Norton puts it) ‘strain, crack, break, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision’. They are merely taken for granted.

Two things are revealed by these fifteen poems Eliot wrote about cats (creatures whom he was said to have been extremely fond of). First, that traditional rhyming comes to him amazingly easily. This rhyming ability could hardly have been inferred from his more serious poems, where his musicality is too intricate to be detected at once. Second, that he can actually laugh and make people laugh, by combining words in order to make up the most fantastic and suggestive names, or to surprise us with a wildly comic gesture. Take, for instance, the introductory poem on The Naming of Cats. It is not the idea that counts (as in his other poems), but the affectionately humorous surprise which each line contains. We learn here that a cat must have no less than three different names, out of which one must be

‘particular,

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?’

This name, as we are presently told, nobody can ever know, except the cat himself, so

‘When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

         The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

         Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

                     His ineffable effable

                     Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name’.

Listening to the tape on which Eliot's voice was recorded reading all these poems, any doubt as to the genuineness of their light-hearted mood is dispelled. He obviously loved cats, and loved making fun of them. For the first (and only) time in his creation, his mood does not involve pain. A cat is to Eliot a creature of joy. The joy which he denied to human life he allows to the exploits of cats. Even if, at times, his funny lines grow too long and a little boring, the revelation of Eliot enjoying something in this life (even cats will do) is touching. A crowd of delightfully shrewd cats pass to and fro. Some with peculiarly suggestive names, others with a laughable, easily remembered line to accompany them.

There is, for instance, an old ‘gumbie’ cat, whose name is Jennyanydots, because

‘Her coat is of a tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard dots’.

She may very well be the ancestor of quite a number of cartoons we know, in which the cats make friends with the mice. This particular Gumbie cat spends her nights taking care of the behaviour and manners of the mice, teaching them ‘music, crochet and tatting’, cooking for them, in hopes that a better diet might keep them quiet (the rhyme belongs to the poet again).

All those trifling lines end in irreproachable rhymes, and none of the rhyming words seems to have been used just for the sake of musicality. Each word has a logical reason behind it. The rhyme, though of major importance in these relaxed poems deprived of innovating zest, looks accidental. Yet Eliot's rhyming resourcefulness does not fail to amaze us up to the very last line of the very last poem. He thoroughly knew the laws of regular music in poetry. Yet, in his major poems he ignored those rules as completely as to intimate he had never even heard of them. He reshaped the poetic idiom to such an extent as to make the readers feel that traditional rhymes and rhythms could not convey the deep music of the soul. All those feline poems show another face of Eliot. They place him in the right light: that of a poet who refused to write traditional verse (although he was perfectly conversant with it) because he had devised a more suggestive poetic pattern for his age.

To come back to the disciplinarian old Gumbie cat, a refrain defines her, and it also gives us a glimpse of Eliot himself affectionately watching the character, and describing the sight for the ears of a readily delighted child:

‘I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

Her equal would be hard to find, she likes the warm and sunny spots.

All day she sits beside the hearth or in the sun or on my hat:

She sits and sits and sits and sits – and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!’

Our delight comes both from the light musical flow of each stanza, and from the accuracy with which Eliot can watch or invent a cat. He magnifies each of their characteristic gestures, as if these were springing from some rational decision. He humanizes these nasty cats with the same earnestness with which he constantly de-humanized his other (human) heroes. There is here again a sign of Eliot's love for opposition, which lies at the root of all his innovations. A man is sub-human, although Eliot toys with the idea that the same man may sometime reach beyond the human; only that is a distant and not really desired prospect. The cat, on the other hand, becomes a super-cat. She behaves like a being with an ability to think, to know the future, to plot. Because all Eliot's cats – and herein lies their fun and the source of Eliot's humour – are plotting cats, tricky, mysterious, self-assured and very dignified.

Such is Growltiger (comically scaring name), the ‘Terror of the Thames’. At the sound of his mere name, people shudder and run to fortify their hen-houses, lock their geese, canaries and ‘pampered’ Pekinese dogs. Eliot describes Growltiger (as all other cats in this volume) tongue in his cheek:

‘His manners and appearance did not calculate to please;

His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy at the knees;

One ear was somewhat missing, no need to tell you why,

And he scowled upon a hostile world from one forbidding eye’.

With false earnestness, the poet usually states the opposite of what his words obviously mean. This has something in common with the ambiguity of Eliot's major poems, where understatements had to be weighed carefully, while over-statements simply had to be reversed in order to be understood properly. Even here, chatting about cats, Eliot prompts the reader to misread his statements. The device he chooses here is the joke: a secret, which Eliot shares tacitly with his readers, that whatever he asserts must be taken precisely the other way round. Growltiger, for instance, terrifying as he is said to be, one peaceful summer night showed his ‘sentimental side’. The moment of his weakness was used by his foes (all the cats, especially those of foreign origin, whom he had ever mistreated) to attack him:

‘The ruthless foe pressed forward, in stubborn rank on rank;

Growltiger to his vast surprise was forced to walk the plank.

He who a hundred victims had driven to that drop,

At the end of all his crimes was forced to go ker-flip, ker-flop’.

London, the highly symbolical stage crossed by the characters of The Waste Land, relaxes too. It is inhabited by picturesque adventurers, such as the ‘notorious couple of cats’ Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer. The very names of these cats induce a state of annoyed amusement. They are in turn ‘knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats’. Their home is in Victoria Grove, but they are ‘incurably given to rove’. We may very well find them, Eliot warns us, in Cornwall Gardens, in Launceston Palace and in Kensington Gardens. Their reputation is ‘extensive’. Their skills are no less. They are, to put it plainly, unashamed ‘cat-burglars’, experts at ‘smash and grab’. So,

‘If the area window was found ajar

And the basement looked like a field of war,

If a tile or two came loose on the roof,

Which presently ceased to be waterproof,

If the drawers were pulled out from the bedroom chests,

And you couldn't find one of your winter vests,

Or after supper one of the girls

Suddenly missed her Woolworth pearls:

Then the family would say: ‘It's that horrible cat!

It was Mungojerrie – or Rumpleteazer!’ – And most of the time they left it at that’.

Old age, Eliot's stinging obsession in Ash-Wednesday (and all his other poems), is also contemplated with hardly suppressed laughter. Its image is Old Deuteronomy, whose name reminds us of course of Biblical times. Has the cat lived that long? Nobody knows:

‘Well of all ...

Things ... Can it be ... really! ... No! ... Yes! ...

Ho! hi!

Oh, my eye!

My sight may be failing, but yet I confess

I believe it is Old Deuteronomy!’

This cat is in a way reassuring. It makes you feel life might be longer than you imagine. Old Deuteronomy himself (accidentally or not, he is a male) has so far lived ‘many lives in succession’. He has buried

‘nine wives

And more – I am tempted to say ninety-nine’.

His welfare is carefully protected by everybody around. Is there any other poem in which we can find Eliot winking at death so confident of cheating it?

The parade goes on. The gallery of portraits includes Mr. Mistoffelees, a cat who, like the legendary Mephistopheles, has devilish powers. Eliot's inventivity is inexhaustible. This particular ‘conjuring’ cat can perform any piece of magic he chooses. He can ‘creep through the tiniest crack’, he can ‘walk on the narrowest rail’. He is also the greatest expert at creating confusion. When you hear him purring by the fire, you may be sure he is in fact up on the roof, and this

‘... is incontestable proof

Of his singular magical powers:

And I have known the family to call

Him in from the garden for hours,

While he was asleep in the hall.

And not long ago this phenomenal Cat

Produced seven kittens right out of a hat!

And we all said: OH!

Well I never!

Did you ever

Know a Cat so clever

As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!’

Each cat has a peculiar look. One is black, another spotted, one has long whiskers. Macavity, the Mystery Cat

‘... is very tall and thin;

You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.

His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;

His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.

He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;

And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake’.

This Macavity is not a mere burglar or pickpocket, like his milder peers. He is no less than the ‘Napoleon of crime’. He may be suspected of any possible mischief: stealing jewels (as well as milk), stifling some poor Pekinese (a ‘Heathen Chinese’ among dogs), breaking the greenhouse glass. Yet, this is not all that he can do. The disappearance of some Foreign Office Treaty or Admiralty plans might also be his doing. Eliot hurries to reassure us that Macavity never lacks an alibi. He even has ‘one or two to spare’, so his crimes will remain forever unknown. The very beginning of the poem introduces him as such:

‘Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw –

For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.

He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:

For when they reach the scene of crime – Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,

He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity ...’

How free Eliot is here from the chains that fetter his thoughts and sensibility in his more serious poems. Is it not hard to believe that the poet who wrote this wildly funny parody of human society is the same poet who reproved man so drastically in The Rock?

The pub (could it be the same pub where Lil's story was told in The Waste Land?) is the place where Gus, the Theatre Cat retells the story of his youth (no longer ‘buried’ in Paris). For a ‘toothful’ of gin, he willingly recalls the parts he once played:

 'I've played', so he says, 'every possible part,

And I used to know seventy speeches by heart.

I'd extemporize back-chat, I know how to gag,

And I knew how to let the cat out of the bag ..’.

No longer in his prime, this Gus (whose real name is in fact Asparagus) can hardly scare the mice or the rats any more. His paws shake because of palsy, his coat is shabby, and he now lives on memories alone. But the poem is devoid of any sadness. Eliot was too busy for pain. He was having a good time.

Unless we see him here, in Possum, thoroughly enjoying himself, laughing whole-heartedly at his humanized cats, we are very much likely to miss the real taste of his humour. Influenced, maybe, by the sign Eliot was born under (Libra), his humour looks like a balance with two scales. One of them (the heaviest) is downward going. The other one, less widely known, is pushed by the former high up into a sky of affectionate laughter and well-being. As Eliot himself ends his delightful book on cats,

‘You now have learned enough to see

The Cats are much like you and me

And other people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

For some are sane and some are mad

And some are good and some are bad

And some are better, some are worse –

But all may be described in verse’.

In short, this Possum book is like a carnival of words. Tongue in his cheek, Eliot mispronounces, invents or skips syllables, joins half-words. His serious poems squeeze meanings out of lexical and syntactical ambiguity. These lectures on the ‘naming of cats’ rely mostly on phonetic effects. Technically speaking, Eliot's humour is here at its best. It settles at the superficial boundaries of the word, far from the heavy burden of the lexical and grammatical rainbow. It also settles at the frontiers of Eliot's sensibility, at a point where no bitter thought can reach and darken it. We have here a book of light verse for light reading, written in a light mood – but by a heavy, expert poetic hand.

Possum is, nevertheless, a short and strange interlude in Eliot's creation. After reading it, we perceive even more intensely the strained irony, the anxiety of the other poems, those poems which plunge headlong into the abyss of night. Eliot's beings, except cats of course, are prodigious at failing and growing old. At time, a touch of humour softens their harsh reality, but their progress downward cannot be stopped. This awareness of powerlessness pervades each word with sadness. Humour fights a hard battle with the tragic mood, such as in Eliot's own presentation of himself:

‘How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim

And his conversation so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And If and Perhaps and But.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With a bobtail cur

In a coat of fur

And a propentine cat

And a whopsical hat;

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

(Whether his mouth be open or shut)’.

                     (Minor Poems)

The bright flashes will not last. What appeals to Eliot is the fall, not the ascent, the tragedy, not the comedy of life. While humming his joking lines, surrounded by dark terrors, the poet suddenly craves for more than jesting reassurement. Too early, he looks back, and sees the light he has been losing fast. Then his humour becomes utterly powerless to take him out of the dark hell of fear and pain. All it can do is, sometime later, to reappear and help him probe the darkness again.

The so-called humorous interludes in Eliot's poetry oppose its falling structure. Humour or irony cannot save the drowning beings. They are therefore merely frustrating. It is not in the power of jesting words to change the poet's falling sensibility into a soaring one. Of course, Eliot's humour keeps trying to drag dark despair into sunlit hope. And, of course, it fails. At most, maybe, it manages to go down to the very bottom. There is no question of coming up victorious. In short, Eliot's poems leave a taste of humour descending.