LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

(ELIOT AND HIS TIME, ELIOT ON HIS TIME)

T.S. Eliot has been commented upon, either praised or blamed, in a lot more books than he ever wrote himself. Many well-known critics have brought to life the excellence of his theatre, poetry and criticism. Equally well-known critics have violently reacted against him, formulating picturesque accusations. All these accusations reveal the bewilderment of most readers in front of a poet, playwright and critic who refuses to be direct.

Eliot's most fertile and efficient mood is that of dissent, of questioning disbelief, of cunning uncertainty. As a critic, he has a denying frame of mind. His best essays start with the spotting of an error made by another critic, or essayist or poet. Eliot restates this error in a variety of ironically serious approximations which end by bordering on the absurd. Finally, this vein of humour, which whispers secretly to the reader that disagreement is perfectly entitled and that the critic himself is on the reader's side, produces as its last utterance a question, and systematically leaves it unanswered. The ‘Gioconda’ smile which Wyndham Lewis noticed on Eliot's face extends to all his writings. It makes them enigmatical, open to both approval and disapproval, unimpaired by either of them. A presentation of adverse reactions to Eliot's work (most of them contemporary with him, a few only belonging to the time after his death) may prove a good introduction to a discussion of Eliot. A list of faults, generously drawn by various critics, will gratify the reader's wish to protest against the puzzling effect of Eliot's poems, against the ambiguity of his criticism: in a word, against his so often mentioned bookishness and difficulty. 

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As preliminary information, some data of Eliot's life and a selective chronology of his works against the background of early and middle 20th century literature might prove useful. Especially if we remember Eliot's opinion that the most useful thing a critic can do to facilitate the understanding of a poem is to provide the reader with factual information of any kind.

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born on September 26th, 1888 (under the sign of Libra, the Scales) in America, the town of St. Louis, Missouri, at 2635 Locust Street. The house he was born in has since been replaced by a new industrial building. St. Louis was at the time an industrial city in the centre of the United States.

His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was president of a brickmaking company. He died in 1919, when Eliot was thirty-one. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, was engaged in social work such as the reform of prisons for women and of the courts of juveniles. She also wrote poems, some of which Eliot later published with respect. The cordwainer Andrew Eliot, T.S. Eliot's ancestor on his father's side, emigrated to America, New England (Massachusetts, Bay Colony) in 1668, from East Coker, Somerset, England. Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, left New England for St. Louis in 1834. He was a minister of the Unitarian Church. The Eliots were Unitarians, a Protestant sect which apparently originated in Poland and Hungary in the 17th century and reached England in the 18th century. The name of the sect was due to the fact that they reacted against the Trinitarian view of God and believed in his single personality. William Greenleaf Eliot was the strong character of the family. He established a Unitarian Church in St. Louis. He campaigned against slavery. He founded Washington University in St. Louis. When T.S. Eliot was born, therefore, as the seventh and last child of a 45-year-old mother and a 47-year-old father, he could by no means have been said to come out of an anonymous family.

Two years before Eliot, in 1886, Ezra Pound had been born. In 1888, Katherine Mansfield, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Eliot's first wife) and Eugene O'Neil were born as well. Edward Lear and Matthew Arnold died. In 1888, books by Walt Whitman and Henry James were being published. Between 1888-1892, novels by Mark Twain, poems by Emily Dickinson and Melville appeared in print. In 1889, Conrad Aiken and Waldo David Frank were born. In 1890, Katherine Anne Porter. In 1891, Herman Melville died. In 1892, Archibald MacLeish and Pearl Buck were born. During the same year Whitman died. In England Browning and Hopkins died in 1889, Tennyson in 1892.

About the aspect of St. Louis in 1892, Theodore Dreiser wrote the following:

‘Never in my life had I seen such old buildings, all brick and crowded together ... . Their interior seemed so dark, so redolent of old-time life. The streets also appeared old-fashioned with their cobblestones, their twists and turns and the very little space that lay between the curbs’.

Until 1905, when Eliot turned seventeen, he lived in St. Louis. He spent his summers in New England, where, in 1897, Henry Ware Eliot had built a house at Eastern Point, near Gloucester. The place was not far from Cape Ann, off which there were three rocks known as The Dry Salvages. While there, Eliot learned a great deal about sailing. Before 1906, he attended the Smith Academy and the Milton Academy. He began writing as early as 1905.

In The Eliot Family and St. Louis (printed in an appendix to ‘American Literature and the American Language’, June 1953, Washington University Studies), we find Eliot's own memories of his native town:

‘As I spent the first sixteen years of my life in St. Louis, it is evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has done. These sixteen years were spent in a house at 2635 Locust street, since demolished. This house stood on a large piece of land which had belonged to my grandfather, on which there had been Negro quarters in his time (...) The river also made a deep impression on me; and it was a great treat to be taken down to Eads Bridge in flood time (...)

And I feel there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. Of course my people were Northerners and New Englanders, and of course I spent many years out of America altogether; but Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world’.

In The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet (printed in ‘Daedalus’, 1960), Eliot also added:

‘... for nine months of the year my scenery was almost exclusively urban, and a good deal of it seedily, drably urban at that. My urban imagery was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed’.

As for the summer house and the sea, here is one more quotation which strongly smells of the Four Quartets:

‘... it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England... In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and the goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts’.

                  (Eliot's Preface to Edgar A. Mowrer's This American World, 1928).

      Between 1892-1905, in America appeared essays and poems by George Santayana, poems and novels by Stephen Crane, novels by Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain, essays by William James, poems by Edward Arlington Robinson, novels by Henry James, Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, poems by Willa Cather, essays by Paul Elmer More. In 1894, e.e. cummings was born. In 1895, Edmund Wilson. In 1896, John Dos Passos, Robert Sherwood and Scott Fitzgerald were born. In 1897, Th. Wilder and Faulkner. In 1898, Hemingway. In 1899, Hart Crane. In England, in 1896, William Morris died. In 1900, Ruskin. Shaw and Wilde published several plays. Joseph Conrad wrote  Lord Jim.

In 1906, Eliot entered Harvard and remained there until 1910. He took his B.A. in 1909, and his M.A. in 1910. He published some poems in the  Harvard Advocate. Remembering Eliot's first three years at Harvard, William Chase Greene wrote:

‘He was recognized as able and witty; not influential at the time; rather aloof and silent; I used to tell him he reminded me of a smiling and quizzical figure of Buddha’.

While at Harvard, Eliot attended a large number of courses of his own choice: Greek, Latin, French, German, English and comparative literatures; Santayana's history of modern philosophy; Irving Babbitt's lectures. He was introduced to Dante and John Donne. In 1908, he read Arthur Symons' book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced him to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbière, Laforgue. In an interview about his first acquaintance with French symbolism, Eliot stated, in La France Libre, in 1944, that if he had not discovered Baudelaire and all his descendants, he would not have been able to write. The main influence acknowledged was Laforgue, about whom he wrote:

‘Laforgue was the first to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’.

1909-1910, Eliot wrote Conversation Galante (poem)

                                   Preludes I and II (poems)

                                   Portrait of a Lady (poem)

                  began The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poem)

In 1910, Eliot graduated and went to Paris, where he stayed from October 1910 until July 1911. He attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He met Alain Fournier, who made him read Claudel and Gide, and introduced him to Rivière. He also went to hear Bergson at Collège de France.

        1910,  Rhapsody on a Windy Night (poem)

                  Prelude III (poem)

In August 1911, Eliot went to Munich. There he met Hofmannstahl.

         1911, finished Prufrock

In 1911, Eliot entered the graduate philosophy school at Harvard. Besides a basic course in philosophy, he pursued Indian and Sanskrit literature and philosophy. He also took boxing lessons. In 1913, he was made an assistant in philosophy at Harvard. He began to work on his dissertation on a contemporary English philosopher, F.H. Bradley. In 1914, he left for Germany, to study at the University of Marburg. When the First World War began, he went to England, Merton College, Oxford, having been given a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship to study Aristotle for a year under Harold Joachim, until 1915. In September 1914, he met Ezra Pound, who wrote in a letter about him:

‘... I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. Pray God it be not a single and unique success (...) He is the only American I know of who has made what I can call adequate preparation for writing. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’.

1914,  Aunt Helen (poem)

           Morning at the Window (poem)

           The Boston Evening Transcript (poem)

           Cousin Nancy (poem)

           Mr. Apollinax (poem)

           Hysteria (poem)

In 1908, Ezra Pound had left America for Italy. During the same year the Imagist group of poetry came into being in London. In 1909, Ezra Pound arrived in London. During the same year, Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris, wrote Three Lives. In 1910, Mark Twain died. In 1912, Harriet Monroe brought out the magazine Poetry in Chicago. In 1913, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg published their poems. In 1914, Tennessee Williams was born. In England D.H. Lawrence published Sons and Lovers in 1913.

In 1915, short of money, Eliot took a job as a school teacher. He taught French, Latin, mathematics, drawing, swimming, geography, history and baseball at High Wycombe, then at Highgate Junior School. In a letter to John Quinn (New York lawyer, patron and art collector to whom Eliot later presented the manuscript of The Waste Land), dated 12th August 1915, Pound was writing about Eliot:

‘He has more entrails than might appear from his quiet
exterior, I think’.

On June 26th 1915 (as appears in the Hampstead Register Office), ‘T.S. Eliot, Bachelor, 26, and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, 27, were married’.

Between 1914-1915, therefore, four major events occurred in Eliot's life. First, he came to England and remained there for the rest of his life. Second, he abandoned both his studies of philosophy and his prospects of becoming a professional philosopher in his native country. He finished and actually sent his dissertation on Bradley to Harvard, in 1916. Yet he never returned there to defend it and take his doctor's degree. Third, he became acquainted with Ezra Pound, his most important literary friend, who influenced both his literary criticism and his poetic strategy. Pound found the first publisher for Eliot's poems and introduced Eliot to other writers such as Wyndham Lewis, Ford  Madox Ford, Yeats  and  Joyce. And, last though not least, he married his first wife. She was to die in 1947, in a mental home. Here is how a biographer of Eliot, Lyndall Gordon, describes her, in Eliot's  Early  Years (Oxford University Press, 1977):

‘Vivienne Haigh-Wood was a few months older than Eliot; when they met, both were twenty-six. She was, at the time, a governess with a Cambridge family, but was interested in the arts. Her father, whom she loved, was a painter; she herself painted and studied ballet and, later, wrote poetry and prose sketches (...) She was attractive to men, but evidently not the kind of woman a gentleman would like to introduce to his mother. Eliot, silent and shy, was touched by her free manner, her lavish temperament, and her downright opinions...’

A year later, Eliot said that he had been through ‘the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive’. But his inborn emotional laziness must have needed that, since he hurried to add that he had ‘lived through material for a score of long poems’. Can he already have been on his way to The Waste Land? He also stated:

‘... she has been ready to sacrifice everything for me (...) She has everything to give that I want, and she gives it. I owe her everything’.

Lyndall Gordon also tells us that

‘... Eliot's friends remembered a chic and literate woman who became, through illness, too hysterical and bothersome to be endured’.

      June 1915, Prufrock was published.

In 1916, Eliot's main occupations were teaching and book reviewing. As to his teaching, he wrote in a letter:

‘... all I wanted to do was write poetry, and teaching seemed to take up less time than everything else, but that was a delusion (...) To hold the class's attention you must project your personality on them, and some people enjoy doing that; I couldn't, it took too much out of me’.

In the meanwhile, Eliot kept writing. The Waste Land must have indeed been in progress even if Eliot himself may have been unaware of the fact. The poem was issued only in 1922, but seemed to have been composed over a very long span of time. Concerning his manner of composition, Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken in August 1916:

‘Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety’.

These lines show that Eliot had already discovered the secret of good criticism, of that kind of criticism which is a piece of literature in itself: the short sentence, the obvious yet slyly indirect meaning. A misleading accessibility, in short.

In September 1916, in a letter to his brother, Eliot complains of an intense fear that he might already have lost his poetic energy, that he will never again be able to write anything worth reading:

‘I often feel that J.A.P. is a swan-song, but I never mention the fact’.

This fear of forthcoming poetic dryness was a lifelong affliction with Eliot. In 1947, in On Poetry: An Address (Concord Academy, Massachusetts), he restated it at large:

‘I have always been haunted by one or the other of two doubts. The first is, that nothing I have written is really of permanent value: and that makes it hard to believe in what one wants to do next. Neither one's inner feelings, nor public approval, is satisfactory assurance: for some men have been enthusiastic about their own poetry and nobody has agreed with them; and other men have been acclaimed as great poets, and ridiculed by a later generation. But the second doubt is still more distressing. I sometimes feel that some, at least, of what I have written, is very good, but that I shall never again write anything good. Some imp always whispers to me, as I am struggling to get down to any new piece of work, that this is going to be lamentably bad, and that I won't know it. At least three times during my life, and for periods of some duration, I have been convinced that I shall never again be able to write anything worth reading. And perhaps this time it is true’.

In the summer of 1916, Eliot became acquainted with Clive Bell and, through him, with Roger Fry, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Stratchey, Ottoline Morrell, Aldous Huxley, Middleton Murry. Lyndall Gordon informs us that, among those English writers, Eliot

‘... remained an outsider. They did not feel at ease with him. His feeling for the conventional and his prim manners were not particularly endearing. His ostentatious learning (partly effrontery, he later admitted) did not impress’.

Aldous Huxley met Eliot in December 1916, and he hurried to describe him in a letter to Julian Huxley, using words to the same effect:

‘... just a Europenized American, overwhelmingly cultured, talking about French literature in the most uninspired fashion imaginable’.

Lytton Stratchey described Eliot as

‘... rather ill and rather American; altogether not quite gay enough ...  But by no means to be sniffed at’.

As to Virginia Woolf, Lyndall Gordon infers again that she

‘... rather liked him – his formidable air entertained her – but he remained peripheral to her life and, for a while in the early twenties, his self-pity became a bit tiresome. She did not look forward to his visits and used to sigh over him in her diary: O dear, Eliot on the phone again. The Woolfs and the Bells coped with Eliot's punctiliousness by treating him as a family joke. They found him deliciously comic. 'Come to dinner', Virginia would write to her brother-in-law. 'Eliot will be there in a fourpiece suit'.’

In 1917, Eliot gave up teaching and entered the foreign department of Lloyds Bank, which he left in 1925. World War I was drawing to an end. Eliot has been accused of ignoring his contemporary historical events, yet here he is, writing about the war in a letter to his father:

‘... everyone's individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions (...) I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them’.

1917,  Prufrock and Other Observations (first volume of poems)

        Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry (essay of literary criticism)

1919, Tradition and the Individual Talent (essay)

       Gerontion (poem)

1920, Poems (second volume of poetry)

       The Sacred Wood (first volume of essays on literary criticism)

In 1921, Eliot wrote a draft of The Waste Land, which he sent to Ezra Pound. The latter suggested various changes, thus playing quite an important part in giving the poem its presently known form. Eliot's editorship of The Criterion began in October 1922, and was to continue until 1939. In February 1921, while Eliot's most controversial long poem was being completed, Virginia Woolf happened to write in her diary the poet's following remark:

‘The critics say I am learned and cold. The truth is I am neither’.

1922, October, The Waste Land (published at the same time with

Joyce's Ulysses)

1924, Four Elizabethan Dramatists (essays)

1926, Fragment of a Prologue

1927, Fragment of an Agon (united with the previous poem in

Sweeney Agonistes, 1932)

1927, Journey of the Magi (poem)

1927, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (essay)

In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and was confirmed in the Church of England. Yet, he once confessed that, besides his ‘Catholic cast of mind’, he also possessed a ‘Calvinistic heritage and a Puritanic temperament’ (On Poetry and Poets). In 1928, in a letter to Herbert Read, he wrote:

‘Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more Frenchman than American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the USA up to a hundred years ago was a family extension’.

Stephen Spender, undergraduate in 1928, remembered that, at the time, contemporary writers seemed to fall into three categories. First, there were the writers generally approved of, who were rather remote from the young generation. These were the Georgian poets, the novelists praised by The Observer and The Sunday Times. Second came the experimentalists, who were trying to be new at all costs: Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, e.e. cummings. Third, the writers concerned with the very acute ‘problem of living in a history which though real was extremely difficult to apprehend’: Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Eliot.

1927, December, Salutation (poem, part II of Ash-Wednesday)

1928, For Lancelot Andrewes (essay)

1928, Perch'io non spero (poem, part I of Ash-Wednesday)

        A Song for Simeon (poem)

1929, Som de l'escalina (poem, part III of Ash-Wednesday)

       Dante (essay)

       Animula (poem)

1930, Ash-Wednesday (poem)

       Marina (poem)

1931, October, Triumphal March (poem)

       Difficulties of a Statesman (poem)

In 1932, Eliot returned to America for a short while, to lecture at Harvard and Virginia.

1932, Selected Essays 1917-1932

1933, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (essays)

1934, After Strange Gods (essay)

1934, The Rock (poetic choruses meant to be broadcast)

In February 1933, Eliot left his wife. This painful decision is indirectly conveyed by the mood of  Ash-Wednesday, a poem completed not long before, but elaborated during the long period while Eliot could not make up his mind whether it was right to do it. He never divorced his wife until she died, but refused to see her again, no matter how hard she tried to reach him. In 1934, he wrote in a letter:

‘I don't think my poetry is any good: not The Rock anyway, it isn't; nothing but a brilliant future behind me. What is one to do?’

1934, Elizabethan Essays

1935, Murder in the Cathedral (first play)

         Burnt Norton (first Quartet)

1936, Essays Ancient and Modern

1939, The Idea of a Christian Society (volume of essays on culture and

society)

       The Family Reunion (second play)

       Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (volume of poems)

In 1939, Eliot closed his literary review, The Criterion. He became director at the publishing house Faber and Faber.

1940, East Coker (second Quartet)

1941, February, The Dry Salvages (third Quartet)

1942, October, Little Gidding (fourth Quartet)

In 1947, Eliot's first wife died in a mental asylum. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit and the NOBEL PRIZE for literature.

1948, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (volume of essays)

       From Poe to Valéry (essay)

1950, The Cocktail Party (third play)

        Poems Written in Early Youth, printed.

1955, The Confidential Clerk (fourth play)

1957, On Poetry and Poets (volume of essays)

In January 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher.

1959, The Elder Statesman (last play)

1964, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley     

             (Eliot's youthful dissertation, published by his wife)

1963, Collected Poems 1909-1962

1962, Collected Plays

Eliot died in London, on January 4th, 1965. Ezra Pound's Valediction (For T.S.E., ‘Sewanee Review’, 1966) was:

‘Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM’.

1965, To Criticize the Critic (posthumous volume of essay

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These few biographical data can hardly offer an image of Eliot's life. His opinion was that a critic

‘... must be at liberty to study such material as his curiosity leads him to investigate, as long as the victim is dead and the laws of libel cannot be invoked to stop him. Nor is there any reason why biographies of poets should not be written. They are very useful. Any critic seriously concerned with a man's work should be expected to know something about the man's life’.

Several biographies of Eliot have been written. It seems easier, though, to reach Eliot by reading memories recorded by people who knew him, as well as the jokes uttered by or about him.

Virginia Woolf, for instance, commenting on some violent scenes in Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, wickedly remarked:

‘If you are as anaemic as Tom, there is a glory in blood’.

I.A. Richards described him as ‘utterly and perfectly banklike, as composed and cautious as a cat’.

Herbert Read remembers:

‘... he would recommend caution – caution in showing one's hand too soon, caution in speech and correspondence, caution in the small exchanges of literary life. 'Always', he would say, 'acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it: if you wait, you have to commit yourself to an opinion'. Another of his rules was: 'Never contribute to the first number of a periodical – wait to see what company you are going to keep'‘.

The same Herbert Read remembers that Eliot was ‘a townsman by preference, and never at ease in the country’. That he did not like to travel. That towards the end of his life ‘he became just a little pontifical, and would refer to his own writings in a tone of voice that was a shade too solemn. He would use expressions like 'Valéry, Yeats and I'...’ That ‘one always had a slight uneasiness in his presence, fearing that he might at any moment assume the judicial robes’. That he was ‘profoundly learned, profoundly poetic, profoundly spiritual’. That he had moods of gaiety and moods of great depression. That ‘he had a streak of hypochondria, and was addicted to pills and potions’. That ‘he made a fetish of umbrellas. He had them specially made with enormous handles, with the excuse that no one would take such an umbrella from a cloakroom by mistake’. That ‘he relished good food and beer, but his specialty was cheese’. Who knows how many of these ‘that he...’ have some, or any, truth in them?

Stephen Spender remembers that, in 1929, when Ash-Wednesday had just been published, during a meeting at the Oxford poetry Club, an undergraduate asked Eliot: ‘Please, Sir, What do you mean by the line: 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'?’ Eliot stared back for a while and replied, ‘I mean 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'.’

Eliot's sense of humour peeps out of a few sentences he uttered about Auden. He stated that Auden was not a scholar, and his argument followed:

‘I was reading an Introduction by him to a selection of Tennyson's poems, in which he says that Tennyson is the stupidest poet in the language. Now if Auden had been a scholar he'd have been able to think of some stupider poets.’

Robert Giroux remembers telling Eliot that most editors were failed writers, to which Eliot promptly replied, ‘Perhaps, but so are most writers’. He also remembers the only time that Eliot met Carl Sandburg:

‘'Just look at him!' Sandburg said to me, pointing at Eliot. 'Look at that man's face – the suffering, and the pain'. By this time Eliot was wearing a great big grin. Sandburg continued, 'You can't hold him responsible for the poets and critics who ride on his coat-tails!' With that, he walked out of the office and I realized that one of the great literary encounters of our time had occurred, and as far as I knew Eliot had not uttered a single word’.

Lyndall Gordon says that

‘People who met Eliot casually were charmed by his fine manners and modest silence, but those on whose friendship he relied saw a man constantly on the verge of a breakdown, peevish and complaining, oppressed by self-pity, weakened by weariness, and preoccupied with fears of poverty’.

At a large London party, when a guest remarked, ‘Very interesting’, Eliot hastened to rejoin, ‘Yes. If one can see the full horror of it’.

Such humorous incidents, jokes, personal memories about Eliot are numerous. They spice the image of the poet, but do not make it any clearer. T.S. Eliot, the man who was born in 1888 and died at 77, in 1965, remains as enigmatic as ever. Maybe because he himself intended us to know next to nothing. Maybe, too, because, as Valéry once said, for a biography to convey the essence of a man, the biographer ought to be able to describe each day of the man's life knowing as little about tomorrow as, at the time, the man in question knew himself. Valéry intimates that a life must not be read backwards, beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. It so happened that Eliot's life did seem to unfurl backwards. Yet, besides what can be found in his works, for the time being we are not likely to learn very much more.

*

The revolt aroused by Eliot's ambiguity of tone, of mood, of poetic manner, the discontent of his contemporaries might be, in a way, his best (though indirect) presentation. It all started, more or less, with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Among the first, Amy Lowell declared: ‘I think it is a piece of tripe’. F.L. Lucas mocked at the Notes to the poem (which Eliot himself discredited later), by saying:

‘... a poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with 'This is a dog' inscribed beneath’.

Arnold Bennett asked Eliot whether these notes were ‘a lark or serious’. A critic named N.P. Dawson felt certain that the poem would be greatly enjoyed in Prohibition America, since, it seemed to him,

‘The dirge is doubtless 'Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum', and the lament is 'oh how dry I am!'‘

Twenty years later, Yvor Winters still thought that

‘Eliot, in dealing with debased and stupid material, felt himself obligated to seek his form in this matter: the result is confusion and journalistic reproduction of detail’.

It seems that Eliot's subject matter – his taste for irritating, disgusting sadnesses and concealed, base tragedies, the same as his elliptical expression of them (which alone could avoid melodrama) were slow in appealing to readers accustomed to milder, genteel poetic idioms. Many early reviews of The Waste Land amply (often comically) prove it. Charles Powell states:

‘The thing is a mad medley. It has a plan, because its author says so: and presumably it has some meaning, because he speaks of its symbolism; but meaning, plan, and intention alike are massed behind a smoke-screen of anthropological and literary erudition, and only the pundit, the pedant, or the clairvoyant will be in the least aware of them. Dr Frazer and Miss J.L. Weston are freely and admittedly his creditors, and the bulk of the poem is under an enormously composite and cosmopolitan mortgage; to Spenser, Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Middleton, Milton, Marvell, Goldsmith, Ezekiel, Buddha, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, St. Augustine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and others. Lines of German, French and Italian are thrown in at will or whim; so, too, are solos from nightingales, cocks, hermit-thrushes, and Ophelia (...) For the rest one can only say that if Mr Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists and literati, so much waste paper’.

Few critics, if any, would dream today of dismissing The Waste Land as waste paper. We are no longer shocked by its bookish allusions, its elliptical lines and triviality. In a way, Eliot's poetry has become traditional. We find nothing uncommon in this cultural poetry of violent sadness.

An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement makes somewhat milder remarks. He finds Eliot to be ‘a dandy of the choicest phrase’, and is consequently shocked by ‘blatancies like 'the young man carbuncular'‘, which must have irritated his sense of decency in a poem. He also notices that, in The Waste Land, Eliot borrows more lines than he creates, and states that the poem exists ‘in the greater part in the state of notes’. He quotes as totally unsatisfactory the last stanza of the poem, which is regarded today as a masterful classic of allusiveness, of cultured, poetry. He accuses Eliot of ‘walking very near the limits of coherency’. But, he ends up,

‘... it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths, and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr Eliot's gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment’.

The poetry written afterwards by Eliot himself and his followers proved the contrary. It can hardly be said to have recovered from that ‘ambitious’ experiment. It assimilated it so well that the very concept of poetic imagination was changed, intellectualized. Echoes of other poems, lines that bring the music of other minds provide in more recent poetry a nostalgia previously induced by picturesque landscapes and adorned imagery. The difference between pre- and post- Eliot poetic taste is made obvious by F.L. Lucas' review: ‘Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm’, he said. He then spoke of ‘that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily’. To attempt an intelligible interpretation of the poem was felt by Lucas to be a sure way of making oneself downright ridiculous, unless one had ‘the common modern gift of judging poetry without knowing what it means’. His taste for logical, clear, tame syntax in a poem was badly hurt by Eliot's roundabout, twisted, ‘dislocated’ language. Lucas clearly stated it:

‘The punctuation largely disappears in the latter part of the poem –whether this be subtlety or accident, it is impossible to say. 'Shantih' is equivalent to the 'Peace that passeth understanding' – which in this case it certainly does. All this is very difficult; as Dr Johnson said under similar circumstances, 'I would it were impossible'‘.

Lucas concluded that ‘perhaps this unhappy composition should have been left to sink itself’, as ‘the borrowed jewels he has set in his head do not make Mr Eliot's toad the more prepossessing’.

Yvor Winters, in 1943, still accused Eliot's cultural poetry of being if not still-born, at least definitely short-lived:

‘The method is that of a man who is unable to deal with his subject, and resorts to the rough approximation of quotation; it is the method of the New England farmer who meets every situation in life with a saw from Poor Richard; it betokens the death of mind and of the sensibility alike’.

In 1937, the American novelist Thomas Wolfe published The Web and the Rock (The Sun dial Press, New York). One of his characters, an American writer himself, Mr. Malone by name, voices a hearty dislike of Eliot. Here are his very words (p. 529):

 'Not bad', he cried chokingly, 'when compared to the backwoods bilge of Mr. Sinclair Lewis! Not bad when compared to the niggling nuances of that neurotic New Englander from Missouri, Mr. T.S. Eliot, who, after baffling an all-too-willing world for years by the production of such incomprehensible nonsense as The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and gaining for himself a reputation for perfectly enormous erudition among the aesthetes of Kalamazoo by the production of verses in dog-Latin and rondels in bastard French that any convent schoolgirl would be ashamed to acknowledge as her own, has now, my friends, turned prophet, priest and political revolutionary, and is at the present moment engaged in stunning the entire voting population of that agnostic republic known as the British Isles with the information that he – God save the mark! – Mr. Eliot from Missouri, has become a Royalist! A Royalist, if you please', choked Mr. Malone, 'and an Anglo-Catholic! ... Why, the news must have a struck terror to the heart of every Laborite in England! The foundations of British atheism are imperiled! ... If the great Mr. Eliot continues to affront the political and religious beliefs of every true-blue Englishman in this way, God knows what we can expect next, but we must be prepared for anything!' 

Even forty years later some people think the same. In 1960, Karl Shapiro firmly declared:

‘The very worst passages are those which are merely quotes (...) The Waste Land (...) is one of the curiosities of English literature (...) ... hoax or not, it was very shortly made the sacred cow of modern poetry and the object of more pious literary nonsense than any modern work save the Cantos of Pound (...) It is, in fact, not a form at all but a negative version of form’.

Aldous Huxley himself ridiculed the poem by seeing in it

‘... a great operation that is never performed; powerful lights are brought into focus, anaesthetics and assistants are posted, the instruments are prepared. Finally the surgeon arrives and opens his bag – but closes it again and goes off’.

Joyce wrote a well-meaning parody, which has already been quoted. It implicitly acknowledges the originality of Eliot's idiom. There is no spite in it, no taste for polemic.

In 1945, a book called The Joyous Pilgrimage published opinions of contemporaries about poets, collected by Ian Donnelly, a New Zealand journalist. One novelist, whose name is not given, joylessly asserts that

‘... Eliot is definitely a bad influence. He is donnish, pedantic, cold. He is an example of the over-educated American (...) It would have been better for contemporary English literature if Eliot had stayed in Louisville, or wherever he came from’.

Another contemporary, Humbert Wolfe, sounds just as grim and final:

‘Eliot is a poet who cannot write poetry. He has a great mind, but spiritually and intellectually, he is muscle-bound’.

The poet Edmund Blunden (I almost spelt ‘Blunder’, by mistake) whimpers in a similar, joyless mood:

‘I don't know why Eliot should feel so badly about things. There is no reason why he should have to write in that 'I-cannot-be-gay' manner. He did not have go through the war’.

Eliot did not fight in the war indeed, though it was not for lack of trying. He had tried to enlist, as a matter of fact, and had been rejected on medical grounds. However that may be, honest criticism, as Eliot himself started, is supposed to be directed at the poetry not against the poet. The above quoted heated, hasty assertions are rather pieces of slander than of criticism. They evince a taste for drastic verdicts, a false courage of saying no to what the mass of readers had already said yes, an alarming lack of understanding for poetry other than conventional. Most of all, these angry (young and older) men turn out to be the kind of critics who like to shake their fists at literature rather than enjoy it. Critics more involved in denying whatever they could lay their minds on, than in literary criticism proper.

Even the Oxford Dictionary of English Literature (1939) characterizes Eliot in the same misleading way:

‘His free verse forms and his individualistic and often obscurely allusive writings have exercised a profound influence on modern and younger poets’.

Another falsifying piece of literary criticism concerning Eliot's work is the simplification of his despair from a sociological point of view, attempted in the History of English Literature (1956) by Anixt (a Russian survey of British literature, actually a handbook of communist wilful, even artful, misinterpretation of capitalist texts). The author calls Eliot ‘the leader of reactionary contemporary literature’ and accuses the poet of writing ‘decadent’ poems, meant to bewilder the ‘bourgeois readers’ by their false anger against a society which in fact Eliot approves of. Of course, Anixt will not allow himself to be mystified. He alertly perceives in Eliot the ‘ideologist of the lost generation’. Eliot's poems are pervaded by unforgivable ‘cynical nihilism’. His essays are as reactionary as his poems, Anixt states. Eliot aims at belittling what is really valuable in English literature:

‘He considers Hamlet to be a failure; Dryden and Pope were, in Eliot's opinion, better poets than Byron’.

The misunderstanding of Eliot's work is, in this short chapter, complete.

As late as 1962, a Literature of England by Eric Gillett still has a tinge of malice in its superficiality:

‘Always sincere, often obscure, sometimes arid, Eliot certainly expressed the intellectual mood of the moment, but he was essentially a writer of verse who was of the intelligentsia. His unquestionable sincerity gained a hearing for his verses, some of which are allusive and often pompously and unintelligibly annotated (...) He is not a natural, instinctive singer but a literary poet whose music is scanty, austere, and very occasionally lovely’.

Indeed, ‘lovely’ would hardly be an appropriate description of Eliot's gravity.

A master of invective against Eliot was A.C. Ward (20th Century English Literature, 1901-1960). He began by announcing that in 1922, upon the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land, ‘literature left the highroad of communication and retreated into an esoteric fastness’, which led to the critic's embarking upon ‘textual detective work’. His point of view is that ‘nothing is so disturbing in poetry as incomprehensibility’. He feels Eliot's imagination to be ‘anaemic and chill’. In an epilogue to Modern English Literature (1944), Ward minutely accounts for his dissatisfaction with Eliot. Most of the statements are impressionistic. They have an air of having been written on the spur of the moment. They also convey Ward's own sour mood and grim nature, and have little to do with literature proper. He too, maintains that Eliot's literary influence was ‘disastrous’. As disastrous as Shakespeare's, he says. English dramatists needed three centuries to ‘work Shakespeare out of their system’. Ward feels it impossible to foretell how long the ‘purgation’ of Eliot from poetry, drama and criticism might take. He fervently hopes that, in case the opinion that The Waste Land was ‘the hoax of the century’ is correct, then

‘Eliot's shadow will endure little longer than the span of his own life, but if, on the other hand, succeeding generations accept him as an intellectual giant, the outlook is bleak’.

None of Ward's fears have come true. We do not concentrate upon Eliot's philosophy more than on his creation. Yet he survives, and has not maimed his poetic followers. He has very effectively spurred them into being different. Ward's sentences have a melodramatic, Byronic halo about them. He complains about the ‘irony of the Eliot revolution’, which released English poetic drama from the rule of Shakespearean blank verse ‘only to clamp upon it the stranglehold of Eliotian free verse’. Eliot's poetry is described as running ‘round and round a closed inner circle, taking on mentally conditioned passengers at the several stations’. Ward's resources of venom (and superficiality) are inexhaustible. Eliot's gift for coining critical concepts in quotable phrases (which many critics may have envied him) is ruthlessly charged at. Ward ejaculates:

‘To quote Eliot became, as it were, a ritual genuflexion to a world oracle’.

Eliot's life experience is questioned as well, and the conclusion is:

‘... what remains to be determined by future inquiries is whether Eliot's waste land and hollow men were discoveries or inventions’.

When the turn of Eliot's poetical strategy comes, we learn that Eliot's attraction among younger poets was an ‘anti-technical’ one. That in Eliot originated a generation of ‘new metaphysicals’, who wanted only to ‘mask their feebleness of imagination and poverty of thought’ in their ‘pseudo-scholarly’ writings. Erich Kästner, a German novelist and poet (who wrote Emil and the Detectives), is also quoted with a statement about Eliot's play The Family Reunion. The words discredit, in fact, the German writer's own ability to understand English literature. Here they are (1959):

‘As soon as the triviality looked like becoming so thick that you could cut it with a knife (which was continually happening) one of the characters would tell the other in an elegiac voice: 'You cannot understand me'. Or 'I cannot explain it to you'. Or 'Even if I did try to explain you wouldn't understand ...' And that always saved the situation for the time being. Because the audience then thought: This must be a most profound and significant play. Not even the actors know what it is about’.

Lawrence Durrell, in Clea (Alexandria Quartet), has a character (the writer Pursewarden) speak of Eliot's gravity, too. Only he does it in far from disparaging terms:

‘Eliot puts a cool chloroform pad upon a spirit too tightly braced by the information it has gathered. His honesty of measure and his resolute bravery to return to the headman's axe is a challenge to us all; but where is the smile? He induces awkward sprains at a moment when we are trying to dance! He has chosen greyness rather than light, and he shares his portion with Rembrandt’.

Another witty (though unfair) statement, this time mocking at Eliot's criticism, comes from one of his (not very inspired) biographers, T.S. Matthews:

‘His attempts (if they were genuine attempts) to explain his own poetic practice leave most of us in a state of enlightened mystification. Take the famous – the notorious – 'objective correlative'. This hideous phrase, it will have to be admitted, was coined by Eliot himself. What on earth does it mean? Well, as nearly as you can put it into plain, unscrunched English, it means a verbal image that works on the reader the same way it worked on the writer.

When the 'objective correlative' does work, it's like hitting the jackpot on a fruit machine: three white leopards in a row, lady. This can only happen when the reader sees and takes in all the references Eliot has used. If the reader gets some references but not all of them, it's like seeing two white leopards but not three: a partial picture and no jackpot. If the reader fails to recognize any references at all, he still has the pleasure of the slight exercise of pulling the lever and hearing and seeing the smooth whirring blur of a cunningly contrived mechanism’.

These superficial, disparaging judgments have been listed only to gratify a certain taste for revolt in Eliot's reader, and then infirm it altogether. Eliot may be a difficult poet. Yet, should an experienced reader be discouraged by the mere thought of it? How was it possible, though, that, more than any of his contemporaries, Eliot managed to gather round his head so much mockery and parody? That a writer like Richard Aldington, for instance, should feel prompted to devise a character who was supposed to stand for Eliot himself and whose very first words, when he was nearly three, were, ‘Mother, why precisely does the refrigerator drip?’ – words which, as a matter of fact, mimic to some extent Eliot's manner of speech?

Part of the answer might be found in Eliot's own critical and poetic strategy. The critics who thus blamed him must have assumed, whether they were aware of it or not, Eliot's own disparaging mood: the consistency which he shows in disparaging himself, his characters, the writers he examines. Eliot gave them the cue, and they gladly took it. He seemed to beg slapping by turning the other cheek. The false humility and apparent aggressivity in his works were taken by most critics at their face value, which was an unwise thing to do. Eliot is essentially a writer of the understatement.

The largest part of the answer lies in the fact that Eliot's poetry changed more than the practice of writing poetry. It brought about a revolution in the reading of a poem. A concentrated poetry, in which ‘links’ (from connecting and explanatory words to elements of narrative continuity) are ‘suppressed’, will require a similar concentration in the reading. If it is true that any individual piece of literature suggests its own appropriate was of being read, Eliot brought along his own logic of reading poetry. Virginia Woolf way trying to introduce this new gymnastics of strained, concentrated reading in the novel. She advised:

‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they flow ...’

She thus claimed another kind of order for the early 20th century novel. An implicit order, as opposed to the explicit narrative of the Victorians. She preached the apparently disorderly narrative: breaking real chronology and allowing the mind to advance by random associations. Stream of consciousness, this pattern was called. Readers revolted against her interrupted narratives which, at best, had an inferred continuity. The act of reading was strenuous, and left one breathless. The same revolt was experienced by readers against Eliot's devices of breaking the continuity, the fluency of the poem. In Introduction to St.- John Perse (whose Anabasis he translated from French into English) Eliot explained:

‘Any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of 'links in the chain', or explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence or to the love of the cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced’.

For a while, somewhat later though, there was some agitation among critics round the idea of ‘active’, ‘creative’ reading. The reader was supposed to take part in creating the secrets of the poem. This poem was like an iceberg, and the reading of it had to plunge underwater to see it whole. Gradually, everybody came to understand that a new way of reading had emerged. An inventive reader was born. The transition from the helpless traditional reader, who only knew what the author told him, to a more independent, more energetic reader, who furnishes the work with his own associations, was slow and painful. But, if today we can read a poem, with an eye to what has not been directly uttered, if we now like to endow even the older texts with a richness of the understatement, we must remember that this curiosity, this ability, to see more, to look deeper into the scaffold of a work, to search in words for more than just their face value, have been made possible by Eliot too.