Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  a chronicle of twelfth-century politics, nor did I want to tamper

  unscrupulously with the meagre records as Tennyson did (in

  introducing Fair Rosamund, and in suggesting that Becket had

  been crossed in love in early youth). I wanted to concentrate on

  death and martyrdom. The introduction of a chorus of excited and

  sometimes hysterical women, reflecting in their emotion the significance of the action, helped wonderfully. The second reason was this : that a poet writing for the first time for the stage, is much

  more at home in choral verse than in dramatic dialogue. This, I felt

  sure, was something I could do, and perhaps the dramatic weaknesses would be somewhat covered up by the cries of the women.

  The use of a chorus strengthened the power, and concealed the

  defects of my theatrical technique. For this reason I decided that

  next time I would try to integrate the chorus more closely into the

  play.

  I wanted to find out also, whether I could learn to dispense

  altogether with the use of prose. The two prose passages in Murder

  in the Cathedral could not have been written in verse. Certainly,

  with the kind of dialogue verse which I used in that play, the

  audience would have been uncomfortably aware that it was verse

  they were hearing. A sermon cast in verse is too unusual an experience for even the most regular churchgoers : nobody could have responded to it as a sermon at all. And in the speeches of

  the knights, who are quite aware that they are addressing an

  audience of people living eight hundred years after they themselves are dead, the use of platform prose is intended of course to have a special effect : to shock the audience out of their com­

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  POETRY AND DRAMA

  placency. But this is a kind of trick : that is, a device tolerable only

  in one play and of no use for any other. I may, for aught I know,

  have been slightly under the influence of St. Joan.

  I do not wish to give you the impression that I would rule out

  of dramatic poetry these three things : historical or mythological

  subject-matter, the chorus, and traditional blank verse. I do not

  wish to lay down any law that the only suitable characters and

  situations are those of modern life, or that a verse play should

  consist of dialogue only, or that a wholly new versification is

  necessary. I am only tracing out the route of exploration of one

  writer, and that one myself. If the poetic drama is to reconquer its

  place, it must, in my opinion, enter into overt competition with

  prose drama. As I have said, people are prepared to put up with

  verse from the lips of personages dressed in the fashion of some

  distant age ; therefore they should be made to hear it from people

  dressed like ourselves, living in houses and apartments like ours,

  and using telephones and motor cars and radio sets. Audiences

  arc prepared to accept poetry recited by a chorus, for that is a kind

  of poetry recital, which it does them credit to enjoy. And audiences

  (those who go to a verse play because it is in verse) expect poetry

  to be in rhythms which have lost touch with colloquial speech.

  What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the

  audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the theatre ;

  not to transport the audience into some imaginary world totally

  unlike its own, an unreal world in which poetry is tolerated. What

  I should hope might be achieved, by a generation of dramatists

  having the benefit of our experience, is that the audience should

  find, at the moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it

  is saying to itself: '/ could talk in poetry too !' Then we should not

  be transported into an artificial world ; on the contrary, our own

  sordid, dreary daily world would be suddenly illuminated and

  transfigured.

  I was determined, therefore, in my next play to take a theme of

  contemporary life, with characters of our own time living in our

  own world. The Family Reunion was the result. Here my first concern was the problem of the versification, to find a rhythm close to contemporary speech, in which the stresses could be made to come

  wherever we should naturally put them, in uttering the particular

  phrase on the particular occasion. What I worked out is substantially what I have continued to employ : a line of varying length and varying number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses.

  The caesura and the stresses may come at different places, almost

  anywhere in the line ; the stresses may be close together or well

  separated by light syllables ; the only rule being that there must be

  one stress on one side of the caesura and two on the other. In

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  retrospect, I soon saw that I had given my attention to versification, at the expense of plot and character. I had, indeed, made some progress in dispensing with the chorus ; but the device of

  using four of the minor personages, representing the Family,

  sometimes as individual character parts and sometimes collectively

  as chorus, does not seem to me very satisfactory. For one thing,

  the immediate transition from individual, characterized part to

  membership of a chorus is asking too much of the actors : it is a

  very difficult transition to accomplish. For another thing, it

  seemed to me another trick, one which, even if successful, could

  not have been applicable in another play. Furthermore, I had in

  two passages used the device of a lyrical duet further isolated from

  the rest of the dialogue by being written in shorter lines with only

  two stresses. These passages are in a sense 'beyond character', the

  speakers have to be presented as falling into a kind of trance-like

  state in order to speak them. But they are so remote from the

  necessity of the action that they are hardly more than passages of

  poetry which might be spoken by anybody ; they are too much

  like operatic arias. The member of the audience, if he enjoys this

  sort of thing, is putting up with a suspension of the action in order

  to enjoy a poetic fantasia : these passages are really less related to

  the action than are the choruses in Murder in the Cathedral.

  I observed that when Shakespeare, in one of his mature plays,

  introduced what might seem a purely poetic line or passage, it

  never interrupts the action, or is out of character, but on the

  contrary, in some mysterious way supports both action and character. When Macbeth speaks his so often quoted words beginning To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,

  or when Othello, confronted at night with his angry father-in-law

  and friends, utters the beautiful line

  Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,

  we do not feel that Shakespeare has thought of lines which are

  beautiful poetry and wishes to fit them in somehow, or that he has

  for the moment come to the end of his dramatic inspiration and

  has turned to poetry to fill up with. The lines are surprising, and

  yet they fit in with the character ; or else we are compelled to

  adjust our conception of the character in such a way that the lines

  will be appropriate to it. The lines spoken by Macbeth reveal the

&nbs
p; weariness of the weak man who had been forced by his wife to

  realize his own half-hearted desires and her ambitions, and who,

  with her death, is left without the motive to continue. The line of

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  P O ETRY AND DRAMA

  Othello expresses irony, dignity, and fearlessness ; and incidentally

  reminds us of the time of night in which the scene takes place.

  Only poetry could do this ; but it is dramatic poetry : that is, it does

  not interrupt but intensifies the dramatic situation.

  It was not only because of the introduction of passages which

  called too much attention to themselves as poetry, and could not

  be dramatically justified, that I found The Family Reunion defective : there were two weaknesses which came to strike me as more serious still. The first was, that I had employed far too much of the

  strictly limited time allowed to a dramatist, in presenting a situation, and not left myself enough time, or provided myself with enough material, for developing it in action. I had written what

  was, on the whole, a good first act ; except that for a first act it was

  much too long. When the curtain rises again, the audience is

  expecting, as it has a right to expect, that something is going to

  happen. Instead, it finds itself treated to a further exploration of

  the background : in other words, to what ought to have been given

  much earlier if at all. The beginning of the second act presents

  much the most difficult problem to producer and cast : for the

  audience's attention is beginning to wander. And then, after what

  must seem to the audience an interminable time of preparation,

  the conclusion comes so abruptly that we are, after all, unready

  for it. This was an elementary fault in mechanics.

  But the deepest flaw of all, was in a failure of adjustment

  between the Greek story and the modern situation. I should either

  have stuck closer to Aeschylus or else taken a great deal more

  liberty with his myth. One evidence of this is the appearance of

  those ill-fated figures, the Furies. They must, in future, be omitted

  from the cast, and be understood to be visible only to certain of

  my characters, and not to the audience. We tried every possible

  manner of presenting them. We put them on the stage, and they

  looked like uninvited guests who had strayed in from a fancy dress

  ball. We concealed them behind gauze, and they suggested a still

  out of a Walt Disney film. We made them dimmer, and they

  looked like shrubbery just outside the window. I have seen other

  expedients tried : I have seen them signalling from across the

  garden, or swarming on to the stage like a football team, and they

  are never right. They never succeed in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks. But their failure is merely a symptom of the failure to adjust the ancient with the modern.

  A more serious evidence is that we arc left in a divided frame

  of mind, not knowing whether to consider the play the tragedy of

  the mother or the salvation of the son. The two situations are not

  reconciled. I find a confirmation of this in the fact that my sympathies now have come to be all with the mother, who seems to me, 1 43

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  except perhaps for the chauffeur, the only complete human being

  in the play ; and my hero now strik�s me as an insufferable prig.

  Well, I had made some progress in learning how to write the

  first act of a play, and I had - the one thing of which I felt sure made a good deal of progress in finding a form of versification and an idiom which would serve all my purposes, without recourse to

  prose, and be. capable of unbroken transition between the most

  intense speech and the most relaxed dialogue. You will understand, after my making these criticisms of The Family Reunion, some of the errors that I endeavoured to avoid in designing The

  Cocktail Party. To begin with, no chorus, and no ghosts. I was

  still inclined to go to a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was

  determined to do so merely as a point of departure, and to conceal

  the origins so well that nobody would identify them until I

  pointed them out myself. In this at least I have been successful ;

  for no one of my acquaintance (and no dramatic critics) recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of Euripides. I n fact, I have had to go into detailed explanation to convince them - I

  mean, of course, those who were familiar with the plot of that play

  - of the genuineness of the inspiration. But those who were at

  first disturbed by the eccentric behaviour of my unknown guest,

  and his apparently intemperate habits and tendency to burst into

  song, have found some consolation in having their attention called

  to the behaviour of Heracles in Euripides' play.

  In the second place, I laid down for myself the ascetic rule to

  avoid poetry which could not stand the test of strict dramatic

  utility : with such success, indeed, that it is perhaps an open question whether there is any poetry in the play at all. And finally, I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something

  should happen ; that the audience should be kept in the constant

  expectation that something is going to happen ; and that, when it

  does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from

  what the audience had been led to expect.

  I have not yet got to the end of my investigation of the weaknesses of this play, but I hope and expect to find more than those of which I am yet aware. I say 'hope' because while one can never

  repeat a success, and therefore must always try to find something

  different, even if less popular, to do, the desire to write something

  which will be free of the defects of one's last work is a very powerful and useful incentive. I am aware that the last act of my play only just escapes, if indeed it does escape, the accusation of being

  not a last act but an epilogue; and I am determined to do something different, if I can, in this respect. I also believe that while the self-education of a poet trying to write for the theatre seems to

  require a long period of disciplining his poetry, and putting it, so

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  to speak, on a very thin diet in order to adapt it to the needs of

  the stage he may find that later, when (and if) the understanding

  of theatrical technique has become second nature, he can dare to

  make more liberal use of poetry and take greater liberties with

  ordinary colloquial speech. I base this belief on the evolution of

  Shakespeare, and on some study of the language in his late plays.

  In devoting so much time to an examination of my own plays, I

  have, I believe, been animated by a better motive than egotism. It

  seems to me that if we are to have a poetic drama, it is more likely

  to come from poets learning how to write plays, than from skilful

  prose dramatists learning to write poetry. That some poets can

  learn how to write plays, and write good ones, may be only a hope,

  but I believe a not unreasonable hope ; but that a man who has

  started by writing successful prose plays should then learn how

  to write good poetry, seems to me extremely unlikely. And, under

  present-day conditions, and until the verse play is recognized by

  the larger public as a possible source of entertainmen
t, the poet is

  likely to get his first opportunity to work for the stage only after

  making some sort of reputation for himself as the author of other

  kinds of verse. I have therefore wished to put on record, for what

  it may be worth to others, some account of the difficulties I have

  encountered, and the mistakes into which I have fallen, and the

  weaknesses I have had to try to overcome.

  I should not like to close without attempting to set before you,

  though only a dim outline, the ideal towards which poetic drama

  should strive. It is an unattainable ideal : and that is why it

  interests me, for it provides an incentive towards further experiment and exploration, beyond any goal which there is prospect of attaining. It is a function of all art to give us some perception of an

  order in life, by imposing an order upon it. The painter works by

  selection, combination, and emphasis among the elements of the

  visible world ; the musician in the world of sound. It seems to me

  that beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our

  conscious life when directed towards action - the part of life

  which prose drama is wholly adequate to express - there is a

  fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so

  to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely

  focus ; of feeling of which we are only aware in a kind of temporary

  detachment from action. There are great prose dramatists - such

  as Ibsen and Chekhov - who have at times done things of which I

  would not otherwise have supposed prose to be capable, but who

  seem to me, in spite of their success, to have been hampered in

  expression by writing in prose. This peculiar range of sensibility

  can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest

  intensity. At such moments, we touch the border of those feelings

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  which only music can express. We can never emulate music, because to arrive at the condition of music would be the annihilation of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry. Nevertheless, I have

  before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama,

  which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to

  present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order.