… music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
What makes such “reading backward” possible, of course, is the biographies. (I have relied on Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon for much of the narrative of Eliot’s life.) Knowledge of the life interprets—decodes—the poems: exactly what Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative was designed to prevent. Occasionally the illuminations cast by reading backward provoke the uneasy effect of looking through a forbidden keyhole with a flashlight:
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
That, wailing out of a jagged interval in The Waste Land, can only be Vivien’s hysteria, and Eliot’s recoil from it. But it hardly requires such explicitness (and there is little else that is so clearly explicit) to recognize that his biographers have broken the code of Eliot’s reticence—that programmatic reticence embodied in his doctrine of impersonality. The objective correlative was intended to direct the reader to a symbolic stand-in for the poet’s personal suffering—not Vivien but Tiresias. Secret becomes metaphor. Eliot’s biographers begin with the metaphor and unveil the secret. When the personal is exposed, the objective correlative is annihilated.
And yet the objective correlative has won out, after all, in a larger way. If The Waste Land can no longer hide its sources in Eliot’s private malaise, it has formidably sufficed as an “objective equivalence” for the public malaise of generations. Its evocations of ruin, loss, lamentation, its “empty cisterns and exhausted wells,” are broken sketches of the discontents that remain when the traditional props of civilization have failed: for some (unquestionably for Eliot), a world without God; for others, a world without so much as an illusion of intelligibility or restraint. In 1867, contemplating the Victorian crisis of faith, Matthew Arnold saw “a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night,” but in Eliot’s echoing “arid plain” there is nothing so substantial as even a clash—only formlessness, “hooded hordes swarming,” “falling towers”; hallucination succeeds hallucination, until all the crowns of civilization—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London”—are understood to be “unreal.”
In 1922 (a postwar time of mass unemployment, economic disintegration and political uncertainty), The Waste Land fell out upon its era as the shattered incarnation of dissolution, the very text and texture of modernism—modernism’s consummate document and ode. In the almost seventy years since its first publication, it has taken on, as the great poems do (but not the very greatest), a bloom of triteness (as ripe truth can overmature into truism). It is no more “coherent” to its newest readers than it was to its astonished earliest readers, but it is much less difficult; tone and technique no longer startle. Post-Bomb, post-Holocaust, post-moonwalk, it may actually be too tame a poem to answer to the mindscape we now know more exhaustively than Eliot did. Professor Harry Levin, Harvard’s eminent pioneer promulgator of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot, quipped a little while ago—not altogether playfully—that modernism “has become old-fashioned.” The Waste Land is not yet an old-fashioned poem, and doubtless never will be. But it does not address with the same exigency the sons and daughters of those impassioned readers who ecstatically intoned it, three and four decades ago, in the belief that infiltration by those syllables was an aesthetic sacrament. Even for the aging generation of the formerly impassioned, something has gone out of the poem—not in The Waste Land proper, perhaps, but rather in that parallel work Eliot called “Notes on ‘The Waste Land.’ ” This was the renowned mock-scholarly apparatus Eliot tacked on to the body of the poem, ostensibly to spell out its multiple allusions—a contrivance that once seemed very nearly a separate set of modernist stanzas: arbitrary, fragmented, dissonant, above all solemnly erudite. “The whole passage from Ovid,” drones the sober professorial persona of the “Notes,” “is of great anthropological interest.” There follow nineteen lines of Latin verse. The procession of brilliantly variegated citations—Augustine, the Upanishads, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Hermann Hesse, Shakespeare, Tarot cards, the Grail legend—suggests (according to Professor Levin) that context was to Eliot what conceit was to the metaphysical poets. A fresh reading of the “Notes” admits to something else—the thumbed nose, that vein in Eliot of the practical joker, released through Macavity the Mystery Cat and in masses of unpublished bawdy verses (nowadays we might regard them as more racist than bawdy) starring “King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween.” In any case, whatever pose Eliot intended, no one can come to the “Notes” today with the old worshipful gravity. They seem drained of austerity—so emphatically serious that it is hard to take them seriously at all.
The same with the plays. With the exception of the first of the five, Murder in the Cathedral—a major devotional poem of orchestral breadth—the plays are all collapsed into curios. From our perspective, they are something worse than period pieces, since that is what they were—Edwardian drawing room dramas—when they were new. They hint at (or proclaim) a failure of Eliot’s public ear. His aim was to write popular verse plays for the English stage—an aim worthy (though Eliot never had the hubris to say this) of Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw had been content with prose—and the majestically cunning prose speeches in Murder in the Cathedral are reminiscent of nothing so much as Shaw’s Saint Joan, including Shaw’s preface to that play. The dialogue of enjambment that is the style and method of The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, never attains the sound of verse, much less poetry. That was precisely Eliot’s hope: he considered Murder in the Cathedral too blatantly poetic, a “dead end.” His goal was to bury the overt effects of poetry while drawing out of ordinary speech and almost ordinary situations a veil of transcendence—even, now and then, of mystical horror, as when (in The Family Reunion) the Furies suddenly appear, or when (in The Cocktail Party) a character we are meant to imagine as a saint and a martyr goes off to be a missionary among the “natives” and is eaten by ants. (Having first been crucified, it ought to be added. And though there are farcical moments throughout, the devouring anthill is not intended as one of them.) Nevertheless nothing transcendent manages to rise from any printed page of any of the last four plays—almost nothing suggestive of poetry, in fact, except an occasional “wisdom” patch in the semi-lyrical but largely prosy manner of the philosophical lines in Four Quartets. Possibly this is because the printed page is perforce bare of technical stagecraft, with its color and excitement. Yet—similarly unaccoutered—Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Shaw, in their greater and lesser written art, send out language with presence and power enough to equal absent actors, sets, lighting, costumes. Much of Eliot’s dialogue, rather than achieving that simplicity of common speech he aspired to, plummets to the stilted, the pedestrian, the enervated:
Oh, Edward, when you were a little boy, I’m sure you were always getting yourself measured To prove how you had grown since the last holidays. You were always intensely concerned with yourself; And if other people grow, well, you want to grow too.
Given only the text and nothing else, a reader of The Cocktail Party, say, will be perplexed by its extravagant performing history: in London and New York in the Fifties, it filled theaters and stunned audiences. Read now, these later plays are unmistakably dead, embalmed, dated beyond endurance—dated especially in the light of the vigorous Fifties, when the energetic spokesmen of the Angry Young Men were having their first dramatic hearing. As playwright, Eliot inexplicably esche
wed or diluted or could not pull off his theory of demarcation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” so the plays are surprisingly confessional—the Furies harbor Vivien, a character is tormented by thinking he has killed his wife, Valerie turns up as a redemptive young woman piously named Monica, etc. Since Eliot’s private life was not only closed but unguessed-at in those years, gossip could not have been the lure for theater-goers. The lure was, in part, skillful production: on the page, the Furies when they pop up seem as silly as the news of the hungry anthill, but their theatrical embodiment was electrifying. Fine performances and ingenious staging, though, were at bottom not what brought overflowing audiences to see Eliot’s plays. They came because of the supremacy of Eliot’s fame. They came because verse drama by T. S. Eliot was the most potent cultural vitamin of the age.
Inevitably we are returned to the issue (there is no escaping it at any point) of Eliot’s renown. As a young man, he had hammered out the prestige of a critical reputation by means of essay after essay. By the time of the later plays he had become a world celebrity, an international feature story in newspapers and magazines. But neither the essays by themselves, nor (certainly) the plays—always excepting Murder in the Cathedral, which ought to count among the most lastingly resonant of the poems—could have won for Eliot his permanent place in English letters. The fame belongs to the poems. The rest, however much there might be of it, was spinoff. Yet the body of poems is amazingly small in the light of Eliot’s towering repute. In 1958, for example, invited to Rome for an honorary degree, he was driven through streets mobbed with students roaring “Viva Eliot!” Mass adulation of this sort more often attaches to presidents and monarchs—or, nowadays, to rock stars. What did that roar rest on? Leaving aside the early Bolo ribaldry (which in any case never reached print), the fourteen cat verses, and the contents of a little posthumous collection called Poems Written in Early Youth (from ages sixteen to twenty-two), but not omitting two unfinished works—“Sweeney Agonistes” and “Coriolan”—Eliot’s entire poetic oeuvre comes to no more than fifty-four poems. England, at least, is used to more abundant output from the poets it chooses to mark with the seal of permanence. My copy of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works adds up to nine hundred and sixty-six pages of minuscule type, or approximately a thousand poems. The changes in the written culture between, say, the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” published in 1807, and Eliot’s Waste Land, published one hundred and fifteen years later, speak for themselves. Still, granting the impertinence of measuring by number, there remains something extraordinary—even uncanny—about the torrent of transoceanic adoration that, for Eliot, stemmed from fifty-four poems.
Eliot may have supposed himself a classicist, but really he is in the line of the Romantics: subjective, anguished, nostalgic, mystical, lyrical. The critic Harold Bloom’s mild view is that he “does not derive from Dante and Donne, as he thought, but from Tennyson and Whitman”—a judgment that might have stung him. For Eliot to have believed himself an offspring of the cosmic Dante and the precision-worker Donne, and to end, if Professor Bloom is correct, as a descendant of the softer, lusher music of Tennyson, is no serious diminishment (Tennyson is permanent too)—though it is a diminishment. Lord Tennyson, the British Empire’s laureate, may have seemed a weighty and universal voice to the Victorians. For us he is lighter and more parochial. It is in the nature of fame to undergo revision: Eliot appears now to be similarly receding into the parochial, even the sectarian (unlike the all-embracing Whitman, with whom he shares the gift of bel canto). His reach—once broad enough to incorporate the Upanishads—shrank to extend no farther than the neighborhood sacristy, and to a still smaller space: the closet of the self. His worship was local and exclusionary not simply in the limited sense that it expressed an astringent clerical bias, or that he observed the forms of a narrow segment of the Church of England—itself an island church, after all, though he did his best to link it with what he termed “the Universal Church of the World.” What made Eliot’s religiosity local and exclusive was that he confined it to his personal pain and bitterness: he allowed himself to become estranged from humanity. Feeling corrupt in himself, he saw corruption everywhere: “all times are corrupt,” he wrote; and then again, “the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism.” Demanding that faith—a particular credo—be recognized as the foundation of civilization, he went on to define civilization as extraneous to some of its highest Western manifestations—the principles of democracy, tolerance, and individualism. Despite his youthful study of Eastern religion and his poet’s immersion in Hebrew scripture, he was finally unable to imagine that there might be rival structures of civilization not grounded in the doctrine of original sin, and yet intellectually and metaphysically exemplary. Even within the familial household of Christendom, he was quick to cry heretic. In any event, the style of his orthodoxy was, as Harry Levin put it, “a literary conception.” As a would-be social theorist he had a backward longing for the medieval hegemony of cathedral spires—i.e., for a closed society. It was a ruefulness so poignant that it preoccupied much of the prose and seeped into the melancholy cadences of the poetry. As a modernist, Eliot was the last of the Romantics.
In the end he could not disengage the mind that created from the man who suffered; they were inseparable. But the mind and the man—the genius and the sufferer—had contributed, in influence and authority, more than any other mind and man (with the exception perhaps of Picasso) to the formation of the most significant aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. It was a movement so formidable that its putative successor cannot shake off its effects and is obliged to carry on its name; helplessly, we speak of the “postmodern.” Whether postmodernism is genuinely a successor, or merely an updated variant of modernism itself, remains unresolved. Yet whichever it turns out to be, we do know for certain that we no longer live in the literary shadow of T. S. Eliot. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead”—the celebrated epigraph Eliot lifted from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and affixed to “The Hollow Men”—applies: the heart has gone out of what once ruled. High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is equated with obscurantism. The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached; anything can count as “text.” Knowledge—saturated in historical memory—is displaced by information, or memory without history: data. Allusiveness is crosscultural in an informational and contemporary way (from, say, beekeeping to film-making), not in the sense of connecting the present with the past. The relation of poets to history is that they can take it or leave it, and mostly they leave it, whether in prosody or in the idea of the venerable. If it is true that The Waste Land could not be written today because it is too tame for the savagery we have since accumulated, there is also a more compelling truth: because we seem content to live without contemplation of our formal beginnings, a poem like The Waste Land, mourning the loss of an integral tradition, is for us inconceivable. For the modernists, the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever we are), there is no recollection of a center, and nothing to miss, let alone mourn.
Was it the ever-increasing rush to what Eliot called “Secularism” that knocked him off his pinnacle? Was it the vague nihilism of “modern life” that deposed modernism’s prophet? Was Eliot shrugged off because his pessimistic longings were ultimately judged to be beside the point? The answer may not be as clearcut as any of that. The changes that occurred in the forty years between the Nobel award in 1948 and Eliot’s centennial in 1988 have still not been assimilated or even remotely understood. The Wordsworth of the “Ode to Duty” (composed the same year as “Intimations of Immortality”) has more in common with the Eliot of Four Quartets—the differing idioms of the poetry aside—than Eliot has with Allen Ginsberg. And yet Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the single poem most representative of the break with Eliot, may owe as much, thematically, to The Waste Land as it does to the bardic Whitman, or to the opening of the era of anything-goes. Ginsberg belo
ngs to the generation that knew Eliot as sanctified, and, despite every irruption into indiscipline, Eliot continues alive in Ginsberg’s ear. For the rest, a look at the condition of most poetry in America today will disclose how far behind we have left Eliot. William Carlos Williams, a rival of Eliot’s engaged in another vein of diction and committed to sharply contrasting aesthetic goals (“no ideas but in things”), said of the publication of The Waste Land that he “felt at once it had set me back twenty years,” largely because of its European gravity of erudition. The newest generation in the line of descent from Williams, though hardly aware of its own ancestry, follows Williams in repudiating Eliot: music is not wanted, history is not wanted, idea is not wanted. Even literature is not much wanted. What is wanted is a sort of verbal snapshot: the quick impression, the short flat snippet that sounds cut from a sentence in a letter to a friend, the casual and scanty “revelation.” As Eliot in his time spurned Milton’s exalted epic line as too sublime for his need, so now Eliot’s elegiac fragments appear too arcane, too aristocratic, and too difficult, for contemporary ambition. Ironic allusiveness—Eliot’s inspired borrowing—is out of the question: there is nothing in stock to allude to. Now and then there are signs—critical complaints and boredom—that the school of pedestrian verse-making is nearly exhausted, and more and more there are poets who are venturing into the longer line, the denser stanza, a more intense if not a heightened diction.
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