Firkin Barmuenster kept reading. The typist went on smacking imaginary flies. Eliot waited.
“I confess,” Firkin Barmuenster said slowly, raising his lids to confront the pallid face of the poet, “that I didn’t expect anything this good. I like it, my boy, I like it!” He hesitated, gurgling slightly, like a man who has given up pipe-smoking once and for all. And indeed, Eliot spied two or three well-chewed abandoned pipes in the tumbler that served as pencil-holder; the pencils, too, were much-bitten. “You know our policy on fee, of course. After we get finished paying Clara and the rent and the sweeping up and the price of an occasional banana, there’s not much left for the writer, George—only the glory. I know that’s all right with you, I know you’ll understand that what we’re chiefly interested in is preserving the sanctity of the writer’s text. The text is holy, it’s holy writ, that’s what it is. We’ll set aside the title for a while, and put our minds to it later. What’s the matter, George? You look speechless with gratitude.”
“I never hoped, sir—I mean, I did hope, but I didn’t think—”
“Let’s get down to business, then. The idea is excellent, first-rate, but there’s just a drop too much repetition. You owned up to that yourself a minute ago. For instance, I notice that you say, over here,
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo,
and then, over here, on the next page, you say it again.”
“That’s meant to be a kind of refrain,” Eliot offered modestly.
“Yes, I see that, but our subscribers don’t have time to read things twice. We’ve got a new breed of reader nowadays. Maybe back, say, in 1896 they had the leisure to read the same thing twice, but our modern folks are on the run. I see you’re quite a bit addicted to the sin of redundancy. Look over here, where you’ve got
‘I am Lazarus, come back from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.’
Very nice, but that reference to the dead coming back is just too iffy. I’d drop that whole part. The pillow, too. You don’t need that pillow; it doesn’t do a thing for you. And anyhow you’ve said ‘all’ four times in a single place. That won’t do. It’s sloppy. And who uses the same word to make a rhyme? Sloppy!” Barmuenster iterated harshly, bringing his fist down heavily on the next banana, peeled and naked, ready for the eating. “Now this line down here, where you put in
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,
well, the thing to do about that is let it go. It’s no use dragging in the Bard every time you turn around. You can’t get away with that sort of free ride.”
“I thought,” Eliot murmured, wondering (ahead of his time) whether banana-craving could somehow be linked to pipe-deprivation, “it would help show how Prufrock feels about himself—”
“Since you’re saying he doesn’t feel like Hamlet, why put Hamlet in? We can’t waste words, not in 1911 anyhow. Now up here, top of the page, you speak of
a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floor of silent seas.
Exactly what kind of claws are they? Lobster claws? Crab? Precision, my boy, precision!”
“I just meant to keep it kind of general, for the atmosphere—”
“If you mean a crustacean, say a crustacean. At The New Shoelace we don’t deal in mere metonymy.”
“Feeling is a kind of meaning, too. Metaphor, image, allusion, lyric form, melody, rhythm, tension, irony, above all the objective correlative—” But poor Tom Eliot broke off lamely as he saw the older man begin to redden.
“Tricks! Wool-pullers! Don’t try to tell Firkin Barmuenster about the English language. I’ve been editing The New Shoelace since before you were born, and I think by now I can be trusted to know how to clean up a page of words. I like a clean page, I’ve explained that. I notice you have a whole lot of question marks all over, and they go up and down the same ground again and again. You’ve got So how should I presume? and then you’ve got And how should I presume? and after that you’ve got And should I presume? You’ll just have to decide on how you want that and then keep to it. People aren’t going to make allowances for you forever, you know, just because you’re painfully young. And you shouldn’t put in so many question marks anyhow. You should use nice clean declarative sentences. Look at this, for instance, just look at what a mess you’ve got here—
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
That won’t do in a discussion of the aging process. There you go repeating yourself again, and then that question business cropping up, and ‘beach’ and ‘each’ stuck in just for the rhyme. Anybody can see it’s just for the rhyme. All that jingling gets the reader impatient. Too much baggage. Too many words. Our new breed of reader wants something else. Clarity. Straightforwardness. Getting to the point without a whole lot of nervous distraction. Tell me, George, are you serious about writing? You really want to become a writer some day?”
The poet swallowed hard, the blood beginning to pound in his head. “It’s my life,” Eliot answered simply.
“And you’re serious about getting into print?”
“I’d give my eyeteeth,” admitted Tom.
“All right. Then you leave it to me. What you need is a good clean job of editing. Clara!” he called.
The fringed typist glanced up, as sharply as before.
“Do we have some white space under any of next issue’s articles?”
“Plenty, F.B. There’s a whole slew of white at the bottom of that piece on Alice Roosevelt’s new blue gown.”
“Good. George,” the editor pronounced, holding out his viscid hand in kindness to the obscure young poet, “leave your name and address with Clara and in a couple of weeks we’ll send you a copy of yourself in print. If you weren’t an out-of-towner I’d ask you to come pick it up, to save on the postage. But I know what a thrill real publication in a bona fide magazine is for an aspiring novice like yourself. I recollect the days of my own youth, if you’ll excuse the cliché. Careful on the elevator—sometimes the rope gets stuck on that big nail down near the fifth floor, and you get a bounce right up those eyeteeth of yours. Oh, by the way—any suggestions for the title?”
The blood continued to course poundingly in young Tom Eliot’s temples. He was overwhelmed by a bliss such as he had never before known. Print! “I really think I still like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ ” his joy gave him the courage to declare.
“Too long. Too oblique. Not apropos. Succinctness! You’ve heard of that old maxim, ‘So that he who runs may read?’ Well, my personal credo is: So that he who shuns may heed. That’s what The New Shoelace is about. George, I’m about to put you on the map with all those busy folks who shun versifying. Leave the title to me. And don’t you worry about that precious Voice of yours, George—the text is holy writ, I promise you.”
Gratefully, Tom Eliot returned to Boston in high glee. And within two weeks he had fished out of his mailbox the apotheosis of his tender years: the earliest known publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
It is a melancholy truth that nowadays every company president can recite the slovenly unedited opening of this justly famous item—
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, etc.
—but these loose and wordy lines were not always so familiar, or
so easily accessible. Time and fate have not been kind to Tom Eliot (who did, by the way, one day cease being painfully young): for some reason the slovenly unedited version has made its way in the world more successfully during the last eighty years than Barmuenster’s conscientious efforts at perfection. Yet the great Firkin Barmuenster, that post-fin-de-siècle editor renowned for meticulous concision and passionate precision, for launching many a new literary career, and for the improvement of many a flaccid and redundant writing style, was—though the fact has so far not yet reached the larger reading public—T. S. Eliot’s earliest supporter and discoverer.
For the use of bibliographers and, above all, for the delectation of poetry lovers, the complete text of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as it appeared in The New Shoelace of April 17, 1911, follows:
THE MIND OF MODERN MAN
by
George Eliot
(Editor’s Note: A new contributor, Eliot is sure to be heard from in the future. Out of respect for the author’s fine ideas, however, certain purifications have been made in the original submission on the principle that, in the Editor’s words, GOOD WRITING KNOWS NO TRICKS, SO THAT HE WHO SHUNS MAY HEED.)
On a high-humidity evening in October, shortly after a rainfall, a certain nervous gentleman undertakes a visit, passing through a bad section of town. Arriving at his destination, the unhappy man overhears ladies discussing an artist well-known in history (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564, Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet). Our friend contemplates his personal diffidence, his baldness, his suit and tie, and the fact that he is rather underweight. He notes with some dissatisfaction that he is usually addressed in conventional phrases. He cannot make a decision. He believes his life has not been well-spent; indeed, he feels himself to be no better than a mere arthropod (of the shelled aquatic class, which includes lobsters, shrimps, crabs, barnacles, and wood lice). He has been subjected to many social hours timidly drinking tea, for, though he secretly wishes to impress others, he does not know how to do so. He realizes he is an insignificant individual, with a small part to play in the world. He is distressed that he will soon be eligible for an old age home, and considers the advisability of a fruit diet and of permitting himself a greater relaxation in dress, as well as perhaps covering his bald spot. Thus, in low spirits, in a markedly irrational frame of mind, he imagines he is encountering certain mythological females, and in his own words he makes it clear that he is doubtless in need of the aid of a reliable friend or kindly minister. (As are, it goes without saying, all of us.)
AGAINST MODERNITY
Annals of the Temple
1918–1927
A CENTURY, like any entrenched institution, runs on inertia and is inherently laggard. Even when commanded by the calendar, it will not easily give up the ghost. The turn of the century, as the wistful phrase has it, hardly signifies the brisk swing of a gate on its hinge: a century turns, rather, like a rivulet—a silky, lazy, unwitting flow around a silent bend. Whatever the twenty-first century (seemingly only minutes away) may bring, we, entering it, will go on being what we are: creatures born into, and molded and muddied by, the twentieth.
And the twentieth, too, did not properly begin with the demise of the nineteenth. When the fabled Armory Show introduced modern art to New York in 1913, the American cultural establishment (to use a term typically ours, not theirs) was in the governing hands of men born before the Civil War—men who were marked by what Santayana, as early as 1911, had already condemned as “the genteel tradition.” Apart from the unjust condescensions of hindsight, and viewed in the not-so-easily-scorned light of its own standards, what was the genteel tradition? Its adherents, after all, did not know themselves to be pre-modernist; they did not know that a volcanic alteration of taste and expression was about to consume the century; they did not know that irony and pastiche and parody and a conscious fever of innovation-through-rupture would overcome notions of nobility, spirituality, continuity, harmony, uncomplicated patriotism, romanticized classicism. It did not occur to them that the old patterns were threadbare, or could be repudiated on grounds of exhaustion.
To be able to say what the men of the genteel tradition (its constituents were nearly all men) did know, and what they saw themselves as, and what they in fact were, would lead us directly to the sublimely conceived fellowship they established to embody their ideals—a kind of latterday temple to the Muses. And the word “temple” is apt: it calls up an alabaster palace on a hill; an elite priesthood; ceremonial devotions pursued in a serious though lyrical frame of mind—a resolute thoughtfulness saturated in notions of beauty and virtue, and turned from the trivial, the frivolous, the ephemeral. The name these aspirants gave to their visionary society—a working organization, finally, with a flesh-and-blood membership and headquarters in New York—was the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The cornerstone of what was to become the Academy’s permanent home, a resplendent Venetian Renaissance edifice just off Riverside Drive on West 155th Street, was laid on November 19, 1921, by Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France. The commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the First World War, Foch was summoned to wield a ritual trowel not only as the hero of the recent victory over the Kaiser, but—more gloriously still—as an emissary of French cultural prestige. The nimbus of power that followed him from Paris to this plot of freshly broken ground along the remote northern margins of Manhattan was kindled as much by his membership in the French Academy as by his battlefield triumphs.
The venerable French Academy, founded by Cardinal Richelieu to maintain the purity of the French language, and limited to forty “Immortals,” had preceded its New World counterpart (or would-be counterpart) by some two and a half centuries. Though this august company of scholars and men of letters was to serve as inspiration and aristocratic model, American democratic principles demanded a wider roster based on a bicameral system: hence membership in the American Academy was open to as many as fifty, and these fifty were selected by ballot from the two hundred and fifty distinguished authors, painters, sculptors, architects, and composers of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the lower (and older) body. And while the “chairs” of the French Academy were phantom chairs—metaphoric, platonic—American pragmatism (and one Mrs. Cochran Bowen, who donated the requisite five thousand dollars) supplied real chairs, with arms and backs of dark polished wood, each with a plaque for its occupant’s name.
The homegrown Richelieu of this grand structure of mind and marble was Robert Underwood Johnson, a powerful magazine editor and tireless poet who, though not precisely the organization’s founder, was present at the Academy’s earliest meetings, and as Permanent Secretary was its dominating spirit for the first three decades. In 1920 he disappeared, temporarily, having been appointed United States Ambassador to Italy. A 1922 newspaper photograph of Johnson—occasioned by a dispute with the Internal Revenue Department over unpaid taxes on ambassadorial meals and lodgings—shows a determined elderly gentleman with a steady yet relentless eye and a rather fierce pince-nez, the ribbon of which flows down over a full white beard and high collar. Unfortunately, no mouth is visible; it would be instructive to see the lips that so often speechified at Academy events, or adorned the hour with original verse. In still another portrait—a wood engraving by Timothy Cole, artist and Academy member—the Johnsonian mouth is again concealed under a cloud of furry whiskers, but the stiff cravat, scimitar nose, straight spine, and erect head are eloquent enough. They declare a fine facsimile of a Roman bust, attentive to what is noble and what is not—the face and figure of a man of established importance, a man who knows his worth: editor of The Century, Ambassador to Italy, Director of the Hall of Fame, Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Above all it is the face and figure of the nineteenth century, when the ideal of the publicly Noble could still stir the Western world. Together with the Harmonious, the Noble spoke in lofty statuary, in the balanced configurations of painting
and music, in the white pilasters of heirloom architecture—but nowhere more melodiously than in the poetry that descended (though somewhat frayed by overhandling) from Keats.
The cornerstone affixed by Marshal Foch—in high-laced boots and full uniform—on that rainy November afternoon in 1921 was a hollow repository. In it Brander Matthews, Chancellor of the Academy and a professor of literature at Columbia University, placed numerous historic articles and documents—congratulatory messages from the President of the United States, from the Governor of New York, from the Academies of Belgium, Rome, Spain, and Brazil; papers recording the Special Symposium on Diction; “Utterances by Members of the Academy Concerning the War of 1914–1918,” bound in purple; replicas and photographs of medals, including one presented to Marshal Foch by the American Numismatic Society (located next door); minutes of meetings; commemorative addresses; and a holographic copy of a dedicatory poem by Robert Underwood Johnson:
The Temple
If this be but a house, whose stone we place,
Better the prayer unbreathed, the music mute
Ere it be stifled in the rifled lute;
Better had been withheld those hands of grace,
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