by Rick Gekoski
To make some extra money to take to college I also worked in the evenings that summer, in the sporting goods department at Macy’s in the local mall. My specialty was drilling bowling balls, and I got sufficiently good at it that customers would return to tell me that they’d bowled an especially good game. During the occasional lulls, I’d chat with my colleagues, who measured golf clubs, or sold sneakers and tennis rackets.
It turned out that one of them was a summer school student at C.W. Post.
‘C.W. Post! Do you know the car park by the president’s office?’ I asked eagerly.
‘Oh yeah, sure, I tried to park there last week, but there was this really tough-looking cop, and I got scared away.’
It was the high point of my summer.
4
LEARNING TO READ
The first step in education is not a love of literature, but a passionate admiration for one writer; and probably most of us, recalling our intellectual pubescence, can confess that it was an unexpected contact with some one writer which first, by apparent accident, revealed to us our capacities for enjoyment of literature.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Education of Taste’
‘Let’s begin here,’ our instructor in Introduction to English said. ‘You have read The Waste Land for today’s assignment. Can you recite the opening line? Not lines, just the one. You should be able to, it’s famous enough, almost a cliché by now.’
He was regarded by most of the class with incredulity, and by me with contempt. That was obvious, wasn’t it? What was the catch? We all knew it, and recited it almost as if it were a nursery rhyme: ‘April is the cruellest month . . .’
‘Wrong!’ (You won’t believe this. We didn’t.) ‘Think again.’
We did, and we wouldn’t back down. What was this guy: stupid?
‘Have a look in your book.’ And sure enough the first line reads:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
‘Why does it start like that?’ he asked. ‘How is that different from the line you remember? Why does he do it like that – what is the effect?’
We read the next line:
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
which repeats the pattern of the first line – doesn’t it? – with the active hanging verb suggesting fertility and hinting at sexuality. (Lines three, five and six will do the same.) Why is it that ‘lilacs’ are what is bred? There is no appended note by Eliot, and our first association was with Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’, the elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Thus new life in the springtime brings with it a hint of the destruction of the best and brightest? That is – is it? – why April is cruel? Is there some later association with the ‘hyacinth girl’ – hyacinths being visually similar to lilacs, similarly strongly perfumed – and the moment of epiphany associated with her?
I can’t remember when I first read T.S. Eliot. This may account for my feeling that he has always been with me, for Eliot, more than any other writer, has been a constant reference point: read and reread, reconsidered, rethought, reimagined, indeed, re-sounded, for the poem can be recited in many ways and voices. For almost fifty years he has been a constant but shifting part of my self-definition, as if what I made of Eliot, at any given period of my reading life, were essential to what I made of myself. And, equally, as my sense of myself has evolved, my responses to Eliot have shifted.
Perhaps – (if this isn’t true nevertheless it carries the weight of truth for me) – it was my father who introduced me to Eliot? His heavily annotated copy of the poet’s Collected Poems was in a prominent place on his shelves, and in everyday conversation he was likely to interject a phrase or image of Eliot’s: at a party the ‘women come and go, talking of Michelangelo’, and we could not enter spring without being reminded that April was ‘the cruellest month’, which to my mind it so obviously wasn’t. (That, dad observed, was exactly the point.)
I like the notion that he introduced me to Eliot, because my nature and ambitions so closely mirrored his as a teenager. In 1930, the eighteen-year-old Bernie Gekoski, recently graduated from high school, adored eldest child and the hero of his younger sister, a well-read, earnest young man and aspiring writer, entered the freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania. He had already read some Freud, and had hopes that he might one day train as a psychoanalyst, but (aware that you needed to be a doctor or a psychology graduate to do this) contemplated instead a career as a professor of English. And if that didn’t work out, he recognized, you could always train as a lawyer, a perfectly respectable profession for a young man with a conscience.
Change the date to 1962, and ‘Bernie’ to ‘Rick’, and all the rest stands. I was aware of the parallels without having considered them, and had no sense of pursuing, as it were, a carbon copy of my father’s life. But the University of Pennsylvania he attended and the one I did, if they had the continuities of genteel Philadelphian propriety and Ivy League architecture, nevertheless were substantially different places in which to major in English. The very act and nature of reading had redefined itself since my father’s time. He had been schooled by historicist and belle-lettriste professors (and gentlemen, and Gentiles) for whom understanding a text consisted of placing it squarely in the historical, cultural and intellectual milieu from which it emerged, and which it might be claimed to represent. To read Shakespeare without knowing about the great chain of being, or to approach Pope lacking an understanding of the premises of the Enlightenment, were activities associated with amateurishness, of reading for the mere fun of it. Indeed, properly understood, such pleasure was a thin and unreliable product in the absence of its background.
It was hardly a sympathetic milieu in which to read Eliot. The Waste Land was widely reviled by contemporary American critics, and more so by American academics of the Penn sort. In 1930, of course the poem was still avant-garde in a way that, by 1962, it no longer was. My father would recall, with a smile and shake of the head that carried, still, an aura of astonishment, what an impact the poem had upon him, how exciting it was to read something like that. Modern? That was the naturalist novels of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, the mid-Western twang of Carl Sandburg, the fine discriminations of Edith Wharton and Henry James. The Waste Land was something else, and required a new concept: ‘modernist’, that would do it. Though the term first appears as early as 1879, its use to refer to the early twentieth century’s explosion of creative innovation in literature, painting and music, is more or less contemporaneous with the publication of The Waste Land. When you wrote or painted, when you composed in this new way, you redefined not only what art was, but how it had to be described and discussed.
A key figure in this shift of readerly perspective was I.A. Richards, the Cambridge don whose Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment defined the aesthetic of this new ahistoric approach to the reading of poetry. Richards would distribute to his classes the texts of poems (which he called ‘protocols’) without divulging the author or the period in which they were written. There were only the words on the page, and it was the job of each student to produce as detailed a ‘reading’ of them as possible. Under such tutelage, that extraordinary undergraduate William Empson was soon to publish Seven Types of Ambiguity, still one of the great examples of what close reading can accomplish.
In America, the term ‘new criticism’ (after the title of a book by Allen Tate) came to be preferred to ‘practical criticism’, though they were largely the same thing. Exegesis and formal analysis became the modes. Just as Picasso and Braque required of their critics a fresh eye, and an accompanying new vocabulary and conceptual apparatus, so too did Joyce, Pound and Eliot necessitate a different set of lenses and critical tools. To understand them required that one re-schooled oneself in the very art of reading. And to do that you had to learn, too, how not to read.
When I first read The Waste Land my response was some literary version of an anxiety attack, accompanied by an enormous exhilaration. As Eliot was to r
emark, ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.’ The poem tugged at my mind fore and aft, the images recurring and reigniting as if from a bad dream, or what Eliot called ‘the octopus or angel’ with which the poet, and the reader, struggles. The poem was like a crossword puzzle or literary quiz, which was rather fun, but the real difficulty lay in assimilating it emotionally. It had emanated from the immense collapse that followed the First War, as well as Eliot’s own nervous breakdown, leaving that ‘heap of broken images’ that its poetic voices struggle to preserve: jagged shards, partially apprehended echoes, scenes glimpsed but hardly comprehended, the past confused with the present, mind, body and spirit in collision.
The Waste Land neither demanded nor allowed paraphrase. Neither did it have a philosophy, a single voice (like a poem by Whitman or Ginsberg), or a clear structure. Though we were supposed to confine ourselves to the words on the page, we snuck off to the Van Pelt Library nonetheless. It was one of my haunts in my first semester as a freshman, a refuge from that lonely disorientation that accompanies leaving home for the first time. I had located a comfy chair in a quiet alcove, which I began to regard as my own, and would repair there most days to read: first the novels of Camus, then all of Kafka, then the major novels of Sartre. Existentialism – in high school I thought the term was ‘existentionalism,’ which I used with embarrassing frequency – was current and sexy, and I wanted to know more.
My enthusiasm for the new philosophy occasioned one of my very few arguments with my father, who liked plain speaking and caught a whiff of cant in my advocacy of the existential.
‘What does it mean, exactly?’ he asked in a voice I suspect he used for cross-examinations.
‘It’s from Jean-Paul Sartre,’ I explained, ‘it’s a form of French philosophy.’
‘I know that perfectly well. Tell me about this philosophy.’
‘The key is that existence precedes essence, that you choose who you are, you don’t have any nature. You are entirely free to make yourself. If you make the wrong choices it’s called bad faith, and the responsibility is entirely your own.’
He considered this for a moment.
‘Tell it to the Jews who died in the concentration camps,’ he said tartly. ‘Did they choose that? Do Negroes choose segregation? Have they got this “freedom” to make themselves whatever they wish?’ A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, he had done pro bono work on cases involving discrimination, was entirely on the side of the underdog, and had little time for ‘philosophy’ abstracted from the reality of daily engagement with the world.
‘I’m not so sure Sartre is interested in that,’ I said. ‘He’s more concerned with the French bourgeoisie . . .’
‘He should be interested! He lived through the war, didn’t he? But I am more interested in why you are so concerned with the French middle classes. Surely there are more pressing things to worry about right here, and now.’
He was genuinely cross, and we agreed to drop the subject. I’d rarely encountered him in such an unforgiving mood, though it was to recur a few years later, when I wrote from Oxford to say that I was contemplating a trip to Poland to find members of our family. I got a sharp letter by return, asking why I supposed that any of them had survived, and why it was that I wished to visit a country from whose barbarous anti-Semitism my grandparents had narrowly escaped? I made other plans.
I suppose my reading in the library during my freshman year was partly designed to frame a rebuttal of my father’s argument, but instead it confirmed it: Sartre had recanted his original position, for the very reasons my father had given. (I never told him this, and began to suspect he’d read the relevant texts.)
Better to join him in our mutual regard for T.S. Eliot whose palpable anti-semitism my father was curiously able to forgive, I became obsessed with The Waste Land, with trying to figure it out. There were a lot of books about Eliot, confirming how difficult he was, but no Collected Letters. His essays were studiedly impersonal, and left his personality a matter of conjecture. A starchy young man from the mid-West, who had assimilated seamlessly into English social and intellectual life, Eliot evolved into a high church, high table sort of chap: formal, conventional, retiring. That was the prevailing impression anyway. There were no biographies to be found; indeed, on his death in 1965 he left express instructions that no such were to be attempted. When Peter Ackroyd published his, in 1984, the Eliot estate refused the author permission to quote from his works, ostensibly on the grounds that Eliot had not wished for a biography to be written. (The book nevertheless won the Heinemann and Whitbread awards.)
But the pattern of withholding permissions goes deeper than this, and it is a sanitized Eliot that we still read today. The Eliot estate, run by his still enraptured widow Valerie, has offered us a version of the poet as saint, resisting publication of Eliot’s early King Bolo verses (which are charmingly obscene) and often refusing permission for quotation from his works. I recently did a BBC Radio 4 programme about the Hogarth Press, and applied to the estate for permission to read the short poem ‘The Hippopotamus’. It was denied. I was cross and bemused, and demanded that the BBC confront Mrs Eliot.
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ said my producer. ‘We need Mrs Eliot a lot more than we need you!’
I didn’t know, reading The Waste Land in my freshman year, that the poet was a more amusing character than one might have supposed. A devotee of music hall, a lover of the Marx brothers, and an inveterate practical joker, he was a constant source of amusement to his publishing colleagues at Faber’s. He was known to return from his morning visit to the Gents with pieces of that old-fashioned, virtually grease-proof toilet paper, on which he had written something silly. Examples were distributed at board meetings: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot salutes the Directors of Faber and Faber.’ (I owned one once, and sold it for £100.) At Christmas parties he would have a few drinks and regale his colleagues with a variety of English accents so stupendously off key that people would sneak out of the room when they thought he wasn’t looking.
It turns out he was rather fun, this Eliot, but you sure wouldn’t have known it in Introduction to English in 1962. Looking up from the page, bewildered, we begged for help. ‘Ah,’ our instructor told us archly (quoting Archibald Macleish’s dictum), ‘a poem should not mean, but be.’ That wasn’t much help. It wasn’t at all clear what The Waste Land meant, we agreed on that. But what help was it to remind us that it was? If it wasn’t, then we could get the hell out of there, but if it be’d, what kind of being did it have?
We canvassed various opinions as to the essence of poetry. Housman reminded us that unless a poem made our skin prickle with delight, so that we cut ourselves while shaving, it lacked poetic quality. (The girls rather objected to this.) And Wordsworth, evidencing the fatal attraction aesthetic theorists have for the verb to be, claimed that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. There was plenty of powerful feeling in The Waste Land, but not much evidence that it was spontaneous, or that it had overflowed. Indeed, much of it seemed crimped and desperate.
The ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, surely, is what you get when you find your neighbour in bed with your wife? Even if this emotion is later, as Wordsworth was hastily to insist, ‘recollected in tranquillity’, it is hard to see how memory can inject the necessary poetic elements. Eliot is ruthless on the subject, observing that Wordsworth, like some sloppy undergraduate, has got everything wrong:
‘. . . emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences . . . These experiences are not ‘recollected’ and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ‘tranquil’ only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
That showed him. And Mr Eliot was prepared to help us as well. When the poem was first published in Englan
d in 1923, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Eliot accompanied it with a set of notes, of limited explanatory value, partly in order to bulk up the slim volume. Curiously, we get a clearer personal voice from these notes than from the poem itself. Whereas The Waste Land is a palimpsest of persons, voice and languages, images, references, and places, and cannot be reduced to a personal statement, its notes, recondite and wry, reveal an Eliot who takes himself seriously but not too seriously, and is happy to acknowledge how much of the poem is, indeed, personal. The note about tarot cards is a perfect example:
I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience . . . The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.
When he was later to describe his masterpiece as ‘just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’, we recognize the tone from the notes, not the poem itself. And, like the notes, the comment misguides as much as it shows the way. If the grinding, abiding misery of The Waste Land is a form of grumbling, it is hard to imagine how Eliot might have sounded when he was really unhappy.
At Eliot’s suggestion I read Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, consulted Frazer’s The Golden Bough, stuffed myself with references to the Fisher King and associated myths of maiming and regeneration. Coming back to the poem I found I could talk knowledgeably about its structure and cultural references, as if I had constructed an internal version of what was later to be called a hypertext.
The Waste Land had thrown down a challenge, and continues to do so. I made of the poem a lifetime companion. Some five or six years later, rereading The Waste Land while doing my BPhil at Oxford, I was surprised to find how much it had changed. I suppose I had too. Texts alter their meaning as readers change their situations, as Eliot argues so cogently in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. I had been reading Freud and Jung compulsively while Barbara and I were both in therapy, and much given to regarding all utterance as symptomatic of an internal state. Though himself undergoing psychoanalysis during the composition of The Waste Land, Eliot maintained that the poem was not a symptom of mere personal distress, that its ravaged landscape was an ‘objective correlative’ of a state of mind that was hardly his alone.