23 the female temperament: Aristotle: “woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive and of more retentive memory”, Historia Animalum 608b (Works IV). Benito Jerónimo Feijoo: “the female temperament being more moist than that of men, women must be the more intelligent of the two”, On the Learning, Genius and Abilities, of the Fair Sex (1774) 122.
[Poem I 36–37 · Textual History II 343]
25–26 The lengthened shadow of a man | Is history, said Emerson: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as Monarchism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson · · · all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons”, Self-Reliance. (See note to Erect in title.) Emerson again: “If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience”, History (Peake). TSE on the Transcendentalists: “Neither Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of the moral life · · · The essays of Emerson are already an encumbrance”, American Literature (1919). To Herbert Read, 27 Feb 1926, on a projected series of biographies: “Emerson might well be included much as I dislike him.” On his significance: “Emerson is himself a ‘Representative Man’, of a deplorable variety, representative of much modern American ‘spirituality’”, Report on a dissertation entitled “Emerson and the Romantic Revival” (1927). To Janet Adam Smith, 24 Apr 1934: “I am not a very good person to talk about Emerson, as I dislike him and his works.” See also note to Cousin Nancy 12.
Hegel: “A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately”, Lectures on the Philosophy of History 34, scored by TSE in his copy. TSE: “no honest man can be a hero to himself; for he must be aware how many causes in world history, outside of abilities and genius, have been responsible for greatness”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 289 (Turnbull Lecture III).
29 Tests the razor on his leg: Mandarins 1 1 also has a present tense verb opening a sentence: “Stands there, complete”.
31 epileptic: Arrowsmith 1981 quotes Owsei Temkin on the history of epilepsy: “The epileptic attack was compared to the sexual act, and both Hippocrates and Democritus were credited with the saying that ‘coitus is a slight epileptic attack’”, The Falling Sickness (1945) 30.
33, 38 The ladies · · · misunderstood: Emerson: “Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood”, Self-Reliance (Peake).
37 hysteria: see note to Hysteria title.
39 Mrs. Turner: against the name in Thayer’s AraVP, TSE wrote a three-line note now illegibly erased. The name may have been prompted by a patron recalled by Wyndham Lewis: “Amongst the people I came across immediately before the War · · · was a very attractive American, of the name of Mrs. Turner. Since then she has become the wife of General Spears, and is best known as [the novelist] Mary Borden, which was her maiden name”, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) 60. Lewis’s first letter mentioning TSE, to Pound [Jan 1915], describes how “The excellent Mrs. Turner is going to take a large studio or hall near Park Lane and there house my squadron of paintings.” Arrowsmith 1981 cites Shakespearean puns, suggesting that the name “declares her a bawd” (see next note for “Mrs. Walker”).
[Poem I 37 · Textual History II 343]
40 It does the house no sort of good: “There’s no money in it now, what with the damage done, | And the reputation the place gets, on account of a few barflies, | I’ve kept a clean house for twenty years, she says”, WLComposite 26–28. For “some really good houses have been ruined in this way”, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 6, “cheap hotels”. Goldsmith: “Were you not told to drink freely, and call for what you thought fit, for the good of the house?”, She Stoops to Conquer act IV. TSE: “A very nice House it was”, Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 9. In a letter to John Hayward, 11 Apr 1938, TSE annotated both sides of a newspaper cutting, heading it: SPOTLIGHT ON 22, BINA GARDENS: THROWN BY JOHN FOSTER—
Will the Mr. Foster said that
the club was the resort of
undesirables, habitual disorder
and drunkenness occurred there,
and the police had frequently been
called in to quell disturbances.
“The premises are badly
conducted, and the police regard
them as one of the worst
in the district,” the inspector
added. Things
Goblin don’t
Nuisance look too
be put good for
an End to? Mrs. Walker
41 Doris: Grover Smith 1998: “Doris’s name comes in oddly. [But] Sweeney has been likened to Polyphemus, who (in Ovid) vainly wooed Galatea, daughter of the sea-nymph Doris.” (See note to 10, “Polypheme”.) towelled: OED’s earliest citation for 3. “ppl. a., wrapped in a towel”.
41–42 towelled from the bath, | Enters: “I would come with a towel in my hand | And bend your head beneath my knees”, The Love Song of St. Sebastian 22–23. (“Jackknifes upward at the knees”, 17.)
43 sal volatile: smelling salts, to treat fainting. Pronounced sal vol-lattily. “F. M.” on a play by William Archer: “I betook myself with a queasy stomach to The Green Goddess and found it as settling as a nice dose of bicarbonate of soda with sal volatile as handed to one over the counter by any chemist for fourpence”, Letters of the Moment II (1924).
43–44 sal · · · a glass of brandy neat: Wilkie Collins: “‘Let me prescribe for you. A glass of brandy neat. So,’ he went into the salle à manger and returned with his medicine”, Blind Love ch. LII. (If taken medicinally, brandy did not breach America’s Prohibition, 1919–33, for which see note to WLComposite 2.) Joyce: “Toss off a glass of brandy neat while you’d say knife”, Ulysses episode VIII (Lestrygonians) in Little Review Jan 1919. Joyce sent this episode to Pound on 25 Oct 1918.
[Poem I 37 · Textual History II 343]
A Cooking Egg
Published in Coterie May Day 1919, then AraVP, US 1920+ and Penguin / Sel Poems. (Six issues of Coterie, one a double number, were published by the Bomb Shop, of which this was the first. TSE was on its editorial committee, along with Richard Aldington, T. W. Earp, Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis.) Read by TSE at the house of Sibyl Colefax 12 Dec 1917.
No recording known.
Undated in tss. Dated “? London 1917” in Isaacs US 1920 and 1917 by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925. Assigned to 1917 by Rainey 198. TSE apparently sent a typescript to John Rodker on 17 May 1919.
To Norman Furlong, 4 Feb 1946, on selections for his English Satire: An Anthology (1946): “I agree with the choice you have made from among my poems with the exception of A Cooking Egg which does not seem to me satirical but sentimental. I have no objection in principle to your using the others. Incidentally, I think that the poem called Burbank with a Baedeker might more truly be described as satirical verse than A Cooking Egg.” (To Sherard Vines, 22 Dec 1931: “I do not know whether I have ever written anything that could be called verse satire or not. What do you think?”)
Title Cooking Egg: not in OED. Fannie Merritt Farmer: “It is surprising how many intelligent women · · · are satisfied to use what are termed ‘cooking eggs’ · · · Strictly fresh eggs should always be used if obtainable. An egg after the first twenty four hours steadily deteriorates”, The
Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896, rev. ed. 1918) 92 (Barbara Lauriat, personal communication).
Epigraph En l’an trentiesme de mon aage | Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues … : [In the thirtieth year of my life, when I drank up all my shame], Villon, Le Grand Testament 1–2. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes “Villon: Poesies, Oeuvres”. On the politician and man of letters George Wyndham:
There is no conclusive evidence that he realized all the difference, the gulf of difference between lines like:
En l’an trentiesme de mon age
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues;
and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay.
A Romantic Aristocrat (1919)
[Poem I 38–39 · Textual History II 344–45]
In the same year (when TSE was 30): “We are a little wearied, in fact, by the solemnity with which Mr. Osborn accepts the youthful mind and the youthful point of view. ‘Youth knows more about the young,’ he says, ‘than old age or middle age.’ If this were so, civilization would be impossible, experience worthless. Hommes de la trentaine, de la quarantaine, assert yourselves”, The New Elizabethans and the Old (1919). Bertrand Russell on TSE at Harvard in 1914: “He was extraordinarily silent, and only once made a remark which struck me. I was praising Heraclitus, and he observed: ‘Yes, he always reminds me of Villon.’ I thought this remark so good that I always wished he would make another”, Autobiography (I, 1967) 212. Ottoline Morrell explained the remark in her memoirs (Morrell 1963 258) as a comparison between Heraclitus’ “If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it” and Villon’s Ballade, “Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine”:
Rien ne m’est sûr que la chose incertaine:
Obscur, fors ce qui est tout évident;
Doute ne fais, fors en chose certaine;
Science tiens à soudain accident
[Nothing is sure to me but the uncertain, nothing obscure except the obvious. I have no doubts except for the certain, and I hold knowledge to be a random accident]
The Heraclitus, frag. 18, was given in Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophers (147), and was used in 1913 by Ernest Jones as one of the epigraphs to Papers on Psycho-analysis.
1 Pipit: Austin Dobson: “men wore stocks · · · And maids short waists and tippets, | When this old-fashioned screen was planned | From hoarded scraps and snippets”, The Screen in the Lumber Room 34–36; see note to “behind the screen”, 26 (Ricks 1998). The name of the pipit bird is thought to derive from its “short and feeble note” (OED). I. A. Richards told Elizabeth Drew that TSE “had corrected him about the interpretation of Pipit as an old nurse, and had said that the clue was in Dans le Restaurant”. Drew suggested that this clue as to her being a young girl was a childhood memory of “un instant de puissance et de délire” (14), EinC June 1953. TSE may rather have had in mind the variant line from the poem as published in Little Review and AraVP: “Elle avait une odeur fraîche qui m’était inconnue”. To Helen Gardner, 20 Oct 1956, after a critical dispute about Pipit in three issues of EinC, 1953–54: “it seemed to me that the nadir of critical futility had been touched (so far as my own work is concerned) by the dispute as to whether the personage in A Cooking Egg was a little girl, an inamorata, a female relative, or an old nurse.” See note to 9–24. sate: Dryden: “Philip’s warlike son | —Aloft in awful state | The godlike hero sate”, Alexander’s Feast (in The Golden Treasury), with “Honour but an empty bubble” (TSE: “Honour”, 9; “Sir Philip Sidney”, 10). Responding to a query about the spelling “sat” in the first-line index to 1969, Valerie Eliot wrote: “Sate is correct and must be corrected in the index” (8 Oct 1969, Faber archive). This archaic spelling occurs three times in Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman, was favoured by Edward Lear (Southam) and is pronounced to rhyme with “fate” in TSE’s 1957 recording of Growltiger’s Last Stand (29). For the convention, see note to 15–16.
3 Views of the Oxford Colleges: no book of precisely this title existed, with or without the definite article (see variant), but Elsie M. Lang’s The Oxford Colleges (1910), with twenty-four illustrations, was published in London and Philadelphia, and a concertina of twelve Views of Oxford had been published c. 1873.
5 Daguerrotypes: the earliest photographic process, invented c. 1837, had proliferated in the US in the 1840s but was superseded in the 1850s. OED gives stress on the first syllable not the second. Fowler: “The OED pronounces -gĕro-.”
[Poem I 38 · Textual History II 344–45]
8 An Invitation to the Dance: italics suggest a title (as of several songs and piano pieces, or of a picture such as E. M. W. Tillyard imagined, EinC June 1953), yet “supported on the mantelpiece” evokes a printed invitation card. (To John Hayward, 29 Nov 1939: “You speak of receiving ‘absurd little invitation cards’ to various College functions. Let me impress upon you—as a Newcomer to Cambridge—the importance of not ignoring these invitations.”) Weber’s piano piece L’Invitation à la Valse was orchestrated by Berlioz, whose version was used by the Ballets Russes for Le Spectre de la Rose in its Paris season, 1911 (Hargrove). TSE: “With preparation for the waltz”, Goldfish I 2.
8 ^ 9 draft stanzas [2, 4] repose · · · toes: “take their repose · · · Jellicles dry between their toes”, The Song of the Jellicles 18, 20.
8 ^ 9 draft stanzas [3] My self-esteem was somewhat strained: Pound’s annotation “used before” may refer to “My self-possession flares up for a second”, Portrait of a Lady III 11.
9–21 I shall not want Honour · · · Capital · · · Society · · · Pipit: Psalm 34: 10: “they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.” Psalm 23: 1: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Williamson). The “shall” repeatedly anticipating conditions in Heaven also echoes through Exequy: “Shall hover in my sacred grove · · · The cordial flame shall keep me warm”, 6, 12.
9–24 I shall not want Honour in Heaven · · · I shall not want Pipit in Heaven · · · Piccarda de Donati will conduct me: Ruskin to Susan Beever, 25 June 1874, about the loss of Rose La Touche: “But, Susie, you expect to see your Margaret again, and you will be happy with her in heaven. I wanted my Rosie here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan’t care a bit for Rosie there, she needn’t think it. What will gray eyes and red cheeks be good for there?” (Matthiessen 92 on “the little girl with whom he fell in love when himself in middle life”. TSE to Matthiessen, 22 Oct 1935: “By the way, that is a good point about Rose La Touche. Was that pure inspiration, or did we ever mention the subject in conversation?”) In Edward Tyas Cook’s Life of John Ruskin (1911), the letter is quoted immediately after Ruskin’s opinion that Dante’s Vita Nuova was “the record of the poet’s real love for a real person, and not a mere allegory” (II 264–65), an opinion TSE was strongly to endorse. Pipit appeared again in an additional draft stanza in the earliest typescript of Whispers of Immortality: “As long as Pipit is alive | One can be mischievous and brave; | But where there is no more misbehaviour | I would like my bones flung into her grave” (see Textual History).
10, 12 Sir Philip Sidney: died, according to popular legend, heroically at the battle of Zutphen, 1586. Sidney · · · kidney: recurrent in 17th-century verse: “each Ladies Kidney | Twitter’d to heare but of the Name of Sydney”, Samuel Sheppard, Epigrams 70; “And thou, swain, shall sing as sweet as Sidney · · · To make Jack Sprat a man of kidney”, A Catch in Pills to Purge Melancholy ed. Thomas d’Urfey (Henry Woudhuysen, personal communication). Thomas Hood: “Bold Sidney, and his kidney”, A Lament for the Decline of Chivalry (1828) (James Loucks, N&Q July 1976). Walter Savage Landor: “Cursing Milton, Hampden, Sidney, | And all others of their Kidney”, Excommunication, Denounced on January 30, 1850 (Daniel Clay, N&Q Sept 1994).
11 have talk with: “He seemeth to have talk with one afar off”, A True and Faithful Relation of What passed · · · Between Dr. John Dee · · · and Some Spirits (1659) 242. OED “talk” 1. cites “We had talk enough, but no conversat
ion”, Boswell IV 186.
[Poem I 38 · Textual History II 344–45]
14 Sir Alfred Mond: industrialist and Liberal MP of German Jewish extraction (1868–1930). Commissioner of Works in Lloyd George’s Coalition Government of 1916–21. During the Great War his family business (Brunner, Mond: a fore-runner of ICI) made munitions at Silvertown, East London, where fifty tons of TNT exploded on 19 Jan 1917, killing 73 people. Pound to TSE, 14 March 1922: “When Hueffer sold the old English Review to Mond [in 1910], it was with the understanding that he was to remain Editor · · · Mond turned him out at the end of four months.” (The replacement was Austin Harrison, who declined The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when it was offered by Conrad Aiken.) TSE: “Lord Melchett is the independent and intelligent Alfred Mond”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1929. (Mond: essence of the worldly. Charles Cotton: “one that’s banish’d the Grand Mond”, Epistle to John Bradshaw, Esq. II 49.)
When TSE read these stanzas at Sibyl Colefax’s house on 12 Dec 1917, “there was a rumpus in the audience, and Lady Mond sailed indignantly out of the room”, Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (1968) 204. In July 1914, Blast had asked “MAY WE HOPE FOR ART FROM LADY MOND?” See headnote to The Hippopotamus, and, for TSE’s suggestion that he might read something even more outrageous, see letter to Pound, 31 Oct 1917, in “Improper Rhymes”. (“Lady Kleinwurm’s monde”, WLComposite 255.)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 57