E. M. W. Tillyard: “Some years ago, when Sweeney Agonistes was performed in London, Sweeney was represented as a rather tired business man. I had the chance of asking the author whether this unexpected representation had his approval. He answered No, and that his own picture of his Sweeney was of a retired professional boxer who kept a pub”, EinC July 1953. Also after the first production, Nevill Coghill asked “Who is Sweeney? How do you see him? What sort of man is he?” TSE: “I think of him as a man who in younger days was perhaps a professional pugilist, mildly successful; who then grew older and retired to keep a pub”, March & Tambimuttu eds. 86. Conrad Aiken recalled TSE taking boxing lessons as a form of self-discipline: “The boxing lessons, meanwhile, took place at a toughish gymnasium in Boston’s South End, where, under the tutelage of an ex-pugilist with some such monicker as Steve O’Donnell, he learned not only the rudiments of boxing, but also, as he put it, ‘how to swarm with passion up a rope’ · · · Was Steve O’Donnell the prototype of Sweeney, as some have suggested?” March & Tambimuttu eds. 21. For the name, see note on the title Sweeney Erect. (TSE took Geoffrey and Enid Faber to a boxing match at the Albert Hall in Apr 1927.)
TSE to Roberto Sanesi, 10 Dec 1959, responding to list of poems Sanesi wished to translate into Italian: “I entirely agree with you that Sweeney Agonistes would probably prove very difficult. A prose translation would not do, and the rhythms are probably possible in the English language only.”
10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN
In reply to a request for permission to stage Sweeney Agonistes, TSE not only acceded, but provided new material. To Professor Hallie Flanagan of Vassar College, 18 Mar 1933:
I have no objection to your doing Sweeney, what there is of him, though I cannot imagine what anybody can do without me there to direct it. The action should be stylised as in the Noh drama—see Ezra Pound’s book and Yeats’ preface and notes to The Hawk’s Well. Characters ought to wear masks; the ones wearing old masks ought to give the impression of being young persons (as actors) and vice versa. Diction should not have too much expression. I had intended the whole play to be accompanied by light drum taps to accentuate the beats (esp. the chorus, which ought to have a noise like a street drill). The characters should be in a shabby flat, seated at a refectory table, facing the audience; Sweeney in the middle with a chafing dish, scrambling eggs. (See “you see this egg.”) (See also F. M. Cornford: Origins of Attic Comedy, which is important to read before you do the play.) I am talking about the second fragment of course; the other one is not much good. The second should end as follows: there should be 18 knocks like the angelus, and then
[Poem I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
Enter an old gentleman. He is in full evening dress with a carnation, but otherwise resembles closely Father Christmas. In one hand he carries an empty champagne bottle, in the other an alarum clock.
THE OLD GENTLEMAN. Good evening. My name is Time. The time by the exchange clock is now nine-forty-five (or whatever it is). I come from the vacant lot in front of the Grand Union Depot, where there is the heroic equestrian statue of General Diego Cierra of Paraguay. Nobody knows why General Cierra is there. Nobody knows why I am there. Nobody knows anything. I wait for the lost trains that bring in the last souls after midnight. The time by the exchange clock is now 9:46.
SWEENEY. Have you nothing else to say?
OLD GENTLEMAN. Have you nothing to ask me?
SWEENEY. Yes.
OLD GENTLEMAN. Good.
SWEENEY. When will the barnfowl fly before morning?
When will the owl be operated on for cataracts?
When will the eagle get out of his barrel-roll?
OLD GENTLEMAN. When the camel is too tired to walk farther
Then shall the pigeon-pie blossom in the desert
At the wedding-breakfast of life and death.
SWEENEY. Thank you.
OLD GENTLEMAN. Good night.
(As Old Gentleman leaves, the alarum clock in his hand goes off.)
The following year, TSE was not sure whether he would continue with the play. To Hallie Flanagan, 9 Feb 1934: “I cannot tell you when or whether there will be more of Sweeney but in any case I hope to start something new of the same kind as soon as I have finished with a dramatic pageant which is to be produced in the early summer” (The Rock). In the event he wrote no more. It was not until 1943 that Flanagan printed the extra dialogue from his letter of ten years before (Flanagan 82–84), with a photograph of the cast on the set, adding that in time for the première in 1933, “The alarum clock went off and Mr. Eliot arrived on May 6”. The extra dialogue was printed again in Carol H. Smith’s T. S . Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice (1963) and in the programme for the Stage Sixty Theatre Club’s Homage to T. S. Eliot (1965).
My name is Time: in The Winter’s Tale, Time appears at the start of Act IV as chorus. Act V includes three Gentlemen. TSE sent a telegram to Flanagan, 27 Nov 1941: “CANT IDENTIFY FATHER TIME KINDEST REGARDS ELIOT”.
General Diego Cierra: apparently TSE’s invention.
the lost trains that bring in the last souls after midnight: Laforgue: “les trains manqués”, Dimanches (“J’aurai passé”) 4, quoted in Baudelaire (1930).
barrel-roll OED: “an aeronautical feat in which an aeroplane makes a complete revolution about the longitudinal axis”, recorded from 1927, then in Auden’s The Orators (1932).
the wedding-breakfast of life and death: Hamlet I ii: “The funeral bak’d meats | Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” (See deleted subtitle.)
[Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
TSE to Virginia Woolf, 25 Apr 1933: “Next week I go to Poughkeepsie N.Y. where the young ladies of Vassar College are to perform Sweeney Agonistes in treble pipe.” (OED “pipelet”: “a weak piping voice”, with 1885, “in a soft treble pipe”.) Directed by Flanagan, the première took place on 6 May 1933, as part of Now I Know Love—A Mime Sequence, the rest of which consisted of idylls by Theocritus, Telephone by Dorothy Parker and Pent House by Vassar student Mary Morley Crapo (later Mary Hyde Eccles).
Before the performance, Vassar Miscellany News reported on 3 May: “The music for the production, which has been composed by Quincy Porter, is thematic rather than historical; yet the three Theocritus idylls are pastoral in tone, while the Sweeney [music] is as mad and contemporary as the text · · · The construction used for the plays is based upon no tenet of stage craft, but is designed to provide a playing space which must defy time and space in their leap through twenty-one centuries.”
The following week, Frani Blough reported that the music “was written for string quartet, with a percussion section behind scenes, which it seems was someone rubbing sandpaper together · · · the strings were perfect for the mournful love themes and the exotic Crocodile Isle music of Sweeney · · · the music for Under the Bamboo Tree in Sweeney Agonistes contained snatches of the popular song · · · Sweeney is the disillusioned and tired man, who toys with the idea that life on a cannibal isle, getting back to the old primitive instincts, might be the solution of the modern problem. He really knows perfectly well it wouldn’t be however, and so does Dusty who says ‘I’d be bored’ and ‘I don’t like eggs, I don’t like life on your Crocodile Isle.’ But it is she who finally goes out with him at the end—to a coffin instead of an idyllic island—not Doris who always picked up his ideas too quickly to understand them, sings Under the Bamboo Tree, and does a native dance. The ‘fragment’ was beautifully reproduced; the acting was a rarely seen combination of finish and spontaneity, especially on the part of Carolyn Hoysradt and Elizabeth Carey as Dusty and Doris · · · A rhythmic motif was carried through the play from the opening when Dusty is cutting the cards to tell her fortune to the last grim knocks off-stage (the knocks have been variously interpreted as hammering the nails in the coffin, and the knocks of the policeman on the door) and the motif seemed not studied but quite inevitable.”
[Poem
I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
After the performance: “‘Yes, Sweeney was entirely different from my previous conception of it,’ said Mr. Eliot, discussing the Experimental Theatre’s production of his play. ‘But I liked it very, very much. In fact, I am inclined to think Mrs. Flanagan’s way of presentation was better than my own might have been. Sweeney is still a fragment to me, I can only see it as part of a longer play, but Mrs. Flanagan successfully produced it as a complete dramatic unit.’ Mr. Eliot was so encouraged by the success of the fragment to which Sweeney belongs that he is planning to complete the play. ‘The first option on the dramatic performance of the finished work will go to Mrs. Flanagan,’ he promised”, Vassar Miscellany News 10 May 1933. Elsewhere in the same issue: “‘I have always wanted to experiment with new forms of verse plays,’ he answered when asked about the actual starting point of Sweeney Agonistes. The blank verse Elizabethan forms are exhausted for the modern dramatic writer, but strongly rhythmic forms, and rhymed verses may have a future on the stage. He mentioned particularly Four Plays for Dancers by William Butler Yeats as being one of the early experiments of the sort. The relation of Sweeney to the agons of Aristophanes was rather by unconscious influence than any deliberate planning. ‘I wanted to soak myself in Aristophanes,’ Mr. Eliot said, and whatever characteristics may have come out in Sweeney were due to that rather than to any direct design. It will come, perhaps, as a surprise to the classics majors that Mr. Eliot bases all his analysis of Aristophanes on that familiar volume, F. M. Cornford’s Origins of Greek Comedy.”
Flanagan 84–85 recalled that the day after the performance, “by request of the student body, Mr. Eliot discussed poetry in the theatre. Roaming about the setting of his own play, he talked about poetry with impersonal lucidity. ‘My poetry is simple and straightforward,’ he declared; and when the audience laughed he looked pained. ‘It is dubious whether the purpose of poetry is to communicate anyway. Poetry ought simply to record the fusion of a number of experiences’ · · · To student questions from the crowded house he was painstakingly exact, though sometimes cryptic. ‘Was the production what you expected?’ ‘The moment expected may be unforeseen when it arrives.’ (This line he later used in Murder in the Cathedral.)” See TSE to J. Bramwell, 11 July 1945: “The first question about a poem is not whether it is intelligible but whether it is readable” (in headnote to The Waste Land, 9. AFTER PUBLICATION).
11. BRITISH PERFORMANCES
To I. A. Richards, 18 May 1934: “Rupert Doone · · · is anxious to put on a performance, which will include Sweeney Agonistes and Fulgens et Lucres, somewhere in Cambridge during this term · · · While I can make no promises for the future of the Group Theatre, it seems to me an experiment worth while trying out.” (The only copy of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, the earliest surviving English secular play, had been sold at auction in 1919 and reproduced in facsimile in 1920.) Despite Doone’s initial plan, the first British performance of Sweeney Agonistes was given privately in London, by his Group Theatre, of which TSE was a literary director, on 11 Nov 1934. John Hayward, London Letter in New York Sun 23 Nov 1934:
[Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
If you · · · are interested in the more intimate activities of contemporary literature, the most important event I can record is a private performance of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, which took place on the evening of Armistice Day. Originally printed in Eliot’s Criterion quarterly, these two Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama have since been published together by Faber & Faber of London (1932). They mark an important stage in the evolution of Eliot’s poetry as his first experiment in a new form of verse-drama. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the performance, but Eliot has given me some notes which may interest you. He tells me that Sweeney Agonistes was actually performed for the first time at Vassar College in May, 1933, under the direction of Mrs. Flanagan. The opportunity for a London performance was given by the Group Theater, a small company of enthusiasts, led by Rupert Doone, formerly one of Diaghilev’s dancers. Doone, incidentally, has already produced a miming version of Auden’s Dance of Death. Sweeney Agonistes was played before a small but distinguished Bloomsbury audience—including Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Lady Ottoline Morrell—in the small attic rooms of the Group Theater in Great Newport street, round the corner from Leicester Square. All the performers, except Sweeney, wore masks, and there was no stage, the actors and audience being situated in relation to each other in such a way as to give the spectators the impression that they were minor characters in the drama, an informal setting, which has been used successfully in Russia. The complete performance lasted about half an hour—rather longer than I supposed—but it appears that the tempo was deliberately slowed up in order to create an atmosphere of suspense. Eliot, at any rate, was satisfied with it all, and particularly with the second of the two scenes. He admits, however, that Sweeney himself was conceived after a different plan from the one he imagined. If he really looked like Crippen, as Eliot says he did, then he is not the same never-to-be-forgotten apenecked Sweeney of the early poems.
A second private performance followed on 25 Nov (prompt copy, Berg). A third performance, in December, was attended by Yeats and Brecht. TSE to Yeats, 6 Dec: “although the presentation was in important respects entirely alien to my intentions, I was very much pleased with the skill and intelligence of the production”. Desmond MacCarthy: “I found myself in an L-shaped room on the third floor, round which seats had been arranged, leaving an empty space in the middle, where stood a table with some drinks on it and some unoccupied chairs. It was in this space that the performance took place. We, the spectators, were in the position of Elizabethan swells; we were sitting on the stage itself · · · Into the darkened room, or rather into a little pool of light created by one lamp overhead, came two young women wearing masks; their masks bore a grotesque resemblance to a commonplace kind of prettiness”, Listener 9 Jan 1935. A newspaper cutting at Harvard reads “All the characters but one are masked. The unmasked is a real man. The masked are symbols · · · The suggestion is that life is a hopeless business”, against which TSE wrote: “This production was completely the reverse of what I meant!”
Sweeney Agonistes was licensed for public performance in Britain by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office on 25 July 1935, after inspection of the printed text. The reader’s report on it by G. S. Street (BL) summarises: “This ‘fragments of an Aristophanic melodrama’ consist of ‘fragment of a prologue’ and ‘fragment of an agon’. In the former two girls tell their fortunes by cards and one of them, Doris, draws a coffin. They are joined by Sam Wauchope and three American friends who talk about London. In the second fragment besides these five there are Sweeney, Swarts and Snow, the last two merely playing nigger instruments. Sweeney talks in free verse about carrying Doris off to a cannibal island and eating her. Later he tells, also in verse, about a man who ‘did in’ a girl in a bath and was not found out but apparently went mad. Then they all sing a chorus about dreaming they are going to be hanged. Serious poets are seldom happy when they relax—Swinburne’s limericks are a notable exception—and I don’t think this nonsense amusing. There is no harm in it. The word ‘copulation’ is used on pp. 24 and 25. I don’t think it is a necessarily banned word and think it would be rather absurd to cut it out of an eminent poet’s verses, even comic ones: it is not indecent. Recommended for Licence, G. S. Street.”
In Oct 1935, Sweeney Agonistes and Auden’s The Dance of Death opened at the Westminster Theatre for 15 public performances (see Malamud). The programme contained a Producer’s Note by Doone: “My production is concerned with morals as well as aesthetics. I have sought to criticise the conventionalities of modern behaviour with its empty code and heartiness—immoral but never immoral enough—decaying, but so long in dying. I see Sweeney himself as a modern Orestes (the only three-dimensional character in the play). The rest are conventionalised conventional characters—the Eumenides or Bogi
es of Sweeney’s persecution. RD.”
*
[Poem I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]
TSE, on Hofmannsthal’s The Tower: “the play is essentially poetic drama. I do not know whether it has ever been presented on the stage; but the latter part · · · becomes so phantasmagoric that one can only imagine its representation in terms of a dream-film such as Jean Cocteau might devise · · · and if The Tower is unplayable, we must attribute this not to failure of skill but to the fact that what the author wished here to express exceeded the limits within which the man of the theatre must work. For the surface meaning, the real or apparent reason for human behaviour which must be immediately apprehensible by the audience if the play is to hold their interest, Hofmannsthal cares less and less as the play proceeds. He seems to have loaded this play, in symbolism which perhaps has more than one level of significance, with all the burden of his feelings about the catastrophe of the Europe to which he belonged, the Europe which went down in the wreck of empires between 1914 and 1918. As Herr Meyer-Sichting justly says, there is much in the play which cannot be ‘understood’, but only ‘intuited’. The play expresses not only the author’s suffering during those years that remained to him, but also his ultimate Christian hope. I find it interesting to compare the message of The Tower, so far as I have succeeded in grasping it, with that of the masterly essay which Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, called La Crise de l’esprit: an essay which, because so much of its prophecy has already come to pass, is more terrifying since the second World War than it was at the date of its first publication. Both men were poets; both had their formation and first practised their art in the world before 1914; both lived on—the French poet eighteen years after the death of the Austrian—into a waning civilization”, A Note on “The Tower” (1963).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 111