The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 146
TSE had warned Hayward on 14 July 1941: “The question is not so much whether it is as good as the others (I am pretty sure it is not) but whether it is good enough to keep company with them to complete the shape. If the problem is more than one of improving details, it will have to go into storage for some time to come.” To Frank Morley, two days later: “The fourth poem has been written and is now being examined by Geoffrey [Faber] and John Hayward but my own suspicion about it is that it is a flop and that I shall have to put it aside and make a fresh start if I can toward the end of the year, but it is yet too soon to be quite sure what is wrong with it and how much.”
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
Hayward’s letter of 1 Aug offered reassurance and detailed criticism, still based on ts3 (see Textual History): “I agree with you that the poem, in the unfinished and unpolished state in which you have allowed me to see it, is not quite up to the standard of the others in the group. But it does not seem to me to be, potentially, inferior to them; nor do I think that it shows signs of fatigue or that, as you seem to fear, it is merely a mechanical exercise; I am sure that it only requires to be revised and perhaps rewritten in certain passages, to which I shall refer, to be brought to perfection as the culminating poem of the series · · · My general impression is that Parts I, II, V and all but the first paragraph of Part III are all right. Part IV seems to me to break down. The first fifteen lines of Part III—the didactic passage—strike me as being imperfectly resolved into poetry, in fact rather laboured and prosy. I think I appreciate the difficulty of this kind of expository writing. It may be that it is too easy to cast such philosophic and ethical statements into the kind of long, fluid lines you use so ingeniously. But this particular passage does seem to me to drag; to need fusing: possibly to be presented to the reader in a less didactic and uncompromising form. As for Part IV, I can’t fit it into the scheme of the poem as a whole. Now that you have discarded (and rightly so, I think) the 2nd. stanza (“Till death shall bring the audit in …”) it consists of only two short stanzas [“Between the initial watery sign” and “The dove descending breaks the air”] and their point has escaped me · · · these two stanzas seem to me scarcely to justify a section to themselves. My own view, for the little that it is worth, is that this section should be extended rather than rewritten, or if this is not possible, that it should be so reorganized as to be capable of being incorporated in some way either at the end of Part III or at the beginning of Part V · · · I approve of the omission of the last four lines of Part III” (the Anima Christi lines, “Soul of Christ · · · incinerate them”). After many “niggling details” (discussed in the Commentary and Textual History) his letter continued: “assure me that you intend to add Little Gidding to the group. You must not discard it just because you have the natural misgivings of a poet bringing a movement to its close—misgivings doubtless exacerbated by the miserable time you have had with your teeth.”
TSE, 5 Aug 1941: “I agree that the first part of Part III needs thorough re-writing · · · I am especially puzzled about Part IV · · · The defect of the whole poem, I feel, is the lack of some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface) and I can perhaps supply this in Part II. It is whatever is wrong with Part IV that bothers me most.”
Bonamy Dobrée was also consulted around this time, and may have been sent the carbon of ts5 (not traced). On 6 Aug 1941 TSE replied to his comments: “I seem to need other people’s opinions (or those of a small number of people) more than I once did: I suppose it comes partly from the different way of working appropriate to middle age, which becomes more deliberate and painstaking. And I feel the need for it especially just now, when I have been conscious of working, so to speak, against time. One sees certain things that one wants to do, and everyone must have a feeling of precariousness of the future; and as my natural way of writing verse seems to require a long period of germination for each poem, before I address myself to the machine, I have been afraid that I have been overproducing, and at last trying to make poetry out of unseasoned material. On the other hand, excellent as your comment appears to me to be, I must say that I think my private critics improve with practice. John Hayward, who has had the longest training in this difficult and exacting art, has now got to the point of making quite drastic criticism; and Faber is improving. It is practice in criticising the work of a particular author in this particular way that is needed, before the mind releases itself to say what it really thinks: and I therefore allow for the leniency of the beginning. I have come to the conclusion that the first two lines of Part II are not right; that the first section of Part III is not well worked out; and that Part II needs a spark, a line or two somewhere, to set it alight. John also finds Part IV a failure: but I cannot yet see just what is wrong. However, you have given me the main assurance that I want: that the poem appears to you to have an organic relation to the others, and is not merely a wooden leg. And for this in particular I am grateful.”
To Geoffrey Faber, 22 Aug 1941, arranging a visit to the Fabers in Wales: “I shall also bring John Hayward’s criticisms of Little Gidding, because I find it useful, not merely to conscript three or four friends (not more) to criticise, but to get them to criticise each other’s criticisms. Thus one gets something like a notion of how the thing might strike a person of equal intelligence and sensibility who did not know the author. I have only made a few minor corrections so far, of which the most important is the omission of Part III. I think Part IV will have to be completely recast.” (Geoffrey Faber’s notes, given below, accompany ts4b; see Textual History headnote.)
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
To McKnight Kauffer, 29 Aug 1941: “I have written a fourth poem to complete the series from Burnt Norton; but I am not satisfied with it, and am putting it aside to work on in the winter after I have got two or three other jobs off. John has made a number of useful criticisms.”
Thanking Hayward belatedly for “your careful notes on ‘Spittle-Skidding’”, TSE told him, 17 Oct 1941, that he had “determined to put the whole thing out of mind until December”. More than a year now passed before the next letter that Hayward bound into his volume of typescripts, and in this period TSE drafted the revised ending to Part II. (To Robert Waller, 19 Oct 1942: “Fortunately for me, my mind ticks rather slowly, so that I can spend a year or more, off and on, over the same poem and perhaps get it finished before I have outgrown it.”) Hayward to Anne Ridler, 24 Nov 1941: “Little Gidding, the last poem of T. S. E.’s tetralogy, has been put aside for revision in December” (BL Add. ms 71225 fol. 53v).
Hayward to TSE, 16 Jan 1942: “I am anxious to hear that Little Gidding is not forgotten.” TSE to Marion Dorn, 2 Feb 1942: “I am stuck with my last poem: I have done a draft of it, but felt quite dissatisfied and put it aside since November.” Hayward to Belgion, 27 Apr 1942: “he promises to complete as soon as possible the fourth last poem of the tetralogy, a draft of which—it’s called Little Gidding—I have had by me for more than 6 months.”
TSE to Hayward, 21 July 1942: “Mr. Hoellering of Film Traders Ltd. comes to see me once a week about Murder in the Cathedral. I have put Part II of Little Gidding into the melting pot, but nothing has solidified yet.” 26 July: “I shall have no peace until I have written in a few bits for the film version of Murder in the C. · · · This film titan, and Little Gidding, are both on my mind · · · When I copy them out I shall let you have a copy of my SET OF VERSES which I composed for Storm Jameson to oblige Bonamy” (A Note on War Poetry). To Hayward, 17 Aug, enclosing ts9b (Parts II and III): “my mind refuses to do its best at the rechauffé of Murder, until it has eased itself of Little Gidding. So here is a recension of Part II, which seemed to me the centre of weakness. Even if this is better than the first version (which I assume you still have by you) it may not be good enough; and if it is not good enough (minor improvements, of course, apart) then I fear that the poem
must simply be allowed to disintegrate. If this is fundamentally all right, then an improvement of the other sections does not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility. I submit it (together with another edition of Part III) with some trepidation.”
He wrote again to Hayward on 27 Aug 1942, enclosing ts9b (Parts I and V) and ts10b (Part II): “this letter is merely to send you another revision of Part II and a slightly altered I and V and to answer a few questions implied or expressed. You will find that in several cases I have followed your advice negatively if not positively.” Then 2 Sept, enclosing ts12: “I send you herewith a new fair copy, having dealt with your criticisms. I think that it is much easier to judge of changes when you have a fresh copy incorporating them, and moreover I find it advisable, as did Virginia [Woolf], to type out anything again and again. Each time I find something that I had previously overlooked and this time I think I have picked up two points which neither you nor I noticed. According to my figures, I have altered nine passages according to your suggestions, rejected six suggestions and remained uncertain about two others. As for Part IV, which I now include, I am as yet too close to this new version to be able to tell whether it is fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong.”
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
On 7 Sept 1942, TSE sent Hayward a two-page report on small points in Little Gidding (see Commentary, especially II 38). A lost letter from Hayward of 8 Sept may have crossed with this, but was more probably a prompt reply. TSE acknowledged it on 9 Sept: “This time I accept nearly everything: perhaps it means that my resistance is weakening, at this stage; but chiefly I think because I perceive that these belong to that almost inevitable residue of items, in a poem of any length, for which the ideal is unattainable.” Again his principal concern was with Part II.
Accordingly, he now retyped the entire poem one final time, sending a carbon of ts13 to Hayward on 19 Sept 1942, accepting “waning dusk” in the Dantesque lines in Part II: “You will also find that I have made other alterations in the same section. This type of verse appears to present the greatest difficulties. Every word sticks out, and the tax upon one’s vocabulary is immense. Syllables and terminations also give one great trouble. If it is as difficult in Italian as in English (which I find it hard to credit) then my admiration for Dante should have no bounds. I am still unsatisfied: ‘enchantment’ and ‘re‑enactment’ in the same passage are unpleasing. But I think that there is a point beyond which one cannot go without sacrifice of meaning to euphony, and I think I have nearly reached it. Anyway, I have sent a copy to Mairet for the N.E.W., and I propose to give a copy of the enclosed to Dick [de la Mare]. There will still be the possibility for [margin: ? of] alterations in proof. But to spend much more time over this poem might be dangerous. After a time one loses the original feeling of the impulse, and then it is no longer safe to alter. It is time to close the chapter.” Even then, after a paragraph of personal news, there was a postscript: “I don’t like ‘strode’ and ‘patrol’ either. But you can’t have a verb with a labial termination ‑ed or ‑t before ‘together’, and I don’t want to give up ‘patrol’. Is ‘strode’ ever pronounced ‘strod’?” (see note to II 54). He returned to II 79, 85 in a further note, dated by Hayward 22 Sept: “I cannot find any alternative for either ‘enchantment’ or ‘re-enactment’ which doesn’t either lose or alter meaning. ‘Re-enacting’ is weak as a substantive; and I want to preserve the association of ‘enact’—to take the part of oneself on a stage for oneself as the audience.”
To Frank Morley, as his American publisher, 10 Sept 1942: “I think that I may have finished Little Gidding. At the moment at any rate I only appear to be held up by the problems presented by two lines and I think it is likely that these may turn out to belong to that small residue of insoluble problems which remain as a sediment in any but the most perfect poem of this length. The whole thing has given me far more trouble than any of its predecessors, which may, of course, mean that it is not so good · · · We propose to give it here a run of a year or more before producing the final volume of all four poems together, but knowing your repeated wishes, the Board are willing to let you publish the collection of four poems together ahead of us. That is to say, you would have to publish it, I presume, within six months of its appearance in the New English Weekly, in order to preserve the copyright, but of course from our point of view, we should prefer you to publish it toward the end rather than the beginning of this period of grace · · · In any case, I shall post you two successive copies of the typescript by air mail as soon as ready.” To Herbert Read, 18 Sept 1942: “I think that Little Gidding is now about as good as I can make it: at any rate I have sent a copy to Mairet [editor of NEW]—though I have already made two more improvements since posting it. This defecation OUGHT to make it possible to attend to Murder: it’s only possible to do tinkering when one is not possessed with the desire for new building” (see East Coker I 9: “there is a time for building” and note to First Debate between the Body and Soul 49). To W. H. Auden, 15 Oct 1942: “Little Gidding I think will be published in November. At any rate I have decided that I am going stale on it after a year and a half, and that nothing further I can do will improve it.”
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
Faber Autumn List 1942: “Little Gidding is the fourth and concluding poem of the series in which Burnt Norton, East Coker, and The Dry Salvages have already been published.”
3. DANTE
After their mother’s death in 1929, Henry Eliot acquired the books that TSE had owned in his school years. In the 1940s he gave them to Eliot House at Harvard. The three volumes of Dante are now in the Houghton Library.
TSE: “I have found no other poet than Dante to whom I could apply continually, for many purposes, and with much profit, during a familiarity of twenty years. I am not a Dante scholar; my Italian is chiefly self-taught, and learnt primarily in order to read Dante; I need still to make constant reference to the translations · · · The reader whom I have kept in mind · · · is the reader who commences his reading of Dante with Messrs. Dent’s invaluable Temple Classics edition · · · For this reason I have in quotation followed the Temple Classics text, and have followed pretty closely the translation in the same volumes”, Dante (1929), Preface (which is omitted from the text in Selected Essays). “I read Dante only with a prose translation beside the text. Forty years ago I began to puzzle out the Divine Comedy in this way; and when I thought I had grasped the meaning of a passage which especially delighted me, I committed it to memory; so that, for some years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey. Heaven knows what it would have sounded like, had I recited it aloud; but it was by this means that I steeped myself in Dante’s poetry”, What Dante Means to Me (1950).
In Dante (1929) II, TSE quoted Purg. XXI 135, “quando dismento nostra vanitate”, but replaced the Temple translation, “when I forget our nothingness”, with his own: “so that I forget our vanity”. To Sir Frederick Pollock, 6 Jan 1930: “I agree that the Temple is often unsatisfactory, either as graceful English or as exact translation. Yet for the passage you mention I still feel that ‘vanity’ is right. The word may convey a greater range of meaning to me than to others; but I should have thought that the reader who was ignorant of the original meaning of ‘vanitas’ might be ignored! The word—with the allusion to Ecclesiastes—is so much richer than ‘emptiness’ is.”
Laurence Binyon was assisted by Pound in making his translations of Dante’s Inferno (1933), Purgatorio (1938) and Paradiso (1943). TSE also offered comment, writing to Binyon, 16 May 1930:
Who am I to criticise translations of Dante? The only attempts at any translation that I have made, suggest to me that it is quite impossible to translate anything; and I feel that in my small essay on Dante, I may lead readers to the erroneous impression that Dante is translatable.
But I do like your translations, and I cannot believe that yo
u are as ignorant of Dante as I am. I like your metric, and I think you are right to stress (as it seems to me you do) the Teutonic element in English: I believe that we can only approach the divine informality of Dante’s Latin speech through our own origins.
If I may make a few unimportant criticisms:
Will “Galahalt” do for “Galeotto”: the implications of “Galahad” are so strong for us.
I am not quite satisfied with “As if of Hell asserting great disdain” because “asserting” seems to me to weaken the contempt: possibly I am affected by “despitto” sounding like “spit”.
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
“Ancestors” seems to me a weak word in English for family Pride: I wish that it might have been “Forebears”. Ulysses: the Italian gives me somehow the notion of a licking tongue, i.e. the metaphor seems in the Italian more closely welded to the image.
“Sweet son”: is it not rather The sweetness of having a son?
“Old honoured father”: should one not give more the allusion to the pietas of Aeneas? I confess that “honoured” has to me the devilish suggestion of a K.B.E. or something of that sort.
“Debito amore” does not suggest to me “overdue”: I may be quite irrelevant, but I think of it as being merely “due” to Penelope who was a boring person.