T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration

This page intentionally left blank T. S. ELIOT AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION Richard Badenhausen examines the crucial...

Author: Richard Badenhausen

152 downloads 1311 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

This page intentionally left blank

T. S. ELIOT AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION

Richard Badenhausen examines the crucial role that collaboration with other writers played in the development of T. S. Eliot’s works from the earliest poetry and unpublished prose to the late plays. He demonstrates Eliot’s dependence on collaboration in order to create, and also his struggle to accept the implications of the process. In case-studies of Eliot’s collaborations, Badenhausen reveals for the first time the complexities of Eliot’s theory and practice of collaboration. Examining a wide range of familiar and uncollected materials, Badenhausen explores Eliot’s social, psychological, and textual encounters with collaborators such as Ezra Pound, John Hayward, Martin Browne, and Vivien Eliot, among others. Finally, this study shows how Eliot’s later work increasingly accommodates his audience as he attempted to apply his theories of collaboration more broadly to social, cultural, and political concerns. RICHARD BADENHAUSEN is Professor and Kim T. Adamson Chair at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he also directs the Honors Program. He has previously taught at Marshall University. His essays on Eliot have appeared in several books and journals, most recently in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy Gish (Cambridge, 2004). This is his first book.

T. S. ELIOT AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION RICHARD BADENHAUSEN

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521841238 © Richard Badenhausen 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format - -

---- eBook (EBL) --- eBook (EBL)

- -

---- hardback --- hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

‘‘No writer is completely self-sufficient’’ T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ (1923)

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

List of abbreviations

x

Introduction – Reaching the stillness of music

1

1 ‘‘Speaking as ourselves’’: Authorship, impersonality, and the creative process in the early essays

27

2 A conversation about ‘‘the longest poem in the English langwidge’’: Pound, Eliot, and The Waste Land

62

3 ‘‘Helping the poets . . . write for the theatre’’: The transitional essays on collaboration, community, and drama

111

4 A dramatist and his midwives: Eliot’s collaborations in the theatre 142 5 The Possum and the ‘‘creating critick’’: Eliot’s collaboration with John Hayward

165

Conclusion – Placing collaboration in perspective: Voice and influence in the late essays

213

Notes

224

Index

249

vii

Acknowledgments

This project has had many collaborators. I am grateful to Mrs. T. S. Eliot for her assistance during the writing of this book, and for her permission to examine and quote from unpublished writings. Quotations from the work of T. S. Eliot are the copyright of the Eliot Estate and Faber & Faber, and are included with their permission. Publication of a few of these items is also by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I would like to thank the following people who, during the research for this book, responded graciously to queries, offered illuminating suggestions, or helped secure materials: John Bodley, Jewel Spears Brooker, Ronald Bush, Michael Coyle, Greg Foster, Lyndall Gordon, William Harmon, Victor Li, Jim Loucks, Randy Malamud, William Matchett, James Miller, Christopher Ricks, Ronald Schuchard, Michael Stevens, and Michael Wood. I am grateful to the staffs of numerous libraries for assistance. They include Jacqueline Cox and Rosalind Moad at the Modern Archive Center at King’s College, Cambridge; Colin Harris and the staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Henri Bourneuf, Head Reference Librarian, Harvard College Library; Patrice Donoghue, Assistant Archivist, Harvard University Archives; Katie Dobson at the Tate Picture Library, and librarians at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the British Library, Ohio State University, Ohio University, Utah State University, University of Virginia, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. For their creativity in securing essential documents, I am especially grateful to the librarians at Marshall University, especially Tim Balsch and his staff, and at Westminster College, especially David Hales, Jerry Jensen, and their staffs. Friends, colleagues, and mentors have been instrumental in the evolution of this book. I want to acknowledge Susan Cerasano, who first showed me how to write about literature, and George Bornstein, who first taught me how to read Eliot and demonstrated through his stellar example how to balance the lives of teaching and scholarship. I would also like to thank viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Steve Haslam for help with French editions of Eliot’s poetry, Charles Lloyd for his assistance with classical allusions, Ed Taft for his rich commentaries on Shakespeare, and especially Lee Erickson, who read entire drafts at various stages and whose insightful commentary helped make this book possible. Administrators at my previous institution, Art Stringer, Joan Mead, Sara Denman, and Leonard Deutsch, helped arrange release time and financial support at key moments. Administrators at my current institution, especially Mary Jane Chase, Cid Seidelman, and Steve Baar, have been especially supportive. I have also benefited from the assistance of my colleagues Peter Goldman and Jeff McCarthy, who strengthened the introduction. As usual, Michele Schiavone has made many improvements to my phrasing and caught many errors that I would have otherwise missed. My research assistant, Heather Brown, did a marvelous job helping prepare the manuscript for publication. I am grateful to Ray Ryan, my editor at Cambridge, for his patience and perseverance in shepherding this project forward, and to the press’s anonymous reader, whose astute suggestions helped give focus and shape to the book. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my wonderful family: my parents, Richard and Margot, who always stressed the importance of language and literature; my children, Will and Liza, whose presence gives me joy every day; and Katherine, my first and last collaborator in all things great and small. I dedicate this book to them.

Abbreviations

ASG CC CFQ CPP ENL IMH L L1 LE LM1 LM2 MP OPP SE SL

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934) T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harvest, 1968) Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1978) The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1985) Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988) T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996) The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) F. M. [Vivien Eliot], ‘‘ Letters of the Moment – 1, ’’ The Criterion 2 (1924) F. M. [Vivien Eliot], ‘‘ Letters of the Moment – 2, ’’ The Criterion 2 (1924) E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (1957; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1984) T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn. rev. (1951; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1980) The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) x

List of abbreviations SW TCC TWLF UPUC

xi

T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 7th edn. rev. (London: Methuen, 1957) T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965) T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harvest, 1971) T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1980)

INTRODUCTION

Reaching the stillness of music

This book identifies collaboration as a life-long operating procedure in T. S. Eliot’s theory and practice, and it also illustrates the various ways he resisted that same assistance. Eliot’s reflections upon this complicated process can be teased out of one of his poetic meditations written in 1935, the same year he visited the gardens of Burnt Norton with Emily Hale. Although ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ now appears as the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets, the poem originally stood very much on its own. It turned up as the concluding piece in Collected Poems 1909–1935 and only began to be seen by its author as the opening of a series during the war, when he started composing additional quartets. Consequently, ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ should not necessarily be read as a forward-looking poem that launches themes, images, ideas, and emotions that eventually surface in those subsequent quartets. Instead, it can be understood more accurately as a summary of Eliot’s past experiences and the effects of those memories upon the presentday speaker. After offering a fairly dense, philosophical discussion of time, the speaker of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ declares: Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, 1

2

T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.1

This passage describes a place in which memories of the past are present but maddeningly inaccessible due to the incessant shifting of the speaker’s perspective. Eliot imparts the frustration of that condition by seeming to orient readers in a specific place but then spinning them around at a dizzying pace. While the garden is filled with passages, doors, gates, and corners, it is a landscape that can never be mapped. We are given the illusion of a place in time, only to find that we share the speaker’s inability to fix that locale in the present. Eliot furthers the confusion through an intricate syntax that drives us forward through complex sentences before we really have time to catch our breath at the pauses created by commas, periods, and line-breaks. As he does in ‘‘Prufrock,’’ then, Eliot invites the reader to participate in the dilemma of his speaker. But unlike that early poem, where the speaker immediately announces himself in the first person singular, the speaker in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ is more comfortable hiding in anonymous pairs or groups. He sticks his head out from behind a bush only momentarily, when he announces: ‘‘I do not know.’’ He materializes alone a second time in the poem to express a similar frustration over his inability to locate place and time. Since this is clearly an individual in search of some stabilizing guidance, I would like to read this passage as an extended metaphor that depicts the complicated process of imaginative creation and positions the assistance Eliot sought and often found in collaboration as a solution to the problems raised by that activity. In fact, the passage demonstrates many of the central concerns Eliot faced when writing his poetry, that ‘‘intolerable wrestle’’ with language. They include questions about how to access memory; how to fix those moments in a phrase; how to give order to the fragments that emerge from that fixing; how language is received; and how collaborators can assist in bringing the process to a successful close. When Eliot writes that ‘‘My words echo / Thus, in your mind,’’ he forces our attention back to the previous sentence through the confusing adverb that implies we have just received an explanation of how it is that the words of the speaker can echo in the mind of another, whether he be an unidentified companion, a version of the speaker, or the reader. But the


3

preceding sentence does not really head toward that elucidation. In fact, it complicates the situation by failing to identify whose specific memory is being targeted in this passage and refusing to clarify the relationship between the individuals that make up the ‘‘we.’’ This passage can be read as an account of the collective memory Eliot and Hale shared of their visit to the gardens of Burnt Norton and of intimate time spent together during the previous two years. The door not opened was an offer of marriage to Hale, who had been confident enough about Eliot’s intentions that she took a year’s leave of absence from her teaching post at Scripp’s College with no assurance of renewed employment when she returned. Though separated from his first wife at the time, Eliot never did follow through with a commitment to Hale and chose instead to continue in that disastrous marriage until Vivien Eliot’s death in 1947. The rose, a symbol of love, remained frustratingly and perpetually out of reach. Another possibility is that the speaker is addressing former versions of himself. The dominant emotion of the passage is regret of a very personal nature. Thus the reader is not implicated in the second and third lines – ‘‘we did not take . . . we never opened’’ – but only in the fifth line: ‘‘in your mind.’’ And the possessive pronoun of that fifth line still accommodates the versions of the speaker’s previous selves: he is now addressing both the reader and those earlier identities. But these important transitional lines also operate on another level. The phrase at line fourteen of the poem, ‘‘Into the rose-garden,’’ concludes a set piece written originally for the Second Priest in Murder in the Cathedral. As often happened with Eliot’s poetry, this passage was cast aside from an earlier effort and became a foundation for ‘‘Burnt Norton.’’ Thus the speaker’s referencing of ‘‘my words’’ points very specifically to Eliot’s poetry written in a different time and place, and introduces the problem of language as a central theme that will continue to be a focal point for later quartets. This topic is especially apropos at a time when Eliot thought that he was unable to write non-dramatic poetry – what he called ‘‘real poetry’’ – any longer, for it was a period, he confessed, when he thought that ‘‘pure unapplied poetry was in the past,’’ until the discarded fragments that had ‘‘stayed in [his] mind’’ eventually helped initiate the shaping of a new poem.2 What had seemed like a dead end in Murder in the Cathedral suddenly provided a path into ‘‘Burnt Norton.’’ At this point in the poem, we have Eliot literally pausing to reflect upon earlier work. He constructs a spectral version of a former authorial self who addresses a present writer faced with the problem of beginning a poem: ‘‘I give you these words written previously and they are now echoing in

4

T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration

your mind.’’ The curious break that occurs at the half-line after ‘‘mind’’ signals a response from a different speaker. In this case, the auditor is the present self, who says: ‘‘But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know.’’ The lack of punctuation indicates that these are the stray thoughts of a mind deep in reflection. The fragmentary phrases unfold as the writer attempts to make sense of the echoes before him. What is the purpose, asks the writer, of considering such echoic images? Is it worth investigating the experiences of an earlier occasion that have been preserved in memory as a keepsake, that of rose-leaves taken from the garden and left undisturbed for a long time? Why stir up the protective blanket of dust that coated these images? Why risk the pain that will inevitably accompany the task of accessing these memories of a road not taken? The speaker concludes that he does not truly know the answers to these questions. These are the predicaments that haunted Eliot whenever he started a poem. The enormous uncertainty he experienced during such occasions is well-documented in Eliot’s own accounts of the creative process, which highlight the pain and torment that accompanied imaginative activity. So we have a poet in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ at the cusp of memory, wondering whether he should dive into the recesses of an imagination that will amplify that memory. He realizes other echoes are potentially available, but is not sure if it is worth following them. At this point of indecision, another presence arrives and encourages the author: ‘‘Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, / Round the corner.’’ The author ponders if he should follow the urging of the thrush, for that path leads ‘‘[i]nto our first world,’’ into the place of memory. We get the answer right away, when he decides to acknowledge ‘‘our first world. / There they were.’’ The author has chosen to pursue that which lies around the corner and he immediately starts to describe that world as he enters into it. This is a key moment in ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ for it dramatizes the authorial vacillation that so often plagued Eliot as well as the solution on which he depended: the presence of another to help encourage and even guide creative output. The mental action that delivers the speaker into the first world is initiated only after the encounter with the companion. Without the encouragement of the bird, the speaker probably chooses not to act, chooses not to disturb the dust of memory, chooses the path of Prufrockian inaction. The entry into the world of memory, however, is not immediate. The language of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ attempts to demonstrate that point by offering a blurred scene that comes into focus in the present only as we retreat further into the landscape of the past: ‘‘There they were, dignified, invisible, /


5

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, / In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air’’ (CPP 311). The speaker offers a pronoun, ‘‘they,’’ for which we have no reference and then begins to characterize ‘‘their’’ demeanor, movement, and location. This is exactly how memory functions, as we move from present to past as constructed in our existing minds. We are accessing a fiction as we are writing it, which throws into disarray the devices we associate with conventional narrative: logic, identification of character, consistency in time and place. As the speaker of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ composes his fiction, his audience interrupts once again: ‘‘And the bird called, in response to / The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery.’’ This revised Keatsian moment celebrates the ‘‘unheard music’’ that results from imaginative creation and signals the speaker that he is on a proper course in his quest to write his memory. In ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’’ the speaker gives voice to the silent music depicted on the urn; here, Eliot is redeploying and refining this imaginative process. The ‘‘hidden’’ music is neither ‘‘unheard’’ nor inaccessible to the bird, since it responds to that noise. Rather, that music – the echoes buried further in the shrubbery of memory – is still unattainable by the speaker at this point. But it exists in the present and is capable of being detected through memory; and the shift in the passage from the initial static ‘‘bowl of rose-leaves’’ to vibrant ‘‘roses’’ indicates clearly that we have entered the realm of recollection. Yet the speaker, like a frustrated Alice wandering through the confusing landscape of her imagination, has yet to open the door to that moment. The bird also responds to another image as yet inaccessible to the speaker: ‘‘the unseen eyebeam crossed.’’ This allusion to Donne’s ‘‘The Extasie,’’ in which lovers are joined in a series of metaphors demonstrating perfect union, establishes idealized love as a remembered condition the speaker hopes to achieve. Currently, he can only guess at its existence, because the roses in the garden ‘‘[h]ad the look of flowers that are looked at.’’ The speaker cannot shift the perspective to the lovers in the foreground of memory, for only the flowers are currently in focus. Then, he comments on this place in time: ‘‘There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.’’ Although the ambiguous ‘‘they’’ returns, surely it refers here to memories accepted by the speaker and memories that accept the presence of the speaker into their past. Then why ‘‘our’’? Are they the guests of Eliot and Hale? Guests of two versions of Eliot? Or of Eliot and his companion, in this case a bird? While the answer is that all these possibilities are concurrently present, I would like to emphasize the final one. Eliot tended to view the writing process as one that could succeed only through the presence of a

6


companion, since he found the poetic material generated by his imagination unwieldy and, at times, overwhelming. He believed that the assistance of a collaborator could help fix experience in some definite form and bring the creative act to a close. When the final movement of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ begins with the image of words and music moving in time, the speaker is looking outside himself for an agent that will help stabilize memory. He surmises that ‘‘Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness,’’ and he equates this condition to ‘‘a Chinese jar still / Mov[ing] perpetually in its stillness’’ (CPP 175). According to ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ the writing process is a dangerous one in which words break under the pressure of creativity, language fails to remain still, and the voices of hostile auditors shriek, scold, mock, or, worst of all, ignore. The transcendent result occurs as the poem moves to its conclusion: ‘‘Sudden in a shaft of sunlight / Even while the dust moves / There rises the hidden laughter.’’ Following the emergence of sound, its physical source comes into focus: ‘‘children in the foliage / Quick now, here, now, always’’ (176). Here, the speaker has finally peeled away the veil that obscures a clear view into memory and the light of that past pours into his consciousness. He realizes that in disturbing the dust on the bowl of rose-leaves he has made the proper choice, for he has been rewarded with epiphanic images of the first world. The redemptive laughter of the children – the formerly unheard music – materializes from behind the shrubbery and is fully available to the speaker at last. It is the culmination of the quest begun at the start of the poem, when the speaker wonders whether or not it is worth the risk of following these echoes. At this moment of fulfillment, the bird returns. At one with the speaker, to the point that it is not even identified, the bird repeats its earlier encouragement to the speaker–author: ‘‘Quick.’’ Hurry up and capture this moment, it urges. The memory you have experienced in the present time and place must be written down, it tells the speaker. Only then will you, I, and others be able to recover this scene ‘‘always’’ through the printed word. Only then will time present be time future. The problem with this highly stylized and personal version of artistic collaboration is that it remained very much an unattainable ideal for Eliot. Written after Eliot had been publishing poetry for twenty years, poetry that often reflected the help of others, the extended metaphor in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ draws up a vision of creation in which a receptive speaker–poet depends on the assistance of sympathetic companions to help access memory, initiate creation, provide stability, and facilitate a poem’s completion. Yet the poem actually distorts, or even recasts, the way in which


7

Eliot’s collaborative arrangements operated in practice. In an assortment of prose essays, Eliot attempts a similar move, refashioning collaboration into a simple, clean, mutually beneficial cooperation between equals that has as its goal the generation of a lasting art. The realities of Eliot’s collaborative alliances were much more complicated, messy, and varied, depending on the personalities involved. Despite the fact that Eliot enjoyed using his prose to wax poetic about the many advantages of productive unions among peers, his own collaborations tended to develop along hierarchical lines. While there is an apt musical metaphor that captures the nature of Eliot’s collaboration, it is not the one he proposes in ‘‘Burnt Norton.’’ Rather, a more appropriate model would be that of a conductor controlling a highly talented orchestra made up of fellow artists with a variety of different skills and a combustible set of neuroses, professional biases, and complicated personal attachments. To make matters more difficult, all of the collaborators are focused on the man in charge, who is himself unusually tentative about fully embracing positions of authority, so much so that many of the prose documents erect models of collaboration that highlight the eliding of authority as one of their primary characteristics. Accordingly, Eliot’s attitudes towards collaboration typically wavered between an enthusiastic attraction to fanciful, idealized constructions of the practice – in which the dominant features are a passive artist who struggles to take responsibility for artistic creation and a cooperative collaborator who is able to offer assertive assistance – and a much more ambivalent posture, where Eliot is loath to acknowledge publicly the assistance of others, even though privately there seems an almost pathological dependence on collaborators. While this study locates collaboration as a central preoccupation of T. S. Eliot’s critical and creative programs, it also demonstrates how difficult it was for the poet to digest the assistance of others on his work. Eliot sought to suppress the personal in his own work, a move collaboration helped enact through the introduction of alternative voices. Yet he also possessed a deep attraction to authority, which necessitated the aggressive exercising of the individual will. My reading shows that collaboration informed the writer’s approach to a wide range of subjects, including audience, tradition, influence, translation, modernism, and the creative process, among others, and that while collaboration became his primary compositional strategy from the early poetry through his final play, Eliot also struggled to arrive at a coherent, comfortable accounting of how that collaboration ultimately took place. I am defining ‘‘collaboration’’ in the broadest possible manner, so as to explore its many different resonances in Eliot’s work. I employ the

8


word in its most literal sense – along the lines of Jack Stillinger’s key discussion of ‘‘situations where someone other than the nominal author is essentially and inextricably a part of the authorship’’3 – in examining Eliot texts that partly owe their existence to collaborators such as Ezra Pound, Vivien Eliot, E. Martin Browne, Frank Morley, John Hayward, Geoffrey Faber, Herbert Read, Sydney Schiff, and Mary Hutchinson, among others. But I have also expanded the scope of what it means to collaborate (partly because the poet himself followed this route) so that it encompasses Eliot’s collaboration with his readers, dramatic audiences, and even past writers, which is a stance that extends beyond even M. Thomas Inge’s recent fairly broad definition: ‘‘Anytime another hand enters into an effort, a kind of collaboration occurs.’’4 Eliot himself, for example, repeatedly configured literary influence as collaboration, most famously in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’’ There Eliot argues that influence does not operate only in one direction but that a reciprocity exists between dead writer and practicing artist, a relationship that readjusts past and present texts and the entire line of literary tradition. He sought to establish a union with his audience as a theoretical ideal in early essays like ‘‘Marie Lloyd’’ and then endeavored to put that theory into practice in his poetry, especially after he started to write for the stage, though as I have just noted, the enactment of these idealized versions of collaboration was much less tidy than Eliot’s prose accounts suggest. Similarly, I have situated allusion in Eliot’s work within this collaborative framework, and treat the many allusive echoes in the poetry as part of a larger conversational alliance Eliot attempted to set up with past collaborators. As in the example from ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ submission to an external authority (in this case previous texts and their multiple voices) helped Eliot manage the creative process and give shape to imagined and remembered material. In fact, Eliot’s persistent search for external frameworks – from the use of epigraphs to position the reception of poems, to notes that try to contextualize poetry in various symbolic and mythic frameworks, to the use of dramatic monologues that filter personal experience through the mask of a fictionalized speaker – has at its core a need to collaborate with other agents in the belief that they can provide the path to the still moment. While this relaxed definition of collaboration accommodates a host of extratextual presences as collaborators, charting a pattern of such associations will show Eliot’s consistent interest in and dependence on collaborative solutions to writing problems in all of his critical and creative work. Eliot’s critical prose suggests he was extremely attuned to collaboration as a creative procedure in the work of others: the word ‘‘collaboration’’


9

appears in over twenty different essays, with about half of those references to be found in his discussion of Renaissance dramatists. Even more prevalent in Eliot’s criticism is a vocabulary that incessantly evokes, suggests, or depends on collaborative activity, for that lexicon is distinguished by repeated uses of words like ‘‘amalgamate,’’ ‘‘assimilate,’’ ‘‘balance,’’ ‘‘collective,’’ ‘‘collocation,’’ ‘‘combination,’’ ‘‘composite,’’ ‘‘compound,’’ ‘‘converge,’’ ‘‘cooperate,’’ ‘‘doubleness,’’ ‘‘harmonize,’’ ‘‘mixture,’’ ‘‘reciprocal,’’ ‘‘reconciliation,’’ ‘‘syncretism,’’ ‘‘synthesis,’’ and ‘‘union.’’ Eliot’s favorite expression marking this process is ‘‘fusion,’’ which surfaces remarkably in over thirty separate essays. This suggests Eliot was particularly preoccupied with the notion of exploring the productive unification of distinct elements and he tended to view the creative process in terms that located some type of collaboration as its fundamental, guiding principle. Whether he is discussing the make-up of the poet’s mind in terms of a chemical analogy in which two gases mix in a productive combination or examining the rejuvenating union of a translator’s mind with that of the original artist, Eliot assumes that distinct entities must come together for creation to occur. Because Eliot was baptized into the modernist movement by Pound, who was instrumental in initiating various collective literary enterprises, Eliot saw early on the advantages of collaboration both in the production and marketing of literary works. The literary scene of the 1910s, into which Eliot plunged as an unproven writer, privileged the group over the individual. Works were distributed via collective vehicles like the anthology and the little magazine, or assigned to larger movements that outlined their artistic programs in strongly worded manifestos. But Pound and Eliot differed in their approach to such alliances. While Pound favored very public partnerships, Eliot adopted more private arrangements: a small, collaborative circle with himself at the middle. While his prose criticism often lauded the many benefits of overt collaboration, Eliot preferred to orchestrate from behind closed doors, where he could exert much more control and also exit collaborative relationships much more quietly and discreetly, especially when they no longer served his purposes. This practice gave him the security to set the tenor of the critical debate and even to engage its members in readings of his work-in-progress, as long as those auditors had already been sanctioned by Eliot as qualified readers according to his strict criteria. A letter of 15 April 1915 from Eliot to Pound – a response to Pound’s request that Eliot join one of his collective schemes – exhibits these dual impulses. Eliot replies cautiously, turning over the implications in his mind: ‘‘How much is implied by the word Alliance? Is the alliance anything more than for the purposes of the manifesto? Of course I don’t

10


know the work of any of these men myself, but that doesn’t matter. But I should like to know in what way this is to be promulgated and how followed up.’’5 That circumspection informed one of Eliot’s standard literary rules, which was never to contribute to the first issue of a new journal. It made better sense, he thought, to pause in order to see with what kind of group he would be associated.6 Eliot did not seek such public literary collaborations until his editing of The Criterion, where he was firmly in charge. Importantly, Eliot waited until 1922 (when his critical and artistic authority was somewhat more assured), before he decided to stand at the forefront of a project that sought to establish a collaborative conversation among the most influential writers and thinkers in Europe. Eliot recognized that alliances afforded by the anthology best served the purposes and desires of younger poets, for the genre gave them a better chance of getting into print, positioned them in such a way so as to allow reviewers to write about them collectively, and made their works ultimately easier to interpret and distribute. This was part of the brilliance of Harold Monro’s marketing of the Georgian poets and the effect was not lost on Eliot, when he observed in ‘‘John Marston’’ (1934) that the ‘‘minor poet who hitches his skiff astern of the great galleon has a better chance of survival than the minor poet who chooses to paddle by himself.’’7 Eliot himself took advantage of such opportunities, most notably in Pound’s The Catholic Anthology (1915). In a review of the volume, Conrad Aiken writes that ‘‘Prufrock’’ and ‘‘Portrait of a Lady’’ were ‘‘the crystallization of the efforts of the other contributors,’’ and ‘‘the logical outcome of such unfinished, though often brilliant work, as that of Messrs. Masters, Bodenheim, Pound, and Rodker.’’8 Nevertheless, Eliot was in search of a broader reputation than that afforded by anthologies, and he would soon caution accomplished poets against depending too much on such volumes. Ultimately, one could only judge the greatness of a writer by the ‘‘whole’’ of his work and that necessitated the distinguishing of writers from each other based on their singular achievements. In other words, despite the advantages of bringing together different writers under a single umbrella, public collaboration could forestall evaluations of individual literary worth. When Pound first met Eliot in 1914, the young Harvard graduate student was ripe for falling under the influence of his fellow American expatriate. Away from his family, friends, and professors, Eliot stood on the periphery of unfamiliar national and vocational environments. This first major collaboration satisfied Eliot’s need for a mentor in England and started to pay significant benefits the following year, when Pound began to place some of the poems that would eventually appear in the Prufrock


11

volume. Eliot’s indecision about whether to pursue an academic livelihood or the more unpredictable creative path and whether to return to America or remain a refugee in Europe made him a perfect candidate to be adopted by the strong-willed Pound. Since Eliot usually looked outside himself for validation, he found it hard to appreciate personal accomplishment on his own. Pound’s promotion of Eliot’s work to fellow writers, to editors of journals, and even to Eliot’s family, helped give Eliot some confidence during a transitional time in his life. But in other respects, like many of Eliot’s collaborative relationships, the one with Pound remained strongest only when it served Eliot’s immediate emotional, professional, and artistic needs. At this early point in his career, Eliot depended on Pound’s assistance and the young poet had the necessary skills and raw poetic material to pique his influential elder’s interest. By the 1930s, though, the tables turned, with Eliot in the position of greater influence, publishing Pound’s poetry and offering generous payments for his Criterion contributions. While the two remained friendly, Pound disappeared as a central collaborator in Eliot’s later work. Collaboration helped stem the isolation that Eliot encountered as an artist. Although he actively sought the solitary life, Eliot was still preoccupied about the effects on his psyche and art. The word ‘‘alone,’’ for example, appears almost 100 times in the five major dramas and many of their principal characters either remove themselves from society in one way or another or struggle with the implications of being locked up in a private prison of the self. Eliot tended to fear becoming too isolated and out of touch with the culture around him. He was also a highly social individual who thrived on interaction with friends. Collaborators could step in to provide companionship at key stages of the creative process, especially when Eliot agonized about the value of his current project or suffered one of his frequent bouts of writer’s block. In many respects, the most important role played by collaborators was to provide emotional support (often in the guise of constructive criticism) at a time when Eliot was most uncertain about the direction of a particular project. The dry periods that surfaced periodically not only limited Eliot’s creative output, but made the process frequently torturous and caused him to question his talents. In the early 1930s, for instance, he found himself ‘‘at a moment when I seemed to myself to have exhausted my meagre poetic gifts.’’9 Elsewhere he uses bodily analogies to illustrate the problem, complaining to Conrad Aiken in 1914 that he is ‘‘constipated intellectually’’ and that he ‘‘writhe[s] in impotence’’ (L1 42, 58). The condition became so severe that at one point Eliot’s masseuse told him of a dream in which Blake visited

12


her specifically to tell Eliot that he needed to write more.10 He also was encouraged by various circumstances to associate the act of writing with actual sickness. The doctors Eliot consulted during his breakdown in the fall of 1921, for example, forbade him from working on poetry, criticism, or even personal letters during his rest cure. While he could joke about these difficulties, as when he notified Mary Hutchinson that the only writing he had accomplished recently was signing his name to leases and legal agreements (409), they depressed Eliot desperately. Under such conditions, when ‘‘[a]ll poetry is difficult, almost impossible, to write,’’ Eliot could turn to collaborators to help get him through the obstruction and deliver him back into that ‘‘first world’’ where he could once again access the ‘‘unheard music’’ previously obscured.11 Collaboration also ostensibly allowed Eliot to obscure the role of personal emotion in poetic creation by turning the focus outside of himself during the production of poetry. Following the lead of constructions of artistic production in his prose, the approach provided Eliot with another entity on which to concentrate and had the liberating effect of turning his attention away from his own struggles with burdensome imaginative material toward a collaborator’s critical response to that material. So when John Hayward wrote extensive comments to a draft of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ it gave Eliot a chance to leave behind worries about his ‘‘shabby equipment always deteriorating’’ (CPP 182) and assert himself within a collaborative conversation in a confident critical voice that he always found more comforting. Also, because Eliot viewed the creative process as one of ordering diverse materials written over time, he was especially receptive to the suggestions of collaborators. Composing and staging dramas, for example, became, on one level, an exercise in arranging multiple elements. He believed the task of creation for the poet was to discern the ‘‘inert embryo . . . germinating in him . . . [even though] he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order’’ (OPP 97). Since they possessed the perspective provided by distance, collaborators were especially welcome to step in and help facilitate that organizational process. Because Eliot tended to compose in fragments, he was forever looking beyond the boundaries of his unfinished texts for solutions that would help complete and order the chaotic poetic scraps. This is why Eliot seems so often to impose structures upon his work late in the process of writing. Eliot’s creative methodology calls into question the very idea of authorial originality because he chose to reconfigure the act of composition as one of discovery and ordering rather than one of imaginative invention. In


13

descriptions of the creative process, then, Eliot typically locates the writer in a passive position waiting for assistance. For Eliot, the success of the writing project is contingent upon the poet’s ability to curb his personality to allow space for the collaborator. In fact, Eliot periodically held up as a test of greatness the ability of an artist to suppress the personal, as when he argued that ‘‘in the greatest poetry there is always a hint of something . . . impersonal, something in relation to which the author has been no more than the passive (if not always pure) medium.’’ This leads to a decoupling of the author and his text: ‘‘The greater the verse, the less it seems to belong to the individual man who wrote it.’’12 Eliot’s well-known tendency to borrow from past texts and splice those lines into his poetry also reveals a proclivity for a collaborative creation that destabilizes the traditional autonomy of the author. Unwilling to allow the assertion of a strong, authorial voice within his texts, Eliot made room for a variety of other voices through quotation and allusion. Yet at the same time, he would be sufficiently uncomfortable retrospectively about the ceding of control that he would almost overcompensate by exerting excessive influence over the reception of his texts, their republication in other editions, and their appearance in abbreviated forms when others sought to quote from them. The suppression of personality expressed itself in numerous ways, most prominently in Eliot’s habit of adopting different poses through his life. Eliot’s many experiments with costumes, nicknames, pseudonyms, accents, and handwriting styles suggest a personality obsessed with disguising identity. Collaboration allowed him to continue those investigations by playing different roles that depended on the special circumstances of each partnership, and it gave him a measure of control over those conditions that he did not feel over the creative process itself: if he could not completely make sense of his poetic material, he could at least choreograph the circumstances under which it would be addressed. But such invented personae also illustrate Eliot’s considerable uncertainty over collaboration and they ironically afforded him a measure of protection when he needed to abandon a relationship that no longer served his purposes or with which he was suddenly uncomfortable. Thus Eliot played the eager, unknown writer to Pound’s experienced literary operator, though he started to distance himself from Pound as his career developed. He hid out as the famous, reclusive writer living under the protection of a physically disabled, gifted intellectual, John Hayward, who himself compliantly acted as the subordinate partner who knew his place. Yet Eliot would abruptly desert Hayward the day after the former’s second marriage. Even Eliot’s

14


embracement in the middle of his career of an overtly devotional life allowed him to be ‘‘at the same time withdrawn and sociable,’’ which was his own characterization of Evelyn Underhill, editor of various editions of mystical texts and author of Mysticism, a text Eliot had read at Harvard.13 These collaborators engaged in a kind of performance that took shape largely according to how Eliot wanted to operate within those relationships and as a result of the potential emotional benefits that each party might take away from them. Their discussions of individual texts and decisions about those texts were ultimately influenced by those particular roles and personal desires. Eliot’s choice of epigraphs to The Waste Land, for example, ignored his own wishes and accepted Pound’s rather obscure suggestion of Petronius because he believed that Pound had more expertise in properly contextualizing a long poem through its epigraph, even though the first option reflected more accurately Eliot’s original aspirations for the poem. At this point in his career Eliot is still coming of age, to borrow Helen Vendler’s phrase, and he is absorbed by the search for a lasting style that ‘‘parallels, on the aesthetic plane, the individual’s psychological search for identity.’’14 Collaboration both complicated and assisted with that quest. Concessions made by Eliot on The Waste Land resulted directly from that submissive pose he had adopted within this relationship, a position that grew out of his ambitions for himself and his work. Likewise, Pound’s role within the relationship (and his effect upon the poem) was informed by a strong thirst to tie himself to young, developing writers whose later success he could potentially take credit for. In some respects, what evolves out of these collaborations is a kind of poetics of co-dependency in which participants require the presence of each other to advance their own private agendas and also satisfy emotional needs. The pressures of those needs, however, become so great that the relationships inevitably deteriorate and Eliot himself has difficulty determining retrospectively his own standing in relation to the affiliation. For example, despite Pound’s massive influence upon the final version of The Waste Land, Eliot was anxious enough with the nature of the collaboration that he struggled for three years to sort out a way to acknowledge openly the assistance. A public dedication finally turned up in a 1925 edition of the poem. Recognizing the collaborative element in Eliot’s life and work challenges some long-held assumptions about the writer. It offers a corrective to the image of ‘‘Great Tom,’’ the inaccessible, Nobel Prize-winning Anglican, the stuffy, threatening, ever-present shadow responsible for so much animus from foes and friends alike, a mythic figure that Eliot is essentially to blame for and which results partly from his periodic attempts to sort out his place


15

in collaborative relationships by erasing others retrospectively from the record of those alliances. Such renderings commonly hold up Eliot as solitary and isolated, a lone poetic deity among mere mortals.15 The cult of the author that grew up around him only helped inflate this effect, to the point that Eliot had almost to go into hiding from the 1930s onwards. In his September 1965 memorial address at East Coker, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis pointed out that Eliot’s fame rivaled that of the Beatles and that he had to respond by hiding his address, keeping his number out of the phonebook, and engaging in a series of defensive maneuvers to thwart a crowd of admirers that incessantly pressed him for attention.16 If this portrait strikes today’s reader as exaggerated, it might help to recall occasions like the rehearsal for The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival where over 100 representatives of the press turned up to question Eliot. By 1958, that number had swelled to 300 for a press conference following The Elder Statesman.17 Strangely, the image of this Anglo-American poet as solitary artist refuses to die, in spite of the existence of much evidence demonstrating Eliot’s collaborative activities. Eliot continues to appear in most scholarly studies as a kind of ur-modernist, isolated, removed, and difficult. Others have co-opted this inflated figure to construct straw men portraits of Eliot in less generous ways. Since many critics who attack Eliot’s work tend to do so by personifying it, a reevaluation of the presence of others in that body of writing is important because it will challenge such readings that restrict themselves to locating a single Eliotic voice in the poetry and show just how ambivalent Eliot himself was about adopting authoritative postures. It is one of the goals of this study to lay bare some of those complications by examining the omnipresence of collaborative voices in Eliot’s texts. This book also sheds light on the motivation behind some of Eliot’s career decisions and critical positions. Eliot’s mid-life move to the stage, for example, makes perfect sense when set against the background of collaborating with his audience and his increasing interest in using art to advance an ideal of a communal society. When he first began writing, Eliot was confronted with what he saw as an increasingly heterogeneous and chaotic culture that he eventually attributed to liberalism, individualism, and a breakdown in social customs. All of these pressures threatened community, order, and tradition, which surface as ideals in Eliot’s philosophy. He responded much like Milton, by creating in poems like The Waste Land an aesthetic of difficulty that endeavored to unite readers able to master the necessary background and training to process challenging material within a privileged circle of learning. But that proved ultimately dissatisfying, so

16


Eliot explored various alternative options, most of which turned on idealizing and broadening his audience, and searching for ways to tap the potential ability of its members to come together under the rubric of common ideas that he would eventually connect to a larger socio-religious program. This occurred when he identified the performance of the musichall entertainer Marie Lloyd as a model for the collaboration that might take place between an audience and performer; when he sought to restore cultural homogeneity through a shared national religion; and most notably, when he settled upon drama as the genre that could bring together disparate groups in a communal process that would concurrently offer intellectual and emotional fulfillment. That unifying element of drama was particularly pronounced in early plays like The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, which took on religious subject matters and positioned their audiences as congregations participating in a collective spiritual exercise. It encouraged Eliot both to conflate theatre and religious ritual and to understand the activities as collaborative exercises, even though Anglican services emphasize the ceremony itself over the individual and don’t ask for collaboration as much as assent. In the case of religious rites, one is submitting to the authority of the church in a way that does not happen in a theatre performance, which is beholden to the spectator for approval or disapproval. The two forms seek to establish community through very different means and with very different attitudes toward passivity and authority; yet Eliot typically seeks to gloss over these differences in his prose, which always emphasizes the potential for collaboration with an audience, because he was so taken by the possible power of drama to reinstate a lost cultural unity. This entry into the new genre happens to coincide with Eliot’s increasing interest in cultural criticism. In fact, his construction over the years in prose criticism of idealized versions of collaboration helped Eliot think in terms of a nation achieving consensus over a set of appropriate values like tradition, order, community, security, social stability, moral values, and personal responsibility. But that idealization also created a blind spot for Eliot during this project, which was ultimately (and inevitably) doomed to fail. Eliot believed the institution of such shared values could stem the cultural disintegration taking place around him and that a collaborative approach, which gave everyone a stake in the project, would provide enough incentive for a broad populace to participate in and through his artistic experiments. Yet at its roots, Eliot’s collaboration often meant the imposition of order upon others, for it had at its heart a presumption of man as a fallen creature. The appropriate response to such a condition was


17

articulated in 1912 by T. E. Hulme, an important influence upon Eliot’s thinking, who wrote: ‘‘The future condition of man, then, will always be one of struggle and limitation. The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy . . . Nothing is bad in itself except disorder; all that is put in order in a hierarchy is good.’’18 Collaboration functioned as an operating principle, but it did so within rather strict guidelines established by Eliot that tended to limit the potential choices individuals could make. The theme of collaboration also helps us better understand Eliot’s complicated attitude toward Romanticism, for we can posit an evolution in which his later appreciation of Romantic writers and their tenets accords with his concurrent attempts to communicate and collaborate with as broad an audience as possible. Likewise, a focus on collaborative strategies helps us link the early and late work (much more coherently than is typically done) through Eliot’s life-long preoccupation with the creative process and reception theory. Developments in theoretical approaches from Barthes and Foucault onwards calling into question the very notion of authorship, evolutions in editorial theory responsible for reevaluating the nature of the ‘‘text,’’ and the increasing availability of new materials that help divulge Eliot’s collaborative practices, all suggest the time has come to modify our understanding of this key modernist. In fact, attending to the collaborative impulse in Eliot shows that his complex and dynamic understanding of authorship lines up, to a surprising degree, with some of the positions advanced later by Barthes and Foucault, who tend to dissolve the author into a structure of discourse(s), though it is ironic, perhaps, that I have taken the seemingly antithetical biographical path to expose some of these similarities. Barthes’s conclusion to ‘‘The Death of the Author’’ that ‘‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’’ and his notion that ‘‘giv[ing] a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’’ has implications for my reading of Eliot.19 Not only does collaboration implicitly devalue the traditional view of authorship by suggesting the creative moment can be dispersed beyond the confines of a single imagination, but it opens up possibilities for readerly collaboration by making the boundaries of the text more porous. It finally acknowledges that audiences can similarly shape meaning in a text even after it departs from the hands of its initial author(s). Barthes’s discussion of writing as the ‘‘neutral, composite, oblique space’’ where the individual subject evaporates is pertinent to my examination of Eliot’s struggle with identity; his distinction between performance and genius helps foreground my positioning of Eliot in the role of ‘‘conductor’’

18


of a performative, collaborative exchange; and his identification of the reader as the locus or field within which writing is inscribed sets up effectively my emphasis on the reader and audience in the second half of the book.20 Also, Foucault’s extension of Barthes’s concepts – especially his location of the author as a product or function of the writing – offers an interesting gloss on the tension between passivity and authority that so often surfaces in Eliot.21 In other words, Eliot spent much of his career struggling to resolve two theoretical modes of authorship that are necessarily in conflict, and Foucault’s model helps explain Eliot’s oft-stated fear of being ‘‘possessed’’ by the writing process, a sentiment that has either puzzled critics or been deciphered via psychological readings. Barthes sought to erase the author-as-authority and thus collapse the boundaries of meanings constructed by that solitary figure in arguing that ‘‘[w]e know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author–God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.’’ The result is that ‘‘the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.’’22 He reverses Romantic conceptions of creativity by assaulting notions of invention and originality and locating the source of material outside the author rather than within the imagination. Foucault’s rendering of these questions foregrounds the issue of power in the relationship between author and reader, calling for an overthrow of traditional constructions of the author as a privileged source of signification. Like Barthes, he attacks Romantic notions of genius as ultimately conservative because they restrict access to the text and limit the potential number of meanings associated with that text. The textual and biographical scholarship of the past thirty years on Eliot and collaboration serves as a starting point for this critical study,23 yet I will move far beyond the limited implications of those works by contextualizing this material within the biographical details of Eliot’s life and his prose criticism and by integrating these isolated studies into a more comprehensive format that establishes Eliot’s collaboration as a life-long pattern. Eliot often discussed collaboration in his prose, but often those discussions took place obliquely, and through metaphors that serve as symbols for collaboration; therefore they don’t become completely clear until gathered together under one roof. In some respects, Eliot is benefiting from the practice of collaboration in his own work while using his prose criticism to manage complicated and ambivalent attitudes toward the activity and its many participants. The metaphors describing collaboration can sometimes


19

be elucidated only when they are set against Eliot’s actual practice of collaboration, which periodically contradicts the ideal versions assembled in the prose. Eliot’s essays are often intimately tied up with issues of collaboration because the writer habitually employed critical essays to attempt to understand a specific creative collaborative association and place it in perspective after the work generated from that collaboration appeared. A number of essays immediately following The Waste Land, for example, struggle to absorb fully the implications of Pound’s involvement by recognizing external assistance as central to creation; in effect, Eliot generalizes from his personal experience, yet he glosses over some of the key contradictions inherent in collaboration. Elsewhere, his essays seek to understand how dramatic collaboration works, in advance of trying his hand as a playwright. Recognizing the predominance of the collaboration theme thus can help explain complicated metaphors, like the ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ exchange or the chemical analogy in ‘‘Tradition,’’ that seem somewhat obscure without this context. As Lorraine York has pointed out in her own excellent investigation of the phenomenon, collaborators often reveal their writerly anxieties about the procedure in their vexed efforts to construct metaphors that accurately capture the essence of this alternative mode of production.24 My study also shows how readers benefit from openly acknowledging Eliot’s debt to collaborators. Readers might better understand the tone, structure, and language of The Waste Land, for instance, when it is presented as a poem that very much reflects Pound’s own biases as a poet and critic. We can attribute part of the success of Eliot’s dramas to the fact that Martin Browne spent much of his collaborative energy addressing structural issues in the plays and eradicating some of the obscure symbolic and mythic references that so dominate a poem like The Waste Land, for Browne sympathized with Eliot’s later goal of making serious poetry accessible and palatable to a broad audience. Anthologies of Eliot’s prose, as well as foreign editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, divulge John Hayward’s attempts to sculpt the public persona of Eliot and present his materials abroad as quintessential English texts that illustrate a great creative mind developing coherently over a long period of time. Eliot’s embracement of collaboration did not, as I have been suggesting, occur easily or without conflict. His collaborative impulse often surfaces amidst anxieties about the propitiousness of revealing oneself to others during creative alliances. The hesitancy experienced by the speaker at the beginning of ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ when he wonders whether or not to pursue the music in the rose-garden, was very vivid and ever-present in Eliot’s

20


imagination. While compelled toward such unions because they benefited his writing, Eliot labored to resolve that attraction with a life-long urge to isolate himself no matter what his circumstances. So while The Waste Land can be understood as a co-authored text whose outcome was partly determined by collaborators like Pound and Vivien Eliot, and whose existence depends in large part on allusive references to earlier authors, the poem labors at times to accept fully the presence of these multitudinous voices and even attempts to achieve some authority over them retrospectively by uniting them, at least in a prose footnote, under the single consciousness of Tiresias. An early title of the poem, ‘‘He Do the Police in Different Voices,’’ enacts this conflict by setting a remote, working-class consciousness against a named, collective, authoritarian institution, whose membership Eliot tried to master through dramatization. In tracing the hand of Eliot’s collaborators in his work, I also endorse a socially constituted view of Eliot’s works that sees a work’s meaning as completed only after its reception by an audience.25 This procedure locates meaning within the process of poetic creation, as a text travels through various networks made up of writers, editors, friends, publishers, and readers. Throughout his career Eliot willingly accepted and sought out editorial advice on his work in progress, and he actively embraced a radically destabilized text right through its delivery to a reader, who himself was periodically encouraged by Eliot to alter or generate meaning within a text. Eliot’s habit of temporarily ceding control to others, which sometimes puzzles critics, is the rule rather than the exception, since creation depended on this arrangement. Especially as his career progressed, Eliot endorsed a destabilizing of his texts in a variety of ways: in continually revising his plays in response to audience reactions; in allowing the sequence of poems that makes up Four Quartets to evolve over time through its publication in multiple versions and in a range of different forms (both singly and collectively); and in sanctioning the addition of notes written by his collaborator John Hayward to the French edition of The Waste Land, where they are interspersed among Eliot’s own notes. Eliot eventually came to regard texts as transient, volatile objects that housed performances by authors and readers uncovering meanings individual to their own needs and experiences; yet he was also at times troubled enough by the amount of freedom he had relinquished to others as a result of the theoretical position that he would overcompensate by periodically seeking to exert excessive control over a text’s presentation and reception. The very make-up of literary collaboration raises threatening questions about the nature of authorship; the various backgrounds (cultural,


21

historical, national, and literary) within which the text is grounded; and the usefulness of bringing biography to bear upon interpretation of the text.26 To better understand Eliot’s approach to the creative process it helps to move away from conventional views of authorship and towards a more fluid model that celebrates the presence of multiple voices as a norm. Such a shift helps us more readily appreciate the emphasis Eliot placed upon audience in the second half of his career, for the poet was comfortable acknowledging the reader’s ability to help shape meaning within a text. In fact, this allows me to read Four Quartets in a way that particularly implicates the reader as collaborator – through its repetition of openended questions, its concentration on the sensory moment, and its incessant addressing of an unidentified ‘‘you.’’ All function as invitations to the reader to join Eliot in rounding the corner into ‘‘our first world.’’ I have illuminated and balanced my discussion as much as possible with references to uncollected, lesser-known essays, most of them unwitting refugees that never received the call home for placement in collected editions of his criticism. I take very much to heart Ronald Schuchard’s cautionary observation that ‘‘90 percent of the essays on Eliot are written without an awareness of 90 percent of his work.’’27 In many respects, Eliot suffered from his own success in fashioning his public image through the careful cultivation of his prose in authorized, highly selected editions. I have sought to put the well-known work within the context of uncollected and unpublished material. I would like to draw a fuller picture that shows how Eliot’s attitudes towards collaboration and his actions within collaborative relationships often depended on variables like his previous relationship with the collaborator, his comfort within a particular genre, and his desire to involve the audience in the construction of meaning. Whereas Eliot played the passive student to Pound’s teacher during their work on The Waste Land, he took over the dominant role in his collaborative discussions with John Hayward. Hayward was happy to serve as the admiring acolyte, though that later relationship was girded by a sort of mutual respect and physical proximity (they shared a flat for over a decade). Although he often used his prose to laud the communal nature of drama, Eliot worried about the freedom the genre provided actors who might inject the personal into the delivery of their lines. Eliot believed he gained the upper hand in his collaboration with such actors by restraining them in verse, for he thought the poetic line forced the actor to suppress his personality and submit himself to the larger needs of the play and the audience. But this tension does not become clear until one places Eliot’s observations about the actor, made in numerous uncollected

22


essays, within the larger discussions he is having about form, drama, and collaboration. I am writing a species of biographical criticism that centers on the process of textual revision and that shows how and why Eliot’s texts have come to be in their various draft and printed states. I agree with Schuchard’s declaration that the many problems confronting the reader of Eliot can perhaps be best addressed by the biographical critic.28 The book, then, follows a chronological order that traces Eliot’s development as a poet and critic, and demonstrates how the different attitudes he held towards collaboration over the course of his career often resulted from the particular nature of the collaborative relationship in which he was currently engaged. The first chapter of this study examines Eliot’s prose criticism from the 1910s and early 1920s. Its three sections explore Eliot’s slippery public and private identities, especially his rootlessness and refusal to assert a strong sense of self in the poetry; the relationship between collaboration and tradition, impersonality, and the creative process; and the conflict between authority and collaboration that would dominate Eliot’s thinking about the topic throughout his life. The early prose constructs models of the creative process that question the notion of originality, situate the writer in a passive position, and demand the presence of another agent for writing to occur. In effect, this early body of work established conditions under which collaborative activity became the only possible recourse during Eliot’s creative efforts. Once collaboration was instilled as his predominant mode of creation, he used the later criticism to reinforce the practice and to modify some of its most threatening features by idealizing the procedure. Eliot’s literary criticism takes on a whole new meaning when we read it in light of his attempts to understand collaboration and justify his participation within the endeavor. Those discussions seem at times rooted in concerns about the role of the personal and the imagination in creation because a creative process dependent on those two features would necessarily limit collaborative possibilities by emphasizing the individual over the communal. Eliot was thus suspicious of neoRomantic constructions of the creative act that glorified the role of the solitary author and called into question secondary attempts at composition through strategies like revision. Collaboration became a way for Eliot to eradicate the personal and secure a more indirect relationship with his texts. This eliding of the personal subsequently made room, at least in theory, for collaborative partners and matched up with Eliot’s well-known, carefully cultivated habit of evasiveness, detachment, and withdrawal, qualities that his own early poetic speakers often evince. The early prose essentially


23

prepared him for the actual collaboration that would soon follow on The Waste Land. Chapter 2 details Eliot’s most famous collaborative alliance, with Ezra Pound, during the writing of The Waste Land. Both Pound and Eliot benefited from this collaboration, for it allowed Eliot to adopt his favored position of the passive recipient of Pound’s active emending, and it also gave Pound (who displayed an almost manic need to advance the careers of young authors) another opportunity to invest his authority in the work of a new writer. I am especially interested in detailing the production process surrounding the poem, in the belief that such a focus will show that The Waste Land took shape largely around Pound’s aesthetic biases and that Eliot participated willingly in this construction partly because he was already preconditioned to receive the assistance due to the theories outlined in the prose. Yet this alliance was not entirely unlabored, for the two poets did engage in a series of struggles over the direction of the poem. For instance, Eliot and Pound were deeply divided about the appropriate national echoes in the poem: Pound attempted to eradicate multiple British elements at the very time that Eliot was trying to establish his authority within that culture. Pound also tended to mute Eliot’s natural impulses towards dramatic presentation, which existed even at this early stage in his career. Eliot’s efforts on The Waste Land established a distinction between primary and secondary collaborators in which primary figures were given free rein to affect the outcome of a text and secondary readers were brought in only at select moments and to address issues limited to a single line, phrasing, or characterization. In this case, Pound operated as the principal collaborator, while others like Vivien Eliot were offered select opportunities to help in lesser ways. In the latter case, I explore the husband–wife collaboration against the background of a subsequent alliance on Vivien Eliot’s prose pieces for The Criterion. Those works, which have never before been discussed fully in the context of collaboration, textually embody a battle for supremacy between two partners in a deteriorating relationship and demonstrate both the advantages and dangers of co-authoring texts when the primary collaborators are at odds. In some respects, that marital collaboration allowed for a kind of provisional, artificial, textual intimacy that was absent in the marriage itself; yet because such editorial alliances have as their primary purpose the completion of the text (and thus the closing of the collaborative communication), those intimate conversations led to separation rather than closeness, the latter condition being the preferred end of affectionate personal interaction. I also re-situate the practice of borrowing and allusion in The Waste Land

24


within the context of the collaborative model, and argue that the many intertextual features of the poem institute conscious alliances with remote collaborators that mimic Eliot’s actions with his more immediate friends, family, editors, and readers. I see allusion in The Waste Land providing Eliot with another strategy to suppress authorial identity and elevate multiple external voices closer to the surface of the text. The third chapter considers how the essays that followed The Waste Land sought to make sense of the collaboration with Pound. They tend to assert the benefits of collaboration quite broadly, but still reflect enough anxiety about the process that they withhold overt commentary on Pound’s involvement in The Waste Land. The essays suggest that Eliot needed to acquire some distance from his collaboration with Pound before he was able to discuss it publicly. For this reason, the writing of the 1920s is overrun with discussions of how poetic creation occurs; but it takes place in prose that is often labored and difficult. The essays celebrate communal production as a sought-after ideal rather than as an exception. The goal becomes the suppression of the personal in favor of the pursuit of truth through the efforts of a group of artists and critics sympathetic to that quest. Eliot also began to locate this ideal in the form of the drama, and his many discussions of Renaissance dramatic literature helped illustrate for Eliot the problems associated with the genre and the way in which collaboration could operate as a solution. As Eliot began to write for the English stage and put into practice some of the theories drawn up in his prose, he was forced to confront more soberly the realities of his collaborative ideal. Consequently, these essays – which are preoccupied with the actor’s collaboration with the writer; the writer’s collaboration with the director; and the audience’s place as a collaborator in performance – tend to offer the collaborative elements of drama as potential solutions to artistic and cultural problems in the belief that such partnerships might ultimately serve to unify a disjointed culture. The prose of this period moves Eliot away from modernism’s restrictive stance on audience towards a broadly inclusive position that saw viewers of his work as co-creators of meaning. It also reveals Eliot taking some surprising theoretical stances, including a rather vigorous assault on intention. In many respects, Eliot’s decision to devote the final thirty years of his life to writing plays can be understood simply as an attempt to broaden his audience as much as possible. It is rather remarkable, in fact, to what degree the essays on drama focus upon the needs of the audience, especially the audience’s role in helping determine the significance of a performance, and how Eliot’s later writings repeatedly demonstrate his abandonment of early modernist stances like


25

the embracement of difficulty, the lauding of authority, and the denunciation of amateurism, among others. Eliot emphasized during this period the social utility of poetry, and drama became a way of enacting this because it stressed the communal in art. Chapter 4 explores how Eliot put these theoretical ideas about drama into practice by working with veteran theatre professionals like Martin Browne, the director of Eliot’s plays. As in his relationship with Pound, Eliot could fall back on playing the passive neophyte to Browne’s experienced producer; but because Eliot’s reputation was so much more solidified at this point, his self-fashioning within the alliance is more mannered, self-conscious, and even playful. Browne operated differently from Pound: he was, for example, less authorized to intrude into the realm of the text as an aggressive editor, because he had not achieved the acclaim Pound had as a writer. As a result, the plays evolve somewhat differently from Eliot’s long poem. Browne usually restricts himself to production questions, matters of structure and character, and issues involving the audience, rather than problems concerning poetic language. The plays, then, do not reflect Browne’s aesthetic biases, but do benefit from his attention to structure, characterization, pacing, and production values, the very areas with which Eliot had the least amount of experience. The performative nature of drama also helped stress the importance of collaboration to the genre, since Eliot worked in the theatre not with one primary collaborator, but with a broad collection of actors, producers, stagehands, and audiences. The differing nature of this collaboration has also allowed me to look at Browne’s overall effect upon Eliot’s drama, rather than chart his influence upon a single play over time. Readers interested in the latter may profitably consult Browne’s own book. Chapter 5 details Eliot’s collaboration with John Hayward on the writing of Four Quartets, on anthologies of Eliot’s prose, and on foreign editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets. In many respects Hayward became Eliot’s consummate collaborator, for both were supremely comfortable with the terms of their relationship in a way that had not happened previously in Eliot’s career and thus their collaboration outlasted earlier ones. They were roommates, shared similar interests, and traveled in the same literary circles. The relationship also unfolded towards the latter half of Eliot’s career, and gave the poet a chance to assert himself within a collaborative partnership in a way he had been unable to with Pound and, to a lesser degree, Browne. While that increased sense of authority altered Eliot’s relationship with Hayward, it also gave Eliot the confidence to afford Hayward an enormous amount of latitude amending his work. In

26


certain cases he allowed his roommate to modify previously published texts, by omitting passages from an essay on Blake reprinted in an anthology edited by Hayward. He even allowed Hayward to add material to Eliot’s published work, like French editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, which contain extensive explanatory notes written by Hayward. This chapter details, in a way never before discussed, how Hayward’s additions to those last two texts severely alter the way they are received by emphasizing the British element of the poems, drawing the reader’s attention to personal echoes in Eliot’s life, and even forcing interpretation in a specific critical direction by introducing the poems with commentary by Helen Gardner and Eliot himself. As one of Eliot’s editors, Hayward also helped shape the reception of Eliot’s prose through his selection and presentation of the criticism in various volumes. Hayward ultimately asserted a highly particularized view of Eliot by minimizing his dramatic criticism, stressing the author’s versatility, and emphasizing the balanced tone of the later essays rather than the relatively aggressive tone of the early prose. My concluding chapter examines Eliot’s late essays, in which he surveys and attempts to understand a career of collaborative exchanges. Works like ‘‘The Three Voices of Poetry’’ are enormously preoccupied with questions of authorship, voice, and influence because these issues are intimately tied up with collaboration. His familiar model of authorial passivity is periodically adapted to accommodate a religious vocabulary and his emphasis on establishing connections with his readers and their larger communities continued under the guise of an overtly Christian program that sought to stem the tide of secular liberalism, which Eliot equated with chaos, excessive individualism, and detachment from tradition. Even at this late date, Eliot expresses fear about the creative process and views texts as unruly children whose authorial parents struggle to understand and control them. The only way they can ultimately be subdued is through the assistance of outside agents. Because Eliot understood throughout his life that ‘‘no writer is completely self-sufficient’’ (SE 31), he had no choice but to seek out collaborators who could help realize his art.

CHAPTER

1

‘‘Speaking as ourselves’’: Authorship, impersonality, and the creative process in the early essays

‘‘ H E

M U S T H I D E T O R E V E A L H I M S E L F ’’ :

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IDENTITY IN ELIOT

Few writers have been so alone amidst so many people. Born in 1888 to parents who were both almost forty-five years old, T. S. Eliot had early in his life the experience of living physically close to loved ones yet remaining emotionally isolated in certain ways. He once confessed to a friend that his father and mother seemed removed enough to be like ‘‘ancestors.’’1 This helped establish a pattern in Eliot’s life of reserve, withdrawal, and isolation within even the closest of relationships, whether in an intimate friendship like that with John Hayward, his roommate of a decade, or even in his first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. The former learned of Eliot’s second marriage only after the fact, while the latter embraced as one of the predominant themes in her published and unpublished writings the utter loneliness of a spouse trapped in an emotionally arid union. Eliot was reportedly so modest that he never shared a bedroom with his first wife and would not even consider shaving in front of her.2 Yet Eliot lived an extremely public life, of the type that consisted of conducting whirlwind reading tours of America in front of thousands of eager listeners and receiving accolades that landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Editor of an influential literary journal, director of a publishing firm, winner of the Nobel Prize – these were the roles that eventually elevated Eliot into the position of twentieth-century literature’s preeminent elder statesman. Yet in Eliot’s 1958 play of that title, the character who is reaching the conclusion of just such a public life struggles to recognize himself amidst all these plaudits. Lord Claverton realizes towards the end of the drama that ‘‘I’ve spent my life in trying to forget myself, / In trying to identify myself with the part / I had chosen to play’’ (CPP 568). He concludes from his experience that ‘‘the longer we pretend / The harder it becomes to drop the pretence, / Walk off the stage, change 27

28


into our own clothes / And speak as ourselves’’ (CPP 568–69). The path chosen by Claverton consisted of seeking professional success to the exclusion of developing his private self, perhaps because standing on stage was easier than probing the depths of the psyche. This was especially true for a man haunted by ‘‘spectres from [his] past’’ (569). Living life behind such an impenetrable mask caused contradictory responses, according to Claverton’s daughter: a ‘‘terror of being alone’’ (527) and a ‘‘fear of being exposed to strangers’’ (528). Anxious about confronting an afflicted self in conditions under which he would have to repair it alone, Claverton dreads having his public costume torn away before his audience. It is the classic Eliotic situation that characters from Prufrock onwards find themselves in: paralyzed in public settings due to the piercing arrows of social convention, the characters discover that subsequent psychological retreats into a world of the self prove abortive, painful, and even destructive. But more significant is Claverton’s observation that his engagement in the public life has impeded personal communication.The language of the authentic self can no longer be accessed because he cannot get past the public costume. Eliot made Claverton the focal point for his final drama in part because he so identified with the character’s endeavors to face the fact that he had lived a life made up of cultivated public personalities. Looking back at his own efforts to construct such poses, Eliot seemed to regret how such maneuvers limited him in his private relationships – at least that is what the play suggests. Yet the subjugation or eradication of one’s identity also opens up space for a collaborative partner. It places the writer in a position that makes him receptive to assistance from a strong personality looking to assert itself. In some cases, it encouraged Eliot to assume various poses that were more suitable for a collaborative relationship, depending on the needs of the particular collaborator. In the case of his work with Pound, for example, Eliot was more than happy to adopt the role of student to Pound’s experienced mentor. Ultimately, because Eliot gained a certain comfort in emotional detachment, this inclination allowed him more latitude to work with charged material and matched up effectively with his critical theories that advocated such ideas as ‘‘impersonality’’ in the writing of poetry or the creation of ‘‘objective correlatives.’’ The key in both cases is that the theories posit a distance between the writer and the artistic emotion generated in a poem or drama. One way Eliot cultivated an amorphous identity was through his refusal during his lifetime to become too rooted, for he always kept on the move: born in St. Louis, educated at Harvard, eventually settled in London, Eliot even tried late in his life to reclaim an American literary heritage. This despite

‘‘Speaking as ourselves’’

29

spending the previous four decades adopting the manners, religion, and citizenship of Great Britain. Eliot’s self always seemed curiously malleable, evidenced by his habit of cultivating an epistolary voice to suit the style of a letter’s recipient. This tendency emerged most forcefully in his correspondence with Pound, who received letters from Eliot littered with sentence fragments, abbreviations, obscure private references, and attacks on women. He also created different, temporary versions of himself when representing his name in print. While he employed an assortment of appellations, including T. S. Eliot, T. Stearns Eliot, T. S. E., T. S. Apteryx, he also resorted to numerous pseudonyms, like Crites, Possum, Gus Krutzsch, and Metoikos. At one point, Eliot penned a series of fictional letters to The Egoist under names like Charles James Grimble and Helen B. Trundlett (L1 211–12). Even Eliot’s handwriting was susceptible to this pliancy; as Lyndall Gordon notes, the poems composed during Eliot’s study abroad in Paris in 1910–11 reveal a sharply altered ‘‘spiky’’ hand, which disappeared upon his return to Harvard.3 This elusiveness was well known to Eliot’s contemporaries, if only through one of his better-known monikers ‘‘Possum.’’ Originally assigned by Pound in a playful attempt to emphasize this practice of withdrawal, the apt nickname stuck to Eliot. Another good friend, Conrad Aiken, tied this detachment to Eliot’s social and professional aspirations, observing in one letter that ‘‘Eliot keeps me at arm’s length: he has an invalid wife and social preoccupations and (I suspect) ambitions which make him as wary and guarded as a [E]uropean.’’ Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, associated the demeanor with Eliot’s need to adopt a monk-like withdrawal, observing that ‘‘Tom, though infinitely considerate, is also perfectly detached. His cell, is I’m sure, a very lofty one, but a little chilly.’’4 One result was that complaints about Eliot’s personal equivocation began to inform reviews of his work, as in John Middleton Murry’s objection about Ara Vos Prec that the poet seemed like a chameleon, constantly changing to protect himself, or in Edgell Rickword’s 1923 TLS discussion of The Waste Land, which tied Eliot’s many literary allusions in the poem to his personal reserve and a general reluctance ‘‘to expose in public’’ his own emotions on journeying through life.5 Even biographical recollections seem to struggle with Eliot as a kind of ‘‘compound ghost’’ forever impossible to pin down. In light of their public, retrospective characters, such biographical memoirs demand a rather generous tone but also allow for a certain flexibility with the facts of an anecdote or life; yet when Eliot is involved, the task becomes daunting. Clive Bell, for example, in his Old Friends: Personal Recollections, a title whose wording captures perfectly the qualities mentioned above, utilizes a

30


table of contents page that lists his subjects simply by their names: Walter Sickert, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes. Yet one entry stands out from the rest, signaling its separation from the others, its troublesome nature announcing itself even before its assigned chapter: ‘‘Encounters with T. S. Eliot.’’ Even though Bell’s tone in his descriptions of Eliot is one of fondness, gentleness, and amusement, he feels disturbed enough to mark the question of identity in Eliot as problematic.6 In another reminiscence, a close friend and fellow Harvard Advocate board member devotes the opening two pages of his recollection to an apology because the events of 1909–10 ‘‘become hopelessly kaleidoscopic,’’ especially when one tries to paint a portrait of ‘‘one who was then as shy and reticent as he is probably still,’’ one who ‘‘cultivate[d] even then a scholarly detachment’’ and one who finally, at Harvard, became a ‘‘recluse.’’7 Interestingly, while the writer first wishes to ascribe Eliot’s elusiveness to shyness, he can’t get around the fact that his friend actively constructed this pose. Indeed, many of these recollections end up acknowledging and critiquing Eliot’s hand in the formation of this image. Eliot clearly possessed the ambitions credited to him by Aiken, as an early letter to his mother Charlotte demonstrates. ‘‘I am known to be disinterested,’’ he writes concerning his burgeoning reputation in London, for ‘‘there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached’’ (L1 280). Ironically, Eliot could probably have justified this stance as one that allowed him to ignore his professional aspirations, for he seems to be borrowing language from Arnold’s model of the ideal critic in ‘‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.’’ That essay, which employs the word ‘‘disinterested’’ repeatedly in key places, lauds the critic who is able to stand above the business of criticism, resist the political pressures that so often skew a writer’s interpretation of literature, and develop a detachment from practical matters that will keep his critical eye sharply in focus. Another contemporary, Anthony Powell, viewed this studied cultivation of detachment as a brilliant marketing ploy. In recalling another writer’s jealousy over the ‘‘efficiency of Eliot[’s] self-advertising machine,’’ Powell pauses to speculate about the source of this approach. He decides that ‘‘[f ]oundations of such publicity had been laid early in life by Eliot, a deliberate policy of withdrawnness, planned methods of impressing people as a hermit-like highbrow.’’8 The intentional clearing away of an accessible, social self created a vacuum that was then filled by this image of Eliot as withdrawn artist. Recent critics have therefore followed the lead of both Eliot and his contemporaries in fashioning readings that take into account Eliot’s


31

detachment. Peter Ackroyd sees a poet who ‘‘vanishes in front of one’s eyes’’; Louis Menand reads The Waste Land as a poem in which ‘‘Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are on everything’’; and Lyndall Gordon highlights Eliot’s periodic abandonment of longtime friends in creating a series of ‘‘new lives.’’9 Even Eliot himself seems perplexed at times as he casts his eyes towards versions of earlier authorial personalities as they are reflected in poems, some of which he confesses to not understanding because they are too ‘‘remote.’’ Others he can’t access because, as he says, ‘‘I’ve almost lost touch with the man I was when I wrote the early poems.’’10 The other possibility – the one raised by The Elder Statesman – is that there is nothing to get in touch with because ‘‘the man’’ consisted of a series of artificial constructs. In both cases, the problem centers on the fact that Eliot tied creation to the eradication of personality, an inclination that surfaced in his remark to Aiken that ‘‘it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout’’ (L1 59). Not only does poetry emerge through violence against the self but the poet is then forced to stand by idly to see if that poetic material will grow and take shape on its own, which is one of the reasons Eliot looked to collaborators at this moment in the creative process – he required assistance in helping his fragments ‘‘sprout.’’ This elusive disposition should not surprise, for the poems themselves function as blueprints for the eliding of identity, particularly in the early work when Eliot’s authority was less assured. The Prufrock volume, which has characters named Nancy Ellicott, Mr. Apollinax, and Helen Slingsby, would seem to promise readers of its poems a certain personal intimacy that comes with assigning specific names. When a novelist, for example, troubles to introduce us to a character, we can expect to learn about that subject. Yet the opposite effect occurs in Eliot. We encounter a distancing that results from humorous and satirical attacks. As the poems progress, the characters shrink (rather than become enlarged) as they suffer from the indictments offered by the controlling consciousness. In fact, most of the poems in Prufrock contain narrative voices that remain unidentified, and they are attached to characters that are both revealed yet withheld through the tantalizingly ambiguous first-person pronoun. The primary figure sometimes even disappears, right before our eyes, as in ‘‘Hysteria,’’ when the speaker is inhaled into the throat of his female companion. The culmination of this tendency, however, occurs in the title poem of the Prufrock volume. The naming of the monologue’s speaker in that title ostensibly promises the revelation of identity, especially within the intimate circumstances that we would expect in a supposed love poem. And yet, as Robert Langbaum has

32


shown, the dramatic monologue, especially as practiced by Browning and Tennyson, had its roots in a kind of anti-confessional sentiment that grew out of those poets’ failed attempts at autobiographical verse.11 Therefore, while the dramatic monologue might give the immediate impression of bringing readers closer to the inner thoughts and emotions of a character, that personage is expressly not the author. The form, in fact, almost operates like a structural articulation of the objective correlative: the poem’s speaker and his or her circumstances become the ‘‘formula’’ that helps evoke an emotion. But the writer is arousing such emotions from behind the safety of the alternative personality. In Eliot’s case, the ultimate benefit is concealment. About Pound’s use of the device, Eliot once explained, ‘‘[h]e is more himself . . . more at ease, behind the mask of Arnaut, Bertrand, Guido, Li Po and Propertius, than when he speaks in his own person. He must hide to reveal himself.’’12 The argument suggests that the dramatic monologue both disguises and, through that masking, enables the surfacing of emotion and personality. This helps explain why, once unveiled in the title, Prufrock’s identity continually erodes through the course of the poem; recognizing the revelation of the self through character, Eliot takes steps to conceal it once again. The pronouns, from the very first line onwards, confuse rather than illuminate. While these pronouns presumably refer to specific people, Eliot frustrates our desire to identify them by never mentioning them by name in the lines of the poem. Not only that, he highlights and perhaps even mocks that frustration by scattering the poem with other names – Hamlet, Michelangelo, Lazarus – that possess only extratextual meaning. While the opening line of the poem seems to promise a man of action, Prufrock ends up paralyzed by questions focusing primarily on how to look, how to act, how to think. So incapacitated is he by these concerns that an unidentified auditor heckles him just outside of the boundaries of the poem: we hear not the attack itself, but only the retort. And Prufrock’s response provides the poem’s most forceful moment – ‘‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’’ (CPP 16) – an acknowledgment that while he is playing a part, he does not favor the role of tragic, angst-ridden royal. Yet the accusation would seem to fit. Prufrock, when not imagining violence upon himself, envisions fantasies of withdrawal and removal, as far as to the ‘‘floors of silent seas’’ (15), even though these dreams end up abruptly aborted. In the end, even his location (both physical and temporal) is difficult to ascertain. The predilection continues in ‘‘Gerontion,’’ another poem whose title promises a focus upon a single consciousness. Once again, however, the


33

speaker becomes lost amidst a blizzard of other named characters and a desire to stand outside himself in a detached reverie. Yet rather than clarifying his character, that stance often ends up blurring the portrait of Gerontion. After opening the poem by identifying his situation in the clearest and most assertive terms of the poem – ‘‘Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain’’ (CPP 37) – the speaker spends much of the remainder of the poem fleeing that selfdefinition. He does so immediately after the first two lines, for example, by offering a catalogue of negation that seeks erasure of the stick figure just drawn: ‘‘I was neither at the hot gates / Nor fought in the warm rain / Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass’’ (37). Elsewhere Gerontion retreats behind defensive postures such as questions, conditionals, and meditations upon those qualities he no longer possesses, including passion and the five senses. This collapse of the self ends appropriately enough in a syntactical rendering of effacement: the poem ends with three sentence fragments that lack verbs and fail to identify the controlling perspective. Not only do we not know who is doing the seeing, but the thoughts and images themselves are effectively cancelled by the white space that follows, since the lack of context causes a kind of evaporation of the concluding material. We ultimately do not know with whom to associate the visions, since the speaker is unwilling to take responsibility for them. In The Waste Land, the insistence on disguise is so great that not only do the confusing, ambiguous pronouns cloak the speakers in a veil of anonymity (‘‘Winter kept us warm . . . ’’), but a clever footnote appended to the text tries to concoct a unifying consciousness through Tiresias in whom all characters ‘‘melt’’ and ‘‘meet’’ (CPP 61, 78). As happened throughout his career, Eliot makes his most assertive moves in prose. In the note on Tiresias, he attempts to rob the poem’s personages of their original identities. It seems as though Eliot, in this first major poem lacking a named character in its title, struggles to assign a central voice because he is unsure himself how and where to locate his own position in relation to such a character. One of the poem’s early titles, ‘‘He Do the Police in Different Voices,’’ raises the issues of disguise, dramatization, and identity as both interests of the author but also potential codes to be deciphered. Unsuccessful in completely resolving those issues in the poetry, Eliot sought a solution in the prose note that has been the focus of so much debate over the years. The allusions to other literary texts and direct quotations in The Waste Land evince an interest in submerging authorial identity in the rhetoric of others and serve to foreground the authorial hesitancy that always accompanied Eliot’s creative enterprises. The

34


‘‘fragments’’ shored against the ruins serve as necessary levees, constructed to stem the tide of an emerging personality, which surfaces briefly in a few notes, only to dart back under cover in the poem proper. Tellingly, the authorial ‘‘I’’ appears unmasked momentarily only in the comforting prose form. This is one of the reasons why Pound’s editorial assistance was so vital: Eliot’s manuscript ultimately lacks a controlling consciousness and suffers under the burden of a variety of voices struggling for supremacy. That confusion also gave Pound a direct way into the manuscript. In The Waste Land, Eliot has reconfigured the role of author into a spectral medium whose major activity becomes the recontextualization of the work of others. The modern condition – the status of self and society – is approached not directly via the confessional mode but obliquely and through the eyes of others. Eliot’s proclivity for erasing identity also remains partly rooted in his complicated attitudes towards place, nationality, and occupation. His quest to become more English than the English necessitated abandoning years of behavior, dress, and even locution, on the way to adopting the new life of British man of letters, marrying an English woman in the summer of 1915 (two months after meeting her) and procuring citizenship and converting to the State’s official religion in 1927. In a preface to This American World, Eliot remarks how he lost his southern accent when he went to Milton Academy and Harvard, but did not replace it with a Boston accent.13 As a result, the flat, clipped, slightly British enunciation that has surprised so many upon first listening to Eliot’s voice on a Caedmon recording possesses a hauntingly rootless quality. Anthony Powell once observed that ‘‘[h]is faint accent was not exactly English, at the same time not recognizably American, anyway to an English ear used to the general run of Americans who come to England.’’14 Eliot apparently viewed foreignness as simply another alternative role, to be assumed whenever necessary; at least that is what he seems to suggest in declaring that ‘‘[o]ne of the reasons for learning at least one foreign language well is that we acquire a kind of supplementary personality’’ (OPP 19). From the late 1910s onwards his English persona served increasingly as the primary supplemental role to that of the American abroad, the guise he first embraced when traveling to England as a student. In a 1928 letter to Herbert Read, Eliot confessed to wanting to write an autobiographical essay about ‘‘an American who wasn’t an American,’’ a result of a complicated familial background that caused Eliot to feel rootless and always displaced, no matter where he was residing. As a result, he ‘‘was never anything anywhere and . . . therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American


35

and more an Englishman than a Frenchman.’’15 Eliot, who never owned a house in his life, who was forever moving to new lodgings, and who often made lengthy temporary stays with friends and associates, clearly maintained an uneasy relationship to the notions of place and nationality, abandoning his country as a young man to pursue the somewhat unlikely career of foreign exchange clerk in a bank. Lyndall Gordon goes so far as proposing that ‘‘[i]n a sense, Eliot was homeless from 1914’’ (ENL 206). Eliot even once suggestively signed a 1945 essay with the pseudonym ‘‘Metoikos,’’ typically translated as ‘‘resident alien.’’16 The classical term possesses rich connotations for a discussion of Eliot’s relationship with England because it designated particular non-citizen residents of Athens who were required to seek patrons as their representatives to the State and were prohibited from securing landed property. In special circumstances, this status could be waived through a decree, allowing for certain freedoms including the ability to purchase land; yet whatever success they might finally achieve, metoikoi could never hope to be fully assimilated into the citizen culture.17 Literally, the term ‘‘metoikos’’ derives from roots meaning ‘‘with’’ or ‘‘together’’ (meta) and ‘‘house’’ or ‘‘household’’ (oikos), suggesting one who lives in the same house. But the meaning is exclusionary rather than inclusive, since the word separates legitimate members of the oikos from those simply living in the same place. The term captures fully Eliot’s suspicion that despite his best efforts at assimilation, he could never completely belong to his adopted homeland. Once recognizing that second class status, Eliot began to embrace such a designation. A special context also exists for Eliot’s employment of the term metoikos in his essay. Eliot wrote the piece specifically to refute arguments made in an earlier article by a pseudonymous ‘‘Civis’’ or citizen, which placed Eliot in one of his favorite roles of attacking from a seemingly inferior position of status. Pound, who once referred to the problem of being an American as a ‘‘virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood,’’ remarked to William Carlos Williams that the disease of Americanism also plagued his friend: ‘‘Eliot has it perhaps worse than I have – poor devil.’’18 In Pound’s version of nationality, Americans like himself and Eliot, both with deep familial attachments to the country’s history, have to struggle incessantly with the curse of the American environment. Such a disease is so debilitating that it infects the patient even if he has removed himself to Europe. Aiken even attributed Eliot’s 1921 breakdown to the strain of trying to assimilate these two national identities: ‘‘Tom Eliot has had some sort of nervous breakdown and is at present in Lausanne: hybrid difficulties, I suppose, or else the severe strain of being an Englishman.’’19 Once again, Aiken’s

36


observations about Eliot’s difficulties as a ‘‘hybrid’’ – a person whose background or nationality blends two different traditions – seem right on the mark. Just two years earlier, Eliot had written his brother Henry about feeling ‘‘humiliated and lonely’’ in London, for ‘‘[o]ne remains always a foreigner – only the lower classes can assimilate. It is like being always on dress parade – one can never relax. It is a great strain’’ (L1 310). Although married to Vivien at the time of the July 1919 letter to his brother, Eliot must have felt particularly alienated during this period. He refers to himself, for example, in other letters written that same month as both ‘‘an outsider’’ and ‘‘a metic – a foreigner’’ (319, 318), the English version of the Greek metoikos. Even readers of Eliot’s early poems suspected this status, because they were never sure which country should claim the poet. British critics consistently unearthed American qualities in the poems, while American reviewers tended to emphasize European echoes. Both groups wanted to push him to the margins of their respective countries, a critical response that must have reinforced for Eliot his own alien standing. The question of Eliot’s occupation no doubt complicated his sense of identity as well, for his abandonment of the family-sanctioned academic career at Harvard meant turning his back also on his grandfather, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, founder and third chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, and more remotely, on Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University and a distant cousin of Eliot’s grandfather. Such pressures were far from remote, judging by a letter Eliot received from the latter relative, in which the university president expresses consternation over how a young man could ‘‘forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere – a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope.’’ He concludes his note by offering up the example of Henry James, whom he had spoken with numerous times, conversations that convinced President Eliot to decide that James’s time in England helped neither his personal well-being nor his writing (L1 323). Eliot’s work, variously as teacher, banker, editor, publisher, translator, reviewer, poet, critic, dramatist, and lecturer, certainly highlighted his assorted talents, but this vocational unsettledness also raised questions about his proper professional role. A certain ambivalence about his career path always existed in Eliot, whether he is proclaiming skepticism about his abilities as a poet, which are not good enough to allow him to ‘‘make a whole-time job of writing poetry,’’ or when he worries in a 1922 letter to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and collector who would later assist Eliot with the American publication of Ara Vos Prec (as Poems) and The


37

Waste Land, that he preferred to present himself to the public in the early issues of The Criterion as a poet rather than an essayist.20 Eliot’s periodic autobiographical portraits for the anniversary reports of his Harvard class of 1910 perhaps best communicate Eliot’s ambivalence about how to present his professional persona publicly. When asked to list his occupation for the 1921 report, Eliot replies ‘‘Banker, Critic, Poet.’’ By 1935 he responds simply, ‘‘Company Director,’’ mentioning later in passing that ‘‘writing a little poetry’’ was one of his ‘‘hobbies’’ but what he really hoped for was to ‘‘write a really good play.’’ Although one might assume Eliot is being coy here and perhaps adopting a tone of mock modesty that might play well with his successful Harvard classmates, the truth of the matter is that Eliot did believe at this time that his days as a poet had perhaps ended. After all, the only major non-dramatic poetry that follows this report is Four Quartets. Not until the 1960 fiftieth anniversary version does he call himself primarily a writer, when he records as his vocation ‘‘Author and Publisher.’’21 This curious sequence recalls Claverton’s summarization of his professional life as a series of dramatized roles that serve to obliterate the ‘‘real’’ self. At the very least, the summaries betray an enormous amount of insecurity about how Eliot should present himself to friends, associates, and strangers, and they reveal a self-consciousness about the slipperiness of identity that would both prepare Eliot to enter into collaborative relationships but also threaten the survival of those relationships over time. ‘‘ S U R R E N D E R I N G

H I M S E L F W H O L L Y ’’ : T R A D I T I O N ,

IMPERSONALITY, AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

T. S. Eliot published his writing over the course of more than half a century, beginning with an ode celebrating the graduation of his 1910 Harvard class and concluding fittingly with an autobiographical note marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of that same class, a contribution he submitted just a few weeks before his death on 4 January 1965.Yet poetry makes up relatively little of this body of work. In contrast to thousands of pages of published prose criticism in the form of book reviews, introductions, public lectures, and essays, the major non-dramatic verse consists of something slightly in excess of 2,700 lines, roughly equivalent to the first three books of Paradise Lost, or about fifty lines for every year as a practicing poet. This relative paucity occasionally troubled Eliot, who after once noting to a Columbia University audience ‘‘the comparative penury of my output of poetry’’ tried to shine the best light on the situation

38


by remarking how this ensured most listeners would have internalized his work, thus affording them the advantage of being able to compare their memory with the performance of the poet on stage.22 It also necessitated a certain amount of repackaging of Eliot’s verse over the course of his career. This persistent republishing of a small number of poems, combined with their repeated public performance, forced Eliot to reassess his poetry regularly and encouraged his preoccupation in the prose with issues related to reception theory, the relationship between artist and audience, and especially the poet’s struggles with the creative process. This helps explain Eliot’s admission that ‘‘[w]hen the critics are themselves poets, it may be suspected that they have formed their critical statements with a view to justifying their poetic practice’’ and that he is ‘‘always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing.’’23 So when Eliot began his 1937 essay on Byron by questioning whether or not excellence can accompany quantity in the writing of verse – ‘‘The bulk of Byron’s poetry is distressing, in proportion to its quality; one would suppose that he never destroyed anything’’ (OPP 193) – the attack reinforced a theory of poetry underscoring modernist notions of compression and concision, and also implicitly endorsed Eliot’s own slight production. Since many of Eliot’s prose pieces appeared originally as responses to other texts (as reviews, introductions, and letters to the editor), they usually take objects and ideas outside of themselves as organizing principles. They possess a habit of establishing a dialogue with another writer, text, or theory specifically because they depend on the presence of an other to come into being. Yet this is how most of Eliot’s prose and poetry evolved. Thus his criticism continually returns to collaboration as a model for creation, as a stabilizing influence in a chaotic world, and as a guiding tenet in discussing topics like translation theory, the unity of culture, the role of the author, and the relativity of meaning, among others. Even Eliot’s earliest prose pieces express a profound devotion to collaborative models; and those texts both prepared him to act collaboratively on his creative work and helped justify that assistance after the fact. Such critical discussions extended the conversations Eliot had previously been having with the various auditors of his work during the draft stage, but they located Eliot in a different position in relation to the text. No longer consumed by the anxiety of attempting to complete a poem, Eliot could achieve in his prose the critical detachment necessary for exploring the creative outcome and examining the procedures that generated the work. Recognizing this feature in other artists, Eliot remarked that some writers ‘‘on completing a work, need to continue the critical activity by commenting on it’’ (SE 31). A further benefit was the fact


39

that Eliot engaged in this enterprise in prose, a mode that provided a certain amount of security that creative work could not. Yet this incessant revisitation of his creative output frequently proved painful to Eliot and throughout his career the poet tended to associate the creative process with terror, pain, suffering, and even extinction. In a 1920 letter to The Athenæum, he offers an unusually stark confession, especially given the public nature of the forum, that defines creation as a ‘‘painful and unpleasant business; it is a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death’’ (L1 387). Surrendering the self as a necessary cost of creation is a leitmotif in Eliot’s many descriptions of how poetry evolves; and in most characterizations he positions himself as a passive element because creative success is tied to his ability to submerge the active part of his personality and give in to the control of an external element, in the form of an actual person, a literary influence, or even a particular tradition. Collaboration became a systematizing theory because the presence of another agent seemed necessary to complete the process. Eliot started to formulate this idea in a comprehensive manner in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919), which followed the publication of his first volume of poetry by about two years. In that essay, creation becomes a struggle between passive and active entities, and Eliot places himself where he is most comfortable, enacting the role of subservient participant. In fact, the author must ‘‘surrender’’ himself to the past in a ‘‘continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’’ This results in a ‘‘process of depersonalization’’ (SE 17). The writer’s task becomes the obliteration of his own personality to make way for the presence of collaborative bodies, configured here as tradition. Eliot has packed ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ with language that characterizes the artistic process in collaborative terms and that suggests the urge toward collaboration is its key feature, especially since the literary criticism via scientific analogy that dominates the middle of the piece turns on collaborative ideas. Words like ‘‘fusion,’’ ‘‘balance,’’ ‘‘unite,’’ ‘‘compound,’’ ‘‘combination,’’ and ‘‘bring together’’ demand the presence of two elements whenever creation occurs and also imply that the solitary artist is doomed to a life of stasis and sterility. The essay, in fact, constructs most of its assertions in terms that mimic the collaborative experience. Thus, in the chemical analogy in which oxygen and sulphur dioxide mix in the presence of a shred of platinum (‘‘the mind of the poet’’), Eliot posits a split of the artist’s consciousness into ‘‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’’ (SE 18). Only when those two come together in a productive union – ‘‘the mind digest[s] and transmute[s] the passions which are its

40


material’’ – will ‘‘mature’’ art result. He then makes the same point in relation to Canto XV of the Inferno, a favorite section, by suggesting its last quatrain presents an image ‘‘which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to’’ (18–19). In other words, shreds or fragments of poetic material can exist in a static condition for eternity; but their meaning will eventually be activated only through the presence of an external authority that fertilizes that material. The confusing repeated pronoun towards the end of the sentence, as well as the preposition that concludes it, serve to illustrate Eliot’s struggle to place the author’s hand somewhere in this process. Yet as I read the final words of that sentence, the author has disappeared from the creative act. The constant impetus in Eliot toward giving in to outside entities, whether they take the form of Pound and other collaborators, a broad system of allusion, or an artificial poetic framework, received its fullest articulation in the theory of impersonality outlined in the ‘‘Tradition’’ essay. That theory – essentially an anti-subjectivist reaction to Wordsworth’s emphasis on an emotional response to experience – grants the poet an avenue of ‘‘escape from personality.’’ ‘‘But,’’ he adds, ‘‘only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’’ (SE 21). This ‘‘process of depersonalization’’ (17) offered the only avenue towards the development of a consciousness of the past, the central requirement for a writer engaging the historical sense, which ‘‘compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’’ (14).24 Similarly, the reception of that writer’s work demands a similar subjugation of the personality, for ‘‘[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone . . . You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead’’ (15). Thus the embracement of tradition is a tacit endorsement of collaboration as an operating procedure, both in the production of texts and in their reception, as long as that process is underpinned by an impersonal sense. As Eliot concludes in his essay, ‘‘[t]he emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done’’ (22). The implication is that while emotion in art is necessary, it must be accessed obliquely, through devices that offer distance from the writer’s personality. Forms like the dramatic monologue, strategies like direct quotation and allusion, and tactics like collaboration all offered this advantage.


41

Eliot’s discussions of impersonality so often feature prominently the writer’s passivity because the writer is forced into a position of having to submit to and await the arrival of the presence of an active, external stimulus that will ultimately ‘‘possess’’ the inert, passive poet. While the writer must indeed actively pursue tradition instead of simply inheriting it – ‘‘you must obtain it by great labour’’ (SE 14) – this pursuit operates as a critical activity that merely helps establish the conditions for creation, which is a much less willful affair. Part of Eliot’s vigorousness in the critical arena was due to the fact that he saw it as a way to help facilitate the creative act. Eliot’s many discussions of influence in his criticism are partly a function of always viewing the creative process in collaborative terms, so that creation occurs when one influence stimulates another. In ‘‘Ben Jonson,’’ an essay published the same year as ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ Eliot argues that ‘‘appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet feels in his enjoyment of other poetry’’ (147). The catalyst metaphor works effectively as an analogy for the effect of influential precursors upon the writer’s mind. In effect, influence enables creation for a poet. Later essays make this point as well, as in the following 1925 discussion of one influence on Shakespeare: ‘‘Montaigne is just the sort of writer to provide a stimulant to a poet; for what the poet looks for in his reading is not a philosophy . . . but a point of departure.’’25 Within this model, Eliot held up the stimulus of outside influences as particularly important for immature writers in search of guidance, so that in ‘‘The Hawthorne Aspect’’ (1918), he believes Henry James benefited greatly from ‘‘foreign stimulus’’ whereas in a 1934 ‘‘Commentary’’ he argues that immature writers must first ‘‘submit’’ the self to influences before progressing to mature states of mind.26 Finally, influences can operate subtly through indirect means, either as ‘‘experiment[s] in metric and language’’ that help ‘‘release [the] imagination’’ or through the translation of foreign works, which Eliot believed could help ‘‘elicit’’ material from one’s own mind.27 The ideas of the ‘‘Tradition’’ essay do not occur in a critical vacuum, for Eliot sought in his reading suitable literary models to satisfy his collaborative impulse. In fact, many of the conclusions of that early essay recall Shelley’s notion in A Defence of Poetry of bodies of literature making up ‘‘that great poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, [build]’’ and his insistence that the composition of poetry is ‘‘not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind.’’ Like Eliot, Shelley uses an analogy to illustrate the second point, comparing the creating mind to

42


‘‘a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.’’28 Shelley eradicates intentionality from the creative process while locating external presences that activate material latent in the poet’s unconscious mind. Eliot calls upon this idea repeatedly in prose renderings of how poetry emerges. Even his discussions of the ‘‘historical sense’’ (SE 14), in which a writer’s traditionalism derives from the appearance of past works in those of the present, and of the idea that ‘‘art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same’’ (16), seem particularly indebted to Shelley’s earlier accounts of the creative process, reception theory, and tradition. As Shelley reasons: All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.29

The similarities between the two might surprise, since Eliot rarely had much positive to say about Shelley or his poetry. The outlook is essentially relativist, in that it suggests a poem’s meaning has no boundaries or limitations. All poems and all of literary history exist in a state of constant flux, each text informing the other and each writer (and reader) altering the whole in an apocalyptic process. This primary argument of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ – that texts have significance only in relation to previously written works, whose meanings are also altered upon the introduction of a new one – suggests Eliot viewed collaboration as an organizing principle for readings of literary history. On the one hand, a writer works with himself and his text in mind, but in an unspoken pact with his contemporaries and precursors. Eliot’s identification of this pact elsewhere as a ‘‘common inheritance and a common cause [which] unite artists’’ (SE 24) demonstrates the underlying goal of integration into a larger whole. Yet the essay also sets individualism against tradition (which is configured as a manifestation of the collaborative) and argues that individuality in a writer cannot be understood by isolating a writer’s work from that which had preceded it but by contextualizing it within a group of writers. Only then will the writer’s character emerge through the pressure of the previous group’s ‘‘mind’’ upon that later writer. Applying a critical reading to an author that highlights this collaborative feature of literary history allows the best parts and the most individual parts of a writer’s work to surface.


43

‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ is a relatively early essay; hence, its writer does evince some ambivalence toward the model of collaboration, which he communicates most notably when sorting out the relationship between active and passive agents. While he had already benefited from Pound’s attention to his earliest poetry, Eliot was still not completely sure where to position himself within representations of collaboration. He intuitively sensed that his own poetic procedures leaned in this direction, yet he is not fully invested in the process to draw up a more definitive model based on personal experience. Immediately following the ‘‘shred of platinum’’ analogy, Eliot seeks to work out the relationship between the two roles: ‘‘The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’’ (SE 19). As its root receptare implies, ‘‘receptacle’’ is incapable of seizing, for it is designed to ‘‘receive,’’ and must be acted upon by some outside agent. Eliot wants to have the poet’s mind both passively receiving and storing up useful data but also reserving the capacity to grasp the material actively. But then once those ‘‘numberless feelings, phrases, [and] images’’ exist within the mind of the poet, Eliot retreats from the idea of an active creator and limits himself to the potential for creation by suggesting only that these elements ‘‘can unite.’’ They can, for the raw materials sit stored in the poet’s mind, waiting to be acted upon. After the poet’s mind has been filled with material from the storehouse of images, the ‘‘compounding’’ occurs almost randomly. The essay insists that the mature poet is no more than a ‘‘medium’’ by which ‘‘feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations’’ (18), and reveals deep suspicions about any active participation on the poet’s part. In ‘‘Tradition,’’ Eliot takes issue with Wordsworth’s poetic formula of ‘‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’’ because it gives the author too great a hand in manipulating experience. According to Eliot, such creative processes occur outside of the control of the author: ‘‘it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.’’ We cannot actively recollect experience; rather, the atmosphere of creation ‘‘is a passive attending upon the event’’ (21). The emphasis on passivity in accounts of the creative process forced Eliot to identify collaboration as a solution. Positioning himself in a subservient role, Eliot was always in search of agents that could help initiate creative activity. Poetic characters like Prufrock and Gerontion, who have difficulty with agency and will, reflect these circumstances, for they stand similarly paralyzed, ‘‘waiting for rain’’ (CPP 37). In his unpublished paper on causality, Eliot explained the problem: ‘‘we have direct knowledge

44


neither of our own nor of others [sic] will; a single man could no more have will than could a machine. We have will by an interpretation of our own behaviour and of others.’’30 Eliot further highlighted his own problems with will and intention in several passages marked in his copy of Traitement des Psychone´vroses par la Re´éducation du Controle Ce´re´bral, a book by the Swiss psychiatrist Eliot consulted in 1921. One of those concerned a paragraph on abouile or lack of will, a problem he identified to Richard Aldington as a ‘‘lifelong affliction’’ (L1 480 and 486). In the Aldington letter, Eliot used the word specifically to identify it as the source of his depressive condition. Eliot tended, then, to underscore and identify with other writers’ definitions of the creative process that minimized the writer’s active role in creation. This occurs, for example, in the longest footnote to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, where Eliot cites Housman’s famous depiction of the production of poetry (from ‘‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’’) as a ‘‘passive and involuntary’’ activity akin to a ‘‘secretion’’ (quoted in UPUC 145), despite the fact that Housman’s Romantic model of creation based on exercising the physical and emotional flies in the face of many of Eliot’s own theories. Eliot followed ‘‘Tradition’’ with a lesser-known essay that developed many of the ideas first proposed there, including the impersonal theory of poetry and the use of science as a metaphor for poetic creation. ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’’ (1920), which appeared in an obscure Indian journal called Shama’a, not only argues that ‘‘poetry is a science,’’ but that a ‘‘mature poet . . . works like the chemist.’’31 Scientists serve as an appropriate model here not only because Eliot is trying to endow literature with some of the authority of the sciences, but because they best express the impersonal quality Eliot hoped to enact in his own writing and which he offered as a proper model for all mature poets. More so than in the earlier piece, ‘‘Modern Tendencies’’ repeatedly returns to the eradication of the personality from the creative process as a necessary component for successful production; thus a scientist works ‘‘not through a desire to express his personality, but by a complete surrender of himself to the work in which he was absorbed.’’ To encourage readers to adopt the approach, Eliot also establishes impersonality as a test for greatness, for the ‘‘greater the poet . . . the more elusive his personality,’’ just as ‘‘[t]here is this same inevitability and impersonality about the work of a great poet.’’32 And once having established that condition, only then can creativity (defined once again via the chemical process which produces sulphuric acid) occur, but with the poet in a thoroughly passive role. The shred of platinum, like the poet’s mind, ‘‘merely looks on.’’33 Great poetry, then, begins in


45

subjugating the personality. Like a scientist collaborating on an experiment, a writer must establish the proper conditions for his writing and then step aside. This model of creative detachment owes much to the ideal of Keatsian disinterestedness stated in the negative capability letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse. There Keats defines the poetical character through its ability to evade: ‘‘it is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – it has no character.’’ In Keats’s model, the Poet ‘‘has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body,’’ so that when amidst a crowd of people, he finds ‘‘the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me, [and] I am in a very little time annihilated.’’34 The remarkable similarity of Keats’s language to Eliot’s descriptions of his own identity eroding during the creative process and the earlier echoes of Shelley suggest that while Eliot often adopted a pose of hostility towards the Romantics, he sometimes shared their assumptions concerning the production of imaginative material, especially when they served his specific purposes.35 Eliot’s notion also borrows more generally from Kant’s examination of aesthetics in Critique of Judgment (1790), which argues for expressions of taste that are separated from the subject’s relationship to the object. This notion of disinterestedness attempts to universalize standards of judgment and allowed Eliot to tie an author’s worth to his ability to suppress the personal and thus be judged on purely aesthetic grounds. Ultimately, ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’’ associates the impersonal with the poet’s ability ‘‘to cease to feel the emotion, to see [language] as the objective equivalent for it.’’36 This distancing of the poet’s feelings from his creative persona during the production of poetry became a preoccupation of Eliot’s around this time – earlier in ‘‘Modern Tendencies’’ he compares the poet’s interaction with his feelings to an astronomer surveying a passing comet in the distance. The year before, this manifested itself in the famous ‘‘objective correlative’’ passage in the essay on Hamlet, while the year after ‘‘Modern Tendencies’’ Eliot arrived at the equally celebrated historicized reading of the seventeenth century in ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets’’ (1921) where supposedly a ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ settled in, altering the course of English poetry up to the present time. The solution to that crisis, when thought and feeling become separated, is for the poet to ‘‘become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect,’’ which in the context of my discussion suggests that the poet must go outside of himself to ‘‘find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling’’ (SE 289). It was during the years 1919–21, around the time of the ‘‘Tradition’’ essay, that Eliot wrestled most intensely with questions about the artist’s role in

46


creation, struggling to synthesize diverse theories about emotion, impersonality, and detachment. But the most intense conflict occurred between Eliot’s attempts to posit a creative persona that flourished under solitary conditions and his repeated construction of models of artistic production that highlighted a dependence on collaborative activity to initiate that output. Continually vexed by a solipsistic world where men are confined, ‘‘each in his prison’’ (CPP 74),37 Eliot nevertheless tried to assert this detachment as a necessary condition for writing. This occurred especially forcefully in the late 1910s, as Eliot attempted to justify his decision to leave his family behind in America by pointing to the demands of the writer’s life. ‘‘The Arts insist,’’ he pleaded in ‘‘A Romantic Aristocrat’’ (1919), ‘‘that a man shall dispose of all that he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of a coterie, but simply and solely himself.’’ This essay seeks proper historical models of artistic individuality, finally settling on Leonardo da Vinci. Of Leonardo’s life, Eliot chooses to emphasize the following details: ‘‘he had no father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he had no stake in the community.’’38 This is Eliot staring at himself in the mirror and pondering his situation. How was he to respond to his own father’s death, which took place a couple of months before this essay, and most significantly, before Eliot could publish a full collection of his early poetry that would demonstrate to his family that he was on his way to a successful career as a writer? How was he to respond to being an exile from his homeland; someone with no official status in England; a metoikos; a man with few affiliations, political, religious, or literary? One path was to recognize this isolation as a dead end and look to assimilation, community, and collaboration as the solution. Thus, Leonardo finally succeeds because ‘‘his mind went out and became a part of things’’ (SW 27). In other words, he is powerful enough to apply intellect to experience, in effect resisting the debilitating dissociation of sensibility. Yet the curious phrasing emphasizes an interaction in which the artist seems not fully committed to or in charge of the collaborative enterprise. While Eliot argues for a unification of thought and emotion, the language highlights bifurcation. The model allows Eliot to have it both ways: to collaborate from a position of reserve, to reach out with the intellect while remaining physically withdrawn. This is one of the fundamental paradoxes of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ written the same year, and it explains why that essay struggles so both to separate the physical/emotional from the intellectual – ‘‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’’ (SE 18) – and to unite them somehow in a productive transformation: a ‘‘transmutation of emotion’’


47

and a ‘‘fusion of elements’’ (19). The great contradictions of that essay result largely from Eliot’s conflict over an attraction to the collaborative impulse because he saw it as a feasible path to poetic creation, tempered by a need to escape the emotional investment that this procedure necessarily demands. Later in his career, this conflict will play out as a struggle between passivity and authority, for Eliot will absorb the help of others and then attempt to assert control over the process and finished product retrospectively. Yet here the lines of debate are less clearly drawn. Although ‘‘Tradition’’ attempts desperately to assert the primacy of the solitary mind over base passions, even in its final moments (at the start of its third section, in the epigraphic nod to Aristotle’s De Anima) it acknowledges that the path to impersonality travels through a surrender to emotion. Although Eliot often felt compelled to dismiss the central tenets of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ as occurring in ‘‘the most juvenile’’ of his essays (UPUC 9), a ‘‘product of immaturity’’ (10), and one that contained ‘‘some unsatisfactory phrasing,’’39 the idea that past literature altered the present and that present literature modified the past was one of the few early ideas he never abandoned. Part of Eliot’s motivation is to overturn a historical bias that equates tradition with a lack of originality and devalues tradition by setting it against nineteenth-century notions of authorship that glorify invention. When discussing tradition in a 1936 Dublin lecture, Eliot offers a telling distinction: ‘‘The perpetual task of poetry is to make all things new. Not necessarily to make new things.’’40 Since Eliot’s historical view customarily stressed division – in famous ideas like the ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ where a separation of thought and feeling settled in like a pernicious virus during the seventeenth century – he conceived of literary influence in terms of reconciliation and union rather than invention or originality. In After Strange Gods, he offers tradition as the solution to this dissociation. Tradition is ‘‘of the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain: it is the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present. In the co-operation of both is the reconciliation of thought and feeling’’ (ASG 30). A year earlier he had identified the task of the ‘‘great poet’’ as the reintegration of a split personality that is English poetic history, hoping the writer ‘‘re-twines as many straying strands of tradition as possible’’ (UPUC 84–5). Indeed, the only way to access the design of the present in one’s art is through an awareness of the past; without the historical sense, the present will not reveal itself. Criticism, too, can help the facilitation of that discovery, by making clear the ‘‘collective personality’’ of the past, which is ‘‘tradition in the larger sense’’ (OPP 58). Ultimately, Eliot’s notion of tradition forbids creation in


48

isolation by recasting the creative experience into a collaborative one: ‘‘no art,’’ he writes, ‘‘and particularly and especially no literary art, can exist in a vacuum.’’ Even Shakespeare’s genius had ‘‘to evolve by the small contributions of a number of people in succession, each contributing a little.’’41 If we accept, then, Perry Meisel’s conception of modernism in The Myth of the Modern as an imaginative response to the impossibility of originality – given its emergence at the end of cultural and literary traditions – then Eliot’s reaction of adopting collaborative modes of creation (in the varied forms of editorial assistance of friends and editors, liberal use of allusion, excessive employment of direct quotation in epigraphs and within the body of poetic texts, to name just a few) seems a rational and resourceful choice for artistic survival in a creatively hostile era. ‘‘ T H E

S I L E N T S T R U G G L E S O F A S I N G L E M A N ’’ :

CRITICAL AUTHORITY VERSUS COLLECTIVE INTEREST

Because readers typically assign control of a text to a (single) author, collaborative approaches to writing immediately complicate questions of authority. Yet if the identity of the author is in question, then readers whose constructions of textual meaning have been based partly on external information like the writer’s name, nationality, gender, reputation, and past body of work must rethink their approach to that text. This question affects readings of Eliot, in particular, since he rigorously pursued rhetorical stances in his early work that helped cultivate a pose of authority. Eliot understood brilliantly that in an economy of symbolic goods that have no absolute price, the only capital a writer could be assured of amassing and drawing on when needed was one’s own reputation or one’s name.42 Yet Eliot’s increasing interest in collaboration complicated and sometimes countered that posture, for as Jeffrey Masten notes, ‘‘[c]ollaboration is . . . a dispersal of author/ity, rather than a simple doubling of it.’’43 Obscuring the origins of a work diverts attention from the ‘‘name’’ and its attendant accumulated value; for this reason, Eliot’s dual roles of critic and poet allowed him the key flexibility of securing the capital of the authorized in his prose while worrying less about such questions in his poetry. Many of Eliot’s contemporary readers, reviewers, and friends remarked upon the poet’s vigorous pursuit of authoritative stances in his early writings. William Carlos Williams once referred to Eliot’s ‘‘affectation of authority,’’ while Aiken observed, in reviewing The Sacred Wood, that Eliot spoke with ‘‘confidence’’ but that he often tried too hard: ‘‘Mr. Eliot is so intent on being intelligent at every point, in every sentence,


49

in every syllable, that many of his pages become mere incoherences of cleverness; the evidence of thought is weighty, but the value of it is vague.’’44 Such a stance, then, would seem ironically to make Eliot most unreceptive to collaborative relationships, since the exercising of authority leaves little space for another to occupy. This authoritative posture, coupled with the expatriate status of writers like Eliot and Pound, sometimes subjected them to resentful attacks that highlighted their nationalities as problematic issues. Richard Aldington, for one, complained later in his life of modernist ‘‘yankees’’ who had been ‘‘high-hatting the natives’’ through strong-arm rhetorical tactics, in effect shaping the opinions of those who loved art and literature. Unlike George Orwell, who regarded this foreign dominance rather calmly, Aldington expressed a severe native resentment over being displaced, even though this animosity might have had more to do with Aldington’s personal falling out with Eliot, a result of Eliot’s perceived dislike of H.D. (Aldington’s wife) and Aldington’s satirizing of Eliot in Stepping Heavenward.45 In fact, in the minds of Pound and Eliot, their very foreignness allowed them the privileged position of the detached visitor, able to assess the culture that they temporarily inhabited in ways unavailable to natives. Believing early twentieth-century America inhospitable to intellectuals, Eliot argued that a writer was forced to become an expatriate if he hoped to develop his artistic sensibility. He used Henry James as his model, for he saw James in Europe as ‘‘everywhere a foreigner,’’ which assisted him in becoming ultimately ‘‘a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.’’ Similarly, Pound, in complaining about the inability of American editors to recognize a talent like Frost (forcing the latter to publish North Boston in England), decided that under such hostile conditions, ‘‘[i]t is natural and proper that I should have to come abroad to get printed.’’46 Such sentiments helped justify Eliot’s belief that cultivating an emotional detachment – in this case from his native land – was the proper approach. This move demonstrates the positive outcomes of exile, for Eliot’s removal from his homeland served to liberate him from that prevailing culture. That homelessness enabled Eliot to acquire the freedom necessary to critique his personal and national backgrounds in a rather unrestrained tone, even though Eliot’s own personal conservatism encouraged him soon to affiliate himself with the dominant British culture in which he had resettled. Eliot established authority, especially in the early prose reviews, in a variety of ways, including through ad hominem attacks, a consciously confident or sometimes bullying tone, and the habit of name-dropping,

50


which implied a broad scope of learning that sometimes threatened to overwhelm the reader, even though many of those allusions were, as Eliot once confessed, to writers ‘‘whose work I hardly knew’’ (TCC 17). Eliot also took on projects that would allow him to overturn canonical norms and attack accepted authorities on a topic: he often begins early essays by citing an authority only to refute it. This is part of the impetus behind the elevation of the metaphysical poets – still somewhat out of favor before the appearance of the Grierson edition reviewed by Eliot – because it allowed Eliot to establish a new order of literary tradition, much along the lines suggested by the ‘‘Tradition’’ essay. Not content simply to restore Donne’s reputation, Eliot spends the majority of one later essay attacking five accepted beliefs about Donne’s work that he feels are misplaced or wrong.47 Similarly, the curious early views on Shakespeare, including the attacks on Hamlet and the reorientation of readers’ attention towards some of the more minor plays, seem intentionally provocative and designed to bolster the authority of the reviewer rather than advance the understanding of readers. Perhaps the most prevalent strategy to achieve authority, however, emerged through Eliot’s attempts to inflate the status of poetry, specifically, and literary studies, in general, through the comparison of literature with the sciences.48 When Pound complains that Austen writes about ‘‘a dull, stupid, hemmed-in sort of life,’’ he is announcing a hostility not only towards the limitations of the novel form, but towards the nineteenth century as a whole and Austen’s status as a woman, a non-professional writer, and one whose artistic range is seemingly bounded by her domestic and economic situations.49 Eliot’s early attitudes towards the feminine were complicated during wartime, when he found himself a solitary male non-combatant working beside women at both Lloyd’s and The Egoist, resulting in a certain amount of anxiety about his own civilian standing.50 He responds with a kind of bluster in a letter to his father, bragging that he tries ‘‘to keep the writing as much as possible in Male hands, as I distrust the Feminine in literature’’ (L1 204). The almost mechanized procedure of The Waste Land – a document treating a topic of such import that it requires the elucidation of hard, scientific notes, with their whiff of objectivity and truth-seeking – can be understood on one level as a work that tries to alleviate this anxiety about status. Eliot’s scientific analogies are legion, from the best-known shred of platinum experiment in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ to lesserknown (though sometimes just as intricate) examples in essays like ‘‘In Memory of Henry James’’ (1918), where he argues that ‘‘[i]t is in the


51

chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that James is unequalled.’’51 The inflation of the writer’s status works implicitly on various levels: the analogy highlights the author’s cleverness for the reader; it assigns to literary studies a level of objective truth it had previously lacked in general, subjective ‘‘appreciations’’ of authors; and it ultimately equates the author with the scientist, both occupied with impersonal observations under laboratory conditions. Thus in ‘‘Modern Tendencies of Poetry,’’ when Eliot is arguing for poetry as a process of work and toil rather than simply an ‘‘ebullition of a personality,’’ he is operating within a model that glorifies, in the 1920 Blake essay, ‘‘impersonal reason’’ and ‘‘objectivity of science’’ (SE 322). This tendency fit nicely with Eliot’s emphasis on form as a way of controlling outbursts of personalities, and the resultant focus of construction and method aligned the process of poetry effectively with a scientist undertaking an experiment. It conformed also to recent modernist interpretations of science as a discipline that enacted a process of dehumanization that would neutralize nineteenth-century narcissistic outlooks that elevated the personal above all else by appealing to reason instead of imagination. Science is thus called on to counteract anthropocentrism.52 The utilitarian qualities of the sciences were attractive features that the modernists also hoped to draw on in their quest to establish literature as an important component of refined society instead of a marginalized product of the mass entertainment culture dominated by the new cinema. This impulse was driven partly by a tradition that associated mass culture with the feminine, which had emerged especially forcefully in the latter half of the nineteenth century.53 In an industrial world increasingly attuned to notions of utility, Eliot responded over the years with titles like ‘‘The Social Function of Poetry,’’ ‘‘Literature and the Modern World,’’ ‘‘The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe,’’ and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, titles that linked the creation and reading of poetry to larger social and political purposes. He would also begin to reposition the role of poetry in society, making it a fundamental component of any successful culture. On a professional level, Eliot eventually reacted to this increasing desire for a social utility by turning to the theatre, which he argued was the ultimate tool in ‘‘exciting this communal pleasure’’ that unified cultures (UPUC 154). Nevertheless, buried within these sentiments is the presumption that science, by definition, possesses value to society, so much so that in his refutation of Richard Aldington’s criticism of Ulysses, all Eliot feels compelled to observe is that Joyce’s method possesses the ‘‘importance of a

52


scientific discovery,’’ as if that statement alone was irrefutable.54 While this blurring of disciplines threatened traditional renderings of the artist, it offered the benefit of attaching a utilitarian quality to Eliot’s work. The analogy equating literature and the sciences operated quite flexibly, for it occurs in passages identifying both the critic and poet as scientists. While numerous essays have the critic measuring the achievement of other writers in a kind of laboratory work that is objective, dispassionate, and vital, just as many compare poetic creation to the detached, methodical process of an experiment. Similarly, the analogy also reinforced Eliot’s notion of literary tradition as a collaborative relationship, for he well understood the sciences as a collaborative discipline and repeatedly pointed out that scientists adopt collaborative investigative procedures. Fellow modernists were embracing similar strategies of equating the two disciplines; Pound, for example, employs the comparison well before Eliot, in essays like ‘‘A Retrospect’’ or ‘‘The Serious Artist.’’ Even though Eliot was far more skeptical of Futurism than some of his colleagues, Futurist arguments by Marinetti and his disciples arguing that recent scientific discoveries were actually altering the human psyche, necessitating new outlooks on the world, also encouraged the embracement of this alliance.55 Eliot’s use of the device, as always, was rooted in more personal issues having to do with authority, detachment, and the creative process. In fact, a key early literary antecedent was Vale´ry’s idea of the poet as ‘‘cool scientist’’ in his 1889 essay ‘‘On Literary Technique,’’ which was not published until 1946 and appears in the appendix of an edition of Vale´ry’s The Art of Poetry for which Eliot wrote the introduction. Clearly, the passage resonated with Eliot. He cites an extended section of the piece (the longest quoted portion in Eliot’s introduction) and identifies the image as an invention that anticipates the twentieth-century approach to poetry. Vale´ry comes upon the subject by suggesting that the age’s ‘‘scientific brutality’’ has turned the problem of literary aesthetics into one of form, which has required ‘‘a totally new and modern conception of the poet. He is no longer the disheveled madman who writes a whole poem in the course of one feverish night; he is a cool scientist, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer. A hundred lines at the most will make up his longest poems.’’ This dispassionate artist ‘‘will take care not to hurl on to paper everything whispered to him in fortunate moments by the Muse of Free Association. On the contrary, everything he has imagined, felt, dreamed, and planned will be passed through a sieve, weighed, filtered, subjected to form, and condensed as much as possible so as to gain in power what it loses in length.’’56 One can see how Eliot would have responded enthusiastically to


53

such a characterization of the poet. The passage contains many of his favorite topics: it rejects the image of the Romantic, solitary author generating imaginatively inspired, unwieldy texts, in favor of a detached, impersonal investigator; it embraces compression and concision as goals; and it identifies creation as a problem of structure and organization rather than one of raw material. Finally, it posits a creative process in which imaginative material must be acted upon – poured into a sieve (a metaphor he uses elsewhere describing Pound’s influence on The Waste Land manuscript [L 1 502]) and ‘‘subjected to form’’ – by an external agent if it is to achieve power. As Eliot says in his introduction to the volume, young poets should keep in mind Vale´ry’s minimizing of the role of ‘‘inspiration’’ in poetic creation. He alludes to his own experience as an editor at Faber, explaining that most unfinished manuscripts that crossed his desk came from writers who had depended too much on inspiration. Such writers, explained Eliot, had ‘‘shirked the labor of smelting what may have been payable ore.’’57 The sciences had also made the successful transition from a nineteenthcentury amateur culture to a twentieth-century professional discipline that necessarily excluded certain groups from participating in the vocation’s conversation, thus making it an attractive model for modernist literary studies as it attempted a similar transformation. In one early attack on the amateur literary culture entitled ‘‘Professional, Or . . . ’’ (1918), Eliot explicitly refutes a TLS piece condemning professionalism in art. That leading article threatened numerous tenets of modernism by suggesting that professionalism draws false comparisons between artistic activities and mechanized processes; that professionalism unnecessarily emphasized the technique of art and therefore destroyed the enjoyment of creation; and that professionalism results in difficult art which alienates a public unable to make judgments for itself about those pieces. Frustrated by such developments, the TLS author hearkens back to a more idealized time, when the Romantics illustrated the benefits of an amateur culture raised to the highest order. The writer ultimately wages the argument on moral grounds: ‘‘In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride.’’58 Eliot begins his counter-assault in The Egoist by nationalizing the problem, when he criticizes the British fondness for the specialist, a misplaced attitude rooted in Romantic elevations of inspiration and Victorian prejudices against professionalism. Eliot then defends technique as one of the highest expressions of art because it requires hard work, which he would set elsewhere against the laziness of the British amateur ‘‘who shrinks from working overtime or at weekends.’’59 Finally, he identifies Chesterton and Alice Meynell as contemporary examples of the nineteenth-century

54


amateur culture. But he reserves his most stinging barbs for Meynell, by identifying her with the feminine and gendering her form – the polite essay – along those same lines, dismissing it as a mere ‘‘parlour-game’’ and a ‘‘forgotten craft.’’ The essay concludes with its most important point, demanding that readers ‘‘must learn to take literature seriously.’’60 The sentiments contested by Eliot experienced various incarnations in the late 1800s, including Oscar Wilde’s vigorous defense of the amateur culture in ‘‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’’ (1891), where he draws a dichotomy between ‘‘useful things’’ and ‘‘beautiful things.’’ Only the latter can be produced by individuals working toward self-generated, artistic goals; when the notion of utility intrudes into the process, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman . . . Art is the most intense mood of Individualism that the world has known . . . But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.61

Within the context of the professional versus amateur debate, Wilde’s argument glorifying the aesthetic ties authentic creation to the motivations of the writer. For Wilde, to be prompted by outside, professional considerations is to reduce the act to one of mere trade. Similarly, it situates the worth of the enterprise within the personality of the individual artist. Coded language like ‘‘unique temperament’’ and ‘‘intense mood’’ draws on Romantic valuations of the imagination that result in privileged positions for the artist in his society. Eliot, on the other hand, attempts to counter each of these trends in prose that reveals an interest in suppressing the personal in favor of an exaltation of the collective, through collaborative efforts like conversation, allusion, borrowing, and co-authorship. He situates professionalism as both an alternative to Wilde’s neo-Romanticism and as a way of elevating the status of literary studies in a society increasingly uninterested in what its proponents had to offer. Wilde, then, often turns up in Eliot’s criticism as the embodiment of that ‘‘certain amateur gusto’’ that has led to the ‘‘vulgarization of literature’’ and is often surrounded by associates of a similar outlook, like Chesterton or Brooke.62 So while Eliot had worked hard early in his career to establish his critical authority, his construction of an impersonal theory of poetry and ultimate endorsement of


55

collaborative solutions to creative problems eventually encouraged him to abandon this solitary path. In the context of modernist analogies between science and literature, attacks like Eliot’s associate the feminine with amateurism, uselessness, frivolity, emotion, and softness, and the masculine with professionalism, utility, seriousness, intellect, and hardness. Concurrent valuations of form and content along the same metaphorical lines are inherent in observations like that made in T. E. Hulme’s 1914 lecture on the philosophy of modern art, art that ‘‘desire[s] . . . austerity and bareness, a striving towards structure and away from the messiness and confusion of nature and natural things.’’63 Such a background allows for the assigning of value to literary studies by associating with modernist texts the progress implicit in scientific enterprises. Indeed, even attaching footnotes to The Waste Land implies a certain professionalization of the reading process that would seem to exclude the amateur unschooled in the proper use of such scholarly apparatuses. This is especially true given the abbreviated form of some of those notes, the four different languages other than English employed, and the casual use of punctuation like ‘‘V.’’ for Vide, which implies a shared familiarity with the private codes of the profession. In retrospect, as Eliot would attempt later to move away from such an exclusionary stance, these strategies must have seemed somewhat overdone, and might provide a source of explanation for his many dismissals of the notes to The Waste Land during the years following the poem’s publication. The majority of essays just cited, which take as their preoccupation the cultivation of authority, appear, not surprisingly, during the first decade or so of Eliot’s career. As his reputation became more secure, Eliot discarded these intentionally aggressive rhetorical stances that had as their goal the inflation of the writer’s status. Eliot understood that once that authority was established, its presence would always be embedded in his name. Thus Eliot felt comfortable enough by the early 1940s to offer a public, retrospective survey of these early procedures, and in typical fashion adopted a somewhat strained tone of hyper-modesty: ‘‘I obtained,’’ he confessed, ‘‘partly by subtlety, partly by effrontery, and partly by accident, a reputation amongst the credulous for learning and scholarship, of which (having no further use for it) I have since tried to disembarrass myself’’ (TCC 145). By this point Eliot had renounced, for the most part, positions that distanced writers from their audiences and began to publicly support collaborative approaches to reading and writing that increasingly involved audiences. Similarly, he aligned this attitude with the construction of social programs that sought to erect idealized versions of common cultures.

56


But Eliot’s quest for a collaborative relationship with his audiences would not get underway fully at least until the mid-to-late 1920s. During the years preceding The Waste Land, Eliot is still trying to walk the fine line of cultivating a personal authority as a writer while at the same time inflating the status of literary studies as a whole through the construction of a collective modernist program. Part of that procedure involved making very bold claims about who was and was not a fit reader for difficult modernist texts. Thus the most hostile comments about mass audiences arrive in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when Eliot seems barely able to contain his contempt for the ‘‘Philistines’’ (borrowing from Arnold) that make up the ‘‘General Reading Public’’ or, put another way, the burgeoning middle class to whom Harold Monro’s Georgian poets appealed.64 At times, Eliot does seem merely to be toeing the modernist party line, falling in behind Aldington’s dismissals of the ‘‘pleasant little rhymes now current’’ or Pound’s hostility toward the ‘‘illiterate motorowners’’ incapable of recognizing great art for themselves.65 But Eliot also realized that modernism needed to present itself as a coterie alternative to the Georgian mass-market offerings, since that market was already filled; thus modernism adopts a self-consciously cosmopolitan stance by foregrounding its indebtedness to literature of other cultures while at the same time dismissing the Georgians for lacking this quality and having to flaunt a debilitating emotionalism. In ‘‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant’’ (1918), for example, Eliot argues that ‘‘[t]he serious writer of verse must be prepared to cross himself with the best verse of other languages and the best prose of all languages.’’ As far as Eliot can tell, ‘‘[i]n Georgian poetry there is almost no crossing visible; it is inbred. It has developed a technique and a set of emotions all of its own.’’66 In this case, fertilization from abroad provides a test for quality because contact with foreign works opened up different possibilities within contemporary poetry. Georgian poetry, which consciously tried to cultivate a native English voice, represents a deviant, self-referential body of work cut off from any larger, meaningful tradition. The Georgians are criticized not only for their collaboration amongst themselves but for their inability to reach out beyond that closed circle. Eliot’s anti-Georgianism, however, forced him to examine his own position within a collaborative faction. In ‘‘The Post-Georgians’’ (1919), an early negative review of some Georgian verse, Eliot highlights the practical economic advantages of modernist collaboration (keeping that movement unnamed) while also condemning a similar collective strategy in the Georgians because it only serves to foreground their mediocrity.


57

In the opening of the essay, Eliot seems to be justifying his participation in the modernist coterie, when he writes: people who are keen on literature look for groups. They are easier to find, easier to talk about, and their multiplied activity is more inspiring to watch than the silent struggles of a single man. Within limits, a group is even a useful thing. Its purpose and justification is advertisement; and the best work requires the best advertisement; and a dozen people can attract more attention together than dispersedly; and if they can attract enough attention, some of them may be able to make a living.67

In addition, modernists evince anxieties about the explosion of literacy rates (accompanied by a decline in taste) and concomitant accelerations in personal income. These two conditions helped advance a consumerist society marked by a proliferation of mass-market printed matter to fill a pent-up demand for leisure material. Modernists sometimes located the confluence of these threatening events in the parallel rise of the novel’s popularity in the nineteenth century, rightly so since approximately fifty percent of the books typically purchased by Mudie’s circulating library during its heyday were novels.68 Andreas Huyssen associates a modernist need for exclusion with this very ‘‘anxiety of contamination by its other’’ in the form of a rapidly expanding mass culture. Modernists tended to minimize in their own works the feature of amusement that was so tied up with popular modes of mass entertainment, dismissing, for example, the ‘‘pleasantness’’ of Georgian poetry.69 Instead, they emphasized selectivity, a feature advanced effectively through the cachet of the little magazine and small, private presses. So when Eliot suggests in 1919 that modernists should ‘‘address the one hypothetical Intelligent Man who does not exist and who is the audience of the Artist,’’ he is dutifully following Pound’s 1916 lead in ‘‘This Constant Preaching to the Mob,’’ which proffered ‘‘The Seafarer’’ and ‘‘The Wanderer’’ as demonstrations of poetry generated not due to a need ‘‘for after-dinner speakers’’ but out of a solitary man’s desire to speak into the void of silence.70 Like Milton’s narrator, they sought not ‘‘the barbarous dissonance / Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race / Of that wild rout’’ but a ‘‘fit audience . . . though few.’’71 Modernism saw ugliness in the many and beauty in the few, even though it continued to be intrigued by the raw energy of mass culture. Its promoters and practioners thus circled their wagons and began preaching this message to each other, a decision that further encouraged the establishment of collaborative partnerships. Eliot had witnessed firsthand in the late 1910s and early 1920s the benefits of associating himself with a group that shared certain

58


assumptions, spoke a similar language, and gave its members a base from which to work. Part of the impetus behind the founding of The Criterion was that the journal would place Eliot at the heart of the extended collaborative conversation being conducted by the modernists. Its existence, from 1922 to 1939, would also allow Eliot to offer authoritative pronouncements suggesting the fit direction of that discussion through the imposing ‘‘Commentary’’ perched at the front of each issue.72 Eliot envisioned the journal as a receptive vehicle that would publish a wide range of opinions, rather than adhere to a particular dogma, since he believed the only way to achieve a productive output was through the kind of positive tension that emerged in most good conversations. Although he sporadically discussed during The Criterion years the way in which an ideal journal would function, Eliot explored this idea most fully in ‘‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’’ (1920), which appeared a little more than a year before he would first discuss founding and running the journal with its sponsor, Lady Rothermere. That essay culminates in an idealized vision of a literary culture in which small, boutique presses thrive and those ‘‘who have a sufficient community of interests and standards publish their conversation, their theories and their opinions in periodicals of their own. They should not be afraid of forming ‘cliques,’ if their cliques are professional and not personal.’’ Ultimately, this conversation generates a stimulating ‘‘friction,’’ and the journals themselves become like lively ‘‘drawing-rooms.’’73 Such sentiments, combined with the collaborative impulse that underpinned his work, made Eliot a natural candidate for attempting to put such lofty aims into practice. Eliot saw the editor as a facilitator of this collaborative environment whose social components were just as important as its literary ingredients. For a writer like Eliot, who both saw the enormous advantages of collaboration in his own work and feared the ceding of control to others, editing a journal allowed him to stand in the authoritative position of conductor orchestrating a varied group of fellow collaborators without losing too much influence. Eliot learned the desirability of this privileged role from Bruce Richmond, who cultivated the poet’s early reviews for TLS, which Richmond edited. In a talk on the relationship between leadership and literary life, Eliot paid tribute to those skills, especially the ones that help facilitate community: ‘‘A good literary editor, furthermore, does much in the way of bringing his contributors together socially: and a writer needs contact, not only with an appreciative public, but with other writers whose personalities are sympathetic, though their points of view may be, often to their mutual stimulation and advantage, opposed.’’74 Eliot’s idealized


59

conception, which he would enact through The Criterion, shares many features of a Renaissance period relatively devoid of a mass-market book culture, a period when gentlemen circulated literary texts within a fairly restricted social class. Wendy Wall designates the results of these circumstances a ‘‘poetics of exchange.’’ One key feature of this culture is that since books were not understood to be generated by a single, Romantic author, ‘‘texts were seen,’’ according to Wall, ‘‘as porous and variable scripts for performance.’’75 Eliot implicitly subscribed to this ideal in his recycling of poetic and prose texts in many different forms, and ultimately in his acceptance of collaborative assistance with his own work. It is often helpful to read Eliot’s collaborative exchanges with Pound, Browne, and Hayward as performative pieces in which each member self-consciously adopts a particular, predetermined pose that depends on the extraliterary dynamics of the relationship. In fact, Eliot, Geoffrey Faber, and Frank Morley, who regularly met at the flat of John Hayward at 22 Bina Gardens, once penned a series of lighthearted poems and had them privately printed under the title Noctes Binanianæ as a kind of mock testament to this practice. (The title plays upon Noctes Ambrosianæ, the series of dialogues in Blackwood’s from 1822 to 1835 that covered a range of timely topics. While more than half of the dialogues were written by John Wilson, they were presented in the form of conversations between fictitious characters based on real people such as friends like James Hogg.) The preface even boasts of the volume’s manuscript circulating amongst the circle of friends for many months. On a more serious note, this activity was carried out by the little magazines that flourished in the period. They designated a select audience and were highly self-referential, in effect carrying on a fairly closed conversation about culturally sanctioned topics. Little magazines both restricted and facilitated conversation in a particular direction, as Pound noted in a letter to Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, where he hoped to find a journal in which he, Eliot, Lewis, and Joyce could appear together so ‘‘friends and readers (what few of ’em there are), can look with assurance of finding us’’ (L 107). Finally, modernism also championed limited editions of texts, which enacted this ideal of a ‘‘poetics of exchange’’ by giving writers a chance to manage reception of their work within this select, identifiable, largely sympathetic audience. The flourishing of small, private presses like Yeats’s Cuala Press and the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press (which prepared the first English edition of The Waste Land in book form, a limited edition of 460 copies), helped institutionalize these conditions. In fact, this circle was so insular that it sanctioned such ethically

60


questionable practices as allowing the Woolfs to publish Eliot’s Poems in 1919 and then subsequently write an anonymous review for The Athenæum praising the volume in critical terms borrowed directly from Eliot’s own storehouse of images, primarily in comparing him to a practicing scientist.76 The practice became ingrained to such a degree that when Osbert Sitwell published Eliot’s work in Arts and Letters, it was only natural that Eliot should respond in kind by placing the Sitwells in the Egoist or after John Rodker published Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec at Ovid Press it made sense for Eliot to review his friend’s volume, The Future of Futurism (1926), in the Nation and Athenæum.77 While Eliot was very conscious of issues like copyright that tended to reinforce concepts such as ownership and solitary authorship, he seemed comfortable with the notion of texts as performative pieces that possessed different meanings in different circumstances. The publication of The Waste Land, for example, in three very different outlets – in The Dial, The Criterion, and as a book (for the first time with notes) – suggests three very different poems. In many respects, this series of publications embodies the ‘‘poetics of exchange’’ culture, with versions of Eliot’s poem circulating under vastly different circumstances and then generating a series of reviews that extended the conversation initiated by the poem in little magazines and literary journals. Notably, even after the poetry has been written, participants in the circle must still converse, for ‘‘talking about poetry,’’ according to Eliot, ‘‘is a part of, an extension of, our experience of it’’ (UPUC 18). This is a rather fluid interpretation of meaning based on a collaborative outlook. I think it helps us understand Eliot’s prose criticism if we keep in mind that the essays would be read, at least partly, in the context of larger conversations occurring outside of those essays. And part of the provocative stances taken in the essays, especially the early reviews, grows out of a belief that ‘‘friction’’ spawned by the conversational environment acted as a positive force because it helped stimulate ideas. This conversation metaphor also fits so securely into Eliot’s view of literature because it posits the need for external prompts to accomplish writing. In the opening sentences of To Criticize the Critic, Eliot consciously positions the essays as pieces that he hopes will ‘‘stimulate other minds’’ and ‘‘provoke other critics’’ to make critical judgments (TCC 11). He feared circumstances that might lead to silence, whether that meant in the form of his own isolation from other disciplines or from different national cultures. The Second World War occasioned another of Eliot’s idealized calls for action, based on his conversational model, only one that extended across national boundaries and stemmed the ‘‘cultural autarchy’’ that surfaced in Germany


61

in the 1930s. Borrowing from his experience as an editor of The Criterion, Eliot asks in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture for a renewal of journals in all the capitals of Europe that will help facilitate the sharing of ideas, ‘‘to exchange ideas in conversation . . . their co-operation should continually stimulate that circulation of influence of thought and sensibility, between nation and nation in Europe, which fertilises and renovates from abroad the literature of each one of them.’’78 This key notion of fertilization, which first appears in the ‘‘Tradition’’ essay, demonstrates that Eliot recognized there was no way to succeed in his art alone. To write meant to converse, to cooperate, and to collaborate.

CHAPTER

2

A conversation about ‘‘the longest poem in the English langwidge’’: Pound, Eliot, and The Waste Land In March of 1922, T. S. Eliot wrote Ezra Pound to solicit his assistance in launching The Criterion, the influential quarterly Eliot eventually edited for over sixteen years. Eliot envisioned the journal as a vehicle that would allow for the collective articulation of the modernist program, yet with a decidedly internationalist slant: the same week he posted the Pound letter, Eliot contacted both Valery Larbaud and Hermann Hesse seeking contributions for the review. In this regard, he was following the lead of Pound, who had earlier understood the importance of trying to unite modernism’s work under the umbrella of a single publication, like Scofield Thayer’s Dial. Pound had always conceived of modernism as a collaborative affair, which is why he was so amazed upon first reading Eliot’s early work to learn that the poet had seemingly developed without the assistance of other members of the circle. Because Pound simply could not comprehend modernism as anything but a shared experience, he expressed surprise to Harriet Monroe that Eliot had ‘‘actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’’ (L 40). Collaboration gave weight to individual literary works by highlighting their association with a collective body.1 It was this approach that Eliot sought for his own project, for collaboration possessed the major advantage of allowing Eliot to maintain exclusive control over the content and direction of the message. After spelling out the conditions of what he hoped would be Pound’s role at The Criterion – they included a quarterly prose contribution, publication of individual ‘‘Cantos’’ as they surfaced, and facilitating the contributions of other writers – Eliot implored: ‘‘Please consider that this venture is impossible without your collaboration, and let me hear from you as soon as possible’’ (L1 508). By this time Pound had already wielded his editor’s pen in critiquing various drafts of The Waste Land, most significantly during Eliot’s two passes through Paris while on a trip to Lausanne to recover from a breakdown and consult Dr. Roger Vittoz, a Swiss psychiatrist recommended by Ottoline Morrell. The alterations to the 62

A conversation about ‘‘the longest poem’’

63

final form of the text were so severe and significant that Eliot paid tribute to his friend’s efforts by referring to Pound in the dedication as ‘‘il miglior fabbro’’ – ‘‘the better artificer’’ or ‘‘craftsman’’ – a reference to the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel (praised thusly in Canto 26 of the Purgatorio) which Pound had already borrowed for his chapter on the poet in The Spirit of Romance (1910). Pound characterized the affair in slightly different terms, when he explained that the ‘‘printed Infancies [of the poem] result[ed]’’ when ‘‘Ezra performed the caesarean Operation’’ (L1 498), terms that stress his own active role in the birthing of the material. Pound’s work with Eliot on The Waste Land is the best-known example of modernist collaboration, an affiliation that was not fully understood until Valerie Eliot’s 1971 publication of drafts that detail the evolution of the poem. As a result, it has generated the most commentary in discussions of Eliot and collaboration. Although many scholars have explored the exchanges contained in these documents, most view the collaboration as an isolated event, a one-time, coincidental pairing explainable due to the special circumstances of time and place, instead of contextualizing it within Eliot’s career-long collaborative impulse.2 Such a corrective placement not only helps illuminate how The Waste Land took its final shape, but it allows for a fuller understanding of the role Eliot sought in his relationship with Pound. That alliance ended up enacting Eliot’s renderings of the creative process in his prose and it established the exchanges that took place during the writing of the poem as a model for later collaborations. Finally, this discussion helps shine a light on the exceedingly complicated nature of the interpersonal politics of Eliot’s collaborations by demonstrating the various guises assumed by the poet-critic as he struggled to resolve his paradoxical attraction to the conflicting impulses of passivity and authority. My reading suggests that within this relationship, Eliot and Pound co-opted specific roles that satisfied particular emotional needs tied to submission and domination, respectively, and that this tacit agreement significantly influenced the outcome of the poem. ‘‘ W I L L I N G

T O D O A N Y T H I N G ’’ : T H E N A T U R E O F T H E ELIOT–POUND ALLIANCE

By 1922, Eliot had benefited significantly from Pound’s assistance as a skilled literary critic and sympathetic mentor. Perhaps Pound’s most important early role, however, was that of advocate. Upon meeting Eliot in the fall of 1914, he took up the unknown poet’s cause by sending ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ to Harriet Monroe and urging

64


publication in Poetry because the poem was the ‘‘most interesting contribution I’ve had from an American’’ (L 41). After that work finally appeared in June, Pound submitted four more poems in August 1915, of which three were published: ‘‘The Boston Evening Transcript,’’ ‘‘Aunt Helen,’’ and ‘‘Cousin Nancy.’’ He then nominated Eliot for the 1915 Poetry award for best work of the year, though the prize eventually went to Vachel Lindsay for ‘‘The Chinese Nightingale,’’ despite Pound’s vigorous defense of his new prote´ge´’s cause. Pound also helped place ‘‘Portrait of a Lady’’ with Others: A Magazine of New Verse in 1915, as well as ‘‘The Hippopotamus’’ and three French poems in 1917 with the Little Review, for which Pound served as foreign editor. Five of Eliot’s poems appeared in Pound’s Catholic Anthology, a volume designed specifically to get some of Eliot’s work into print.3 Pound also successfully encouraged Harriet Shaw Weaver to hire Eliot as assistant editor of The Egoist (after Richard Aldington left the position in 1917 when he volunteered for military service) and attempted to advance Eliot financially in other ways as well, most notably in the ill-fated Bel Esprit scheme which sought in 1921–2 to release Eliot from his job at Lloyd’s by providing him a £300 stipend on which to live and write full-time. Updating the custom of Renaissance aristocratic patronage, Pound marketed the scheme as an investment in talent, elevating the status of the contributor to that of co-creator, for to ‘‘give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation,’’ he wrote, and the only way to achieve that is through the ‘‘co-operation of subscribers.’’4 Typically, though, he went overboard in making the appeal public in the New Age. That development violated Eliot’s finely honed sense of decorum and exacerbated his mixed feelings about where he stood in relation to Pound’s assistance, which so often took aggressive forms. Paul Delany’s examination of Eliot’s finances demonstrates that the poet responded to such efforts ‘‘with a mixture of embarrassment and collusion.’’5 Pound was forever encouraging Eliot to abandon all of his outside interests to get down to the serious task of writing poetry; thus he expressed exasperation over projects like The Criterion and Eliot’s seeming refusal to take Pound up on his offer of being ‘‘willing to do anything I can to further your own production’’ of poetry (L1 512). In fact, while Pound served as Eliot’s primary early booster, defending the young poet’s choice of career in a rambling letter to Eliot’s father (99–104) and anointing him publicly as a significant poetic voice in a 1917 review for Poetry of Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot was always torn about how to manage this effusive support.6 Pound also exerted significant influence over the stylistic direction of Eliot’s work even before The Waste Land period, both through the


65

suggestion of specific literary models that would help give Eliot’s work focus and through actual annotation of Eliot’s poetry in draft form. In one interview, for example, Eliot explained how he and Pound studied Theóphile Gautier’s work, whose ‘‘form gave the impetus to the content,’’ an influence that resulted in a series of quatrain poems written during 1918–19, like the Sweeney series, ‘‘Whispers of Immortality,’’ ‘‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,’’ ‘‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,’’ and ‘‘A Cooking Egg,’’ among others.7 Christopher Ricks’s edition containing this early material from the Berg notebook, as well as other work influenced by Pound like ‘‘Gerontion’’ and the French verses from Poems (1920), illustrates Pound’s effect upon this poetry and Eliot’s efforts to benefit from that influence while still maintaining some authorial autonomy. While the exchanges are not as dramatic as those on The Waste Land manuscript, the relationship that emerges through the Berg drafts does anticipate some of the tendencies of the later collaboration. Pound’s primary impetus, for example, was always to cut. Guided by his firm belief that the ‘‘serious artist’’ always ‘‘uses the smallest possible number of words,’’ Pound stressed concision over Eliot’s propensity for wandering poetically or repeating himself, a habit that surfaces from ‘‘Prufrock’’ onwards.8 In the opening lines of ‘‘Gerousia,’’ for example, which would later become ‘‘Gerontion,’’ Pound immediately deletes (in his carbon copy of the poem) ‘‘Here I am, an,’’ preferring to emphasize the image over the poem’s speaker, believing the former should convey its own power. Not willing to banish the strong presence of the speaker at the start, Eliot ignores the suggestion. On the other hand, Eliot was willing to adopt wholesale cancellations, and accepted, for example, Pound’s deletion of entire stanzas in ‘‘A Cooking Egg.’’9 Elsewhere, Pound attended to a varied range of issues by addressing the rhythm of Eliot’s verse, inserting punctuation marks, correcting Eliot’s French, and providing an alternative vocabulary in places where a word or phrase bothered him. While other collaborators began to materialize around this time – Sydney Schiff and Mary Hutchinson, for example, read pre-publication versions of ‘‘Gerontion’’ in the summer of 1919 – Pound had established himself as Eliot’s primary collaborator of the period. Eliot tried to reciprocate Pound’s generosity in numerous ways. He returned the favor of critiquing work in progress fairly early in his relationship with Pound. In August 1917, Pound explains to Harriet Monroe that ‘‘Eliot is the only person who proffered criticism instead of general objection’’ (L 115) to ‘‘Three Cantos,’’ even though a later letter suggests Pound had to ‘‘stand . . . over him with a club’’ to generate a response.10 Elsewhere,

66


Eliot explains to John Quinn in March 1918 how he read some of Pound’s poetry before it was sent off to (and ultimately rejected by) Poetry (L1 223). While Pound was busy ‘‘booming’’ the work of Eliot, as he described it in one letter to Quinn, Eliot published anonymously the flattering portrait Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry in early 1918.11 A testament to the coziness of this relationship is the fact that Pound himself edited the typescript of that review, and, along the way, suggested the title, insisted on including Gaudier’s portrait of himself, and attempted to manage the reception of the document by proposing the publisher print on the front of the essay ‘‘price 25 cents,’’ so readers ‘‘will think they are getting something for nothing,’’ since they planned to hand out the text for free (SL 130). This established a pattern for future reviews and introductions, in which the two poets would promote each other’s work, even though each of the strong-willed writers periodically used his prose to jockey for position within the relationship. A few years after the anonymous pamphlet, Eliot tried to solidify the bond when he considered wresting control of The Criterion from the hands of Lady Rothermere and turning the journal into a vehicle run independently by the two friends. Just as he expressed reluctance about Eliot’s initial overtures to involve him in the operations of The Criterion, Pound resisted these subsequent attempts and retreated into his advisory role, counseling Eliot not to sink any of his own money into the project and perceptively noting that the primary value of the project consisted solely of what Eliot brought to it through his talents as editor (L1 589–91). Even though Pound contributed amply to The Criterion – from 1923–39, his work appeared in twenty-four different instances, in the form of poems (3 occasions), essays (14), letters to the editor (4), and reviews (3) – he probably sensed an unalterable shift in their relationship. Not only did the two men continue to develop different artistic, political, and spiritual interests during this time, but they saw less of each other because Pound by now had left England. To complicate matters, Eliot’s literary ascendancy eventually inflated his reputation well beyond that of Pound, making the latter increasingly sensitive about his association with his former prote´ge´. Eliot grew concerned about this tension soon after he began editing The Criterion, for he wrote Quinn on 4 October 1923 that he enjoyed being able to pay his friends for their submissions to the journal but that Pound presented special problems, for he was ‘‘sensitive and proud’’ and forced Eliot ‘‘to keep an attitude of discipleship to him.’’ Furthermore, complained Eliot, ‘‘every time I print anything of his it nearly sinks the paper. And he offers more than I want, thinking that he is helping.’’12 A decade later, Eliot


67

would drop the pretense of ‘‘discipleship’’ and publicly mock his friend with a sort of mean-spirited humor that occasionally surfaced in later comments on Pound. In the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary report of Harvard’s Class of 1910, Eliot informs his classmates with some exasperation that he is ‘‘obliged to spend a great deal of time answering letters from Ezra Pound, but my firm pays for the stamps.’’13 After Eliot shut down the journal, less opportunity for contact existed, though Faber and Faber would continue to publish selected Cantos over the years and the two poets were still swapping letters in the 1930s that discussed Eliot’s various personal and financial problems. But the death of close friends like Ford Madox Ford in 1939 and Pound’s increasing political extremism eventually isolated him almost entirely, to the point that he writes almost desperately from Rapallo in 1940 to James Laughlin: ‘‘I badly want news of Eliot or other living writers.’’14 Later, Eliot became involved in early efforts to keep Pound out of prison after his arrest for treason following the Second World War and sat on the jury of the Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters that bestowed upon Pound the Bollingen Award for best work of poetry in 1948 (for the ‘‘Pisan Cantos’’), which resulted in a series of blistering attacks by Robert Hillyer culminating in a call for Eliot’s removal from the jury.15 In two xenophobic, jingoistic essays for The Saturday Review of Literature, Hillyer condemned the selection of Pound by insinuating the jury was beholden to foreign interests, in light of Pound and Eliot’s expatriatism and the ties of Paul Mellon, the sponsor of the award, to Carl Jung who, Hillyer whispered, had expressed support for Hitler in the early 1930s. What is more interesting for my discussion, however, is that the documents serve as a testament to the success of Eliot and Pound’s modernist collaboration, even though Hillyer tries to turn that relationship against the two men by suggesting the literary alliance is unseemly, undemocratic, and implicitly un-American. Hillyer argues that Pound, Eliot, and their followers ‘‘have pooled their separate timidities and frustrations, gaining strength from each other’s weakness’’ and within ‘‘their subsidized quarterlies they bandy polite disagreements back and forth to maintain an illusion of independent thought, but in all important matters they are at one.’’ Hillyer then fabricates a totalitarian structure with Pound and Eliot as the ‘‘unquestioned and . . . single point of reference,’’ the leaders of various ‘‘coteries and pressure groups’’ that ultimately influenced the Bollingen committee, itself stacked with ‘‘disciples of Pound and Eliot and sympathetic to a group which has a genuine power complex.’’16 While the charged rhetoric seems amusingly overblown today (and the portrait implies a coherence to this relationship that did not exist by this time), the features

68


highlighted by Hillyer echo Eliot’s own idealized versions of the collaborative conversations he had hoped to establish through The Criterion and other vehicles. In fact, the last major project the two men would engage in came a few short years after the Hillyer affair, when Eliot edited the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound for Faber and Faber in 1953.17 But the nature of the Hillyer offensive should not have surprised Eliot, for it wages its assault via the very language the poet himself had been using since the late 1910s to prop up the reputation of modernism by suggesting its members operated collectively. In 1919, for example, Eliot (writing anonymously) paused during a review of a new quarterly called Coterie to break down the ‘‘verse-producing units’’ of contemporary Great Britain into four generations, the last of which consisted of ‘‘the curious shapes of Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound.’’18 By the 1940s, critics hostile to modernism were simply employing the term ‘‘coterie’’ as a kind of code-word or shorthand to assail its collaborative procedures. Hillyer is merely falling in line behind writers like Van Wyck Brooks, who set ‘‘Primary Literature’’ against ‘‘Coterie Literature’’ in an attempt to devalue the latter during one of his many attacks on Eliot.19 What made these two very different men suitable as partners is a difficult question. Certainly Eliot’s tendency toward collaboration can be attributed in part to his own lack of self-assurance, especially early in his career.20 The model I have drawn up in chapter 1, in which Eliot repeatedly locates the artist in a passive position surrendering to a more active agent, shows how he used his prose to advance that theory partly as a justification of his own role in the creative process. (Similarly, Eliot’s later conversion to AngloCatholicism gave him another opportunity to exercise this disposition to submit to a stronger power.) Having fled to Europe anxious to make his mark as a poet-critic, yet still wishing to please his family back home, and missing a father-figure to guide him in this pursuit, Eliot was a perfect pupil for the strong-willed Pound, who thrived in the role of mentor. This urgency to succeed and therefore justify his controversial choices is apparent in Eliot’s letter of 6 January 1919 to John Quinn. There, Eliot explains how he hoped his book (eventually published in 1920 in New York as Poems) might appear before a summer or fall trip to America, since he had moved to England against the wishes of his family. He speculates that the volume would placate his parents and demonstrate that he had ‘‘not made a mess of [his] life.’’ Even though he claims to be unsatisfied with the book, Eliot reiterates to Quinn that ‘‘it is important to me that it should be published for [these] private reasons’’ (L1 266). Given Eliot’s intense desire to make his parents proud before seeing them in the flesh, it must have


69

been a crushing blow to learn of his father’s death the very day after this letter was written. Another motivating factor behind the alliance with Pound was that Eliot feared the isolation of a poet like Blake, which incapacitated that Romantic writer’s claim to greatness, at least in Eliot’s critiques of his work. In one essay, Eliot blamed Blake’s problems on the fact that he wrote within an atmosphere incapable of providing assistance to a man ‘‘completely alone’’; he suffered because ‘‘[i]solation is not conducive to correct thinking.’’21 These sentiments, seemingly lifted almost verbatim from Yeats’s own essay on Blake, published in 1897,22 suggest that had Blake had the benefit of living within a society stressing community, the influence of a proper culture upon the artist would have ‘‘controlled’’ the violent imaginative impulses. The model also reasons that the poet who fails to collaborate with the elements of his environment runs the risk of both exposing himself unnecessarily and losing himself in his own work, even though other essays written around this period lament the isolation of the artist and recognize the great difficulty in reaching any communion. Eliot was so concerned about the absence of the stabilizing influence of an outside agent in Blake’s work that he incessantly returned to the image of Blake’s nakedness to illustrate his status as a Romantic genius-cum-madman and to portray the dangers of operating in the creative realm without assistance from others. He mentions in passing ‘‘the dangers to which the naked man is exposed,’’ ‘‘the naked vision,’’ ‘‘the naked observation,’’ the ‘‘naked philosophy’’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and finally how Blake ‘‘was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal’’ (SE 319–20). The natural result, in Eliot’s world, of imaginative activity unrestrained by outside forces, is a collapse of order within the work, the other observation to which he returns repeatedly in the essay. Blake’s idiosyncratic philosophy ‘‘makes him eccentric, and makes him inclined to formlessness’’ (320). On one level, Blake came to represent what Eliot feared for himself, an unencumbered personality creating alone; and his comments about isolation thus echo the exaggerated tone of the Blake examples. This occurs even later in Eliot’s career, when he remarks how ‘‘[t]here are moments, perhaps not known to everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible awareness of his isolation from every other human being’’; and it is poetry and its ability to provide us with a knowledge of the world of others that serves ultimately as a ‘‘surcease of solitude.’’23 Poetry becomes the solution, via its collaborative possibilities, in a world marked by darkness. Eliot consciously sought collaborative relationships with others who could serve as guides in his quest to remain connected to the world around

70


him. Pound was the perfect candidate for the position since Eliot tended to identify him as the writer who most established the conditions for the flourishing of such relationships in the modern period, claiming Pound facilitated through his varied efforts a movement ‘‘in which English and American poets collaborated, knew each other’s works, and influenced each other.’’ He concludes that ‘‘[i]f it had not been for the work that Pound did . . . the isolation of American poetry, and the isolation of individual American poets, might have continued for a long time.’’24 Yet in many respects, upon the introduction of The Criterion and Pound’s departure from England, the two men exchanged places, with Eliot now setting the tone for European modernism through his influential quarterly. In fact, Eliot was as suited to lead the movement into its mature years as Pound was the right person to generate enthusiasm during its infancy; and armed with the authority carefully cultivated over the preceding decade, Eliot was free to broaden the appeal of modernism by making it more accessible on any number of levels, the most important of which would be to extend modernism’s reach in ‘‘exhibit[ing] the relations of literature – not to ‘life,’ as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life,’’ a criterion established in a note composed at the end of the first year of The Criterion.25 Pound had already experienced the benefits of collaboration, during the three winters he spent with Yeats in Sussex in 1913–16. In this case, though, Pound played the role of the student to Yeats’s mentor.26 But the relationship still benefited both men in their quest to construct a ‘‘secret society’’ of modernism. For example, Pound’s translation of the Noh plays under the guidance of Fenollosa’s notes affected Yeats’s conception of drama, and Yeats’s interest in the occult helped shape the direction of Pound’s work on The Cantos. Even Eliot later acknowledged the significance of the Pound–Yeats collaboration, noting in 1939 that the ‘‘reciprocal influence between himself and Ezra Pound is visible.’’27 Such intertextual dialogues conditioned Pound for his editing of The Waste Land because this early work with Yeats helped demonstrate that advanced collaboration between authors and texts could be a norm. Yet with Eliot’s arrival on the London scene, Pound had a chance to step into the authoritative position previously occupied by Yeats and exercise lessons learned from that association. Eliot was more than happy to fall into the acquiescent role, with his well-known habit in letters to Pound of mimicking his mentor’s strange dialect signaling his standing as a follower.28 Lyndall Gordon’s suggestive reading of Pound’s sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) as a ‘‘covert


71

dialogue with Eliot’’ in which ‘‘Pound criticizes a Prufrock-like poet too given to hesitation, drifting, ‘maudlin confession,’ and aerial fantasy’’ fits naturally into this pattern of modernist procedures as a shared project, although in this case one in which both partners endorse a mutually beneficial hierarchical undertone to the relationship.29 In fact, it is possible to take Gordon’s reading one step further by viewing Pound’s series of poems as a collaborative blueprint for the relationship that evolved during the editing of The Waste Land, with Pound attempting to choreograph not only the direction of an individual poem but of the modernist movement itself. Eliot had already paid tribute to his relationship with Pound in ‘‘Eeldrop and Appleplex,’’ which appeared in the May 1917 edition of the Little Review, the first issue for which Pound served as foreign editor. The story’s ‘‘two queer chaps’’ (SL 98), as Pound called them, secure rooms in a shabby section of London so as to allow them to ‘‘mingle with the mob.’’30 Like the two poets, Eeldrop and Appleplex are not native to the culture under their examination, which affords them the necessary detachment to carry out their anthropological evaluations. The gregarious Appleplex possesses the ability to engage the people around him, while Eeldrop ‘‘preserved a more passive demeanor’’ and even later confesses to being a bank clerk, an occupation Eliot had assumed two months before the appearance of this curious character study.31 Pound’s own ‘‘reading’’ of his collaboration on The Waste Land, in his whimsical poem ‘‘Sage Homme,’’ emphasizes hierarchy and situates Pound in a dominant position. There, he asserts that ‘‘Ezra performed the caesarean Operation’’ (L1 498), the terminal word capitalized to signify its importance over writing. This characterization values editing above composition in the economy of literary production and assaults the nineteenth century elevation of imagination and genius. The metaphor implies that without the editorial efforts of Pound – marked as male – the text would not have been ‘‘born’’ or ‘‘extracted’’ from the female patient, Eliot. This ‘‘extraction,’’ when set against a natural birth, both highlights creation for Eliot as a problematic affair and identifies collaboration as a necessary procedure to bring about poetic material. Pound insists on aligning Eliot with the feminine, for the poem earlier describes the parentage of The Waste Land as such: ‘‘A Man their Mother was, / A Muse their sire’’ (L1 498). This confusing explanation not only sets up the later metaphor of the pregnant Eliot prostrate on the operating table awaiting delivery but locates poetic inspiration both outside the artist and with the male. Although one does not want to make too much of Pound’s ‘‘Sage Homme,’’ as a whole it reveals him intuitively gendering the editorial

72


act, and places him in the dominant, active, male role marking up a passive, feminine manuscript. Because modernist characterizations of the creative process often act out various ideological struggles related to gender identity and because modernism regularly expresses a significant antipathy to the feminine, it makes sense that Pound would place the feminized party in the subservient position.32 While Eliot continually struggled with anxieties about his own role and status in a collaborative exchange, and his prose seems acutely aware of the vexed politics of creation on the eve of The Waste Land ’s publication, he felt quite comfortable with Pound’s representation of their collaborative relationship most likely because he had so benefited from the arrangement. In fact, the characterization rang so true with Eliot that he hoped in January 1922 to print Pound’s lines about the caesarean operation ‘‘in italics in front’’ of the entire poem, a move that would have publicly announced collaboration as a norm in modernism (L1 504). Collaboration was such an ingrained feature of Pound’s conception of modernism that he would use the appeal of participating in a collective program to entice patrons into supporting struggling artists. As in the Bel Esprit scheme, Pound once sketched a portrait of unknown artist and generous patron as co-architects of imaginative works, where the wealthy sponsor not only offered monetary support but in the process transformed himself into a creator. Pound invoked this metaphor artfully in a 1915 letter to John Quinn, when he explained: ‘‘My whole drive is that if a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, and food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist: he is building art into the world; he creates. If he buys even of living artists who are already famous or already making £12,000 per year, he ceases to create. He sinks back to the rank of a consumer’’ (L 53–4). The insertion of the word ‘‘building’’ for the expected ‘‘bringing’’ is a brilliant touch, for it alters the patron’s role slightly – but ever so significantly – from a mere passive shopper to active, engaged inventor and maker. In tying the worth of the benefactor to the impoverishment of the artist, Pound betrays the modernist prejudice that a popular art could never be of a high order and reveals partly why he himself felt such a strong urge to act so charitably toward a generation of struggling writers. In fact, as the above letter demonstrates, Pound often was preoccupied with the question of how works of art acquire value; and it may be this fascination with participating in the production of value that most encouraged Pound’s collaborative efforts.33 When Pound boasts in 1915 to Quinn that there is a young poet named Eliot – ‘‘I have more or less discovered him’’ (SL 37) – while Eliot writes a year earlier that ‘‘Pound is rather


73

intelligent as a talker: his verse is well-meaning but touchingly incompetent’’ (L1 59), the two men adopt poses appropriate to their different levels of investment in the relationship. Pound, having risked his substantial capital, must talk up the value of his asset; conversely, Eliot, with little reputation to risk, is free to disparage his sponsor’s work. Such an account offers one explanation for Pound’s active role in the alliance, even though Eliot’s embracement of an artistic passivity eventually would have forced Pound into that position if he had not already been predisposed to seizing the part. Pound’s efforts to defend Eliot ultimately say as much about Pound as Eliot, for such defenses become wagers on an unknown writer’s long-term prospects, with the outcome of his or her reputation finally determining the payoff, which itself reflects and magnifies the talents of the advocate. At least that is how Pound conceived of the enterprise in his forceful refutation of Arthur Waugh’s attack on ‘‘Prufrock’’ (during a review of Pound’s Catholic Anthology) in which Pound concludes his numerous ad hominem denunciations of Waugh and equally enthusiastic praise of Eliot by claiming, ‘‘I said the same sort of thing about James Joyce’s prose over two years ago. I am now basking in the echoes.’’34 The ineptly executed plots like Bel Esprit, Pound’s plea to Eliot’s father to accept his son’s career path, the curious characterizations in ‘‘Sage Homme,’’ and the artificial voices of the Eliot–Pound correspondence demonstrate the highly performative nature of this collaboration. Ultimately, these men are dramatizing roles to satisfy emotional needs that exist in a particular time and place. The performances are also extremely self-conscious and artificial, as when Eliot plays the financially struggling young poet and allows Pound to attempt to come to his rescue, even though it is clear in retrospect that Eliot had a much more highly developed business sense than Pound: compare Eliot’s success at aligning his literary projects first with the deep pockets of Lady Rothermere and then with Faber and Gwyer to the clumsy efforts of Bel Esprit. Eliot’s financial travails were perhaps less severe than he was letting on, since they fit in with the public role he was cultivating: unbeknownst to Pound, at a time when he is in dire financial straits himself, the struggling poet for whom Pound is trying to raise funds is collecting dividend checks from his family’s investments.35 What is most significant, however, is that the positions each of these men assumed within the relationship ultimately had a bearing upon decisions made about the final form of The Waste Land. While Pound’s influence on The Waste Land has been debated for years, most vigorously during the period immediately following the 1971 publication of the drafts, readers too often make the mistake of characterizing the

74


interaction in dialectical terms, seeking to assign possession of the text to one or the other. Those eager to dismiss Pound’s influence altogether by exalting Eliot as the sole author, as well as their rivals who argue that the poem would not have existed without the assistance of Pound’s sharp editorial pen, limit their potential readings by assuming interpretations that accept tacitly the notion of single authorship. One of the faults of this type of analysis is that readers insist on locating a dominant voice that is finally privileged and identified by its signifying name right below the title. Even Jack Stillinger, who attacks this ‘‘myth’’ of the solitary author, feels compelled to label the poem ‘‘Pound’s Waste Land,’’ a designation that seems to forbid the construction of a more complicated (yet more tenuous) collaborative relationship where partners share artistic authority while performing numerous key tasks during the various stages of composition and over a period of years, so that the roles themselves evolve and resist being fixed, defined, and separated. Such conventional approaches reveal an anxiety about how texts project meaning by both refusing to let the poem stand by itself and insisting on attaching an authorial identity to the text, in the belief that such an identification is necessary to help shape a proper reading. An alternative approach might be to acknowledge that before a critic who might want to deconstruct the poem even arrives at the text, its collaborative nature has already rendered it unstable, literally and figuratively. One of the rarely acknowledged ways modernism reflected the instability of its surrounding culture was by creating texts via a collaborative model that destabilized the traditional relationship between author and text, especially by collapsing notions of authorial intention. Eliot’s level of comfort with alternative, non-individualistic versions of authorship was so high, in fact, that he suggested Pound allow him to print some of his editorial emendations as part of The Waste Land text, a move that would have complicated enormously the stability of the text and authorship, not to mention the poem’s reception. At the heart of this desire is a ceding of authority, for marginal annotations ultimately call into question control of the text and most significantly foreground the ‘‘demonstrated possibility of alternatives and opinions,’’ according to H. J. Jackson’s study of the phenomenon.36 Pound ultimately objected to Eliot’s plan of attaching his marginalia to The Waste Land, encouraging Eliot not to publish the commentary or to bury it in the ‘‘accompanying matter’’ of a collected edition, an exchange that surprisingly reveals Eliot as the experimental poet in the relationship, more willing to entertain an untraditional presentation of the text (L1 498). Typical discussions of Pound’s influence on The Waste Land usually seek to assign possession of the text because they fail to


75

account for how the modernists had ingrained collaboration into their program; this results in outcomes charted by Stead when he summarizes those critics hostile to Pound’s role in helping mold the poem, with one school suggesting that ‘‘there was a structure of ideas [in the original draft of The Waste Land ] which Pound’s editing had obscured’’ and another reading the work as a ‘‘confessional poem, its true centre of gravity obscured (once again Pound is to blame)’’ by the heavy cuts.37 Just as Prufrock possesses a tendency towards provisionality, Eliot, too, struggled to arrive at final, definitive versions of his poetic communications. He often scribbled fragments of verse and then hoarded them for a later time when they might blossom into larger works or be inserted into another text. What is missing in the world of his poems is what Eliot found in life, a figure like Pound to stabilize a compulsion toward indecision and bring to birth a whole text. Yet the collaboration between the two men did not function in a strict, linear fashion, with Pound making changes to rough drafts and Eliot accepting them without comment; instead, Pound’s responses gave Eliot a distinct critical position from which to work, adapt, and manipulate – in effect, the responses served only as the first stage of a ‘‘conversation’’ with Pound as ideal reader akin to ‘‘the one hypothetical Intelligent Man’’ of the ‘‘Kipling’’ essay. In 1931, Eliot discussed in general terms the significance of such verbal exchanges: ‘‘the practice of conversation is invaluable. Indeed, I believe that to write well it is necessary to converse a great deal. I say ‘converse’ instead of ‘talk’; because I believe that there are two types of good writers: those who talk a great deal to others, and those, perhaps less fortunate, who talk a great deal to themselves’’ (SE 500). Those who talk to themselves are ‘‘less fortunate’’ because Eliot understood the agony of isolation combined with the pressures of an excited imagination, and also because he associated relief from that isolation with the introduction of a fellow ‘‘conversationalist’’ who was ready to respond to the poet’s work and help give shape to difficult material. This was the role played by Pound in Paris, for example, when Eliot traveled to Switzerland to recover from a breakdown.38 Eliot often conceived of the artistic process as one of ordering: one way he proceeded during the process of writing was to paste together poetic fragments collected over the years – consequently, the creation of a poem turned into a literal ordering. Thus he was particularly prone to looking outside the self for stabilizing guidance, whether it took the form of a person, an outside text, or a mythic system. Eliot’s understanding of how a poem came to fruition therefore made him especially susceptible to positioning himself under the supervision of Pound. Even when Eliot viewed

76


The Waste Land retrospectively, he tended to highlight this feature of Pound’s collaboration: his ability to help organize unwieldy material by assisting in turning the work ‘‘from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem.’’39 In fact, in the conversations with Pound about the development of The Waste Land, Eliot repeatedly resisted placing boundaries around the poem while Pound countered that urge by seeking to close up the ‘‘whole’’ of the work. At various times, Eliot is willing to contaminate the structural borders by considering attaching ‘‘Gerontion’’ as a prelude, printing The Waste Land in four separate sections in successive issues of the Dial, or even splitting it in two for the first two numbers of The Criterion as a way of drawing more readers to the quarterly (L1 504, 502, and 572). Pound rebuffed these attempts throughout, always insisting Eliot maintain the organization: ‘‘The thing now runs from April . . . to shantih without [a] break,’’ instructs Pound. ‘‘That is 19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge. Dont try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further’’ (497). POUND’S

‘‘ M A I E U T I C

A B I L I T I E S ’’ : B I R T H I N G

THE WASTE LAND

We can highlight some of the other effects Pound had on The Waste Land by exploring representative changes finally adopted by Eliot, alterations that grew out of Pound’s readings of the poem and his subsequent comments and suggestions. Those changes have wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the text, for they had the ultimate effect of positioning the poem more as an impersonal vision rather than an autobiographical text; establishing a literary foundation for the poem that was more antiquated and classical than contemporary; and distilling some of the more lengthy poetic outbursts into hard, clear verses that satisfied Pound’s own stylistic biases as a poet, one of which was an antipathy toward drama as a genre. The two men also wrestled over the degree to which the poem would embrace an English background. While Pound finally added very little new material to the final version of The Waste Land, he performed brilliantly in eliciting a poem from his colleague, the very activity required by Eliot’s model of the creative process discussed in my previous chapter. Likewise, because the two men implicitly configured their collaborative relationship in terms emphasizing dominance and submission, Pound was better able to dictate the direction the poem would ultimately take. One of the features of The Waste Land that Pound and Eliot discussed at some length was its epigraph. It is sometimes difficult to know how much


77

weight to give Eliot’s epigraphs, for they can skew our readings unnecessarily or even lead us down interpretive paths that are wholly unproductive. For example, the citation from the Inferno at the start of ‘‘Prufrock,’’ recalling the moment when Guido da Montefeltro, wrapped in flames, questions whether Dante will be able to leave Hell, encourages a particular reading that the text itself does not necessarily live up to. Other epigraphs are so strikingly dense – like the one attached to ‘‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’’ that compiles six different sources – that it is hard to know what their relevance is to the poetry they precede. Epigraphs are also sometimes absent from Eliot’s initial publication of material, only to emerge in later editions. This transpired in Sweeney Agonistes when the epigraphs from Aeschylus’s Choephoroi and St. John of the Cross appear affixed to the two fragments not in their original 1926 incarnation in The Criterion but in the 1932 Faber edition of the play. Conversely, epigraphs that situate the poem in one context in its early stages sometimes disappear in published versions, as occurs when two lines from the Inferno originally appended to ‘‘Gerontion’’ (they suggest a hellish landscape, a separation of mind and body, and the problematic nature of knowledge) are later eradicated by Eliot (IMH 349). I would argue that in the majority of cases, Eliot’s epigraphs have less to do with the poetry they seemingly initiate and more to do with the needs of the poet doing the composing. Important to Eliot in earlier stages of his thinking about and writing of the poetry, epigraphs become increasingly less significant as a poem moved towards its audience and then traveled through various editions. Instead of shaping the impending reading, epigraphs emerge more as a tactic to assure the authority of the poet and as emblems that confirm his qualifications to write the proper type of verse. This is at least how Eliot conceived of Sir Walter Scott’s use of quotations to head the chapters of his novels, a strategy he thought ‘‘illustrate[d] the wide reading and critical good taste of that novelist.’’40 Nevertheless, it is clear that Eliot originally hoped the epigraph to The Waste Land might serve as a sort of guidepost. Although the epigraph from Petronius’s Satyricon that Eliot finally chose often appears in today’s anthologized versions in small type underneath the title, in the Dial and Boni and Liveright editions the lines were centered conspicuously, taking up more space than the title itself and giving them a certain prominence that is lost in contemporary renditions of the text. Complicating matters, the epigraph is absent from The Criterion version. If Eliot had followed through on his original intention of citing the lengthier Conrad text, the epigraph would have had the effect of completely dwarfing the title and

78


demanding the reader’s fullest consideration, not only through its substantial length but because its rendering in the native language made it friendlier than the Petronius extract. Here is Conrad’s passage appended to the original draft of The Waste Land: ‘‘Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – ‘The horror! the horror!’’’ (TWLF 3). Those lines, taken from the scene in Heart of Darkness when Marlow questions Kurtz’s state of mind on his deathbed and then relates his final words, serve to personalize the nature of the quest explored by Eliot’s poem and associate with it Kurtz’s (and Marlow’s) inability of facing, surviving, or even transcending the surrounding hostile environment. Kurtz’s difficulty negotiating an inhospitable landscape is the very dilemma faced by many of Eliot’s most powerful and personal speakers, including Prufrock, Gerontion, the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, and Harry in The Family Reunion, all speakers who at one time or another serve as mouthpieces for the poet. Some of Eliot’s contemporaries made a similar association; Virginia Woolf, for one, records in her diary that Eliot’s friend Mary Hutchinson supposedly viewed The Waste Land quite clearly as ‘‘Tom’s autobiography – a melancholy one.’’41 Certainly the original opening of the poem, beginning ‘‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place’’ (TWLF 5), with its male speaker delivering a breezy, extended narrative account of a night on the town in an ambiguously located, composite metropolis, plunges the reader immediately into a personal vision, especially given the references to autobiographical locales like the ‘‘Opera Exchange,’’ where Eliot would drop in for drinks after attending performances at the Grand Opera House in Boston as a student at Harvard (TWLF 125, note 6). Substituting that canceled passage with the restless, springtime landscape seemingly unreceptive to a human presence (including that of a reader, who seems immediately less welcome in the poem) converts the first impression to a starkly impersonal one, even though we learn later that the lines are spoken by Marie; and while it is difficult to know if Pound or Eliot ultimately urged the cutting of that original beginning, Pound consistently tried to eradicate the personal from Eliot’s verse.42 Setting The Waste Land against the background of Conrad’s plot emphasizes the questing features of the poem by glancing at an isolated figure within a foreign landscape in search of answers. Eliot actually stressed this feature of Conrad’s work elsewhere, writing a little more than a year before he started thinking carefully about The Waste Land


79

that Conrad’s characters represent ‘‘the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost, they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness.’’43 Also, the novel expresses the phenomenalistic position that Eliot was trying to convey in his footnote to F. H. Bradley in The Waste Land. Marlow even lays out a literal articulation of this philosophical line of reasoning in very Bradleyan language when he says: ‘‘Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know.’’44 In light of these contexts, it makes sense that Eliot remarked to Pound that he viewed the original lines from Conrad as ‘‘the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative’’ (L1 504). Pound’s initial complaint about the lines from Conrad was that they were not ‘‘weighty enough’’ (L1 497), a barb aimed most likely at the novelist rather than the lines themselves. While Eliot expressed mild confusion over his friend’s concern by writing, ‘‘Do you mean not use Conrad quot. or simply not put Conrad’s name to it?’’ (504), Pound responded that he finally did not care either way about the epigraph: ‘‘who am I to grudge [Conrad] his laurel crown’’ (505). But Pound’s ambivalent tone was enough to bring about the change, which highlights just how uncertain Eliot was about significant features of his poem and just how willing he was to submit to an external authority, even if it altered the entire thrust of his work. The use of Petronius also connected the poem to a more classical, consequential tradition and located a substantial influence in a remote, non-British tradition rather than in a relatively current (1902) and extremely popular English text, an association possessing a whiff of the Masses that Pound would have deplored.45 The effect was to expand the scope of the poem’s literary foundation, a move Pound carried to an extreme in The Cantos. In this case, it certainly helps us better understand a side of the poem that might be minimized without the context provided by the epigraph. Nevertheless, Eliot did accept Pound’s objection, waiting three more years until collecting ‘‘The Hollow Men’’ in Poems 1909–1925 to insert a Conrad epigraph, albeit an abbreviated one, a decision that suggests just how powerful this influential novel was for Eliot. A second effect of the conversation between Pound and Eliot involved the relative ‘‘Britishness’’ of the poem. At a time when Eliot was trying to establish himself in England and serve as an authoritative voice within that nation’s literary scene, he would have liked to accentuate the British features of all his writing, especially The Waste Land. I have shown elsewhere the many ways Eliot set British and American literary traditions against each other. Those tactics included vilifying American literary history in early book reviews for British journals; criticizing representatives

80


of that tradition like Whitman, even though he acknowledged a debt late in his life to the poet; and arguing for a critical stance that judged texts not by place but by language. Thus as a recent American expatriate he could place poems like ‘‘Prufrock’’ in a British tradition, despite the fact that American critics were exalting the poem as representative of their country.46 Within the poem itself, Eliot even tried to suppress obvious debts to an American writer like Whitman. For example, in a line like ‘‘Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees’’ (CPP 73), evocative of that poet’s description of the thrush as a withdrawn hermit in ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,’’ Eliot masks the echo in a typically evasive note linking the allusion to Chapman’s handbook on North American birds.47 The year before the publication of The Waste Land, Eliot became angry at being included in the anthology Modern American Poetry (1921) and publicly announced, in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement, that he would have preferred not to have appeared in the volume (L1 489). The original use of Conrad was one way to announce a debt to British tradition, albeit through the path of a foreign-born author who eventually became a naturalized citizen, a step Eliot would take five years after publishing The Waste Land. The fact that some of those modifications affected the native tradition of the poem makes perfect sense in light of Pound’s concurrent attempts to travel in the exact opposite direction of Eliot regarding his attitude toward Britain; in effect, the poem becomes a battleground for two writers struggling to wrest modernism away from the other’s unique vision of the movement, especially that movement’s debt to different literary and national traditions. While Eliot did his best to immerse himself in things British, Pound signaled his goodbye to England in 1920 with Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.48 The modern artists who fail in that poetic sequence might also account for Pound’s reservations about employing Conrad, himself a living modern writer at the time, as an appropriate epigraph to The Waste Land. So we get Pound writing to Eliot in 1922 from Paris in a particularly belligerent tone claiming to ‘‘have not the slightest interest in England,’’ for Englishmen don’t keep their word, the country will not have a hand in shaping future civilizations, and all its readers want are outdated poetry and ‘‘immitations [sic] and dilutations’’ (L1 511–13). As a result of this tension, some interesting exchanges surface between the two men that expose each poet’s ambivalence about specific national literary traditions. In light of features like Eliot’s original epigraph from Conrad, the long imitation of The Rape of the Lock that served as the original beginning to ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ the numerous British place-names and


81

settings, the many allusions (both oblique and overt) to British authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Tennyson, and the working title of the poem (‘‘He Do the Police in Different Voices,’’ a reference to a character from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend who is good at ‘‘doing’’ the voices in the stories of the daily newspaper), the poem as originally conceived by Eliot had a distinct and intentional English flavor to it. Eliot’s adaptation of Pope, for example, would have pricked up Pound’s ears as representative of the very fault he found in the British literary marketplace: that it wanted primarily ‘‘imitations.’’ As a result he drew diagonal lines right across each of the long stanzas in the draft stage. Eliot, on the other hand, saw such satirical set pieces as natural material for an extended treatment, for he believed the best satire in English appeared in the long poem. Satire also fit into the overall high aims of The Waste Land, for Eliot thought the form one of the most difficult in the language, for it must both embrace contemporary situations while at the same time strive for permanence.49 Eliot’s comments a few decades later about the excised passage reveal clearly Pound’s objections: ‘‘Pound said, ‘It’s no use trying to do something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do something different’,’’ a critique that was sure to succeed since it archly drew on Eliot’s anxieties about influence and tradition.50 Interested in charting new courses in literature, Pound made suggestions that accentuated those features of the poem that were new or experimental over those that were overtly derivative. Although the final version of ‘‘The Fire Sermon’’ does retain references to distinctly British texts like Spenser’s Prothalamion, Marvell’s ‘‘To His Coy Mistress,’’ and The Tempest, among others, the section ends up emphasizing the mythic undercurrents instead of the overtly British framework as its controlling feature. Despite Eliot’s assertion, many years after The Waste Land, that Pound ‘‘was a marvellous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself,’’ Pound’s editorial suggestions do divulge a number of his stylistic biases.51 The editorial process of reading, cutting, and questioning evolved into a critical act in which Pound tried to reshape the poem according to the many stylistic tenets articulated in his own prose criticism. Always partial, at least during the first half of his career, to qualities like verbal economy (‘‘To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’’), clarity and precision in language (‘‘throw out all critics who use vague general terms’’), abandonment of syntactical archaisms like inversion (he thought Yeats successful when he had ‘‘driven out the inversion’’), and an emphasis on the image itself rather than on the surrounding ornamentation (‘‘the natural object is always the adequate symbol’’), Pound

82


applied those rigorous doctrines to moments in the poem that would have most benefited from their application (LE 3, 37, 379, 5). Much of the activity, then, involved cutting and paring, or ‘‘boil[ing] away all that is not poetic’’ (LE 11) so as to highlight the strongest pieces of Eliot’s poetic fragments. Pound continually urged Eliot to delete distracting excess material in favor of distilling the image to its essential properties and getting to the point narratively, as when he suggests Eliot reduce the following lines, Two men came down with gleet; one cut his hand. The crew began to murmur; when one watch Was overtime at dinner, justified, Extenuated thus: ‘‘Eat!’’ they said,

to a much sharper, focused version: ‘‘Two men came down with gleet; ‘Eat!’ they said’’ (TWLF 65). Elsewhere, Eliot’s original portrait of the ‘‘Unreal City’’ in ‘‘The Fire Sermon’’ bothered Pound due to its excessive use of pronouns which, aside from lacking concision, resulted in misplacing the emphasis on the speaker doing the seeing, an effect that both distracts and detracts from the power of the image itself. Consequently, Pound cut the rhetorical ornamentation surrounding the presentation of London: Unreal City, I have seen and see Under the brown fog of your winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants . . .

(TWLF 43)

It may be that at those times he was particularly uncomfortable with the apparent absence of a controlling speaker in the poem, Eliot tried to bring the poem back under his command by asserting the identity of the speaker through a string of pronouns as he did in early poems like ‘‘Prufrock.’’ This explanation helps unravel Eliot’s famous note at the end of The Waste Land – one responsible for hundreds of pages of criticism – that explains how ‘‘Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest’’ (CPP 78). The ‘‘Unreal City’’ passage we read today incorporates Pound’s changes with the single addition of an ‘‘a’’ before ‘‘winter noon,’’ a signal that Eliot had decided to lessen the emphasis on a central speaker. Ever receptive to modifications that made the poem’s vision appear less subjective and more adherent to his theory of impersonality, Eliot would have welcomed Pound’s distancing of the image from the speaker. This feature of Pound’s editing attempted to avoid the ‘‘[i]ncompetence [that] will show in the use of too many words,’’ his blunt warning to writers predisposed to prolixity in ABC of Reading.52


83

Similarly, part of Pound’s discomfort with Heart of Darkness (and Eliot’s initial attraction to it) may have resulted from the complex narrative frame in that novel, which leads to an intentional confusion of voices, a feature Pound tried to eradicate in lines like the ones above. Pound spent much of his energy reining in excesses that he usually located in Victorian and Georgian poetry, especially those of verbosity, inversion, lack of precision, and the mixing of ‘‘an abstraction with the concrete,’’ like the phrase ‘‘‘dim lands of peace,’’’ for ‘‘[i]t dulls the image’’ (LE 5). Next to one quatrain describing, in a rhythm very close to prose, the typist clearing away her dishes, Pound has written: ‘‘verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it’’ (TWLF 45). As a result, the final version contains the original four lines ‘‘boiled down’’ to two very regular, concise, concrete lines: ‘‘The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights / Her stove, and lays out food in tins’’ (141). In the stanza immediately following, Pound became upset by the inverted syntax: ‘‘And on the divan piled, (at night her bed) / Are stockings, dirty camisoles, and stays’’ (45). Even though Eliot finally ignored his suggestion, Pound tried to move the verb ‘‘piled’’ before ‘‘on’’ and tried to give extra weight to the change by writing in the margin, ‘‘inversions not warranted by any real exegience [sic] of metre’’ (45). Always adhering to the principle that ‘‘the words of poetry . . . follow the natural order’’ (LE 362), Pound spent much of his time rearranging Eliot’s syntax. Nevertheless, parts of the manuscript survived these blows and a number of Eliot’s inversions surface in some of the best known phrases of the poem, like the ‘‘young man carbuncular.’’ Finally, when Pound came upon the lines, ‘‘‘This music crept by me upon the waters’ / And along the Strand, and up the ghastly hill of Cannon Street’’ (TWLF 47), his urge to cancel the abstract characterization of the street as ‘‘the ghastly hill’’ must have been immediate. Aside from mixing an abstract with a concrete, it also embodied the ‘‘adjectival magnificence’’ he criticized in texts like Chapman’s translation of Homer and failed to adhere to Pound’s warning that the natural object was adequate enough on its own as a symbol’’ (LE 207). While that modifier was finally cut, Eliot altered slightly the geography by describing a landscape ‘‘along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street’’ (TWLF 141). Likewise, as with ‘‘dim lands of peace,’’ Pound circled Eliot’s phrase ‘‘violet hour,’’ preferring instead the more concrete ‘‘hour’’ (43). Finally, in a section that eventually appeared separately as ‘‘Song to the Opherian’’ in The Tyro (1921) and revised as part of one of ‘‘Doris’s Dream Songs’’ in the Chapbook (1924), Pound objected to Eliot’s characterization of ‘‘the sullen river’’ along similar lines, preferring the river to stand alone, unmodified (99).

84


Another key role played by Pound was his insistence that Eliot resist, as much as possible, his predilection for hesitant speakers notable for their inability to act. Eliot had already created Prufrock and Gerontion, who both betray problems with agency and will through their insistent use of conditionals and a related tendency to substitute fantasy in place of actual action. Pound, who had little problem making up his mind on any matter, was frustrated by this uncertainty. As a result, when Pound came across Eliot’s rhetoric of hesitancy in a line like ‘‘Across her brain one half-formed thought may pass,’’ he circled ‘‘may’’ and wrote in the margin, ‘‘make up yr. mind you Tiresias if you know know [sic] damn well or else you don’t’’ (TWLF 47). No doubt acutely aware of his propensity for hedging in this way, Eliot perhaps overcorrected by adding two strong, active verbs: ‘‘Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass’’ (141). This fondness for provisional language also surfaces in Eliot’s overuse of a word like ‘‘perhaps,’’ which Pound cut in one place (45) and viewed elsewhere as enough of a fault to comment on the word itself. At various points he circled the word and remarked in very heavy writing, ‘‘Perhaps be damned’’ (45); wrote next to it, ‘‘dam per’apsez’’ (31); or figured he could extinguish it by writing next to a line like ‘‘Perhaps it does not come to very much’’ simply, ‘‘georgian’’ (99). Resistant to viewing anything in absolute terms, Eliot was served well by Pound’s ability to fix and ground the experiences of the poem; because he could not play that role himself, Eliot depended on an outside agent to help eradicate his penchant for hesitancy. The confessional element of Eliot’s poetry that he fought so hard to regulate or even suppress also brought out Pound’s blue pencil fairly rapidly. While Pound did help Eliot tone down the autobiographical features of the poem, Pound’s efforts on this front were more important in helping provide the general qualities of restraint, order, and control throughout the poem. This tempering functioned both in minor ways, when Pound recognized the tone getting away from Eliot, and in major ways, when he encouraged the cutting of almost all of section IV, leaving only ten lines to make up ‘‘Death by Water.’’ For example, at the conclusion of the description of the sexual relations between the ‘‘young man carbuncular’’ and the anonymous typist in ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ Eliot originally brought the post-coital scene to an end by observing how the clerk leaves with a ‘‘patronising kiss,’’ departs the building, and then ‘‘at the corner where the stable is, / Delays only to urinate, and spit’’ (TWLF 47). Sensing that the passionless love scene was already sordid enough and that the description of the act should remain the focus, Pound wrote next to the two lines, ‘‘probaly [sic] over the mark,’’ for he rightly sensed that Eliot has lost control of the tone at this point.53 While


85

colloquialisms serve productively elsewhere in the poem and Pound himself followed Browning’s lead in employing them in his own work, the shockingly forward language here proves distracting and was probably better reserved for private communication, as in the King Bolo material exchanged by the two poets in their letters. That cancellation also returns us more quickly to the typist, who is ‘‘[h]ardly aware of her departed lover’’ (141), and accentuates the alienation of each character, despite their recent act of ‘‘love.’’ Finally, in an inspired choice of punctuation, Eliot chose not just to delete the two lines objected to by Pound and end with a period, but to add a final, suggestive ellipsis: ‘‘Bestows one final patronising kiss, / And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . . ’’ (141). The effect emphasizes a kind of resignation on the part of the speaker, who disapproves of the distasteful situation as it lingers unresolved at the end of the line, and possibly suggests a future continuation of the vile activity – even though we are not privy to a description, we might imagine it quite easily. The most extreme cutting at the draft stage occurred with Part IV, ‘‘Death by Water,’’ which Pound originally received as a set of four handwritten pages to which he responded: ‘‘Bad – but cant attack until I get typescript’’ (TWLF 55). Of the original ninety-three lines of this section, only the final ten survived the editorial winnowing. After securing a typed copy of the manuscript, Pound went to work on the language at the start of the first quatrain, trying as best he could to peel away excess rhetoric from the central images: The sailor, attentive to the chart and to the sheets. A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide, Retains, even ashore, in public bars or streets Something inhuman, clean, and dignified.

(63)

In addition to those cuts, he moved ‘‘Retains’’ to the end of that third line. The resultant portrait stresses the sailor himself rather than his vision and tries to highlight just a few of his characteristics (inhuman yet dignified), without the distractions of the other modifiers. After performing similar slashing in the two quatrains that follow, Pound seemed to become frustrated by the entire set of lines and drew down the right side of them two long brackets, indicating a desire for excision. He attempted similar cutting through the next seventy lines, only to end up again drawing heavy marks through large blocks of the poetry. Not surprisingly, since Pound left untouched only the final ten lines of the section, Eliot haltingly asked in a letter, ‘‘Perhaps better omit Phlebas also???’’ (L1 504). Eliot’s seriousness about omitting this entire section is indicated rather indirectly in a letter written a few days before the one to

86


Pound, when he explained on 20 January 1922 to Scofield Thayer that he would soon have a long poem of four parts and asked if the Dial would be interested in printing it (502). The only possible way to conceive of the fivepart poem in four sections at this point in the writing process is to imagine that Eliot was so unnerved by Pound’s cuts that he planned to omit the fourth section entirely. Pound’s response to Eliot’s concern, however, was quite assertive: ‘‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas. In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor, and he is needed ABSoloootly where he is. Must stay in’’ (505). While Eliot usually focused on the vast amount of verse that was excised, Pound honed in on the best part of the section that remained, while keeping an eye on the overall structure of the poem and Phlebas’s relationship to the other parts. Of the two, only Pound managed to play the role of detached critic during the composition process, for Eliot was too immersed in the material to maintain the broad perspective necessary for objective editing. The same tendencies unfolded when Eliot had the urge to place ‘‘Gerontion’’ as a ‘‘prelude’’ to The Waste Land and Pound advised sharply against it, since the long poem stood on its own and that earlier effort would have served merely to distract (504–5). Eliot’s appeals to Pound during the planning stages of The Criterion in 1922 illustrate the complicated nature of this relationship, especially when the men discussed literary, financial, and personal matters. Given Eliot’s construction of the artistic process with himself in the passive, subordinate role, he adopted the pose of student to Pound’s teacher, addressing some letters, including one discussing The Waste Land changes, to ‘‘Cher maitre’’ (L1 426, 506). Recalling Pound’s effect on the manuscript (which was still lost at the time of a 1958 interview), Eliot sought to explain the beneficial influence by remarking upon his friend’s ‘‘maieutic abilities,’’ positioning himself as a disciple to Pound’s Socrates, whose greatest talent was in eliciting responses from an apprentice who required prompting.54 Their collaboration, however, functioned symbiotically, for Pound was also ever in need of a pupil to mentor. Pound’s various tracts like ABC of Reading or the series of three articles in 1929 on ‘‘How to Read’’ for the New York Herald Tribune Books betray a strong didacticism at the core of his personality. He enjoyed reading poetry (whether the text was finished or unfinished) because he could exalt the reading process as an interpretive act in itself that gave him an opportunity to express his own critical biases. In this respect, Pound served as the perfect ‘‘pre-audience’’ for Eliot’s modern epic, allowing Eliot the luxury of testing his material privately in a manner that would facilitate a collaborative conversation, much along the lines of


87

the model established a year earlier in ‘‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,’’ where Eliot promotes circulating new poetry among a select ‘‘private audience’’ before releasing the material to the larger public.55 In his 1954 ‘‘Introduction’’ to Pound’s Literary Essays, Eliot singled out those characteristics of Pound’s personality he found most exceptional: ‘‘He has always been, first and foremost, a teacher and a campaigner.’’ But this is a teacher of a rather aggressive sort: ‘‘He would cajole, and almost coerce, other men into writing well: so that he often presents the appearance of a man trying to convey to a very deaf person the fact that the house is on fire. Every change he has advocated has always struck him as being of instant urgency’’ (LE xii). In his familiar, self-deprecatory style, Eliot hints that he has had vast experience of being ‘‘cajoled,’’ and that without that help, it would be hard to imagine his own work as anything other than a pile of ashes. While Eliot’s language about Pound’s advocacy of change is ambiguous – recalling Pound’s changing poetic styles, changing philosophies, and changing homelands – it might well serve as a very clear explanation of Pound’s assertive method during the editing of The Waste Land. While seeming to apologize for and attempting to explain Pound’s intrepid bombast, Eliot also gently pokes fun at the image of old Ez railing against the mob. This was the typical stance Eliot took in retrospective accounts of collaborative partners. They tended to take the form of generous acknowledgments of the assistance sprinkled with jibes that undercut the importance of that help specifically because Eliot remained so torn between embracing authority and giving himself up as the submissive recipient of others’ attention. Yet the ultimate target in this particular remembering is Eliot himself, for late in 1921 he was that ‘‘very deaf person’’ who sought Pound’s assistance on the poem that would make Eliot’s reputation. Eliot’s comments accept tacitly the fact that poetry is written and read not in a vacuum but in the context of collaboration amongst many different parties. Such language might help us better understand and even possibly answer a question posed by Michael Coyle in his book on Pound, mainly ‘‘why it was that Pound was able to close the poem that Eliot could not.’’56 ‘‘ D I F F E R E N T

V O I C E S ’’ : S E C O N D A R Y

COLLABORATION IN THE WASTE LAND

Eliot did not restrict his collaboration on The Waste Land to Pound. He also sought assistance from others, including his wife Vivien. In a 1921 letter to Sydney Shiff, patron of the arts and financial backer of the quarterly Arts & Letters (in which Eliot placed a few essays and poems), Eliot explains that

88


he had finished a ‘‘rough draft’’ of part III of The Waste Land, ‘‘but [I] do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable’’ (L1 484). This characteristic need for validation from an outside agent partly explains why Eliot composed his poems and plays largely in sections, and then paused to allow for a response from a trusted auditor. Only after those periods of consultation would Eliot move towards completion of a final draft. In fact, Vivien Eliot’s collaboration with her husband occurred extensively during their marriage and it operated on numerous levels.57 She was apparently responsible for the naming of The Criterion and even originated an abortive scheme to buy the journal from Lady Rothermere after its first issue was published (534, 538, 588–9). In addition, she either helped write ‘‘On the Eve, A Dialogue’’ for The Criterion (according to Gallup) or wrote the piece entirely and had it placed under her husband’s name (according to Seymour-Jones). She also published pseudonymously at least ten of her own items in the journal during 1924–5.58 Eliot had such confidence in his wife’s literary taste and writing abilities that he was willing to call on her to assist him in reviewing novels for the Westminster Gazette early in his career (149). She even once rather grandiosely claimed in a letter to Richard Aldington to have essentially dictated one of Eliot’s ‘‘London Letters’’ for The Dial. Because Eliot was on the verge of a breakdown, she explained, ‘‘I told him what to say, and he just wrote it down . . . So the article is more mine than his’’ (544). On the other hand, Eliot encouraged his wife with her own work and would, at times, revise her fiction. Valerie Eliot attributes Vivien Eliot’s difficulties as an artist to her inability to ‘‘focus properly’’ and argues that it was actually Eliot who was the more prominent booster in the relationship. In one interview, she portrays Eliot as an enthusiastic partner indulging a frustrated dilettante and cites as evidence Eliot’s periodic completing of her stories and an occasion when Eliot attempted to place one of Vivien’s stories with The Dial, only to have it rejected.59 Vivien Eliot’s biographer, however, sees the partnership as one of equals and even identifies the ideal of artistic collaboration as specific motivation for the marriage, though she later sees it evolving into one of ‘‘co-dependence in which psychological need and distress played a large part in illnesses which often had no organic basis.’’60 As with all of Eliot’s collaborations, the actual nature of the relationship is difficult to sort out entirely, partly because the alliance served different purposes for the participants. In this case, it is clear that each partner depended on the other in an almost pathological fashion. A long letter to his brother on 2 July 1919, in which Eliot outlines the perils of life in


89

competitive literary London and then attributes his success at overcoming weaknesses in his character to ‘‘Vivien’s assistance’’ (L1 311), hardly overstates the case: the very survival of each individual, at least in those early years, was due to the support of the other. Thus past discussions of this marriage, which consistently process the partnership solely in terms of the effect Vivien had on Eliot’s work while minimizing her own artistic interests and achievement, offer a rather limited picture. Also, the kneejerk habit of characterizing the collaboration hierarchically by routinely assigning Eliot a superior position in the relationship ignores the variable roles Eliot tended to adopt within creative unions. This intimate collaboration had immense value for both participants, even though at times the contentious nature of the exchange seemed to run counter to Eliot’s idealized prose descriptions of how he envisioned collaboration operating. 1924 contributions to The Criterion – breezy accounts of the London cultural scene entitled ‘‘Letters of the Moment’’– offer insight into the nature of this co-dependent literary collaboration between husband and wife that had become second nature in the years immediately following publication of The Waste Land. The pieces present an intimate glimpse of a deteriorating marriage crumbling publicly on the pages of Eliot’s august journal and they are worth exploring before returning to the other collaborative voices of The Waste Land for the light they shed on this marital dialogue. In fact, the ‘‘Letters’’ record events that Lyndall Gordon sees as signaling ‘‘the mutual misfortune of the Eliot marriage [coming] to a crisis,’’ a result of financial insecurities, Vivien’s poor health, and Eliot’s creative impotence.61 While Vivien Eliot’s contributions to The Criterion are often dismissed by critics as ‘‘flirtatious vignettes,’’ simple ‘‘sketches,’’ or mere ‘‘fragments’’ that seem ‘‘disjointed and confused,’’62 in the case of the two ‘‘Letters of the Moment,’’ they appear much more highly wrought, aggressively purposeful, and wrenchingly personal once readers attend to the dramatic structure suggested by the writer and set the pieces against the background of the collaborative dialogue that had existed between the two for a number of years. First, the letters possess a complex ancestry, for they took shape over a series of drafts, appearing initially as very personal epistles that became increasingly inventive in subsequent drafts through the addition of fictional details and eradication of all but one reference to actual named acquaintances.63 Although the reports come from the pen of an ‘‘F. M.,’’ a necessary camouflage if Vivien were to publish in her husband’s journal, the second installment of ‘‘Letters of the Moment’’ also contains (unattributed) twenty lines by Eliot from an early version of the Popean couplets

90


cut out of ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ as well as two prose paragraphs written by Eliot himself.64 Thus the letters carry on multiple dialogues as they unfold, for while they both are literally addressed from the pen of a female writer to ‘‘my dear Volumnia,’’ they can also be understood as a conversation between husband and wife. Both partners are operating within the confines of a collaborative narrative but doing so in increasingly antagonistic ways as they struggle with their problematic marriage, a marriage that Eliot had already started thinking about abandoning by this time.65 In addressing her letters to someone called Volumnia, which happens to be the name of Coriolanus’s eloquent mother, Vivien positions herself implicitly in the role of Virgilia, who first appears in Shakespeare’s play paired with her mother-in-law and engaged in a dialogue in which she gloomily worries over her warrior husband’s absence. Adopting such a mask also casts Eliot as Coriolanus, who had surfaced two years earlier at the conclusion of The Waste Land as an example of an egotistical man locked in the Bradleyan prison of the self. That poem, of course, is littered with male characters behaving poorly towards their female partners, partners whose frustration is best summed up by one such spouse who cries out: ‘‘Why do you never speak. Speak’’ (CPP 65). This Shakespearean context in Vivien Eliot’s writing has gone unnoticed until now, as far as I can determine. Resentful of a matrimonial void caused by the pressures of public duties, Virgilia vows in Shakespeare’s play to remain indoors until Coriolanus returns, despite Volumnia’s attempts to cheer her up and argue that honorable behavior in service of the State is more important than a husband’s responsibilities in the marriage bed. Typically presented as a mere cipher, a construction of Coriolanus’s imagination much along the lines of how his own mother created him, Virgilia appears almost mute against the background of Volumnia’s lengthy orations and the rhetorical fireworks that dominate much of the action. This further highlights Virgilia’s powerlessness, since Coriolanus is a play about using speech to get what one wants. In fact, Volumnia’s first words on stage identify communication as a problem for Virgilia. Volumnia beseeches her daughterin-law to ‘‘sing, or express yourself in a more comfortable sort’’ (1.3.1–2).66 Virgilia also spends most of her time offstage, appearing in only four brief scenes interspersed amongst the martial and political intrigue that dominates Coriolanus. Indeed, Shakespeare’s drama is, on one level, about a marriage gone bad. It portrays a neglected wife, an intrusive mother-in-law, and a husband wedded more to his work than to his wife. To underscore this point, Shakespeare assigns Coriolanus a series of metaphoric marriage partners other than his wife, at various times pairing


91

him up with Rome, his mother, Menenius, and Aufidius.67 Part of the difficulty in watching the play is that audiences (like Virgilia) have no way to identify with Coriolanus; because of his emotional remoteness, there can be no cathartic consolation at the conclusion of the tragedy. Ultimately, Coriolanus is a character who is utterly alone.68 The Eliot household had begun, around 1924–5, to resemble these very circumstances. After the departure from London in the summer of 1921 of his strong-willed mother, whose visit Eliot had mistakenly believed might solve his personal problems but only served to reinforce the antipathy the two most important women in his life felt for each other, Eliot plunged into a period of prolonged depression culminating in his fall 1921 breakdown, a three-month leave from Lloyd’s, and the trip to Lausanne to consult Dr. Roger Vittoz, Ottoline Morrell’s preferred psychiatrist at the time. When Eliot set up separate quarters early in 1923 in Burleigh Mansions, ostensibly as an office in which to conduct Criterion business but in reality as an escape from his own marriage, Vivien’s response consisted of a series of panic attacks brought on by the fear that her husband might be leaving her.69 Not only did Vivien increasingly resent Eliot’s absences and respond by shutting herself away at home, but illnesses like hers were typically treated by forbidding the patient from writing or by setting up very strict parameters under which that writing could be controlled. Vivien’s ‘‘Letters,’’ then, become attempts to escape these constraints and give herself (and Virgilia) a voice denied to her by public and private circumstances. This approach fits in with the themes of Vivien Eliot’s larger body of fictional work, which wrestles with the image of spousal paralysis and is littered with female figures that experience afflictions like physical paralysis, deep loneliness, and communication problems. So when the first ‘‘Letter of the Moment’’ opens with the writer lamenting her isolation, trapped in ‘‘the bars of the cage,’’ and regretting that she is ‘‘not the same person who once played . . . a leading part in those spring fantasies,’’ we are invited to identify ‘‘F. M.’’ with Virgilia as soon as Volumnia surfaces as the apparent recipient of these protestations (LM1 220).70 Later, she complains of the ‘‘winter’s isolation, the typewriter and the telephone, the sight of one’s face in the glass and how one started life by being a beautiful Princess admired and worshipped by all men’’ (222). This fear of being alone had plagued Vivien Eliot since she was a girl, and the condition sometimes worsened to the point that Eliot had to remain physically with her to placate the anxiety. In an effective employment of Shakespeare’s characterization of Volumnia’s oratorical skills, F. M. echoes

92


her attendant’s eloquent objections to her complaints – ‘‘But, you say, what about the wonderful parties of your intellectual friends which you used to describe to me so gaily?’’ (220). This presentation is seemingly appropriated from Shakespeare’s scene in which Volumnia tries to console Virgilia and which ends with Volumnia dismissing Virgilia because ‘‘she will but disease our better mirth’’ (1.3.104–5). F. M. responds that such parties belong to an earlier, happier time that has since passed and that only ‘‘egoists’’ can enjoy parties. She implicitly positions herself as a non-egoist who has been incapacitated due to expending so much energy simply trying to occupy the ‘‘odd minutes and odd hours’’ of every day (LM1 221). An egoist, on the other hand, is able to fill up his day ‘‘by toying with some aspect of himself.’’ F. M. pauses to wonder whether artists are egoists, before abruptly exchanging this deeply personal tone for a breezy account of an upcoming revival of Wycherley’s The Country Wife (220–1). Vivien Eliot certainly must have known that a veiled suggestion that true artists (and implicitly her husband) might reveal egoist tendencies would have struck a nerve, given Eliot’s habit of haranguing Romantic writers as egotists and his criticism of democracy, only ten months earlier in the pages of The Criterion, as exceptionally hospitable to egotism. This quality renders one incapable, in Eliot’s model, of connecting beyond oneself, and, most significantly, impairs one’s critical judgment due to a debilitating subjectivism.71 That seems, however, to be the very point being made by Vivien, who sees herself suffering under the weight of an absent, emotionally distant partner much like Virgilia before her. Vivien broadens the attack by tying the ‘‘success of an artist’’ to the amount of ‘‘energy’’ he possesses, a particularly hurtful charge given Eliot’s exhaustion from balancing dual careers and the writer’s block that plagued him at the time. In light of Vivien’s rendering of the Shakespearean background, it seems as if she intended to present this psychodrama involving a lonely wife and absent husband to multiple audiences. Certainly, airing the portrait publicly in the pages of The Criterion must have given her some sense of righteous relief, even though few readers would have sorted out the various allusions and masked identities or assigned the roles to the family members of the journal’s editor, given the pseudonymous presentation of the material. Later in life, Vivien Eliot would resort to more forceful and obvious public humiliations of her husband, especially after their separation.72 If we follow the logic of the familial relationship suggested by ‘‘Letters of the Moment,’’ Vivien is also surreptitiously addressing Charlotte Eliot, a mother who always hovered protectively over her youngest son and with whom Vivien tried initially to curry favor. She obediently carried on a


93

regular correspondence with her mother-in-law, especially early on in the marriage, around 1917–18, despite the fact that Charlotte blamed Vivien for Eliot’s abandonment of his academic career and decision to remain in London, an ocean apart from his family. She also never quite approved of Vivien’s background or behavior and ultimately punished her daughterin-law in various ways: by refusing, for example, to transfer shares of the Hydraulic Press-Brick Company to Eliot (putting them in trust instead) and by failing to mention Vivien’s name even a single time in an account of her son’s life that she penned after returning from her 1921 visit to England.73 In addition, Eliot’s great desire to succeed professionally as a way of satisfying his mother is matched by Coriolanus, whose similar motivation is so transparent that all the citizens of Rome know that his service to his country resulted from a need ‘‘to please his mother’’ (1.1.37). In her opening speech, the overbearing Volumnia actually displaces Virgilia conditionally, when she explains how she would behave ‘‘If my son were my husband’’ (1.3.2–3).74 But the most meaningful focus of Vivien’s plea must have been Eliot himself; and the many ambiguous ‘‘you’s’’ of the two letters can easily be construed as addresses to a husband, who himself often held up Coriolanus throughout his career as one of Shakespeare’s great underappreciated plays. It is proffered in the Hamlet essay, for example, as a greater ‘‘artistic success’’ than the better-known tragedy (SE 144). In fact, Eliot continually returned to the play as a kind of touchstone, drawing an epigraph from it for his 1918 ‘‘Ode,’’ which portrays a bridegroom fussing with his hair amidst the blood-stained marriage sheets, and alluding to it briefly in ‘‘A Cooking Egg.’’ He inserted the aforementioned reference to its title character (who is ‘‘broken’’) at the climax of The Waste Land, and employed it later in the early 1930s to unite two poems under the heading of Coriolan, poems that juxtapose the martial life with the love of mother, one of the cruxes of Shakespeare’s play.75 Vivien must have sensed that Eliot would have understood the import of the allusive construction, especially given the exile status shared by her husband and Shakespeare’s character. The second installment of ‘‘Letters of the Moment’’ begins as if in the midst of a continuing dialogue, seemingly in response to another speaker’s request. The first line reads: ‘‘You beg me not to describe The Country Wife and The Way of the World as all that, you say, is already too Voguish’’ (LM2 360). After reintroducing Volumnia as the beseecher in the sentence that follows, F. M. gives an account of the Mermaid Society’s revival of seventeenth-century drama and then explains that ‘‘I mused upon the passing Movement and flung it for its obsequies these few poor verses as

94


I ran.’’ She then transcribes twenty excised lines from The Waste Land, beginning ‘‘When sniffing Chloe, with the toast and tea, / Drags back the curtains to disclose the day’’ (360). The syntax of the sentence introducing Eliot’s expunged passage is particularly tortured, and it expresses a certain amount of anxiety about claiming authorship of lines she knows belong to another. In fact, in a third draft of the first letter, Vivien recognized consciously or unconsciously that the influence of The Waste Land over her literary efforts had become too strong and too overt. The description of ‘‘spring in London’’ that opens the published piece originally characterized the season as ‘‘difficult and painful, spring under the earth, a slow pushing and striving.’’ Part of the line is canceled in pencil in that third draft, while the rest of the line disappears by the final version.76 Despite that cancellation, the opening image of the first letter – the hyacinths ‘‘bursting clumsily out of their pots’’ – still strongly evokes the presence of that flower in ‘‘Burial of the Dead.’’ To complicate matters in ‘‘Letters of the Moment – II,’’ Eliot himself picks up the prose after the poetry, writing two paragraphs as F. M., even though his authorship is never disclosed. In order to accomplish that switch, Eliot falls back into his favorite tactic of masquerade, posing as a woman who receives some amorous attention from a suitor at a birthday dance. He rebuffs those advances with a final parodic echo from one of the refrains in ‘‘Prufrock’’ (perhaps a retaliatory signal to friends seeking to locate the identity of the masked writer) by declaring, ‘‘No, I did not care for the Boutique at all, not at all’’ (LM2 362). The rest of the passage is littered with typical Eliotic touches like a solitary speaker ascending a staircase and the pairing off of anonymous men and women for implied sexual encounters. Vivien’s voice answers this authorial intrusion by tidying up the two-paragraph package and rhetorically discarding it: ‘‘Well, so much for Secrets’’ (362). On one level, the tone here appears to be one of playfulness, the result of two partners engaging in a collaborative hoax in which they possess the thrilling license allowed by the various rhetorical disguises of the piece. Certainly that’s how Eliot retrospectively explained Vivien’s appropriation of the deleted lines from The Waste Land, calling the tactic ‘‘a joke between them.’’77 This is a fitting tactic, I suppose, for a letter dated 1 April. The document’s co-authors embrace collaboration as a shared secret, dropping slight clues to their identity along the way. That surely must have been the appeal to Eliot, lover of puzzles and detective fiction, who gleefully challenges (or even taunts) the reader in his portion of the letter: ‘‘in every part of this viscous morass, this gently undulating bog of


95

Anglo-Saxon democracy, Secrets of one kind or another are to be discovered’’ (LM2 361). But the private undercurrent of the dialogue, especially Vivien’s wrenching plea to her husband in the first letter – essentially giving Virgilia a voice denied to her by the circumstances of Shakespeare’s play – exposes a darker, less productive side of their collaborative exchange. Eliot’s answer to Vivien’s plea would have been doubly difficult for his wife to bear: instead of responding to her complaints or even taking them seriously, Eliot co-opts the pen of F. M. and passes her ‘‘into the expectant hands of a young gentleman with eyeglasses in the belief that he and I should find many high-souled things in common’’ (361), a haunting (though no doubt unintentional) echo of Eliot’s own complicity – as detailed by Seymour-Jones – in his wife’s affair with Bertrand Russell. His tone is much lighter as he adopts the voice of a female party-goer in a playful exercise of rhetorical cross-dressing. This contrast makes Vivien’s plaintive tone that much more acute. When she wrests back control of the letter, we find her alone again, countering Volumnia’s implicit objection about being ‘‘cut off from civilisation’’ with the stark observation that her only companions are the many literary journals sitting before her, ‘‘set out in rows like a parterre’’ (362). Ultimately, Vivien’s two letters reveal her as an inventive writer capable of constructing a rather complicated and nuanced plot that turns on the very skillful mining of Shakespeare for personally relevant source material. The result is a deeply tortured portrait of a relationship on the brink of failure and one in which the partners have become so contentious that the only way they can now communicate their respective frustrations is through the tactic of literary collaboration. In fact, the exchanges in the Criterion pieces show that the predominant method of establishing intimacy in this marriage was through the activity of textual collaboration. As mentioned earlier, Eliot was so modest before his wife that he did not share a bedroom with her at any point in the marriage and could not even bring himself to shave in front of Vivien. His own works are littered with male–female relationships marked by aborted communication and failures to achieve intimacy. In The Waste Land, for example, the speaker who asks the question ‘‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’’ can’t conceive of any motivation for marriage other than progeny. The assumption is that marriage has little to do with love, affection, or friendship. In many respects, the poem serves to demonstrate the crisis of intimacy that had emerged in post-war Britain, though it has rarely been discussed in that manner. Written at a time when Europe was trying to assimilate millions of physically and psychologically scarred soldiers back into altered domestic and professional spaces, The Waste Land

96


offers a series of interactions between men and women that suggests this reintegration was doomed. It’s not that men and women don’t interact in this environment, it’s more that those interactions are marked by a complete lack of intimacy, as evidenced in the rape of Philomel, the mechanical sexual encounter between the ‘‘young man carbuncular’’ and the typist, and the abortion brought off by Lil, who’s afraid of losing her husband (just returned from combat) because sexual freedom is running rampant in the post-war society. Part of the problem was that the separation of the sexes brought on by the war utterly transformed gender roles, so that men and women no longer understood how to relate – norms instituted in pre-war settings were suddenly anachronistic, at least according to the poem. But the problem also involved the more fundamental issue of language and its sudden inability to convey truth, to represent the individual accurately, and to ultimately bring human beings together in a shared understanding. The Waste Land even possesses a curious ambivalence about establishing intimacy with its reader by insisting on delivering its material through a series of indirect voices, allusions, and quoted material, though it does seek to recover a connection with its audience (albeit rather unsuccessfully) through the footnote form that Eliot found so comforting. One way to understand collaboration in the Eliot marriage, then, is to see it as facilitating a provisional – though artificial – textual intimacy in which creative works provide the two with an actual (and, it turns out, the only) landscape for intimate communication. Their collaboration on The Waste Land, for example, allowed the two to engage in spirited conversations within the protection afforded by the editorial process, since the individual is speaking to the partner in an uninterrupted manner, but doing so in his or her absence and under conditions in which you don’t immediately receive a reply. Vivien offered a number of notable emendations to and suggestions on the drafts of ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ that illustrate this procedure. After reading one version, Vivien returned the marked manuscript to Eliot with the note, ‘‘Make any of these alterations – or none if you prefer. Send me back this copy & let me have it’’ (TWLF 15). In addition to encouraging Eliot by repeatedly penning exclamations in the margin like ‘‘wonderful,’’ ‘‘yes,’’ and ‘‘splendid last lines,’’ Vivien convinced her husband to shorten the original formal series of ‘‘Good nights’’ near the end of the section to the more colloquial ‘‘Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.’’ She also succeeded in compelling him to drop two lines she did not like and substitute for one of them the line, ‘‘If you don’t like it you can get on with it.’’ Vivien’s substitution of this line in place of Eliot’s more formal, ‘‘No, ma’am, you


97

needn’t look old-fashioned at me,’’ maintains that colloquial authenticity that he found so hard to reproduce. Indeed, altering the tone through ordinary language may have been Vivien Eliot’s greatest contribution to this section of the poem, since the colloquialisms are finally what give the conversation between the two women its energy and distinguish their lower-class relationships from the two other examples of upper-class failed love in the section. Even the Eliots’ maid, Ellen Kellond, had one of her idiomatic sentences co-opted for the poem (127). A careful reader of the exchanges in ‘‘Letters of the Moment – II’’ will be able to differentiate Eliot’s stiff, formal syntax and vocabulary in his two-paragraph insertion from the more relaxed, conversational style of his wife. In this respect, their styles are complementary and actually reenact the way in which their personalities were originally drawn together. Vivien also helped achieve that authenticating effect in The Waste Land by substituting ‘‘pills’’ for ‘‘medicine’’ in the line that eventually read, ‘‘It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said,’’ and by contributing the line, ‘‘What you get married for if you don’t want to have children,’’ which Eliot finally shortened by omitting ‘‘to have.’’ While Vivien failed to appreciate Eliot’s attempts in the opening twenty lines of ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ to paint a highly stylized, cinematic portrait of female seductiveness – ‘‘Don’t see what you had in mind here,’’ she wrote (11) – she helped give shape and authenticity to dramatic scenes less dependent on literary allusion. Vivien Eliot regretted seeing the poem published because the project had given the couple something on which to work together and she sensed that collaboration helped advance the intimate communication lacking in her own marriage. Late in 1922, she confessed that ‘‘[i]t was a terrible thing, somehow, when the time came at last for it to be published,’’ because ‘‘it has become a part of me (or I of it)’’ (L1 584). Thus while collaborative alliances helped Eliot bring his work to completion, Vivien Eliot had such a personal investment in that shared composition that the publication of the work signaled the death of a small part of herself. Her collaboration with her husband, then, served ironically as a self-destructive enterprise: the procedure was doomed to fail because such editorial exchanges have as their very purpose the closure of the text and thus inevitably lead to the end of communication, the exact opposite goal of most intimate interaction. The conversation taking place in Vivien Eliot’s ‘‘Letters of the Moment’’ ultimately shows that while collaboration can serve the different needs of both contributors, it can also result in texts that threaten to break apart under the pressures of those conflicting desires.

98


Eliot replicated the strategy of borrowing or adapting poetic material from living partners by freely employing literary allusions from previously published texts. The Waste Land ’s method of incessantly alluding to other literary works – often lifting lines verbatim from those texts – establishes an almost compulsive intertextuality in the poem that is itself collaborative, mimicking the alliance with primary collaborators like Pound through ‘‘relationships’’ with these more remote partners. Once again, the suppression of his own personal identity within the poem made more room for these allusive collaborators, a point implicitly made by Edgell Rickword in his TLS review of The Waste Land, where he argued that the poetic overdependence on allusion resulted from Eliot’s fear of revealing himself to his reader.78 When Eliot invokes an eerie line from The Tempest – ‘‘‘This music crept by me upon the waters’’’ (CPP 69) – in the middle of ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ he explicitly calls on Shakespeare’s text to help execute a number of specific thematic reverberations in his modern poem: for example, linking the previous scene of the solitary typist playing a record on a gramophone with the subsequent setting, a bustling pub marked by a mixture of mandolin strains and chattering voices; refocusing attention on the poem’s protagonist, the supposed speaker who surveys the scene ‘‘along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street’’; and celebrating the power of music to temper the passions of the typist and protagonist-speaker, as it did for Ferdinand. Such a device (which Harold Love refers to as ‘‘precursory authorship’’ in his recent important study of attribution) enacts Jerome McGann’s contention that placing quoted material in alternative contexts establishes different ‘‘networks of meaning’’ which shifts fundamentally the import of the original.79 If we take to heart the model of literary history set up in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919), the correspondence between the texts operates in both directions, for the introduction of The Waste Land has altered utterly the past line of literary works. This allows Eliot to conceive of literary borrowing as a collaborative exercise with implications for both participants, even though the living writer is the more overtly active partner in the relationship and he ultimately controls the outcome of the textual appropriation, a move that appealed to Eliot’s need to establish authority while at the same time give in to an outside agent. For a poet who was particularly ambivalent about how to value the creative process, allusion possessed the double power of allowing Eliot to submit to a larger tradition while also validating his own work by placing it within this authoritative tradition. In citing Ferdinand’s lament, Eliot also introduces alternative perspectives that complicate the narrative point of view. As if the single


99

consciousness of the poet is not sufficient to bear the great weight of a tortured century’s misfortune and upheaval, Eliot falls back on the voices of literary precursors to buttress his modern dirge. Jack Stillinger goes as far as suggesting that such literary source material be ‘‘considered an element in the authorship of the work,’’ a proposal my work supports.80 Some might question the notion of allusion and borrowing as collaboration, wondering if we extend the authorial boundaries to include literary echoes might not all texts fall under the category of multiply authored texts. Following Stillinger’s logic that single authorship is not possible under any circumstances, this is indeed the case. But the key difference with Eliot’s work is that he consciously set out to embrace other writers as co-authors through allusion, constructing an intricate theoretical system in his prose that accommodated such borrowings and then attempting to follow through in his poetic practice. With most other writers, allusion operates less closely to the surface, giving the dominant authorial voice room to assert independence; in Eliot’s poetry, allusion became a device that allowed for the burial of authorial identity, a way of evading complete responsibility for the work. In The Waste Land, those alternative quoted voices collaborate with the author by overlaying the vision of the quotation or source on top of Eliot’s perspective. This union of source material and personal vision furthers the confusion of authorial identity and distances the writer from his material in much the same way that the protagonist in a dramatic monologue provides a protective mask for the author. The conscious construction of collaborative voices, in place of the single protagonist that many have tried to discover in The Waste Land, allowed Eliot to maneuver within the tenets established by the modernist program while also letting him distance, sanitize, or ‘‘impersonalize’’ some difficult autobiographical material. This is the exact procedure he admires in some of Pound’s early Cantos, which employ allusive fragments as a way of achieving ‘‘a positive coherence . . . an objective and reticent autobiography,’’ that last oxymoronic phrasing illustrating Eliot’s discomfort with exposing the self poetically.81 In the end, such fragments shored against the ruins of Eliot’s psyche posit intertextuality as a bulwark against a collapsing ego unable to maintain control. The obsessive employment of literary sources reveals an author refusing to take full possession of his poetic material because he is more comfortable with the authorial blending that collaboration ensures.Wyndham Lewis once referred to Eliot as an ‘‘incarnate Echo,’’ which effectively points to the poet’s need for external source material to help actualize his own voice.82 The urge towards intertextual collaboration occurs most

100


vigorously at pressure points in The Waste Land, like beginnings and endings of sections, where we would usually expect the assertion of a controlling consciousness that might establish contact or even intimacy between reader and speaker. Instead we get echo, allusion, and quotation, devices that erect barriers and insist on turning over responsibility for construction of meaning to the reader. Even when the poem calls out explicitly to the reader, at the very conclusion of ‘‘The Burial of the Dead,’’ it must do so through Baudelaire and in the original foreign language. The tendency culminates in the final eleven lines of the poem, a section that first seems to promise narrative revelation and closure through the emergence of the first person pronoun – ‘‘I sat upon the shore’’ – but which soon deteriorates into a hysterical outburst of allusions in different languages, voices, genres, and periods, ‘‘fragments’’ that attempt to abandon ownership of the poetic experience at its most crucial moment. This intertextual procedure naturally calls into question the notion of authorial originality.83 It accords quite readily with Eliot’s notion that no writer or text has any significance alone, for only context can finally confer upon them meaning. His extended discussion of influence in his prose criticism attests to this principle, that to explain a contemporary work it is necessary to place it within the framework of some anterior material. Under such circumstances, explains Eliot, ‘‘[w]e cannot understand any one European literature without knowing a good deal about the others. When we examine the history of poetry in Europe, we find a tissue of influences woven to and fro’’ (CC 190). Part of Eliot’s anxieties about making a career for himself in America rested with its apparent lack of a literary tradition that would facilitate such intertextual approaches. In fact, Pound locates this deficiency in an essay for Poetry just a few months before ‘‘Prufrock’’ appears, arguing that such a methodology is impossible in America because it is too young to have a cultural capital and the ‘‘value of a capital or metropolis is that if a man in a capital cribs, quotes or imitates, someone else immediately lets the cat out of the bag and says what he is cribbing, quoting or imitating.’’84 Eliot believed he had solved this problem by emigrating to England and leaving behind the liberal society of America where one could not be assured educated citizens had read any of the same books, which results in a lack of agreement about a common body of knowledge: ‘‘the idea of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation’’ (CC 33). But his increasingly aggressive search for a common culture in the 1930s suggests that he badly overestimated the unity of British culture, so much so that by 1935 he is complaining in terms that reaffirm Pound’s earlier sentiments: ‘‘It is unlikely that our age will


101

develop a characteristic common style: our individual interests, and points of view are too divergent; our education indeed is so chaotic that no two persons in the same company can be assumed to have their minds stocked with the same furniture; you cannot make a quotation or an allusion to which the whole of any company can respond.’’85 For a writer who so depended on allusion in his own work and who saw intertextuality as central to his theoretical positions on authorship, collaboration, and tradition, a condition of such extreme individualism proved enormously threatening. Revolutionary assertions about what constitutes creative production appear so often in Eliot’s prose because they accommodated his need to come to terms with his own ambivalent attitude about resorting to collaboration during the composition process. This project plays out most interestingly in Eliot’s skewed reading of Romanticism, where he redefined notions of genius by dismissing Romantic models of solitary originality and endorsing systems that turn on the reworking or even simply reordering of previously generated material. It is worth pausing here to investigate the question of Eliot’s anti-Romantic tendencies because they had such a large impact on making him more receptive to non-traditional, revolutionary approaches to authorship. In ‘‘The Frontiers of Criticism,’’ Eliot sympathetically cites John Livingston Lowes’s famous study of Coleridge as proof of the idea that ‘‘poetic originality is largely an original way of assembling the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole’’ (OPP 108), while elsewhere he defines good poetry as ‘‘not an outburst of pure feeling, but . . . the result of a more than common power of controlling and manipulating feelings’’; thus invention consists not in generating original material but in arriving at new methods for shaping alreadypresent matter.86 Eliot was conditioned to accept this position because he identified with the Bergsonian conception of the artistic process as an attempt to recover immediate experience. In Hulme’s rendering of Bergson, the ‘‘process of artistic creation would be better described as a process of discovery and disentanglement’’ and the artist himself ‘‘cannot be said to have created [external reality], but to have discovered it.’’87 Methods based on this idea minimize invention to such a degree that form takes precedence over content, since the latter can only be recycled anyway. In this example, the ‘‘scraps of Coleridge’s reading became transmuted into great poetry’’ (108). Such a bias appears as early as 1918, when Eliot reviews Russell’s Mysticism and Logic and cites approvingly Russell’s observation that ‘‘[i]n science, the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method.’’88 This becomes translated into artistic terms in 1919, in

102


forums such as the iconoclastic essay on Hamlet, in which Eliot locates the failure of the play as one of form rather than character, for he believed Shakespeare was unable to ‘‘manipulate into art’’ intractable emotional material (SE 144). The impetus in Eliot from the very early period in his career is to steer away from traditional Romantic renderings of genius, which stress ‘‘internal’’ pursuits like invention, inspiration, and originality, by recasting the creative act into one concerned with ‘‘external’’ questions like form and procedure. Coleridge became an acceptable Romantic in Eliot’s eyes not only because Eliot sympathized with the tortured artistic persona who excels in the prose form while periodically releasing brief poetic eruptions, but because Coleridge also seems to have conquered the greatest problem of the Romantic era, at least in Eliot’s drawing of it: shaping unwieldy poetic material into a proper form.When Eliot discussed the period as a whole early in his career, he usually stressed the inability of Romanticism to contain its impressions, for it is an age of ‘‘excess,’’ a word he used to characterize the movement in one of his 1916 Oxford extension lectures on the origins of Romanticism. In his talking points for that address, Eliot cites Rousseau as the source of these problems, endowing his personality with all the faults he typically associated with other Romantic poets, including an overemphasis on the personal, an elevation of feeling over thought, a severe egotism, and finally, a ‘‘[d]epreciation of form in art, and glorification of spontaneity.’’89 Romantic emotional inspiration leads one away from form, structure, and technique because its spontaneous nature compelled the writer to accede to an imagination he was unable to control. In numerous sketches of Poe, for example, Eliot tended to view that poet as a conflicted writer by setting Poe’s abilities as a craftsman and his interest in technique against the Romantic ‘‘man inspired to utter at white-heat,’’ finally questioning Poe’s truthfulness in ‘‘The Philosophy of Composition,’’ an essay containing an extremely detailed composition history for the ‘‘Raven’’ that belies the accepted view of writers, ‘‘that they compose by a species of fine frenzy – an ecstatic intuition,’’ in Poe’s words.90 Eliot’s skepticism, which surfaces in just about every one of his discussions of Poe’s essay, focuses upon the tension between form and spontaneity: ‘‘we are likely to take it as a spontaneous romantic effusion upon which the author had expended very little labour.’’91 The association of inspiration with spontaneity was particularly threatening because it posited invention as something beyond the control of the writer, and it called into question the validity of later attempts at revision or collaboration, since this Romantic model would view those revisions to the text as less authentic. In Shelley’s ‘‘fading coal’’


103

model (the tradition Eliot cites with his ‘‘white-heat’’ reference), the poet already begins writing under conditions in which inspiration is fading; there would be no point in revisiting a fully developed poem because the ‘‘fire’’ would be extinguished – at least that is the implication in Romantic accounts of composition history attached to poems like ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’’ or Keats’s sonnets. Like Poe, Blake comes off poorly in Eliot’s reconstruction of literary history, for Eliot saw his works as revealing that ‘‘genius and inspiration are not enough for a poet. He must have education, by which I do not mean erudition but a kind of mental and moral discipline.’’ Conversely, Vale´ry exhibits the opposite tendency, since he is ‘‘conscious of the benefit of working in strict forms’’ and points out the ‘‘small part played’’ by inspiration in construction of a poem in favor of the ‘‘process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labor.’’ This serves as a ‘‘corrective’’ to the ‘‘romantic attitude’’ that employs inspiration in seeing the poet’s role as ‘‘mediumistic and irresponsible.’’92 Part of the impetus behind the various external apparatuses of The Waste Land – the footnotes, epigraphs, allusions, five-part structure, and locating of Tiresias as a unifying voice or The Golden Bough as an organizing source – results from Eliot’s anxieties about a poetic inspiration unchecked and the related belief that such organizing principles were necessary to give proper shape to his material. This also explains why he offered himself and his text as pliable material to Pound, who provided ‘‘discipline’’ to the amorphous text. In a skillful, historicized reading of the notion of originality, Mark Rose highlights the debt of nineteenth century revolutionary views of the concept to a Lockean discourse concerned with production and ownership. When such thinking collided with both Romantic exaltations of genius and evolutions in copyright law, the result is a ‘‘modern system of the author and the ‘work’ – the reified aesthetic object, unitary, closed, and caught up in relations of ownership.’’93 Such a model conflicted with Eliot’s impressions about authorship and creative works on many levels. The relative novelty of originality was hardly suitable for a writer who looked to earlier periods for appropriate guidelines by which to construct his craft in the belief that ‘‘art never improves’’ (SE 16). The restrictive outcome of the above concept – in which a text became an inaccessible system inhospitable to non-owners – conflicted with Eliot’s assumptions about tradition, influence, and collaboration. Similarly, it emphasized the role of the personality in the generation of creative material, a move that violated Eliot’s theories of impersonality and his desire to return to a pre-Romantic condition in which primarily anonymous authorship gave the writer no

104


special claim upon the production of meaning.94 The weight given to personality served to advance the myth of Romantic poets as autonomous, solitary writers, which ultimately made the approach incompatible with all of Eliot’s renderings of the creative process, especially those stressing collaboration. Finally, his deep-seated suspicions concerning originality, which appeared as early as ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ and its companion essay ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry,’’ encouraged Eliot to establish as the goal of his work not original thought but the combining of already formulated materials from locations outside of the poet. Such a stance was compatible with modernist arguments that the conditions of the contemporary world prohibited originality, a point articulated hauntingly by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. The brilliance of the Company Manager – ‘‘he originated nothing,’’ according to Marlow – rests in his understanding that there exists a finite quantity of goods in the natural world and it was his job to manage a system which had as its goal the efficient extraction of those commodities. The individual’s success derives from his ability to subsume individuality in the face of an all-powerful market economy: ‘‘He was commonplace’’ and ‘‘of ordinary build.’’ In fact, the manager is so hollow that Marlow speculates, ‘‘[p]erhaps there was nothing within him.’’ Kurtz, the one figure of ‘‘universal genius,’’ who is marked by his very uniqueness and like an artist is able to make ordinary people like the Russian see into the life of things, collapses under the pressure of that drive toward originality.95 Even when Eliot does raise the issue of originality in a seemingly positive manner, it becomes codified in the language of influence, tradition, and imitation, as when he remarks: ‘‘Some of my strongest impulse to original development, in early years, has come from thinking: ‘here is a man who has said something, long ago or in another language, which somehow corresponds to what I want to say now; let me see if I can’t do what he has done, in my own language – in the language of my own place and time’’’ (TCC 56). Ultimately, Eliot’s anti-Romanticism established conditions that primed him for collaborative activity, since that position allowed him to repeatedly attack egotism, individuality, ignorance of tradition, and an inability to submit to external, stabilizing structures. Such a sentiment emerged in a 1924 discussion of King Lear, a play that Eliot argued demands the cooperation of actors, an overall harmony, and finally ‘‘collaboration.’’ Conversely, he complains, one of the aspects of the ‘‘modern democracy of culture’’ is an ‘‘aversion for the work of art, this preference for the derivative, the marginal,’’ for within democracy, one gets ‘‘that egotism of motive, that incapacity for surrender or allegiance to something outside of oneself.’’96 Ultimately, this


105

rendering sets egotism (that characteristic of democracy and Romanticism) against the ability to give in to external forces (the very action most prevalent in Eliot’s conception of the artistic process), and it becomes an implicit call for favoring the collective over the personal. The intertextual features of The Waste Land stress this collectivity; and to make sure readers attend to these outside, collaborative texts in their readings of the poem, Eliot included footnotes that identified source material. Although Eliot tried at various times in his career to dismiss their importance, the notes have become one of the most remarked upon features of The Waste Land, an outcome Eliot once joked about by claiming that readers would ask for their money back if the supplementary material was ever omitted. During that particular discussion in ‘‘The Frontiers of Criticism,’’ Eliot tries to imply that he jotted down references originally as mere protection against future charges of plagiarism by critics who failed to appreciate the function of the many allusions. He then explains that he expanded those notes to fill out the publication of the poem in book form, after its appearance without notes in the Dial and The Criterion, ‘‘with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day . . . now they can never be unstuck’’ (OPP 109–10). Although Eliot’s recollections of his methods are always somewhat selective and we should immediately question the casual explanation that the notes were a mere afterthought necessitated by the demands of the book trade when the rest of the poem evolved through such a painstakingly careful process, there is no question that the former doctoral candidate was comfortable within this academic genre. Also, in light of both the model proposed in ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ (1923), which unites a writer’s critical and creative impulses in a cooperative union, and Eliot’s habit of seeking opportunities to respond to his work critically after its publication (in essays and interviews, for example), the notes make perfect sense, for they gave the poet the chance to position his work in advance of its public, critical reception.97 Indeed, the notes intensify the performative nature of The Waste Land by enacting for the reader its dialogic engagement with other texts and authors that have preceded it, acting out one of the central premises of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’’ Like scholarly footnotes, the references in Eliot’s poem position the text within a constantly unfolding conversation and they encourage a like participation on the part of the reader; such devices are meant to be elucidative rather than obfuscatory. While some critics like Aiken had expressed frustration at supposedly being ‘‘told what occurs’’ in the poem via the notes, within my conversational

106


model, the device attempts to open access rather than close it.98 Eliot, for example, insisted that the notes offered ‘‘no prophylactic against interpretation and dissection,’’ a claim that accords with the freedom he sought for readers’ interpretive strategies in his prose criticism. Elsewhere, he observes more generally how allusion operates by liberating potential readings rather than shutting off entry points to the text: Joyce’s use of allusion, he maintains, creates a ‘‘vista opened to the imagination by the very lightest touch.’’99 The text is brought into full existence only through its encounter with the reader; and part of the success of the poem is that it fulfills Wolfgang Iser’s requirement that a ‘‘literary text . . . be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative.’’100 Yet the notes also serve a kind of mediating role, by taking the reader into the writer’s confidence but also potentially seeking some authority over him. This orientation is doubly important because of Eliot’s refusal to allow a single speaker on which the reader may focus his attention, so there always exists an unfulfilled desire on the part of the reader to seek out some narrative authority: the strategy brilliantly creates within the reader a longing for collaboration by generating during the reading process specific questions about the identity of speakers and sources that are seemingly answered, or at least addressed, in the notes. This seemingly schizophrenic attitude towards artistic authority and passivity demonstrates just how difficult it was for Eliot to embrace collaborative procedures fully in practice, even though he spent an inordinate amount of time in his prose idealizing the method. Even the withholding of a complete gloss on a passage could be interpreted as either a hostile action (while producing the illusion of providing answers) or a prompt that gives a reader room to maneuver. Certainly that is how Peter Ackroyd reads the effect, when he identifies in The Waste Land ‘‘a continual oscillation between what is remembered and what is introduced, the movement of other poets’ words just beneath the surface of his own. This accounts for the strange echoic quality which his poetry has . . . [thus] the reader must lend to the poetry the inflections of his own voice in order to give it shape.’’101 In this sense, the reader’s imposing of meaning upon the text becomes the central experience of The Waste Land. Eliot’s invitation in ‘‘The Burial of the Dead’’ – ‘‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon fre`re!’’ – in which he names the reader as both double and brother locates this collaborative coupling as an operating procedure and further reduces the privileging of the author, by withholding his or her identity and minimizing the significance of intention. Since we tend to


107

associate intention and authority, Eliot’s resistance to that very notion leaves open that role, to be occupied by potential collaborators, whether they take the form of fellow poets like Pound or unknown readers. In many of Eliot’s discussions of Shakespeare, he identified the dramatist’s ability to suppress any personal philosophy in his work as one of his greatest traits, for it ultimately gave the audience authority to impose its own meaning upon the text or to ‘‘live through’’ the play.102 In effect, the footnotes to The Waste Land imply a never-ending conversation, with the boundaries of the poem continually open. And while the notes turn to the reader rather than the author to ‘‘close’’ the meaning, to employ Barthes’s term, any meaning a reader might wish to construct can only be provisional. The overall effect of blending the many allusions in The Waste Land is to recast their meaning, since shining the new light provided by updated context remakes the original into something vastly different and unique. This juxtaposition of materials adapts the theory of collage to suggest how a collaboration of disparate items can achieve new meaning through the reordering of elements. Collage offered Eliot a perfect mechanism to pass over inspiration as an artistic problem and position the writer’s task as one of ordering, the very concept threatened by collage – it gave the writer, in effect, something to do. In all of his comments about influence and borrowing, Eliot stressed that the rending of a quoted line from its original context was useless unless the poet gave it a new sensibility resulting from an overall unity of effect. That becomes the very definition of the mature poet in ‘‘Philip Massinger,’’ which preceded The Waste Land by two years. While collage forces the artist to go outside himself for inspiration so that the process of creation becomes transmuted into a problem of ordering rather than one of invention, it achieves the beneficial effect of involving the reader more readily than he or she might otherwise be. In a study of literary impressionism which examines the effect of collage upon literary strategies, Todd Bender notes how the device ‘‘force[s] the reader into an unusually active role’’ by demanding that he or she construct emotional connections in the text and, in the case of The Waste Land, he argues that ‘‘[r]ather than talking about feeling lost, disoriented, and threatened, T. S. Eliot constructs a verbal collage which makes the reader feel directly disorientation, confusion, and fear.’’103 This provided Eliot with one of his many reasons for criticizing the Georgian poets, whose work he believed offered discussions about feeling rather than objectifications of emotion in ways that made it available to the reader to use on his own terms. Such poets turned consciously inward because they were unable to connect to any outward, non-native tradition.

108


A final feature of The Waste Land that attempts to displace a dominant authorial consciousness and makes the text thus more available to readers as collaborators is its dramatic underpinning, which Eliot conceived of very early on, when he originally titled the work ‘‘He Do the Police in Different Voices,’’ an allusion that consciously highlights the performative elements of the text by referencing Dickens’s character Sloppy dramatizing voices from the newspaper. An inveterate newspaper reader and well-known mimic, Eliot meant the poem to be ‘‘performed’’ as he himself did in the summer of 1922 for the Woolfs, when he ‘‘sang it & chanted it rhythmed it.’’104 This allowed Eliot to connect the construction of dramatic voices with the limiting of the personal in the poem, since around the time he began thinking of beginning what eventually became The Waste Land he wrote that one ‘‘cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities’’ (SE 321). But the ‘‘various personalities’’ that appear in The Waste Land, from Madame Sosostris to Phlebas the Phoenician to Tiresias, function as characters, despite Eliot’s note that Tiresias is ‘‘a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character.’’’ Eliot wrote The Waste Land during a period when he was trying both to accentuate and reconcile the dramatic elements in poetry and the poetic elements in drama, attacking any position that sought to separate the two genres. Eliot criticizes Charles Lamb’s Specimens in ‘‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’’ (1924) largely because Lamb posited a division between poetry and drama. Although Eliot does not mention Lamb’s famous opinion that Shakespeare is best read rather than performed – for involving actors in the delivery of such genius pollutes its artistic purity – Eliot surely must have had such sentiments in mind when asserting his stance.While readers often remark upon the dramatic elements embedded in the final version of The Waste Land, its original incarnation is even more dramatic, for the omitted material that had begun parts 1, 3, and 4 play out like scenes on the cinema screen. They contain dramatic tableaus with vivid landscapes, engaging characters, and lively dialogue. Depending on our aesthetic biases, we have Pound to thank or condemn for this outcome. Pound never shared Eliot’s enthusiasm for drama, despite his extensive work on the Noh, which he and Yeats distinguished from popular drama because of its aristocratic roots and non-naturalistic manner. At times Pound was aggressively hostile to the form, arguing in one ‘‘Paris Letter’’ published soon after The Waste Land that drama was structurally flawed as a genre because it forced writers to introduce unnecessary action, that Homer was superior to the Greek


109

dramatists who wrote ‘‘bad’’ plays, that one professor’s contention that Shakespeare resorted to drama because he could not excel at non-dramatic poetry made perfect sense, and finally that poetry was superior to drama because it was immortal.105 Eliot, on the other hand, saw drama as the ‘‘most permanent’’ genre and one that was ‘‘capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied types of society, than any other’’ (SW 61). Pound’s excision of the haunting, dream-like shipwreck account that makes up the majority of the early version of ‘‘Death by Water’’ is unfortunate on one level, for it offers one of the most accessible scenes of the drafts. It was inspired particularly by Eliot’s experiences sailing off the coast of New England with his brother Henry and later with Harold Peters, a friend from Harvard, and it looks ahead to ‘‘the hand expert with sail and oar’’ in ‘‘What the Thunder Said.’’ It is also one of the most powerfully dramatic sections of the manuscript, with horrified sailors struggling to tame a violent sea and an anonymous speaker hovering over the scene trying to ‘‘wake up and end the dream’’ (TWLF 59). In fact, one of the great ironies of Eliot’s collaboration with Pound is that it reduced some of the collaborative possibilities for readers of The Waste Land by minimizing these accessible dramatic moments in the poem, mainly in the excised passages at the beginning of ‘‘The Burial of the Dead,’’ ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ and ‘‘Death by Water.’’ Each reduction omits material rendered in plain language, the type of poetry that Pound later complained resulted from Eliot’s habit of writing ‘‘for very feeble and brittle mentalities.’’106 Although maintaining these three major sections would have loosened the overall focus of The Waste Land, such a decision also would have made the poem less difficult and less allusive, and would have finally enacted the ‘‘theory of levels’’ that Eliot located in Shakespeare and others in his dramatic criticism from 1930 onwards. That theory (discussed in my next chapter) posits that in ideal drama a broad variety of spectators from different backgrounds can enjoy the performance because meaning is conveyed both emotionally and intellectually on those two planes at once. And through that shared appreciation facilitated by the drama, disparate individuals become unified under a common culture. Although Eliot never fully succeeded in his aim, the idealized vision of a dramatic text that provided access to a broad audience due to the multi-layered presentation of material, including a broad sampling of narrative for the ‘‘simplest auditors,’’ actually manifests itself in the drafts of The Waste Land a short time before the Sweeney Agonistes experiment gets under way. It may be that the curious note about Tiresias ‘‘uniting’’ all the characters, which critics have always struggled to explain, resulted from

110


Eliot’s attempt to distinguish the character of the highest plane who would address the most intelligent members of the audience, leaving the relatively straightforward, less allusive dramatic scenes for the rest of the readers. Yet Pound’s suppression of those scenes stanched this effect in the poem, even though it resurfaced more powerfully in the drama a few years later, where Eliot could finally strive for that collaborative communication with a broad audience unhindered by Pound’s prejudices. Recognizing these collaborative tendencies in The Waste Land drafts allows us to locate a coherence to Eliot’s aesthetic over the decades that readers have often overlooked, preferring the drawing of sharp demarcations between The Waste Land period and the later writing for the stage. My work proposes, however, that the collaborative impulse in Eliot survives as a controlling principle throughout his career and functioned as one of the few consistent features during Eliot’s succession of new lives, even though the author struggled at times to process and ultimately accept that assistance from outside agents.

CHAPTER

3

‘‘Helping the poets . . . write for the theatre’’: The transitional essays on collaboration, community, and drama One of the most dependable patterns in Eliot’s career is his habit of following one of his own poems or dramas with an essay that explores the procedures of that creative work. This allowed Eliot to gain some distance from the imaginative act and explore the troubling process of creation in the comforting form of prose, where he could assert his opinions much more vigorously and, following Arnold, use criticism to establish order. Since The Waste Land took shape during one of the most turbulent times in Eliot’s personal life and it was the first work to benefit from a full-blown collaboration, Eliot was especially eager to make sense of that undertaking in his own criticism that followed the long poem. And while these essays have sometimes been discussed in terms of Eliot’s thinking in The Waste Land, placing them within the context of the collaborative model I have drawn up puts them in a drastically new light. In effect, they reveal Eliot wrestling with the implications of Pound’s assistance and struggling to align Pound’s editorial contributions with his own needs and fears as an artist. Unwilling to acknowledge Pound’s assistance overtly, the essays express Eliot’s seemingly conflicting impulses of preferring to configure the writer in a passive position in the creative act while at the same time allowing for the exercise of authority. Part of the motivation of the essays, then, seems to be a desire to resolve this contradiction. Noting these complications helps us better understand some of the stances Eliot takes in the prose criticism of the 1920s and early 1930s as he becomes increasingly interested in drama, the genre that most easily accommodated collaboration. The essays on drama that surface during that time, and in the years following Eliot’s move to the stage, seek to institute a meaningful collaboration with the dramatic audience and further diminish the role of authorial intention as a way of justifying that collaboration, though the application of that theoretical position was somewhat more problematic. While these essays highlight some of 111

112


Eliot’s anxieties regarding the new genre, he ultimately celebrates drama’s ability to facilitate an ideal partnership that elevates the communal over the personal and individual. This celebration grew out of the form’s natural receptivity to collaboration, but it also resulted from the fact that drama would satisfy some of Eliot’s larger political aims that start to surface especially vigorously around this time and become developed more fully in the subsequent quarter century in outlets like The Criterion, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, among others. In effect, Eliot’s inclination to collaborate in drama is not just a result of a personal pre-disposition to the activity; rather, it functioned as a political act of some consequence. Collaboration became a way to advance central ideas of a new cultural aesthetic, including the reestablishment of the ritual verse drama, the conservation of a national idea, the expression of the historical experience of a people, and the preservation of the voice of a unified culture. Eliot lays the groundwork for these central ideas in his 1923 essay in ‘‘Marie Lloyd,’’ which returns repeatedly to collaboration as a solution and also charts a path toward a variety of ideals that Eliot would pursue in the subsequent four decades.

MAKING SENSE OF COLLABORATION ON THE WASTE LAND: THE ESSAYS OF THE

1920S

Despite its title, Eliot’s ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ (1923) is deeply concerned with the creative act. Part of Eliot’s goal in the essay is to broaden the definition of ‘‘creative’’ to include various critical practices like evaluation, revision, and editing. Late in that discussion, he makes the authoritative pronouncement that ‘‘no writer is completely self-sufficient’’ (SE 31), the linking verb suggesting the irrefutability of a mathematical equation and the anti-Emersonian sentiment rejecting both the American ideal of self-reliance and the Romantic exaltation of the solitary genius exercising the imagination in an excited state. But coming as it does one year after the publication of The Waste Land, this essay can also be read as Eliot’s attempt to justify Pound’s editorial assistance by recasting how creation occurs to accommodate collaborative arrangements. Yet the omission of any mention of Pound or of the poem in an essay that describes in extensive detail the ‘‘toil of the artist’’ (SE 30) suggests Eliot needed to acquire some distance from his recently completed project before he could engage in a complete and overt deconstruction of its procedures and arrive

‘‘Helping the poets . . . write for the theatre’’

113

at a model that somehow reconciled Eliot’s contradictory attractions to passivity and authority in the creative process. Most critics forget to point out that the famous dedication to Pound as ‘‘il miglior fabbro’’ did not appear publicly in the poem’s first incarnations in the Dial, Criterion, or Boni and Liveright editions. While Eliot did inscribe the words in his own hand in the first edition he gave to Pound, the acknowledgment remained private until the 1925 publication of Poems 1909–1925. While Eliot felt compelled to express his gratitude to his fellow collaborator, he seemed to need to keep that assistance confidential until he had worked out in his own mind the nature of their cooperation on The Waste Land drafts. That is in part what takes place in the essays that follow the distribution of the poem. ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ explores the relationship between the creative and critical acts by repeatedly representing the creation of a text as a union of disparate entities and emphasizing the ability of the detached critical mind to shape unwieldy material. At one point, Eliot’s enthusiasm for the topic was so great that he scolded Matthew Arnold for ‘‘overlook[ing] the capital importance of criticism in the work of creation itself . . . [for] the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative’’ (SE 30). This is based on Eliot’s belief that the ‘‘critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist’’ (31). The participles in the middle of this explanation – sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing – inadvertently detail the creative method of The Waste Land, but also recast that procedure as one of criticism. That poem, published exactly one year before ‘‘The Function of Criticism,’’ contains an amalgamation of disparate quotations, voices, allusions, and languages that only fell into place under Pound’s critical guidance. The terms recall the exchange of drafts between Eliot and Pound, and the many ‘‘corrections’’ that were then recast and retried. (Eliot and Pound naturally tended to link the two activities of creation and criticism in part because they had begun to market their poetry around this time, as Robert Crawford demonstrates, through their criticism, which often sold better than the verse. The strategy employed the critical essays to educate audiences, prepare them to receive and digest modern poetry, and ultimately create a desire for that work that would inflate sales.1) But most significant is Eliot’s formulation of the artistic process into an equation stressing the cooperation of two sides of his own persona: the critic and the artist.

114


The artist’s surrender to external agents during the creative process, first introduced in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ resurfaces in ‘‘The Function of Criticism,’’ an essay Eliot consciously linked to the earlier one by placing it immediately following ‘‘Tradition’’ in Selected Essays and referring to that piece in the opening sentence of ‘‘Function.’’ Eliot’s message is not only that creation cannot occur alone but that the writer must actively suppress his personality – generate an absence – to make room for the collaborator’s presence. ‘‘There is accordingly something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance,’’ writes Eliot, ‘‘a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself in order to earn and to obtain his unique position’’ and, therefore, ‘‘only the man who has so much to give that he can forget himself his work can afford to collaborate, to exchange, to contribute’’ (SE 24, emphasis added). This procedure suggests a kind of palimpsestic notion of authorship in which the erasure of identity determines whether or not subsequent poetic material can come into focus. In Eliot’s case, the eradicative impulse is directed towards the self, appropriately so given his attraction to the passive role and his complicated anxieties about his own body. Eliot’s approach conditioned him for collaborative assistance since it elevated the finished product above the producer(s) by encouraging the artist’s placement under the guidance of some stronger, external authority. Authors are configured as passive vessels waiting for their material to be set free through the efforts of a strong, active collaborator or through the writer’s submission to a larger system. This sentiment occurs in his 1924 discussion admiring Vale´ry’s impersonal poetry, where Eliot praises a similar method of creation in Lucretius: ‘‘the passionate act by which he annihilates himself in a system and unites himself with it, gaining something greater than himself. Such a surrender requires great concentration.’’2 Annihilation is achieved through union, but a union with one element in a subservient position, willing to acquiesce; only then can something be gained. This strategy confronts head-on the image of the Romantic solitary genius by claiming a writer of that period needed more than just an imagination in an inspired state to bring about creation. Eliot sought also in ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ to identify himself personally with this anti-Romantic position by repeatedly calling into question his own imaginative powers. He refers to himself, for example, as an ‘‘Inner Deaf Mute,’’ in other words, one who is unable to hear his own unconscious mind at work (SE 30). He belabors the point later in the same paragraph, parenthetically alluding to his own ‘‘lack of inspiration’’ and singling out men, of which he is not one, who possess a ‘‘critical discrimination [that] flashe[s] in the very heat of creation’’ (30).


115

In this model, Eliot stands paralyzed, unable to speak or hear. He cannot access his own imagination and is unable to call on his critical powers to activate the creative. That does not mean, however, that Eliot was willing to come right out and discuss in detail Pound’s critical judgments of The Waste Land drafts. Instead he approaches the subject obliquely, sometimes coming at the creative through the critical in ‘‘The Function of Criticism.’’ For example, Eliot ties the ability of a writer to tame the personal to the success of criticism. He recasts criticism into a collaborative activity, arguing that ‘‘[h]ere, one would suppose, was a place for quiet co-operative labour. The critic . . . should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks . . . in the common pursuit of true judgment’’ (SE 25). The sentiment, reminiscent of Pope’s from his ‘‘Essay on Criticism,’’ posits an ideal of authentic criticism achievable only through the embracement of the impersonal, and encourages Eliot to argue earlier that criticism is not ‘‘an autotelic activity’’ (24), for it must apply itself to assisting in the creation of the artistic work. If the tempering of the personal failed to occur, collaborative partners could not occupy the same space at the same time. For this reason, Eliot later offers a model of reading in which the critic achieves his goal of authentic criticism by suppressing his own personality and then assuming ‘‘the personality of the author whom he criticises, and through this personality is able to speak with his own voice’’ (UPUC 112). In other words, collaboration cannot occur with two voices struggling for control of the dominant position. One of the reasons for the success of the collaboration on The Waste Land was that both Pound and Eliot were comfortable occupying their respective roles in the hierarchy of the relationship. Thus, Eliot’s ascension to the summit of literary London in the years following that poem ended up prohibiting a repetition of that particular partnership. In the essays written during the months following publication of The Waste Land, Eliot returns repeatedly to descriptions of creation as an incredibly painful enterprise. In ‘‘The Function of Criticism,’’ for example, he mentions the word ‘‘toil’’ twice in a paragraph that discusses the creative process (SE 30). He returns to that language in his 1923 review, ‘‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth,’’ identifying Joyce’s method as ‘‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’’3 While it is difficult to resist the habit of many critics who have employed this passage to outline the method of The Waste Land, in the context of my discussion the piece on Joyce can be best understood as an attempt by Eliot to make sense of Pound’s assistance. (This may explain why the essay gave

116


Eliot such trouble, for though it appears in the November 1923 edition of the Dial, the review was being worked on by Eliot at least one year earlier. In a letter of 8 November 1922 to Aldington, Eliot confesses that ‘‘I am struggling with a notice of Ulysses myself which I have promised long since to the Dial ’’ [L1 594]). As in ‘‘The Function of Criticism,’’ the repetition of participles in the passage quoted above positions the creative act not as a drawing out of imaginative material but as a process of framing matter that is already present. In fact, earlier in the review, Eliot points out that the writer has absolutely no control over this substance: ‘‘in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept. And in this material I include the emotions and feelings of the writer himself, which, for that writer, are simply material which he must accept – not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished.’’4 The recurrence of the italicized phrase reveals Eliot talking less about Joyce’s work and more about his own recent frustrations in managing the many poetic fragments that had been potential candidates for inclusion in The Waste Land and that only came under control due to Pound’s guidance. The easiest way to help construct a coherent structure out of such materials was through the assistance of a collaborator who could help organize and bring a broader perspective to the material. The anxiety about powerlessness in the face of charged creative material is one of the reasons Eliot became so preoccupied with form through his career, so that his definition of ‘‘the true experimenter’’ is not one who generates new material but one who is guided ‘‘by the compulsion to find, in every new poem as in his earliest, the right form for feelings over . . . which he has, as a poet, no control’’ (OPP 237). Control was achieved not by turning inward to discipline a tumultuous self, but by searching for external stabilizing agents that could perform the task. Nevertheless, Pound makes no appearance in the evaluation of Joyce’s novel or ‘‘The Function of Criticism.’’ It’s as if Eliot has Pound completely in mind throughout but refuses to let him break overtly through the boundaries of the essays. Oddly, after spending much of the Ulysses review establishing conditions under which a writer must seek assistance from external agents, Eliot concludes his discussion by emphasizing just how alone the artist is in the modern world: ‘‘only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use’’ in helping make the contemporary world receptive to great art.5 While Eliot certainly sought discipline in his personal and artistic lives, that is also one of the key qualities that Pound brought to The Waste Land drafts. It appears as if Eliot is still unsure how to acknowledge that aid publicly. Despite his seeming avoidance of Pound in these essays,


117

Eliot had no desire to relive the situation of a poet like Blake. That writer, the quintessential solitary genius lost at sea amidst a chaotic environment, haunts Eliot’s consciousness around this time and therefore became one of the impetuses for arriving at a model that would consciously integrate collaborative assistance into his discussions of the creative process. While he struggled in the months following the publication of The Waste Land to make complete sense of the individual assistance Pound had rendered in the formation of his poem, Eliot did assert the general benefits of modernist collaboration quite vigorously in his prose. Eliot’s poem was quickly seen as representative of a larger movement and it enacted theoretical arguments about tradition and literary–historical collaboration that had surfaced earlier in essays like ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’’ Such public acknowledgment helped Eliot realize just how much he had benefited from Pound’s editorial efforts and also reinforced for him the correctness of deciding to view his work within the modernist coterie. Pound encouraged that vision by speaking of the poem as ‘‘the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900’’ (L 180). Consequently, Eliot makes a series of comments in print in 1923 that emphasize the modern writer’s place within a small group of fellow artists and sets off that circle from the larger public. In ‘‘The Function of Criticism,’’ he argues: ‘‘A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously: it must be admitted that the union is mostly unconscious. Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community’’ (SE 24). In the review of Ulysses, Eliot writes, ‘‘a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs.’’6 Eliot’s tone is a bit more strident in the latter essay, due in part to the fact that he had been conducting an extended argument with Richard Aldington about the merits of Joyce’s novel. But in both cases, the ability of an author to participate in a select group of likeminded writers and ignore the demands of the mob becomes a testament to his greatness. Such ‘‘true artists’’ or ‘‘men of genius’’ become upholders of a communal tradition and the arbiters of taste for a culture. This is why in ‘‘The Function of Criticism’’ Eliot calls on critics to suppress ‘‘personal prejudices’’ and instead work towards the ‘‘common pursuit of true judgment’’ (25). This became also one of the overriding goals of Eliot’s journal, The Criterion, which he started the year before ‘‘The Function of Criticism.’’7 Even the title of that journal implies that judgment of artistic value is something that should be carried out collectively rather than by the individual, since the latter would be unable to temper his opinions without the restraint provided by the group.

118


Yet Eliot’s confident tone in his essays often belied a personal uncertainty about the wisdom of limiting one’s audience too severely as had happened in The Waste Land. One event in particular – the death of musichall performer Marie Lloyd in the fall of 1922 – did as much as anything to call into question Eliot’s thinking about these topics. For in Marie Lloyd, Eliot saw an artist who was able to achieve popular success while also maintaining her quality of greatness, which Eliot had at first associated with selectivity, both in one’s artistic circle and one’s audience. His essay on Lloyd is an enormously important piece on three fronts: it helps Eliot begin thinking about the possibilities of expanding his collaborative model to include a larger audience; it introduces some key concepts in Eliot’s political agenda, which eventually attempts to discover a set of shared values that will restore a unified English culture; and, most significantly, it allows Eliot to construct a model in which an artist can exert authority through collaboration. In effect, Marie Lloyd demonstrated a way out of the seeming conflict between passivity and authority that had surfaced during Eliot’s collaboration on The Waste Land. Written for the Dial just weeks after the publication of The Waste Land in that same journal, Eliot’s ‘‘London Letter’’ on Marie Lloyd’s death allowed him to turn his attention toward the relationship between the performer and her audience. Eliot viewed the subject as important and he revised the Dial essay for the second number of The Criterion, where the piece would appear as his first prose contribution to the new journal in January 1923. Ultimately, it would take its permanent place in the last section of Selected Essays, alongside treatments of Baudelaire, Arnold and Pater, and Bradley, among others. Lloyd’s appearance amongst this august collection of personalities illustrates the magnitude of her achievement and also encapsulates Eliot’s belief around this time of uniting the high and low.8 In fact, he remarks in the middle of ‘‘Marie Lloyd’’ that her death ‘‘is itself a significant moment in English history’’ (SE 458). But I am arguing that her importance rests more with Eliot’s personal needs and the advancement of a political program that will emerge from those desires. Lloyd offered Eliot a way out of the modernist trap in which he found himself when he tied an author’s greatness to a limitation upon his audience. Lloyd became a symbol of an artist who managed to maintain her standards while also appealing to a broad audience. This is the very issue Eliot takes up at the start of his essay when he observes that ‘‘it is not always easy to distinguish superiority from great popularity, when the two go together’’ (456). He singles out Lloyd’s death as significant because she ‘‘was the greatest music-hall artist of her time in England; she was also the


119

most popular. And popularity in her case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest’’ (456). Lloyd’s genius was her ability to ‘‘express’’ the feelings, needs, and hopes of the working-class audiences that patronized the music halls. Eliot’s attempts to accomplish the same sort of thing in the pub scene and young man carbuncular section of The Waste Land represent some of the most vital sections of that poem. Yet Eliot recognized that consciously cutting oneself off from that community through the construction of an exclusive, modernist coterie would increasingly make such material inaccessible. Like the cultural anthropologists in ‘‘Eeldrop and Appleplex,’’ Eliot would be forced to take a flat in a seedy section of London just to establish some contact with the objects of his interest, yet he would forever be pressing his nose against the glass of the window, cut off from that culture. Eliot, who frequently patronized music halls, identified Lloyd’s power as her ability to gain the audience’s sympathy: ‘‘Marie Lloyd’s audiences were invariably sympathetic, and it was through this sympathy that she controlled them’’ (SE 456, emphasis added). Here was what Eliot had been looking for, a method of collaboration that contained the attendant benefits of working with others while also allowing the artist to exert authority over that audience. On one level, Lloyd seemed to counter for Eliot the deficiency early modernists like Ford Madox Ford had identified in the English character: ‘‘the great defect being [the Englishman’s] want of sympathetic imagination.’’9 While sympathy derived from a collapsing of barriers between artist and audience, it seemed to do so in a manner that kept Lloyd firmly in charge. This inequitable cooperation between performer and audience was also accelerated by the very nature of the music-hall setting, which facilitated interaction between the two not only through its casual nature but through devices like jokes, double entendres, physical gags, and songs with choruses that encouraged spectators to participate. In this depiction of verbal exchanges, the artist remained the focal point: on stage, in control, and establishing the boundaries of the textual performance. Eliot saw in this genre the possibility of an ideal artistic experience: ‘‘The working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art’’ (458). This represents a monumental shift from Eliot’s exclusionary stance, for not only is he making space for his audience in the collaborative equation but he is doing so for an audience


120

that falls outside the boundaries of the literary coterie. And he is proposing this as a model not only for drama but for all art. Nevertheless, the model depends on the artist’s mastery and it is this ‘‘superiority’’ that will finally permit him to embody the entire culture. This was the role played by Eliot’s Dante in the 1920s, who served in The Sacred Wood and in the 1929 book Dante as the mouthpiece for his people and their time because he had mastered ‘‘the perfection of a common language’’ and the resultant effect was ‘‘universality’’ (SE 252, 239). The foil for such achievement was William Blake, who appears in an essay published the same year as The Sacred Wood as the imperfect poet unable to give voice to anyone because of his private, personal, non-traditional vision. The expression of authority or mastery as a way of reestablishing a sense of order, security, tradition, and community within a national, religious society would become one of Eliot’s central preoccupations from the mid-1920s onwards, because he identified it as the only way to stem ‘‘the social changes, the mobility, the insecurity, the mechanization of minds and the atomization of individuals in an industrial age, which have operated unconsciously upon the mass of human beings,’’ according to his 1940 uncollected essay ‘‘The English Tradition.’’10 Eliot’s attraction to Marie Lloyd lay partly in the fact that, in the face of a decaying, disintegrating, mechanized culture (which Eliot represents in the 1923 Lloyd piece through the example of the increasingly influential and popular cinema), she is able to unify a people through the expression of their values and virtues. With Lloyd’s death and the decline of the music hall, Eliot posits a kind of cultural vacuum waiting to be filled, for the lower and middle classes no longer had an artist to express sympathetically those values that highlighted the ‘‘dignity’’ (458) of their lives. In the months following the Lloyd essay Eliot will still make a few passing comments about the importance of establishing a select community among writers, but in Marie Lloyd’s performances he discovered a paradigm that might allow him to extend his collaborative reach beyond fellow writers like Pound, as he prepared to write for the stage himself. ‘‘ T H E

R E A D E R ’ S N E E D S , D E S I R E S , A N D P R E J U D I C E S ’’ :

AUTHORIAL INTENTION AND THE COMMUNAL AUDIENCE

Although the appearance of The Waste Land in the fall of 1922 proved a defining moment in Eliot’s career, in many respects he marked its publication by turning his back on the fundamental ideology of that document and its apparent appeal to a select, highly educated audience.


121

He says as much in a November 1922 letter to Richard Aldington, breezily remarking, ‘‘[a]s for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style’’ (L1 596). Anticipating the reception of that long poem seems to have spurred Eliot to meditate upon the relationship of the artist to his audience, the subject that surfaced so prominently in the Marie Lloyd essay. His growing unease writing for a narrow, insulated modernist coterie – even if that cohesive group had provided a significant amount of security for a relatively unknown writer trying to make his mark in a foreign culture – caused Eliot to begin to lay the groundwork for a significant broadening of his audience. One way Eliot accomplished this was to distance himself from early comments made in the prose that stressed the artist’s solitude and remoteness. Instead, Eliot claimed a social function for poetry that necessitated a more collaborative, inclusive approach to art.11 For example, Eliot spends part of his prefatory remarks to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) disputing W. P. Ker’s conception of modern poetry as a movement that leaves its poets ‘‘to themselves to find their themes and elaborate their modes of expression in solitude, with results that are often found . . . perplexing and offensive’’ (UPUC 21). He responds by offering an alternative version of the contemporary poet, one who is interested in a popular, useful poetry, like the music-hall comedian reaching out to his audience (32). One year later, while considering the implications of charting a new career as a dramatist, Eliot rejected the restrictiveness of the modernist agenda, believing that the ‘‘young dramatist to-day . . . does not want to write a play merely to please a small audience of poetry-lovers many of whom he will know, and the faces of the rest of whom he remembers having seen before and is tired of seeing.’’12 Instead, he sought to replicate Lloyd’s situation, which demanded the participation of a broad and unknown audience to ensure the popular success of the artistic piece. To emphasize his point, Eliot set that idealistic aim of artists collaborating with audiences against the mind-numbing effects of cinema, which Eliot thought rendered the spectator passive because it released him from the responsibility of contributing to the effect of the work. Even at the early time of the Lloyd piece, when he had already been considering writing a verse drama based on the character of Sweeney,13 Eliot began to see drama as a way of potentially offering an ideal collaborative relationship that would not only broaden his base but rescue audiences from the stultifying naturalistic, commercial theatre that reigned on London stages. There was only one problem: he did not know how to write drama.

122


Eliot had, however, spent an inordinate amount of time writing about drama, especially the Elizabethan drama that he inevitably associated with collaboration. Although his first full-length play, Murder in the Cathedral, did not appear until 1935, Eliot had been preparing himself for the theatre for much of the 1920s by investigating the work of early dramatists in a series of pieces eventually collected in two volumes: Selected Essays 1917–1932 in 1932 and then, with ‘‘John Marston,’’ in Elizabethan Essays in 1934. They range from early treatments of Marlowe, Jonson, and Hamlet, written in 1919, to examinations of ‘‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’’ (1924) and ‘‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’’ (1927), to later discussions of individual dramatists like Tourneur, Heywood, and Ford in 1930–2. The essays allowed Eliot to generate theories of drama without having the pressure of testing those hypotheses on stage until he was somewhat more secure about his understanding of the genre. It gave him the luxury of working from the ideas of others rather than manufacturing his own theories in a vacuum, since most of the essays started as book reviews. And this all took place in the prose essay, a form with which Eliot was supremely confident. Eliot’s study of Elizabethan drama also allowed him to search for proper models of collaboration in the theatre and to speculate about how such partnerships might fit into his theories about issues like tradition, impersonality, and authorship. In fact, Eliot rarely failed to mention the collaborative relationships among authors of the period, believing collaboration to be a fundamental feature of Renaissance writing. In ‘‘Cyril Tourneur,’’ he writes that ‘‘the critic is rash who will assert boldly that any [Elizabethan] play is by a single hand’’ (SE 183). Elsewhere, in ‘‘Philip Massinger,’’ he argues one cannot even comprehend this drama without attending to the collaborative elements: ‘‘To understand Elizabethan drama it is necessary to study a dozen playwrights at once, to dissect with all care the complex growth, to ponder collaboration to the utmost line’’ (206). But Middleton is the one playwright he most associated with collaboration. According to Eliot, Middleton ‘‘collaborated shamelessly’’ and was the ‘‘most impersonal . . . the readiest, except Rowley, to accept collaboration.’’ Ultimately, ‘‘Middleton remains merely a collective name for a number of plays’’ (161). Middleton is a key figure for the post-Waste Land Eliot because he serves as an example of an artist who is able to suppress his personality to make room for collaboration, the process Eliot engaged in with Pound. Middleton illustrates that a similar strategy can work in the theatre, at least in Eliot’s theorizing of the practice. An additional benefit of this posture is that critics must address, according to Eliot, the work of Middleton rather than his biography,


123

an outcome he admires and envies. Yet Eliot also realized the trap of dramatic collaboration. Since it depended on the dispersal of identity and authority, collaboration potentially rendered one ‘‘inscrutable, solitary, [and] unadmired,’’ and could result in circumstances in which the author might attract ‘‘in three hundred years, no personal admiration’’ (169, 170). Eliot’s conflicted attitude towards collaboration, which subsumed authorial identity under a larger collective body, would always involve risking his place in literary history and potentially squandering the personal capital and authority he had built up over the years with friends and colleagues, editors and publishers, reviewers and readers. Most comfortable in his authoritative prose voice, Eliot constructed in his criticism a fairly intricate theory of drama well before he had staged his first play. That writing is enormously important not only because it strives to construct an ambitious blueprint that might guide the practicing playwright searching for theatrical success, but because it articulates a vision of dramatic art rooted firmly in collaboration. The prose of the 1920s and beyond that discusses drama also stresses theoretical positions that would help support a collaborative practice. Among those topics are an attack on intentionality, so as to open space for the audience to participate in the shaping of a text; an emphasis on the relativity of meaning, to accomplish a similar end; an explicit call for audiences to collaborate with the dramatist; and ultimately a firm belief in drama as a communal experience. Indeed, this communal aspect of drama, both in its shared production and in its engagement with a live audience, encouraged Eliot to view the genre as separate from other types of literature, believing that ‘‘dramatic verse alone has as its function the making [of ] an immediate, collective impression upon a large number of people gathered together to look at an imaginary episode acted upon a stage’’ (OPP 17). Rooted in a conception of drama based on Greek theatre, which demanded a public participation in a performance because all citizens of a polis possessed a stake in its outcome, Eliot’s theory explicitly tied artistic success to collaborative achievement. Eliot typically historicized his readings of drama by constructing theories of the form grounded in its Greek origins. He once wrote to Hallie Flanagan, who put on the first performance of Sweeney Agonistes on 6 May 1933 at Vassar College in New York, that F. M. Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy (1912), the first comprehensive attempt to uncover the sources of Aristophanic comedy in religious ritual, was essential to understanding his goals in that play.14 Cornford’s volume helped Eliot associate primitive ritual with the expression of the communal in drama. It confirmed Eliot’s innate understanding of the Chorus’s role as a transitional figure linking

124


drama to earlier religious rites. The choral members stand ‘‘in an intermediary position between the actors, still absorbed in the action,’’ Cornford asserts, ‘‘and the spectators, who are only concerned in the drama by way of sympathetic contemplation,’’ that last phrase falling right in line with modernist concerns over ‘‘sympathy’’ and offering a possible source for Eliot’s emphasis on the idea in his discussion of audience in the Marie Lloyd essay.15 By the 1930s, Eliot began to view the communal as a necessary social component, as he called it, seeking to make literature increasingly relevant to the world. Thus the theatre becomes the ‘‘most direct means of social ‘usefulness’ for poetry’’ (UPUC 153). Not only was this ideal necessary for successful art, but the very well-being of our culture depended on its enactment: ‘‘in a healthy society there is a continuous reciprocal influence and interaction of each part upon the others’’ (OPP 22). In effect, Eliot saw collaborative performances as a way of establishing and reinforcing within a culture a set of shared values. The Group Theatre performances of Sweeney Agonistes in 1934–5 took this involvement of the audience to an extreme, placing the drama at the center of the theatre space, with the audience encircling the action. Nothing separated the masked actors from the viewers, a situation replicating the conditions of the music hall that appealed so to Eliot. The set-up forced spectators to become drawn physically into the events of the drama and finally, at the play’s climax, united them with the performers as a blackout blanketed the room. In fact, in his enthusiastic review of the production, Desmond MacCarthy likened the position of spectators amidst the action to that of a chorus, for not only was the audience on the stage but actors sat amongst the viewers.16 Drama gave Eliot an excuse to consider the problems of audience more overtly than in his non-dramatic poetry because its reception took place in public, often before the eyes of the writer. In response, Eliot invited the audience ‘‘into’’ the production of the drama, making the playwright’s problems those of the audience and vice versa. In the prose criticism, the audience becomes thoroughly implicated in the work, even to the point that Eliot elevates the audience to the role of co-creator, much along the lines of collaborators like Pound. He argues in the same year as Murder in the Cathedral that ‘‘we cannot expect to produce a new dramatic literature until we have the audiences and also the producers capable of helping the poets to write for the theatre.’’17 Whereas tradition had earlier served as the enabling force for the creation of new literature, in subsequent years that role is assumed by the audience, which through its mere presence establishes a favorable environment for art. As in other renderings of the creative


125

process, the writer waits anxiously for an agent to activate creation by providing the necessary provocation – the presence of such external collaborative conditions allows production to begin. Because Eliot saw a broad audience as instrumental to the success of his verse drama, he spent an inordinate amount of time exploring how it might be accommodated. While Eliot’s successful ascent of the London literary scene depended, in part, on establishing a level of authority through whatever means possible, at some point he would need to bring the audience along with him. Eliot acknowledged this retrospectively when he allowed that the portfolio of hostile comments at the beginning of his career reflected ‘‘errors of tone’’ (TCC 14). And if he were to have some success in projects like revising the canon, one of his early criticism’s central preoccupations, he would need to cultivate a readership that would purchase those newly christened classics. Even though the notes to The Waste Land have been typically held up as examples of Eliot parading his learning before his reader or constructing rigid boundaries seeking to force ‘‘right’’ readings of the poem, it is possible, for example, to locate early moves toward a more friendly relationship with a broader audience by reading the footnotes in this light, as a canon-shaping exercise that also attempts to collude with the reader by letting him in on the poem’s ‘‘secret.’’ And as I have suggested above, Eliot remained somewhat aloof from modernist exaltations of high culture over low not only for personal reasons and because he enjoyed mass culture forms like the music hall, off-color humor, the newspaper, and detective fiction, but because he possessed larger aspirations for his work that would necessitate bridging some of these cultural divisions. One strategy of attending to his audience was to invoke Greek culture as an example. Eliot believed Greek civilization an instructive ideal because it established a framework that encouraged every citizen to explore art and religion according to his or her own aptitude and for the good of society, advantages he saw at different times in Christianity and Communism.18 Drama provided special benefits as a genre because, as ‘‘a mixed or composite art,’’ it consisted of so many elements – language, elocution, movement, gesture, expression, setting, lighting – that provided a much broader range of potential links to different spectators than non-dramatic poetry.19 The Greeks also embodied a condition that Eliot hoped to replicate in the modern period: a cultural unity based on shared values that could be reinforced and exalted through art. As if still anxious about the ability of the theatre to appeal, Eliot supplemented these advantages by devising a theory of doubleness in

126


drama, in which the action could be understood on multiple levels, allowing spectators of different backgrounds to enjoy the same play. He extolled this model in numerous essays, first legitimizing it in 1930 by locating its presence in the work of Shakespeare, where a ‘‘doubleness’’ creates a situation in which the playwright is ‘‘talking to you on two planes at once.’’20 He then advanced the concept most fully towards the conclusion of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. There, ‘‘the theory of levels’’ becomes an idealized version of the central theme of those Norton lectures at Harvard, lectures extolling the belief that poetry has a genuine, useful place in society because under the proper conditions it can give some pleasure to just about all people. In the discussion, Eliot starts by identifying the quality in Shakespeare: ‘‘In a play of Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually.’’ He then confesses to having tried to adopt a similar strategy in one of his own dramatic experiments, where his ‘‘intention was to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience . . . There was to be an understanding between this protagonist and a small number of the audience, while the rest of the audience would share the responses of the other characters in the play’’ (UPUC 153). The verse play to which Eliot refers is Sweeney Agonistes, parts of which we know he had composed as early as September 1923, since Wyndham Lewis refers to the work in a letter to Eliot of that time.21 This is the same year that Eliot is theorizing, in outlets like the Marie Lloyd essay, how to establish a sympathy between performer and audience under a shared sensibility and starting to experiment with forms like poetic drama, which might achieve similar aims in practice. Shakespeare operates as the quintessential exemplar because he unified his audience by offering access to his material on so many different planes and because in Shakespeare Eliot always saw a writer who could maintain artistic integrity while appealing to a popular audience. Part of the success resulted from Shakespeare’s location in a time before the ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ set in – a time when thought and emotion were integrated – but a large portion of his success was due to his mastery of form. Eliot’s mention of his own attempts at enacting this theory suggests he saw verse drama and collaboration with his audience as tools to restore the unification that had been disrupted since the seventeenth century.


127

Another key feature of this argument is the fact that verse becomes the most effective medium for these multiple levels because it intensifies the emotional content of the play and allows the actors to achieve a connection with the audience that prose cannot, thus reversing the standard argument that prose drama was more accessible and providing a rationale for Eliot’s adoption of the form. Ultimately, Eliot views verse drama as more compelling and realistic than naturalistic drama because, instead of employing poetry to obscure meaning, in a kind of Shelleyean pulling away of the veil it ‘‘remove[s] the surface of things, expose[s] the underneath, or the inside, of the natural surface appearance.’’22 Here Eliot is operating under the influence of Hulme’s theory of art (itself derived from Bergson), which posits that given the limitations of perception, art must function to ‘‘break through the veil which action interposes . . . [allowing us to] come into direct contact with sense and consciousness.’’ Eliot is also following Hulme’s argument in ‘‘Romanticism and Classicism’’ that only verse can properly and precisely convey visual meanings because it provides a framework to contain the indeterminacy of language; prose, on the other hand, ‘‘is an old pot that lets them [visual meanings] leak out.’’ Yet Hulme also sees opportunity and freedom in verse for the audience in a way that would have appealed to Eliot: ‘‘Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose – a train which delivers you at a destination.’’23 These ideas would become a commonplace of Eliot’s discussions of poetic drama and especially of Shakespeare. In a 1937 unpublished lecture, ‘‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist,’’ he cites the ability of verse drama to expose for audiences another level of reality, using the metaphor of the palimpsest to explain how such a revelation surfaces amidst other levels.24 Eliot’s attitude towards audience started to modify most visibly in the early 1930s because he was finally ready to embark seriously on a career writing drama. In a July 1932 ‘‘Commentary,’’ for example, the typical stratification appears between the cultured reader and the rabble. He observes that ‘‘the pernicious habit of novel-reading’’ is acceptable as long as ‘‘a small public survives to appreciate the best . . . the taste of the mob can never be much elevated, because of its invincible mental laziness.’’ Yet Eliot tempers this final comment by recognizing a danger in such an attitude, for an ‘‘e´lite which is only recognized by itself is in a bad way.’’25 During the decade that followed The Waste Land, Eliot demonstrates a new readiness for embracing possibilities of reaching out to (and ultimately collaborating with) his audience, aware that the complicity of that group contributes to the modification of taste he had always sought. Around this time, Pound starts to separate himself from Eliot’s evolving attitudes towards audience

128


by suggesting that Eliot writes down to his reader rather than approaching them as he does: ‘‘I quite often write as if I expected my reader to use his intelligence,’’ he argues, whereas Eliot ‘‘always writes as if for very very feeble and brittle mentalities.’’ In Pound’s usual idiosyncratic thinking, this tendency in Eliot reveals his ‘‘contempt for his readers [which] has always been much greater than mine.’’26 Of course, we might reverse Pound’s conclusion by viewing this as reflecting Eliot’s increasing concern for such individuals. A decade later, Eliot has fully accepted a collaborative approach to audience. In a 1940 broadcast interview with Desmond Hawkins, for example, Eliot’s attitude about the relationship between artist and reader has become quite expansive, when he explains: ‘‘So what should happen in a healthy language is a continuous collaboration between the few who can write it and everybody who speaks it – a collaboration none the less genuine for most people being unaware of what is going on.’’27 No longer in a hostile relationship, writer and reader work together for the benefit of the larger culture, even if the audience’s role seems largely unconscious and the thinly veiled endorsement of class stratification remains embedded in the construct. While he does acknowledge differences between groups of people, literature becomes an instrument for bridging those gaps. Not only that, but the earlier modernist conception of the artist has broadened. Eliot concludes this conversational model by expanding the definition of artist to include historian, judge, philosopher, scientist, and explorer, all working together to save language, ‘‘preserving, refreshing and developing the language.’’28 The poet is no longer a solitary, tortured soul struggling to make sense of a miserable modern world, but a pragmatic activist collaborating with other men of significance in a larger recuperative project with social and cultural implications. Eliot accompanied the Hawkins interview with a reading of various texts, including the ‘‘One summer evening’’ section of book 1 of The Prelude, a rather remarkable choice given Eliot’s early struggle with Romanticism in general and Wordsworth in particular. The well-known dismissals – in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ and in the ‘‘Preface’’ to the revised edition of The Sacred Wood – of Wordsworth’s formula ‘‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’’ or the mocking attitude in comments like ‘‘he went droning on the still sad music of infirmity to the verge of the grave’’ (UPUC 69), reveal Wordsworth as a convenient foil for Eliot up through the early 1930s as he sought to construct a poetic aesthetic through the negation of nineteenth-century principles. But in the 1940s, Eliot tempers such criticism and even shifts his understanding of the artist’s place in society toward a more Romantic-based model that posits a


129

common language. On the eve of this shift, in one of his unpublished 1939 lectures for the canceled British Council Tour of Italy, Eliot offers a discussion of the modern poet’s artistic development in which the major change involves his move from obscurity to lucidity. One of the tests of a mature poet’s success is his ability to write with ‘‘greater simplicity and directness.’’29 This results in Eliot arguing in 1942 that ‘‘poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear’’ and the ‘‘music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time . . . latent in the common speech of the poet’s place’’ (OPP 29, 31). By 1945, in ‘‘The Social Function of Poetry,’’ the tone is even more assured as Eliot argues that ‘‘[e]motion and feeling, then are best expressed in the common language of the people – that is, in the language common to all classes . . . [it] express[es] the personality of the people which speaks it’’ and that in expressing the feeling of his people, the poet is ‘‘also changing the feeling by making it more conscious . . . making people more aware of what they feel already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves’’ (19, 20). In fact, the ability of a poet to express emotions that can be ‘‘shared’’ or ‘‘appropriated’’ by others is what finally measures him as a ‘‘genuine poet.’’ Authenticity (and potentially greatness) had earlier been tied to the limiting of one’s readership; here, though, the equation is turned on its head and the poet’s goal, following seeds planted earlier in the Lloyd essay, becomes the establishing of a sympathetic relationship with his audience that will in turn help advance a common national consciousness. Much of this, in fact, seems lifted right out of Wordsworth’s ‘‘Preface,’’ a document Eliot seems to have had close at hand through the 1940s, for it turns up repeatedly in essays from this period.30 That document suddenly took on a new light for Eliot in mid-career as he sought increasingly for ways to achieve a common culture in which cooperation forestalled a kind of ‘‘social disintegration’’ that resulted ‘‘from the lack of continuous communication, of the artist with his friends and fellow artists and the small number of keen amateurs of the arts, with a larger public educated in the same way’’ (TCC 153). This proclamation turns the modernist restrictiveness completely around, and offers an invitation to previously excluded groups like the literary amateur and the broader public. Eliot saw this new inclusiveness as the only way to stem the tide of cultural decay around him. Shaken by the collapse of Europe during the Second World War, Eliot co-opted one Romantic stance as a potential solution around this time, mainly to cite the efficacy of poetry and the arts to hold together a crumbling society split apart by hostile intentions from within and

130


without. Underpinned by an unusually optimistic belief in the power of poetry and poets to influence sociopolitical affairs, this position became a commonplace of Eliot’s post-war writing.31 Eliot turned to religion as another answer. ‘‘The religious sense,’’ he writes, ‘‘and the sense of community, cannot be finally divorced from each other’’ (TCC 113). He also became increasingly interested in writing about education in the 1940s and 1950s. He saw poetry, religion, and education as the surest ways for citizens to achieve a common background that would help facilitate his social and literary programs that had at their core a collaborative outlook. In fact, by 1955 he is even willing to dismiss characterizations of the modernist program as obscure (whereas they had earlier served as badges of honor), rewriting literary history by suggesting modernists like David Jones and himself ‘‘have all been desperately anxious to communicate, and maddened by the difficulty of finding a common language.’’32 Eliot proposes that modernist obscurity was not a conscious stance but an inevitable outcome given the cultural disintegration of twentieth-century Europe. Because writers and readers have no common frame of reference from which to draw, the establishment of communal ties between the two becomes even more paramount. These invitations to his audience from the 1930s onwards complicated Eliot’s conception of the reading process: how meaning was both conveyed and received. Just as Eliot understood writing in collaborative terms, so too did he increasingly tend around this time to conceive of the reading experience as a collaboration, even going as far as questioning a concept like authorial intention. This perhaps surprises, for given the monumental reputation enjoyed by Eliot during his lifetime, the poet rarely surfaces as a sympathetic voice in attacks on intention.33 As a young writer Eliot felt it necessary to cultivate authority to counter his expatriate, uncredentialed status while also being caught up in a modernist marketing machine that peddled its wares by celebrating the authority of its authors. By also writing prose essays that sought to delineate the proper way in which such texts were to be approached, Eliot located himself as the source of meaning in those texts. Yet he also had started experimenting with strategies in The Waste Land that called into question authorial intention; those tactics included his collaborative editorial alliance with Pound (and others) and the construction of the poem around multiple voices and a ‘‘tissue of quotations.’’ Emboldened early in his career by a deep-seated anti-Romanticism hostile to notions of originality and genius, Eliot adopted numerous strategies that helped enact a ‘‘removal’’ of the author.34 Eliot’s minimizing of intention also followed naturally from his numerous models of the creative process in


131

which the author waits passively to be animated from an external agent. There is substance latent within the author’s imagination, but he has no control over it. The material must be drawn out by another. Eliot’s denunciations of authorial intention began to appear with regularity in the early 1930s, when he expressed discomfort over any system that might limit interpretation along lines prescribed by the author. A typical articulation of this view appears in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, when Eliot directly confronts the question of how meaning is conveyed during the reading process. ‘‘But what a poem means,’’ he observes, ‘‘is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning – or without forgetting, merely changing. So that, when Mr. Richards asserts The Waste Land effects ‘a complete severance between poetry and all beliefs’ I am no better qualified to say No! than is any other reader’’ (UPUC 130). Tellingly, the anxieties that earlier had surrounded the question of ‘‘qualifications’’ for Eliot no longer seem to bother him; now that authority is assured, he is free to cast it away or diminish its importance. Here Eliot envisions that the eradication of the author necessarily erases his authority to interpret and thus allows readers, empowered by the absence of this author-function, to generate legitimate readings on their own. Under such circumstances, when questions of authority are no longer relevant, conditions emerge making possible the disappearing of the author-function.35 As Eliot sought in mid-career a literature that possessed a social usefulness, so then do the comments attacking intention start to emerge most forcefully in the 1930s and onwards. He understood that one could accomplish a broadening of one’s audience through a diminishment of the author’s power. Those critiques take various forms, including vigorous defenses of the reader’s place in the process of generating meaning, when he surmises in ‘‘The Music of Poetry’’ (1942) that a ‘‘poem may appear to mean very different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant . . . The reader’s interpretation may differ from the author’s and be equally valid – it may even be better. There may be much more in a poem than the author was aware of ’’ (OPP 30–1). Fourteen years later, the tentativeness of the above statement has disappeared. He asserts that ‘‘the meaning is what the poem means to different sensitive readers’’ and attacks the mistaken belief that ‘‘we understand a poem when we have identified its origins and traced the process to which the poet submitted his materials’’ (113, 114). In fact, toward the end of his career, he was most blunt, claiming ‘‘I couldn’t apply

132


the word ‘intention’ positively to any of my poems. Or to any poem.’’36 Readers frustrated by the absence of any kind of textual apparatus, including explanatory notes, in Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1962 and The Complete Poems and Plays, might at least consider that Eliot was resisting any interpretive device that would intrude upon the reader’s experience of the poem. In one late letter to the Master of Magdalene College, Eliot made that very point in explaining why he forbade illustrations of his poems, annotations of individual lines, or the setting of his work to music: each imposed a reading upon the poem before it arrived in the hands of a reader (IMH xix). While many of the poems of the first half of Eliot’s career depend on epigraphs ostensibly to nudge readings in particular directions, the final three Quartets abandon that device to give the reader, I would argue, more room to operate. This is an approach borne out of practical considerations, for Eliot recognized around this time that an increasingly heterogeneous audience would make the allusions in his work even less apprehensible and therefore increase the multiplying of potential readings. One reason no notes exist for Four Quartets is that Eliot’s authority was assured enough to allow readers to do with the poem what they would. Other sources exist for Eliot’s willingness to embrace a sensibility that eradicated the author’s role in shaping meaning. For example, one of Eliot’s long-standing definitions of poetry included the feature that it must give pleasure: ‘‘poetry must first of all be enjoyed, if it is to be of any use at all,’’ he argued, and ‘‘it must be enjoyed as poetry, and not for any other reason.’’ Eliot tended to express viewpoints that would accommodate as many different interpretations of a text as possible, as long as readers delighted in those positions.37 This belief was no doubt accelerated by Eliot’s mid-career move to the stage, which heightened his desire to please audiences in his work. In fact, in one interview in the Glasgow Herald marking the 1949 production of The Cocktail Party, Eliot locates obscurity in poetry as a positive characteristic specifically because it will open up the number of potential readings a poem can accommodate and forbid critics from essentially taking ownership of a poem through their restrictive, ‘‘right’’ readings. ‘‘If you can completely explain a poem,’’ he suggests, ‘‘with an exact correspondence between the deliberate intention of the author and the reception of the idea by the reader, then it just is not poetry.’’38 In fact, Eliot always enjoyed learning that readers uncovered a range of different messages in his work. Thus his version of a reader-response outlook often leans towards erring on the side of the reader, making sure to give him or her as much flexibility as possible during the reading process.39 Eliot was completely comfortable tying a poem’s meaning to the ‘‘results’’ of an audience’s


133

encounter with it, even going so far as accepting that readers’ backgrounds alter their receptions of texts. For example, a writer like Pascal, he once observed, will be examined in new ways by each generation of readers, for ‘‘[i]t is not he who changes, but we who change . . . our world that alters and our attitudes towards it’’ (SE 402). As often occurred with some of his favorite theories, Eliot eventually embedded the importance of a reader’s response into his larger critical program by making it a sometime test of a work’s greatness, as he did with his beliefs on impersonality, cultivation of the past, and development over the course of a career, which all served at various times as ways to measure significant artistic achievement. Thus The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets classified by Eliot late in his career as one of those ‘‘great works of imagination’’ because it ‘‘can give to every reader whatever he is capable of taking from it.’’40 Ancillary causes of Eliot’s empowerment of the reader include a wellknown, personal bias against biographical criticism, itself a result of his own reserve, his theory of impersonality, and the success of New Critics in adapting and advancing these ideas in the academy. Thus the identity of the writer becomes an inconsequential detail on the way to achieving understanding. ‘‘We can only say that a poem, in some sense, has its own life,’’ claims Eliot, ‘‘that its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet’’ (SW x). Early comments like these usually stress the poet’s lack of control over his creative output, which simply reinforced later moves to a more reader-centered model of interpretation. Since he always stressed both the author’s inability to achieve an active role in generating material and his incapability of ultimately understanding the meaning of that material, there is no way for Eliot to reinsert himself after the fact as an interpretive authority, when all the accounts of poetic invention emphasize anxiety, terror, or frustration. For this reason, Eliot saw very little usefulness in seeking to ‘‘discover’’ the identity of the author, in the belief that that would explain the meaning. Ultimately, Eliot invites the reader into the creative process in a collaborative relationship in which the text functions as a stimulus, in the same way that other texts and influences prompted the author to generate his material. The result is a direct assault on intention: the author is merely turning over his text into the possession of unknown others, who will themselves respond in ways the author cannot predict or even comprehend, so to ask what the author ‘‘meant . . . is itself a meaningless question,’’ argues Eliot. In the end, plays should ‘‘suggest ideas to those who hear and read them; and they could not

134


have this provocative power if the author had been concerned to impose an opinion, convey a doctrine, or influence conduct . . . the great play will affect different people differently; it will be capable of innumerable interpretations; and it will have a fresh meaning for every generation.’’41 Meaning is continually in flux and relative to the different experiences of readers immersed in those texts. Eliot recognized that language was provisional and that it acquired new significances when placed in new contexts, whether those contexts resulted from the passing of time, from changes in locale, or from the varied experiences of audiences. In a 1926 ‘‘Commentary’’ for The Criterion, Eliot offers that ‘‘the meaning of a work of art is always relative to the world in which the reader lives, and to the reader’s needs, desires and prejudices, to his knowledge and his ignorance.’’42 The key here is that some agent other than the writer provides associations to a word that ultimately give it a meaning, however transitory, through that engagement. Thus linguistic indeterminacy encourages collaboration because it refuses to close the boundaries of the text to those other than the author. This theory fits perfectly with Eliot’s desire to find a way to endow his audience with the authority to interpret a work as it saw fit. And it worked especially well within Eliot’s model of collaborative drama, a point he made in a letter to his producer Martin Browne, when he expressed a preference for leaving open some questions for his audiences to figure out for themselves (MP 58). When Aiken complains, in his review of The Sacred Wood, that Eliot’s ‘‘sense of the definite is intermittent; it abandons him often at the most critical moment, and in consequence Mr. Eliot himself is forever abandoning us on the very doorstep of the illuminating,’’ he makes a presumption that Eliot’s refusal to embrace absolutist assertions is unintentional.43 In fact, within the model I have drawn, Eliot stops short of ‘‘illumination’’ for the express purpose of allowing the reader space in which to draw his own conclusions, since the particular circumstances of that reader will ultimately determine his reading. If, as Eliot says, ‘‘it is well to recognize the incompleteness of any definition that we give’’ (TCC 74), then the most sensible response would be to resist giving those definitions. ‘‘ S T R A N G E

A N D S O M E T I M E S B E A U T I F U L O F F S P R I N G ’’ : T H E PROBLEMS OF THE DRAMATIC FORM

While Eliot typically used his prose to idealize dramatic collaboration and chart out theories that he hoped to put into practice, he also employed his criticism to explore various problems associated with the process. Indeed,


135

Eliot did not simply embrace collaboration as an immediate cure-all; instead, he wrestled with the implications of the approach by considering the effects in his prose. He did this in the 1920s, before he had tried writing drama, in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was most active as a dramatist, and even in the 1950s, when he was able to look back at a body of dramatic work and consider some of the effects of his plays. But the transition from poet to verse dramatist was not necessarily a smooth one, and speculating about the new form in his prose provided Eliot with a measure of confidence he otherwise would not have had if he had started writing for the theatre without having first worked out a broad theoretical model in his own prose. For a poet who relished order, control, and structure, the task of facing a live audience was daunting. This explains in part Eliot’s particularly deep admiration for Marie Lloyd’s ability to control an audience while still maintaining its sympathy. Further exacerbating these anxieties was the required collaboration with other individuals involved in putting on a play, before it even appeared in front of an audience. Although his work with Pound allowed Eliot to focus his efforts toward one auditor in a relationship over which he maintained some control, a theatrical performance was a chaotic work-in-progress that depended on the contributions of dozens of participants. The prospect proved both frightening and exciting to Eliot, who again used Elizabethan drama to work out his emerging feelings in 1925 about drama, and argued that the furious influx of literary, philosophical, historical, and religious influences during that period created circumstances under which ‘‘anything might join with almost anything else to produce strange and sometimes beautiful offspring.’’ The figure of Chapman occasions these remarks, and Eliot chooses to characterize him as a dramatist under the influence of collaborative forces. Consequently, Eliot floods his essay on that writer with metaphors that call on that image, in constructing a portrait of a playwright who is ‘‘mixed’’ and ‘‘crossed,’’ and whose work possesses a ‘‘double significance’’ and a ‘‘strange fusion.’’44 Not yet having practiced collaboration in the theatre, Eliot seems both drawn to the practice but still unsure about the potential difficulties of the actual procedure. The repetition of the word ‘‘strange’’ in association with collaboration lends the whole process an aura of mystery. It is at once attractive and potentially dangerous. The consequences of this danger manifest themselves in another essay, where collaboration among Elizabethan dramatists proves too overwhelming and gives Eliot pause. In their work together, including plagiarizing each other’s texts, a charge leveled periodically at Eliot during his career, these dramatists ‘‘adapted, collaborated, and overlaid each other to the limits of confusion.’’45 While collaboration can operate

136


positively, the potential for chaos always exists. Ultimately, the tide of that anarchy can only be stemmed by a stabilizing agent, which is why much of Eliot’s prose on drama spends so much time and energy seeking to locate such entities. One of the most troubling features of writing for the theatre was the presence of the actor, the figure who took Eliot’s lines and, in effect, made them his or her own. While Eliot could release his earlier poetic efforts into the world knowing they would be interpreted in myriad ways, the actor’s actualization of his work before his own eyes and those of a live audience proved troubling enough for Eliot to use his prose criticism once again to flesh out the nature of collaboration in this new genre. In a number of essays Eliot grapples with the question of what happens to dramatic verse when it is delivered by others. He obsessively focused upon the fact that the writer can’t know the identity of the actor for whom he is writing, yet he also believed the sacrifice of control over signification a necessary price to pay for moving beyond his earlier work. Nevertheless, the idea that he had to turn over that poetry to actors who would provide their own shading of character, potentially altering the writer’s perception of the material through a delivery style influenced by variables like tone, volume, elocution, or even gesture, bothered Eliot. In some respects, Eliot viewed the actor’s manipulation of his writing as an intrusion, and wondered why actors could not simply voice their lines untainted and unaltered. In one review of a Phoenix Society revival of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Eliot complained repeatedly about this quality of modern actors. He believed such performers were most inept when asked to deliver the finest poetry. This was an especially problematic outcome for a critic whose aspirations included restoring poetic drama to its former glory on the English stage. Frustrated over Catherine Nesbitt’s portrayal of the Duchess, Eliot writes: ‘‘We required only that she should transmit the lines, but to transmit lines is beyond the self-control of a modern actor, and so she did what the modern actor does: she ‘interpreted’ them. She had to throw in a little titter, a feminine gesture or two, a hint of archness, and she became, not the Duchess, but somelike [sic] the respondent in a drama of divorce. The scene was demolished; the dominant atmosphere in which the author wraps it was dissipated.’’ In fact only later, when the actors are ‘‘held in check by violent situations’’ does the overall effect improve. Yet the subject bothers Eliot to such a degree that he can’t help but return to it in the final page of his review, and implores his reader to remember that ‘‘poetry is something which the actor cannot improve or ‘interpret’; there is no such thing as the interpretation of poetry; poetry can only be transmitted; in


137

consequence, the ideal actor for a poetic drama is the actor with no personal vanity.’’46 What most bothered Eliot was the intrusion of the personal into the pure transmission of the poetry. He repeats the word ‘‘transmit’’ three times in the hopes that the heavy-handedness might make up for the actor’s deficiency. The form of drama is inherently unstable according to this rendering because it serves as a landscape for a kind of unspoken struggle for dominance between author and actor, who are both collaborating to achieve a desired effect and yet wrestle to control the flow of that effect. In ‘‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’’ (1920), written the same year as the review of Webster, Eliot articulated similar concerns about the freedom of the performer. Eliot worried that it sometimes appeared that the actor’s single goal was to express his or her personality as aggressively as possible. He locates a like fault in modern music, believing this ‘‘triumph of the performer’’ could only lead to a structureless, mediocre art (SW 69). The accentuation of personality not only violated the impersonal theory of poetry he had been constructing around the same time in criticism discussing non-dramatic poetry, but it threatened the unity of the theatrical piece by allowing actors to wander off on different tangents, directed solely by their own personal whims. The resultant ‘‘chaos of the modern stage . . . this histrionic anarchy’’ could only be reined in by training actors grown soft from the freedom allowed by the naturalistic drama.47 Eliot believed that the solution rested in countering that mode that predominated in the contemporary theatre with ritualistic verse drama. Such a form would provide the actor with a strict framework by reining in the delivery of the author’s words and also facilitate a connection with an audience whose members might be threatened under conditions in which the exercising of the personal played too large a role in shaping meaning. Much of Eliot’s discussion of the ballet around the early 1920s as a model for drama results from the appeal of its formalistic nature and Eliot’s belief that it might offer him an answer to the problem of the actor. The intense training of dancers as well as the rigidly defined parameters of balletic performance provided Eliot with an apt artistic parallel that allowed for collaboration but did so within a structure that assumed some control over the performer by regulating any tendencies toward improvisation. Again, this is the ideal put forward in the Lloyd essay, which theorized a model of collaboration that maintained the authority of the artist. A dancer like Leónide Massine represented for Eliot ‘‘the greatest actor whom we have in London’’ specifically because he is ‘‘the most completely unhuman, impersonal, [and] abstract.’’ Instead of ‘‘express[ing] emotion,’’ the major flaw of the modern actor, Massine employs an ‘‘abstract gesture . . . which

138


symbolises emotion.’’48 Later, in ‘‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’’ (1924), Eliot calls for a strict ritualized drama, based on the example of the Russian Ballet, because the form determines for the actor what limited movements he is allowed. He ‘‘is not called upon for his personality.’’ Instead, the personality emerges through the performance, that personality being a ‘‘vital flame which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance.’’ Realistic drama, on the other hand, ‘‘is drama striving steadily to escape the conditions of art, [for] the human being intrudes.’’ Ultimately, only the great dancers exhibit this impersonality (SE 113). Readers of T. E. Hulme will recognize that much of this vocabulary seems indebted to the critical program established in the posthumously published Speculations (1924), which Eliot discussed at length in a ‘‘Commentary’’ for The Criterion two months after the appearance in the same journal of ‘‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists.’’49 In the Speculations essays and elsewhere, Hulme’s construction of a classical revival depends on his rendering of a fallen man, an imperfect creature forced to acknowledge the limits imposed upon him by Original Sin. Within this model, then, man must abandon the freedoms of the Romantic mindset and embrace discipline. He concludes: ‘‘Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating. Institutions are necessary.’’50 Although Hulme’s thought has been cited as a source for Eliot’s anti-Romanticism, it also resonated with the poet because it lined up with his understanding of the individual artist’s need to submit to authority as a way of achieving creative productivity, the very procedure that collaboration enacted. Hulme’s passage on order rang so true with Eliot that he chose it as the conclusion to his 1930 essay on Baudelaire. In fact, Eliot’s concerns about an unchecked artistic personality became most inflamed in the early 1930s, as he prepared himself in earnest to begin a career writing drama. Dramatic collaboration demanded the suppression of the personal to make space for other collaborators but also to reinforce the dramatist’s supremacy in the relationship. In addition, since drama resulted from the collaboration of many, its overall framework was somewhat tenuous and could collapse at any moment. This spurred Eliot’s attempts to control the actors in his plays and condemn any flare-up of the personal that might undermine the integrity of the dramatic structure. It is during this period, then, that Eliot reacted most violently to those writers he believed were unable to suppress their personalities during the course of their work. Such eruptions resulted in an excessiveness of individualism that threatened control and order. In After Strange Gods (1934), for example, where he comes as close as he ever would to offering a


139

coherent, if negative, theory of the novel, Eliot complains that contemporary novelists ‘‘impose upon their readers their own personal view of life . . . part of the whole movement of several centuries towards the aggrandisement and exploitation of personality’’ (ASG 53). He concludes that this disastrous condition is an outgrowth of society’s inability to provide the moral structure necessary to curbing the personal: ‘‘when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy – that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church – and when each man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance’’ (54). Placing aside the Christian conservatism here, the statement’s thrust accords with his aesthetic model of impersonality. Only in this case, Eliot seems to feel compelled to restate those standards in language informed by his postconversion outlook, marking the overemphasis on the personal through the devices of repetition and italicized emphasis. Eliot follows this discussion with examples of writers who fail the test of impersonality. Hardy’s work, for one, serves as ‘‘an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs; unhampered by any ideas, or even by what sometimes acts as a partial restraint upon inferior writers, the desire to please a large public. He seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of ‘self-expression’ as a man well can’’ (ASG 54). Later, he denounces one of his favorite targets, D. H. Lawrence, who ‘‘started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution, that he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity,’’ and contrasts him with Joyce, who was ‘‘trained’’ and always in control (59). Elsewhere, in a 1939 unpublished lecture for a canceled British Council Tour of Italy, Eliot struggles to classify poets like Milton, Blake, and Hopkins because of their ‘‘eccentric’’ quality of having ‘‘a strongly developed personal idiom.’’51 He even categorized periods according to their degree of interest in personality, with the Romantic age usually presented as the era most enthralled by its power, for people with such a mindset ‘‘find in ‘personality’ an ultimate value’’ (SE 352). The common thread running through such thoughts is the need to temper the personal in favor of some larger controlling order. Since Eliot feared the presence of the personal to such a degree, his prose discussions of drama often become quests for devices and agents that will provide stability in the absence of a single, strong controlling consciousness. Verse, for example, acted as a constrictive, disciplining force, not only providing access to a broad audience (at least according to Eliot’s theory of

140


levels), but helping generate a certain ‘‘inflexibility’’ that contributes to the necessary ‘‘emotional unity’’ (SE 214). Therefore, the comments on poetic drama often sought analogous models representing creative success through constraint. Thus Eliot returns to the ballet as a model of discipline in ‘‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’’ (1928), where ‘‘E’’ discusses attending the Russian ballet and proposes its form as an ideal for drama, since the ballet enacts ‘‘a tradition, a training, an askesis’’ (47). Ultimately, the dancer’s success rests in his suppression of the personal to serve the larger demands of the performance.52 This becomes a fundamental notion in Eliot’s drawing of the collaborative, because it demanded an individual submit himself to the control provided by others or by external frameworks. This stabilizing feature is embodied in the concept of ‘‘askesis’’ (one of Eliot’s favorite words), which he often associated with dance or offered as a solution to the problems of a liberal society. When one finds himself in such a place and time – ‘‘a period of drift, license, and irresponsible emotionality’’ – a ‘‘man requires an askesis, a formula to be imposed upon him from above.’’53 Models like this, which require submission within a collaborative framework as a solution to cultural problems, forced Eliot to cast suspicions on the work of Blake or Lawrence, whom he viewed as either out of touch with their periods or unable to acquiesce to the rigors of a larger system, whether it be religious, artistic, or societal. Eliot also sometimes evinced a highly ambivalent attitude toward other contributors to a dramatic performance; while he recognized the enormous benefits of the communal framework in which authorial authority is subsumed to the larger goals of the group, Eliot inevitably strived to assert some control within this construct. In fact, he defined the ‘‘world of a great poetic dramatist’’ in ‘‘The Three Voices of Poetry’’ as a place ‘‘in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden’’ (OPP 102). The question of who would possess ultimate control over a theatrical production became a particularly charged question in the early twentieth century. With the revival of Elizabethan drama through outlets like the Phoenix Society and the success of Gilbert Murry’s translations of Greek drama (which Eliot attacked), the authoritative position usually occupied by the living writer had suddenly become open. One result was the elevation of the director into that available space. Men like Gordon Craig and William Poel asserted the primacy of the director as an unchallenged administrator of the (deceased) author’s vision. Craig even elevated the performer’s importance over that of the playwright. This outlook was periodically shared by Rupert Doone, the central figure in London’s Group Theatre of the 1930s and producer of Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Doone once remarked that ‘‘the


141

actor does not interpret the poet’s words, he recreates them.’’54 Within the model of the Group Theatre, the actor was given a certain amount of freedom to explore his or her powers of improvisation, but only to serve the larger purposes of the company. The approach embodied by Doone’s comment, made in 1935 within this context, caused Eliot to construct theories of collaboration that would rein in such liberties. In fact, in 1955, Eliot wrestled with this very question in his essay on ‘‘Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,’’ and wondered at the start of the piece what contributes most to the audience’s enjoyment in a ‘‘composite’’ art like drama. He struggles to interpret Craig’s comments about the relationship of the director to the actor, and questioned if that theory results in a director as dictator or director as passive attendant offering minimal interference. Surprisingly, Eliot adopts a laissez faire attitude about the question. He claims it is not his business and poses similar questions about all the elements of drama. Finally, he asks ‘‘[w]ho is the most important person in the theatre’’ and then immediately qualifies the question by suggesting it can never be answered, even though he had implied earlier that all the components should serve the ‘‘message conveyed by the words.’’55 Yet just when we think Eliot is working his way toward a theory asserting the primacy of the playwright, he backtracks ferociously. He addresses Craig’s belief that a writer’s stage directions should be ignored (because they interfere with the director’s vision) by seemingly agreeing to relinquish control of his text: ‘‘I have always felt that stage directions were an interference by the author in the domain of the producer.’’56 It is a curious performance by Eliot, who had by the time of the Craig essay witnessed all but one of his dramatic works produced and presumably could be expected to be slightly less ambivalent about his relationship with his director, especially when the early prose establishes a theory of drama in such forceful, unambiguous terms. I suspect Eliot was reluctant to commit wholly to the supremacy of the writer because he understood by this time just how beholden he was to a collaborative model, which allowed him to assert himself in a theatrical performance while still maintaining that comfort of remaining oblique. What remains to be seen is just how Eliot practiced such a collaboration.

CHAPTER

4

A dramatist and his midwives: Eliot’s collaborations in the theatre

Eliot’s involvement with the Group Theatre, which he joined officially in 1934, two years after its founding, gave him an association with an artistic community that not only sanctioned collaborative achievement but held it up as an ideal, both in the name of the acting company and in its artistic manifestos. A draft of one of those manifestos proposes that creative success would occur ‘‘by continually playing together . . . work[ing] like a welltrained orchestra.’’1 As in Eliot’s many attempts to look to other disciplines for models of artistic success, this approach demanded that the individual suppress his personal needs for the greater good of the whole. The Group’s interest in countering what its members believed was a degenerate, commercial theatre through the ideal of an amateur dramatic community that would synthesize the many different elements of theatre – from movement to speech to design – also accorded with Eliot’s formal introduction to the theatre through the same route. Productions of The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, for example, depended in large part on amateur performers of varying talents and backgrounds gathered together in the spirit of fellowship and cooperation to bring off the dramas successfully. This approach represented another significant departure from Eliot’s early modernist stance in the criticism, which sought to inflate the status of the literary enterprise by lauding the benefits of its professionalization, despite concurrent calls for a restoration of England’s great nineteenth-century amateur tradition. At this later date, Eliot invokes that very tradition to legitimize a program of restoring verse drama to its proper place in British culture. Eliot’s association with the Group also put him in touch with other poet-playwrights like Auden, whose The Dance of Death Eliot’s firm published in 1933 and which influenced The Rock.2 The Group Theatre’s performances of Sweeney Agonistes in 1934–5, one of which was attended by Brecht and Yeats, achieved a certain notoriety due to Brecht’s enthusiastic response and because of Desmond MacCarthy’s positive review. Once again, collaboration had opened doors to Eliot’s artistic 142

A dramatist and his midwives

143

success. Yet as in the earlier instances, while Eliot was attracted to the ideal of collaboration, he also strained to reconcile these lofty collective aims with his fierce attraction to authority, control, and aloofness. Indeed, these dual impulses generated a complicated problem for Eliot: he had employed his prose criticism on drama to take rather ambitious, almost utopian stances that advocated a kind of egalitarian ideal in the theatre, yet at the same time he was adopting – like a number of his fellow modernists – radically conservative positions as a response to the perceived ill effects of political, social, and economic movements tied to the spread of democratic initiatives in Britain. The plays, then, offered Eliot an occasion to try to resolve some of these tensions. Because Eliot got his start in the theatre in 1934 co-authoring The Rock, which by design had to be particularly conscious of a specialized religious audience, he saw early on the advantages of trying to include his theatre audience in the collaborative circle of the dramatic performance. The pageant was commissioned to raise funds for the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the London Diocese and thus it illustrated theatrically the larger social purpose in which a community’s ‘‘workmen’’ must come together to erect a lasting and beneficial structure. In the play itself, those laborers ‘‘work together’’ building ‘‘with new stone’’ and ‘‘new timbers’’ a ‘‘Church for all / And a job for each / Every man to his work’’ (CPP 149). The production, for which Eliot was commissioned to write the choruses and some prose dialogue, developed as a genuinely collective effort in which mostly amateur actors took up the stage roles; Elsie Fogerty trained the choral performers; Martin Shaw composed the music; Eric Newton designed the set, while his wife Stella Pierce worked on the costumes; and Martin Browne, who would become the director of Eliot’s subsequent plays, oversaw and arranged the entire enterprise. Eliot viewed his role accordingly, writing in a letter to Shaw ‘‘as a collaborator, to express my satisfaction’’ about the music he composed. At the conclusion of the letter, Eliot wished for future companionship: ‘‘I hope that this effort will not be the end either of our acquaintance as human beings, or of our collaboration as workmen’’ (MP 13). The last word intentionally echoed the play’s major theme of Christians coming together in a communal effort to improve the society in which they live. While the play details the construction of the Church through the assistance of its members, Eliot’s letter to Shaw shows that he understood the creation of a play in similar terms. Four years later, while arguing for the desirability of a ‘‘flourishing poetic drama’’ in England, Eliot highlighted as its most important feature the collaborative nature of the form: ‘‘its establishment depends obviously upon the happy


144

concurrence of four classes of people: the authors, the producers, the actors, and the public.’’3 Collaboration on The Rock rescued Eliot from one of his ‘‘dry periods’’ and gave him new life in a genre he had been hoping to explore for some time.4 As with Pound’s assistance a decade earlier when he helped make some sense of the chaotic manuscript of The Waste Land, the presence of collaborators on The Rock had the restorative effect of a familiar and powerful elixir. It demonstrated for Eliot once again that co-produced projects offered solutions to artistic problems that had paralyzed him as a solitary writer throughout his career. The dramatic effort brought Eliot momentarily away from the pain of his loneliness that he believed few others could comprehend. The trick would be to figure out a way to apply the collaborative circumstances and effects of this highly specialized religious production to a broader, more popular poetic drama. ‘‘ O U T

O F A C T I O N F O R S O L O N G ’’ : T H E C H A L L E N G E O F ARTISTIC CREATION

In 1928, as Eliot was preparing to step gingerly into the world of drama, he took the opportunity to reflect upon this unfamiliar genre. Having published the two aborted Sweeney fragments in The Criterion in late 1926 and early 1927, Eliot was ready to examine the failed project in an essay called ‘‘A Dialogue on Poetic Drama,’’ which he printed, along with a preface, as material preceding a 1928 edition of Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie. Later, it would reappear, absent the preface, in Selected Essays as ‘‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry.’’ Anxious about being somewhat uncredentialed to discuss poetic drama, Eliot manipulates the form so that he is not speaking in his own voice but is presenting a dialogue among various unnamed individuals. This strategy accommodates Eliot’s critical interests while affording him the luxury of hiding behind the unusual dialogic structure. The omission of the preface to ‘‘A Dialogue’’ from Selected Essays is quite understandable, since it reveals Eliot at his most uncomfortable, unsure about his own authority even to initiate the discussion, especially in relation to Dryden: ‘‘Dryden had written great plays; but the contemporary critic has not written a great play, so is in a weak position for laying down the law about plays.’’5 Eliot’s anxiety is so great here that he is unable to look at himself squarely in the mirror, and instead refers to himself obliquely in the third person. The dialogue form offered a sensible solution, for the splitting up of the critical voices into faceless ciphers represented only by a single letter disperses responsibility and absolves Eliot of having to claim the authority of the single essayist that typified most of his critical


145

work. It also shows once again conversation as a solution to a problem, the comfort of the group appeasing the anxieties of the solitary writer. Later in the ‘‘Preface,’’ Eliot indicates that ‘‘the dialogue form enables me to discuss the subject without pretending to come to any conclusion.’’ But Eliot’s relationship to the source of these conversations is also somewhat anguished. He alleges the piece ‘‘represents the scraps of many actual conversations’’ – not that these are scraps but that they represent them, a curious choice of verbs that would seem to contradict the notion of actuality.6 Finally, after establishing the cloudy origins of the essay, Eliot spends the final paragraph fleeing its implications: ‘‘I have no clear opinions on this subject. Hence I have distributed my own theories quite indiscriminately among the speakers; and the reader must not try to identify the persons in the dialogue with myself or anyone else.’’ Concerned that such a warning might not be heeded, Eliot essentially dismisses his characters by declaring that ‘‘[t]hey are not even fictions; they are merely voices; a half-dozen men who may be imagined as sitting in a tavern after lunch, lingering over port and conversation at an hour when they should all be doing something else.’’7 Given the overwhelming number of contradictions embedded in the prose, one almost does not know where to start objecting. Certainly it is startling to hear the booming critical voice of the early Athenæum essays claiming to have no opinions on a topic. Yet Eliot then turns around and offers that he does have ‘‘theories.’’ But they will be distributed among the various speakers in the dialogue, who are so provisional that they do not even exist as fictions. Nevertheless, Eliot immediately starts characterizing them quite specifically, by their gender, time, and place. The dialogue itself covers many of the topics that typically occupy Eliot when he discusses poetic drama: the importance of verse drama as a genre, especially as a counter to realistic drama; the author’s relationship to his audience; theatre as a popular art; the ballet as a model for creative expression; the religious roots of drama; and Shakespeare as the quintessential poetic dramatist to whom all others aspire. The most notable feature of the preface is the writer’s utter lack of confidence in his abilities to do or say anything productive about or within the form, in contrast to Dryden, of whom ‘‘B’’ announces during the conversation: ‘‘Observe how confident Dryden is!’’ (SE 57). It is not surprising, then, that Eliot chose not to print this prefatory piece four years later in Selected Essays, preferring to let the dialogue itself stand on its own, and to tinker with the title in the hopes, perhaps, of escaping the torment of the original introduction. Eliot continually emphasized his own supposed inadequacies in the dramatic form. Even in 1940, after the success of Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, Eliot is referring to himself in print as an ‘‘amateur’’

146


playwright.8 So it does not surprise that early in 1948, when Eliot had begun to formulate some ideas for a third play that would eventually become The Cocktail Party, he wrote an anxious letter to Martin Browne to apprise his friend of the status of the new project. By this time Browne, a multi-talented man who had directed Eliot’s first two full-length plays and essentially supervised the poet as he tested the alien waters of the English stage, would have been very familiar with Eliot’s halting, nervous assessments of his own work in extremely charged language. Eliot explained to his director: I certainly expect the play to be born this year. I do not know how long it will be before it learns to walk, to say nothing of an acrobatic turn worthy of the theatre. Knowing how slowly I work and the amount of time it is likely to take up to get up a head of steam with an engine which has been out of action for so long, I know that the thought of working to a date for this summer would throw me into a panic. I should be quite happy with the prospect of Spring, 1949, and if, as I hope, I can break the back of the new born infant during the summer, I should be able to do polishing work even while at Princeton. I hope to be able to start work – or more exactly perhaps I should say sit down morning after morning with nothing else to do – in two or three weeks. (MP 170)

Although he did not know it at the time, the dramatic text Eliot fathered in the summer of 1949 would become his greatest commercial success. But at this early point in the creative process, Eliot chose not to consider the possibility of popular acceptance and communal acclaim. Instead, he focused upon the agony that had always accompanied his composition of verse. Although Eliot’s two marriages produced no children, his birthing metaphor comes attached with appropriate and accurate references to anticipation, uncertainty, pain, panic, inactivity, monotony, and violence. It is the mention of artistic fertility and birth followed quickly by a murderous impulse that is perhaps the most unique and troubling feature of the letter, for it betrays the author’s ambivalence toward the creative process and the resulting dramatic text. Even the mere imagining of the future product spawns anxiety and visions of violence. The characterization of the artistic process in sexual terms in Eliot’s letter to Browne is from a decidedly male perspective, most notably in Eliot’s complaint about having trouble ‘‘get[ting] up a head of steam with an engine which has been out of action for so long.’’ That comment is loaded with thinly veiled references to a weakened, long-dormant phallus. Although associated with a powerful and potentially potent male organ, Eliot’s imagination churns in a reproductive vacuum and the artist is reduced to a weak, onanistic figure sexually debilitated by his seclusion. His appropriation in the letter of the mother’s function in the birthing


147

process is a response both to his own impotency and to the lack of a corresponding, fertile female figure: the poet ends up embodying both sides of the reproductive act. Yet while Eliot employs the procreative power of the female, he does so from the authoritative position of the male. Once again, the metaphor demonstrates Eliot’s dual attractions to the conflicting roles of the passive (female) vessel awaiting validation and the active (male) agent that initiates and controls events, and his belief that he had to discover some kind of external impetus to produce the text-child. Eliot’s depiction of the artistic process may also have biographical overtones related to the writer’s own problems with sexuality and especially with his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood. Threatened almost from the start by Eliot’s inability to conduct sexual relations and Vivien’s guilt over failing to ‘‘stimulate’’ him, their marriage was rarely happy.9 Lyndall Gordon’s sensitive biographical reading details exhaustively Eliot’s general aversion to sexuality and argues that we cannot understand the poet’s relationships by depending on the traditional meanings of love. Gordon also discusses Eliot’s repeated vows of celibacy, one of which he shared, in a kind of unspoken fashion, with John Hayward (ENL 66 and 211). Hayward, who was paralyzed from the waist down due to a form of muscular dystrophy, was Eliot’s roommate from 1946–57 and acted as a collaborator on Four Quartets. By the time of the 1948 letter to Browne, Eliot’s wife had been dead for just over a year and he had not seen her since 1935 due to her increasingly erratic behavior and her committal into an asylum in 1938. Being ‘‘out of action for so long’’ implied having difficulty with writing poetry; but the language also resonates with the shame of sexual inadequacy and inactivity. Choosing male collaborators allowed the poet to bury these feelings and think of personal relationships in more comforting terms. While Eliot always seemed sapped of his strength during the isolation that accompanied composition, he turned to his male collaborators to revive and stimulate him with their critical insights. In part as a biographical testament to his own first, disastrous marriage, Eliot created Harry in The Family Reunion, whom the audience (along with Harry himself ) initially thinks has pushed his sometime suicidal wife over the side of an ocean liner. In a letter to Browne dated 19 March 1938, Eliot tries to explain how Harry’s marriage to his wife has paralyzed him metaphorically and sexually. These feelings become confused when he meets another woman, Mary: The effect of his married life upon him was one of such horror as to leave him for the time at least in a state that may be called one of being psychologically partially desexed: or rather, it has given him a horror of women as of unclean

148


creatures . . . [He feels a] conflict inside him between this repulsion for Mary as a woman, and the attraction which the normal part of him that is still left, feels towards her personally for the first time. This is the first time since his marriage (‘there was no ecstacy’) that he has been attracted towards any woman . . . [T]his attraction . . . has stirred him up, but, owing to his mental state, is incapable of developing: therefore he finds a refuge in an ambiguous relation – the attraction, half of a son and half of a lover, to Agatha [his Aunt]. (MP 107)

The dominant images are those of paralysis yoked with sexuality, albeit aberrant in nature. Such an irreconcilable combination will assure only frustration and pain for individuals who perceive relationships in those terms. Indeed, the psychological impotency Eliot seemed to share with Harry only escalated when he chose to speak of his creative efforts in metaphors that mimicked sexual reproduction. Eliot responded in the only way possible: since he typically associated both the female sex organ (in ‘‘Hysteria’’) and the reproductive act (in The Waste Land ) with violence and physical defenselessness, his descriptions of the artistic process in letters to male collaborators tend to characterize the act in terms that exclude the female partner. Eliot’s descriptions of the sexual act usually lack a corresponding female being (or object), inevitably stress a failed sexual union, and choose to focus on the troublesome monster-child (represented by the text) that either is lifeless and of no use to the creator or is giving the parent trouble.10 In some respects, Eliot’s primary difficulty with the creative process was that it occurred alone. Indeed, his metaphors describing the act of writing stress the singularity of the author, locating this not as an advantage (a´ la Romantic renderings) but as a problem. As outlined elsewhere in this book, Eliot refused to subscribe to the Romantic myth of the solitary poetmadman, with ‘‘flashing eyes’’ and ‘‘floating hair’’ in Coleridge’s version, inspired by nature into a frenzied composition. Eliot challenged one of the central tenets of Romanticism by denying that the writing process involved naked self-examination. Instead of focusing on the self, Eliot concentrated on an object once removed from himself, on the pain that accompanied the lone artist’s task. The trauma was real enough during the crafting of The Waste Land that it helped occasion a mental breakdown. Eliot had sequestered himself during creative activity so as to draw on internal inspiration, but had found himself dangerously unstable. That condition was alleviated only by social interaction or through the expulsion of the finished text. As a result, when Eliot speaks of his work, he does not highlight the enjoyment that comes from the process of composing but instead on ‘‘that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief


149

reward of creative work’’ (UPUC 108). The celebration arrives after the work is completed and occurs regardless of the quality of the project. After 1922 Eliot had no desire to visit the tormented seclusion that had helped produce both the landmark poem and a psychological collapse. Consequently, he depended increasingly on collaboration in his art, a method served perfectly by the most collaborative of literary disciplines: drama. Those who struggle for explanations as to why Eliot spent the final thirty years of his life writing for the stage should recognize that drama, as a public and collaborative art, allowed Eliot to pursue his artistic program while avoiding some of the excruciating suffering he associated with the (single) authoring of nondramatic poetry. Drama drew him to his collaborators early in the process of composition – Eliot usually held discussions about a play with Browne even before putting pen to paper – and this lent a certain stability to creation that had not occurred in the writing of the non-dramatic poems. ‘‘ E N C O U R A G I N G

W O R D S ’’ : T H E G U I D I N G H A N D O F MARTIN BROWNE

It would be difficult to overestimate the emotional satisfaction Eliot derived from working with his literary collaborators. Not possessing a stable wife or female partner to play the nurturing role until very late in his life, Eliot turned to male associates in search of the encouragement he needed to combat a solitary existence and to convince himself that his new undertaking as a dramatist was the proper choice for someone who had already enjoyed enormous success as a poet. In 1942, when an ailment kept him from traveling to Iceland and put Eliot in a rather somber mood, the poet wrote Browne to express his gratitude for the steady, comforting message forwarded by the director: ‘‘Your encouraging words gave me great pleasure . . . This sort of encouragement is really needed . . . it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity – especially as there is never any certainty that the whole thing won’t have to be scrapped. And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless’’ (MP 158). As he would do throughout his career, Eliot set the writer’s lonely life against the temptations of the public sphere. Because the mental anguish which accompanied the solitary work of composition took its toll on Eliot, his method evolved into drafting rough sketches of plays and then scheduling long conferences with Browne to discuss problems, solutions, revisions, casting decisions, and staging questions. They in effect became co-architects of all the stage dramas, with

150


Browne doing his best to put Eliot’s lofty theoretical aims and ideals into practice. As Browne shows in The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, the two men engaged in extensive correspondence during the formation of the five major plays and The Rock. They traced all elements of the performance together, the experienced English director guiding the stage neophyte. Browne’s reproduction in his book of large portions of manuscript materials held at the Houghton Library at Harvard and the Hayward Bequest at King’s College allows readers to view quite clearly both the development of the plays from the early stages of synopses to final versions as well as the influence others had in the shaping of that material. Browne’s compilation is particularly important because Eliot preferred to move from rough notes to typewritten drafts and so many of the changes from draft to draft do not appear on any hard copy of the plays. Therefore Browne’s first-hand testimony, often assisted by letters and personal notes, helps fill in some gaps concerning the evolution of the drama. Since Browne has already arranged these materials chronologically in chapters devoted to individual plays, I have focused my discussions instead upon overall tendencies and themes that surface in the collaboration between the two men. This approach allows for a more coherent discussion that stresses the theory, practice, and psychology of collaboration between Eliot and Browne. Readers wishing to follow the development of a single play can profitably consult Browne’s own book. My discussion seeks to contextualize these textual evolutions within some of the larger patterns I have already drawn rather than simply presenting them in an isolated fashion. Forever uncomfortable about his inexperience as a dramatist, Eliot would always worry about the ‘‘defects of [his] theatrical technique’’ (OPP 81). In one letter about drafting a scene, he remarked ‘‘I am certainly not confident about anything’’ (MP 219). Eliot, then, willingly played the student to Browne’s teacher, especially in the first half of his new career. This relationship mimicked the early partnership with Pound, where Eliot positioned himself metaphorically in the subordinate role, though this time Eliot’s lack of authority derived from his limited experience in the theatre environment and he still reserved the right to exert his will when needed. In Browne, Eliot found the perfect foil, one who seemingly understood the complex psychological negotiations that were necessary in collaborating with Eliot and who knew exactly when to adopt the role of counselor and when to step aside and allow the author to assert his independence. That both men seemed comfortable with the nature of this alliance is clear from one of Browne’s letters to Eliot, dated 31 March 1949,


151

about the final act of The Cocktail Party. In it, Browne adopts a tone we would expect from a mentor overseeing a large project. He tries to encourage his prote´ge´ while also gently explaining certain effects, reminds him about issues like characterization, and finally points him in new, beneficial directions. He first expresses gratification that Eliot’s revisions are progressing nicely and then cautions the writer: ‘‘Don’t forget Edward and Lavinia in that latter part: we are very much attached to them by now, and pleased at their achievement of a modus vivendi, so we should like to hear how they managed it – this might well be useful material in the Peter section. I think you will find that in playing they will assume great importance – the play will seem to be largely about them: and on that importance you can build.’’11 Curiously, Browne chose not to include this letter in his book, even though he published generously from other correspondence that details exchanges on revisions of the play. This suggests that even though Eliot clearly thrived under those conditions, Browne wanted retrospectively to minimize this feature of the relationship in deference to Eliot. Given an environment in which the principal creator incessantly highlighted his own inadequacies, it makes sense that, like Pound, Browne’s most important early role was that of advocate. He convinced a skeptical Reverend Webb-Odell, the director of the Forty-Five Churches Fund in the London diocese and the originator of the idea to hold a theatrical performance to mark the fundraising project, that Eliot was the right man for the job of writing the choruses for what eventually became The Rock (MP 3–6). Although this foray into the London theatre scene might not have appealed to every poet, for Eliot it presented just the right confluence of attractive conditions. It allowed him to begin to experiment with a new form, in a limited fashion, and not to have to worry about inventing from scratch a topic, setting, or characters. Such a prospect was so overwhelming in an earlier period that it no doubt contributed to Eliot’s abandonment of the aborted attempts in Sweeney Agonistes. Instead, he could start his work on The Rock knowing that Browne had already conceived of the Chorus as a major character in the play and under the realization that his director and others would provide the essential framework for the setting and action. Although he made a show of complaining about his restricted role in The Rock, which required him to write only ‘‘bits and snippets,’’ the situation seemed ideal and it gave Eliot the liberty to concentrate on writing verse.12 His collaboration with Browne was successful enough on The Rock that Eliot apparently made Browne’s participation as director a condition of accepting George Bell’s invitation to write a play for the Canterbury Festival of 1935 (35). Later, after Eliot had achieved some success in the

152


theatre, Browne’s task involved less public advocacy; instead, he became one of Eliot’s primary private encouragers, as his series of letters in the 1940s shows. Those letters often pester Eliot (with the proper dose of added flattery) to start writing his next play or try to involve him in a specific writing project as a way of initiating the creative process (see 160, 165, 169). Eliot never forgot the significance of Browne’s early support and remained forever loyal to his director. Eliot even refused to allow Hugh Hunt to consider the hiring of a different director for an Old Vic production of The Cocktail Party. Eliot preferred to turn down the opportunity rather than abandon Browne (179–80). Browne also played the key role of sensitive auditor and responder, giving Eliot a specific audience for which to write and from whom he could expect significant practical feedback. Eliot recalled that relationship for Donald Hall in the Paris Review interview, where he explained how he turned himself over willingly to Browne’s guidance. In certain instances in which he had made mistakes like writing poetry that failed to advance the action, Eliot believed his work required the attention of a theatre veteran: ‘‘That was when Martin Browne was useful. He would say, ‘There are very nice lines here, but they’ve nothing to do with what’s going on on stage’.’’13 Part of the attractiveness of collaborators like Browne was that they filled a gap between the creative moment and the final production in the same way that Pound had served as a private reader of The Waste Land drafts. They offered Eliot an opportunity to measure a response before the public performance, almost like a Greek chorus, which Eliot once referred to as ‘‘a more or less detached observer or a commenter upon the action of the play.’’14 He would then incorporate that model into his Christian dramaturgy. Thus when Eliot complained in one letter to Browne about The Cocktail Party that ‘‘I don’t feel that I can myself judge whether I have plotted the emotional curve of the important scenes successfully’’ (MP 174), he expected a sensitive response from the director that would help him discover a solution. The play thus being ‘‘fixed’’ after viewing by a small, private audience of experienced auditors, Eliot could offer up his art confidently to the public. In some respects, this collaborative arrangement allowed Eliot to suppress the exercise of authority during composition and then exert it during productions of his drama, even though that tended to occur under the guise of supposed collaboration with his audience. Browne records that early in their relationship Eliot ‘‘loved going to the theatre, but he knew nothing about how it actually worked.’’15 For example, Browne comments upon Eliot’s shock at first seeing some of his work on The Rock thrashed out by actors in rehearsal, since he had had little experience


153

with such matters. He was startled enough to write a letter to Rupert Doone worrying about the ‘‘limp and chaotic state’’ of the performance and questioning if this was typical of amateur productions (MP 10–11). Yet Eliot was a willing student, and he professed it as his goal ‘‘to learn the technique of the theatre so well that I could then forget about it.’’16 Such a situation made it natural that Eliot and Browne would become ‘‘drawn so sympathetically together . . . [since they] had obviously in common a passionate feeling for the drama. Each had qualities which the other lacked,’’ as Eliot once wrote about the collaboration of Wilkie Collins and Dickens (SE 466). In the foreword to The Rock (1934), Eliot acknowledges Browne – ‘‘submissive to whose expert criticism I rewrote’’ many of the choral passages and dialogues – and then decides the effect was so great that Eliot could claim to be ‘‘literally the author’’ of only one scene.17 After The Family Reunion, Eliot thanked Browne for ‘‘all you have done for the play, from the time when you read the first draft until now’’ (MP 148) and he followed The Confidential Clerk (1953) with praise for Browne in very similar language (289). After completion of The Cocktail Party, Eliot speculated in a letter to Browne’s wife (politely including her in his praise for the director) that ‘‘[w]hen the various drafts of the play are finally collated and studied by researchers in American universities, I think that my debt to you and Martin will emerge!’’ (239). Eliot was perhaps too optimistic, however, in that last prediction. He could not have anticipated how the theoretical implications of collaborative efforts might seemingly challenge his own authoritative public image that he had constructed over the years and therefore make such discussions threateningly subversive. Henzie Raeburn’s enthusiastic assertion that her husband Browne ‘‘created’’ Murder in the Cathedral ‘‘from the manuscript with Eliot’’ illustrates just how revolutionary collaborative models are, for they can encourage the assigning of co-authorship to Browne.18 Browne used his theatrical instincts to guide the inexperienced Eliot in matters involving staging, audience response, and acting, among numerous other areas. Yet Browne’s greatest contribution to the plays themselves was probably his assistance on structural issues. Whereas it is relatively easy to chart the effect Pound had upon The Waste Land, the extent of Browne’s influence upon Eliot’s work is much harder to pin down. Unlike Pound, Browne positions himself beyond the edges of the text and his collaboration is most often centered upon issues other than the language of the drama. As a result, Browne’s assistance rarely appears – like Pound’s famous blue pencil – for all to see, but tends to surface instead in verbal support that is more difficult to reconstruct. Organizational problems had always plagued Eliot, to the point that he defined the creation of poetry in

154


the prose criticism not as a task involving invention but as a procedure concerned primarily with the arrangement of material. Pound’s editorial efforts, which so often focused upon organizational issues as he sought to streamline the text by making the many poetic fragments cohere, show this quite clearly. This would prove even more of a challenge for Eliot when confronted with a new genre that came with the complications of a live audience. In the case of The Rock, drafts of the final choral ode show that at its early stage the material existed in prose form, with major images intact. Only after he had arrived at the Gloria in Excelsis as a structural container, so to speak, did he develop the material into its final poetic form (MP 25–6). Browne assisted not only by sketching out major portions of the plot, but by suggesting to Eliot that he add specific scenes as a way of solving dramatic problems. For example, Browne observed correctly that the final section of The Rock required some action to break up the procession of characters streaming across the stage (8, 10). In another example, when Murder in the Cathedral moved from its original place of production at Canterbury to the Mercury Theatre in London, Browne sensed that the new setting and revised structure of the drama (an interval had been added to what was originally a one-act play) dictated opening part II with a chorus. That feature was absent from the final Canterbury version, even though Eliot had originally written a choral ode in anticipation of opening a scene following an intermission. Eliot agreed to the request and the result, as Browne notes, ‘‘is one of the most beautiful lyric passages in the play, and admirably fulfils its dramatic function, providing a parallel both to the nature-cycle and to the waiting tension of the opening’’ (49). As was often the pattern with Eliot, he thrived under conditions in which he could act as the responder to a prompt. Such agents acted as comforting stimulants (to use the word that often appears in his renderings of the creative act) that often provoked an outpouring of poetry. These structural cruxes confronting Eliot inevitably demanded Browne’s assistance, sometimes resulting in introductions of entirely new sets of characters. For example, Eliot presented Browne with a draft of Murder in the Cathedral containing most of the action of Act I but with one fundamental problem: how was Eliot to illustrate for an audience the transition in Becket’s state of mind from his arrival in England on 2 December 1170 to his Christmas day homily? Browne suggested Eliot invent three historical characters, a childhood friend, a politician, and a baron, who might help advance Becket’s intentions as well as filling in some of the historical background on the Church’s struggle with the State. Eliot drafted such scenes, only to decide with Browne that they did not fit.


155

Then Doone suggested transforming the actual personages into figments of Becket’s mind and calling them Tempters. This successful change resulted in the production of characters that are responsible for some of the play’s most lively exchanges (MP 42–3). In other cases, Browne attacked structural flaws by suggesting slight rearrangements of speeches. In a letter of 26 February 1950 to Eliot he outlines some alterations for the much-revised final scene of The Cocktail Party as the production prepared to make its way from New York to London. Most of the changes, which Eliot adopted, seem driven by the needs of an audience at this late point in the performance of the play. Browne’s proposals get the scene moving while helping to hold the audience’s attention (229). Staging questions often occupied Eliot during his composition of plays, and he was especially conditioned to seek answers from others because he had not had to worry about such problems in writing his non-dramatic poetry. Browne served as a vast resource here, answering a broad range of questions for Eliot as he sought to thrash out dramatic moments in a scene. For example, as he developed the ritualistic dance in The Family Reunion, where Agatha and Mary circle Amy’s birthday cake and blow out a few candles after each revolution, Eliot wrote a letter to Browne asking if open flames were allowed on stage (MP 101). This is a central staging issue for this final scene, for the ritualistic extinguishing of the lights accentuates the message of characters as they chant about the ‘‘pilgrimage / Of expiation’’ (CPP 350). Browne also helped move Eliot’s characters on and off stage by providing guidance with entrances and exits (an area with which Eliot often specifically asked for help). He sometimes pointed out particular moments that required the addition of lines to facilitate these departures (MP 128). What is perhaps most surprising is how early Browne became involved in some of these staging questions. An early unpublished draft of the final act of The Cocktail Party, for example, contains penciled notes by Browne in the margins in which he is essentially choreographing the characters’ movements and even sketching out specific locations on stage for each character as a way of illustrating for Eliot how the scene might take shape theatrically.19 Elsewhere, Browne’s influence over staging issues ends up having a major impact on the overall outcome of the play. Once Eliot completed a draft of Murder in the Cathedral for the Canterbury production, for example, Browne thought that doubling the parts of the Tempters and Knights would help an audience better understand some of the historical details and parallels between the two groups of characters. Although Eliot agreed with the suggestion and altered his script to accommodate the change, two decades later he wrote a letter regretting the

156


doubling, believing it resolves a major question in the drama – whether the Fourth Tempter’s actions are good or evil – and therefore cuts off potential avenues of interpretation for an audience.20 The characters of his drama often gave Eliot trouble, for many of them remained underdeveloped until very late in a play’s evolution. Since his non-dramatic poetry did not require him to delineate characters as clearly as on stage (to the point that in The Waste Land he could even get away with the footnote about Tiresias uniting all the voices), Eliot sometimes wrote lines for groups of minor characters like the Priests in Murder in the Cathedral without any thought to characterization, leaving it to Browne to assign specific lines to individuals within that group (MP 72–3). This occurred as well with the Women of Canterbury. It is traditionally the director’s task when staging that play, along with the person responsible for training the chorus, to assign lines after testing different arrangements, dictated in large part by what the individual members are capable of. This strategy in The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral removed Eliot again from issues involving characterization, effectively leaving it to others to determine shadings of character within the choral unit. Elsie Fogerty’s narrative account of training the Women of Canterbury reveals the necessary role of conductor and echoes the sentiments of the Group Theatre manifesto that employed orchestral collaboration as a model for performers to follow. Fogerty recalls that rehearsals made her realize that ‘‘we were doing not strictly choral work – but orchestral work; each speaker had to be like an instrument, in harmony with the other voices during the ensemble passages, but repeating a recurring phrase in an individual tone.’’21 Readers can trace how the odes were broken up among individual choral members by looking at the prompt copy of Murder in the Cathedral for the first production of the play at the Mercury Theatre in 1935–6, which contains penciled notes by Ashley Dukes assigning sets of lines from Eliot’s texts to specific actresses named in the margins of the script.22 The intricacies of plot also troubled Eliot, as he himself acknowledged. In one letter to Browne replying to the director’s reading of a draft of The Family Reunion, Eliot places this issue at the top of a list outlining the multiple problems he faced, for he worried the drama was too thin on plot (MP 106). This became especially problematic the deeper Eliot went into a play’s events, for early scenes of Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party remain quite similar to their final form, especially relative to other parts of the play, suggesting Eliot was particularly comfortable in initiating the action of his dramas but then became less confident as he was confronted with the developments of those narrative


157

scenarios. Browne, therefore, was forever trying to get Eliot to ‘‘integrate’’ scenes in early drafts ‘‘into a pattern of action,’’ as he explained in one letter of 31 July 1948 about a version of The Cocktail Party (MP 175). Browne believed this ‘‘integration’’ could be achieved through Eliot’s development of Julia and Celia, especially, two characters he thought would tie together the action for the audience. Eliot responded on 4 August that he would use these observations to guide his revisions (177). Likewise, in the earliest known draft of The Confidential Clerk (a script titled Ur-Clerk), held in the Hayward collection at King’s College, the major plot problems occur in the final act, which left too much to be revealed at that late point and also failed to keep all of the actors involved in the action through the last section, two issues that apparently dominated many of the discussions between Browne and Eliot held at Eliot’s flat (267). Subsequent attempts illustrate Eliot clearly trying to act upon this advice in a second draft of the play, for example, by revealing Sir Claude as Colby’s father at the end of the first act instead of delaying that revelation (this was subsequently altered). By the final version of the play, some of this late material from the original Act III is either cut altogether or moved up to earlier moments. Despite that assistance, Eliot struggled with the ending of the play right through rehearsals for its production at the Edinburgh festival (282–4). Although Browne gave careful thought to Eliot’s poetic language, he restricted his suggestions in that area to changes that would clarify the sense of a scene and to eradication of material that might seem obscure to an audience. Browne realized his authority in Eliot’s eyes must have derived predominantly from his theatrical experience, so he tended to couch his recommendations about changes in wording in terms that emphasized the audience’s needs. Browne made one such objection to a line in a draft of The Cocktail Party in which Edward discusses the inner lives that men lead. The line – ‘‘And who in some men may be the daemon, the genius’’ – troubled the director because he thought the reference to a ‘‘daemon’’ seemed confusing and out of context. He encouraged Eliot to replace the last three words with ‘‘guardian,’’ a change Eliot adopted for the final version of the play (MP 184; CPP 381). Browne argued successfully for a similar eradication of the word ‘‘sanctification’’ describing Celia’s fate at the end of the play, believing it out of place (MP 227). Seemingly slight alterations like this served the enormously important dual purposes of eliminating some of Eliot’s more obscure, difficult, privately symbolic references and secularizing the theme so as to make it palatable to a broader audience. Elsewhere, Browne asks Eliot if he wouldn’t consider simplifying a line like Reilly’s ‘‘And we now are ready to proceed with the libation’’ to

158


‘‘And now we are ready to drink their health.’’ This request prompted Eliot to write on 25 May 1950 that ‘‘I will perpend the libation problem for the next few days, only it does seem to me that every step in simplification brings me nearer to Frederick Lonsdale’’ (188). The struggle reveals much about the relationship between the two men. Eliot worried about his reputation and did not want to be confused with a playwright like Lonsdale (who specialized in the light comedy of manners), while Browne attempted always to attend to the needs of audiences that might find such language too unrealistic, cumbersome, or challenging. Nevertheless, the line stood. At other times, Browne revealed the impulse to cut that existed so strongly in Pound; yet that was a responsibility that Eliot turned over to him willingly, as he reveals in one letter discussing the resumption of The Cocktail Party after the Edinburgh festival. In that note, Eliot seems unwilling to want to work out the play again in his own mind. He offers to sketch out a few new lines if needed, but confesses that he would rather rely almost entirely on Browne to reduce the length of the drama.23 Browne did not share Pound’s enthusiasm for suggesting alternative phrasing, knowing that, for the most part, intrusions into questions of poetic meaning were better left to auditors like Hayward, whom Eliot had sanctioned as qualified in this area (MP 111). In some penciled notes to Browne’s original lengthy response of 11 March 1938 to the draft of The Family Reunion, emendations that Valerie Eliot identifies in the Houghton Library copy of this letter as John Hayward’s, Hayward responds somewhat dismissively to Browne’s attempts at questioning Harry’s speeches as ‘‘abstract’’ by writing ‘‘I don’t agree’’ and ‘‘this is apparently a criticism of the poetry.’’24 A late typescript version of The Family Reunion dated 28 September 1938 contains extensive commentary in Hayward’s hand and shows the degree to which he felt comfortable in the role of a strong collaborator who was authorized to question a wide range of dramatic elements in the play. Hayward flagged not only Eliot’s wording in places – wondering whether a phrase like ‘‘the moorland country’’ was idiomatically correct, resulting in a change by Eliot – but addressed the problem of the Eumenides, staging matters, inconsistent characterization, dramatic pacing, and his favorite twin hobby horses: punctuation and repetition.25 Following his successful collaboration with Eliot on Four Quartets in the early 1940s, Hayward would continue to assist Eliot with his dramatic endeavors. The Ur-Clerk, for example, contains appended to it two pages of detailed notes by Hayward addressed to Eliot on a wide range of topics. This also occurs at a time when Eliot seems increasingly confident about his playwriting skills and finds himself depending, therefore, less on Browne’s assistance during the


159

composition of early drafts. As Browne notes, unlike the earlier dramas, the first draft of The Confidential Clerk he saw ‘‘is already a complete play’’ (MP 254), even though it would go through a series of substantial revisions before and after its first production. A similar exchange took place on Eliot’s final play, The Elder Statesman, which Browne started to discuss with Eliot only after significant sections had already been drafted (317).26 Perhaps the most accessible material illustrating the way in which Eliot worked with his dramatic collaborators occurs in the documents reproduced by Browne during his discussion of The Family Reunion. These documents consist of letters by Eliot, Browne, Ashley Dukes, and Frank Morley, as well as drafts of the play analyzed by those letters (MP 101–45). Eliot’s initial correspondence of 15 February 1938 to Browne, accompanied by a manuscript of the play, asks Browne to offer his criticism as soon as possible and requests that he make sure to pay particular attention to plot, character, entrances and exits, and, because of Browne’s English upbringing, the accuracy of Eliot’s reproduction of the milieu of ‘‘foxhunting society’’ (102). Browne responded in a lengthy letter asserting rather directly that he and Dukes thought the drama possessed a weak plot. Later he detailed suggestions in those areas with which he was most comfortable and could be of most use to Eliot: characterization, structure, and staging. Eliot was obviously deeply immersed in the writing process at this time and energized by the collaborative exchanges, since he replied to Browne’s letter the day after he received it, writing an incredibly detailed justification of his thinking about the drama. Remarkably, in this letter at least, Eliot skirts many of Browne’s overt objections, seemingly using the occasion of his director’s observations to work out in his own mind the justification of specific characters’ actions (the focus of the letter) as well as some features of the plot. In fact, the one major concession made by Eliot in the letter was his admission that a reference in the latter half of the play to plans by Harry’s father (since deceased) to push his mother down a well appeared forced, following the earlier reference by Harry of shoving his wife into the sea, an objection made by all of Eliot’s correspondents. After completing the letter, Eliot then made himself a list of ‘‘What I think must be done:’’ 1. To introduce Mary at beginning and send her out to arrange flowers. 2. To make Amy’s farewell to Harry more convincing. 3. To break up Harry’s long speech at beginning of Act II sc. ii. 4. To motivate Mary’s entrance later in this scene. 5. To deal with definite article in Agatha–Harry duet. 6. Harry’s father etc. 7. To alter newspaper paragraph. (108–9)

160


Except for a few minor points, these are mostly structural issues, which Eliot arrived at following Browne’s ‘‘prompt.’’ In one of the most consistent patterns in all of Eliot’s work with his collaborators, the poet depended on feedback from external agents because it enabled him to write against a particular position rather than operating as a lone voice in a critical vacuum. In effect, the initial overture to others signaled Eliot’s accession to the collaborative ideal of cooperation, but their subsequent responses inevitably afforded him the opportunity to assert himself. After sending off this list, as well as the earlier letters and manuscript materials to Frank Morley for his response, Eliot must have been partially gratified to receive a letter from his Faber colleague dismissing many of the observations by Dukes and Browne as quibbles. Morley did, however, think the overall effect of Browne’s criticism was accurate. So he tried to encourage Eliot to reveal more of the events behind the action on stage (MP 109–10). Eliot followed through on this final observation by adding significant sections of explanatory conversation to later drafts. He included, for example, the exchange between Harry and Agatha that concludes Part II, scene II, in which the audience learns some of Harry’s motivation (he is being pursued) and how that has led him to map out a future in which he ‘‘must follow the bright angels’’ (CPP 339). But the most significant addition to subsequent drafts of the play resulting directly from the comments by Browne and Morley was Eliot’s fleshing out of Mary’s character through a number of vehicles: making her older, replacing her soliloquy with a conversation with Agatha, and introducing a scene in which she and Harry recollect their childhood at Wishwood (CPP 306–7). Only then does Mary become a central figure in the play. Browne concludes his citation of some of these materials by observing that Eliot ‘‘could firmly go his own way . . . from all of us when he felt it to be better’’ (MP 111). Although Eliot might seem to be stubbornly resisting the initial comments made by auditors like Browne and Dukes, the series of drafts show their participation in the evolution of the play to be essential. Not only do their specific observations prompt changes by Eliot but they provide an occasion for Eliot to engage in collaborative conversations that ultimately provided him with a way to bring the creative process to a successful conclusion. Eliot did not restrict his collaboration on the plays to his work with Browne, even though he remained the major influence. As with Eliot’s other works, another tier of secondary collaborators emerged. Their efforts show to what degree Eliot invited trusted auditors to help shape portions of his texts because he realized they were necessary to his method of creation.


161

The range of involvement is also quite extraordinary. Associates like Doone offered significant structural changes, such as the addition of a scene to Sweeney Agonistes already mentioned or his liberating suggestion that Eliot personify the conflicts in Becket’s mind in the form of Tempters (MP 43). The final benediction at the end of The Rock resulted from Martin Shaw’s idea of repeating that section of a song already presented by the actors. This enabled much of the audience to join the cast singing the material at the initial production, which must have delighted Eliot, given his belief in involving his spectators in the dramatic action (31). The titles of Eliot’s plays often evolved over time, and he often cast about for suggestions, adopting recommendations of others on The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral (27, 55). Associates of Eliot often stepped in to assist with those areas that most perplexed the poet, like those involving staging. Realizing the much-altered third act of The Cocktail Party required additional lines that would signal overtly to the audience that two years had elapsed from the close of the previous act and that Edward and Lavinia had spent that time relatively peacefully, Henry Sherek convinced Eliot to pen lines in which Lavinia implores: ‘‘You know that we’ve given several parties / In the last two years. And I’ve attended all of them’’ (MP 218; CPP 424). Earlier, Ashley Dukes proposed a way to introduce characters in Murder in the Cathedral (MP 74). These secondary collaborators seemingly felt most authorized to offer assistance in areas with which Eliot had the least experience. This occurred when Geoffrey Faber read a draft of The Cocktail Party in which Reilly laments the routine of typical parents: ‘‘Breeding children whom they do not understand / And who will never understand them’’ (CPP 417). Faber objected strenuously to these lines in a letter of 25 August 1949 to Eliot, suggesting they were the play’s one major flaw because they failed to describe accurately the conditions of marriage and parenthood, at least in his own experience.27 Despite Faber’s complaint, the lines remained in the play. Eliot did allow his language to be altered, as long as it served the larger purposes of the play. In his ‘‘Prefatory Note’’ to The Rock, Eliot writes somewhat archly that the Reverend Vincent Howson, the actor who played Ethelbert and one of the few players in the production with professional experience, ‘‘has so completely rewritten, amplified and condensed the dialogue between himself (‘Bert’) and his mates, that he deserves the title of joint author.’’28 It probably helped Howson’s cause that most of the modified material was prose rather than verse. Indeed, that ‘‘Prefatory Note’’ reveals much about Eliot’s conception of his authorial self at this early stage of his dramatic career. In it Eliot evinces an almost pathological

162


refusal to take responsibility for creation. He claims that he ‘‘cannot consider myself the author of the ‘play,’’’ insists that he operated ‘‘under . . . [the] direction’’ of and ‘‘submissive to’’ Browne, highlights the ‘‘collaboration of Dr. Martin Shaw,’’ amongst many other named contributors who follow, and finally concludes by identifying Howson as a co-author. If it seems somewhat curious to contemporary audiences for the author of The Waste Land to be trying to absolve himself of solitary authorship so vigorously a mere dozen years after the publication of that document, it is only so because many of Eliot’s readers have been and continue to be held hostage by the cult of the author surrounding him. It might help to set Eliot’s own dramatic experiments against those of a writer like Samuel Beckett, who famously insisted on controlling his dramatic texts not only right down to their stage directions but even from beyond the grave via instructions in his will seeking to restrict too-liberal interpretations of his work. Such behavior offers a stark reminder of a belief in final, authorial intent as inviolable. In contrast, Eliot’s thirty-year collaboration on verse drama seems suddenly radical and generous, unique and inclusive, flexible and contemporary. Finally, Eliot always kept his audience in mind as a potential collaborator in the drama. On the most basic level, theatregoers’ responses to individual performances encouraged Eliot’s constant fine-tuning of a play, a kind of embedded provisionality that occurs much more rarely in non-dramatic poetry. A telling example of audience-provoked revision occurred at the initial production of The Cocktail Party in Edinburgh, when the reference to Celia’s body decomposing after being eaten by ants caused such a stir that Browne and Henry Sherek, the producer, encouraged Eliot to eliminate the reference to smearing ‘‘the victims / With a juice that is attractive to the ants’’ (MP 226). Subsequent versions of the play contain a much tamer allusion to the attack; indeed, much of that final act was altered in response to audience reactions, as the production traveled from Edinburgh to New York to London (218). Ironically, it was upon the suggestion of Browne’s wife, Henzie Raeburn (who had played Ivy in the original production of The Family Reunion), that Eliot penned the original graphic reference, for she thought the audience would feel cheated if it did not know the details of Celia’s death (225). This example – one of many like it – illustrates both Eliot’s predilection for collaborative assistance and his willingness to alter his texts if given reason enough to do so. According to Henry Sherek, Eliot’s producer, the writer’s ‘‘readiness to re-write’’ in response to problems that surfaced in rehearsal was most unusual given ‘‘the obstinacy of some authors.’’29 Eliot never viewed the play’s script as a fixed object bounded by a rigid authorial control, even after he had


163

published the play; as Browne remarked once, in his experience Eliot ‘‘was the last man to regard his lines as sacred’’ (285). In fact, Eliot came to so depend on the response of an audience to help guide his rewriting that he decided after the publication of The Family Reunion (arranged to correspond exactly with the play’s first performance) never again to ready a play for publication before an opening. The continued revisions to subsequent editions of a play like Murder in the Cathedral illustrated for the author the pitfalls of pressing ahead without having first had the benefits of witnessing his audience’s feedback (145). Indeed, even in the 1938 fourth edition of the latter play, according to his note to its text, Eliot is making changes to his text specifically in response to issues arising out of performances of the play. While the presence of a live audience typically influenced decisions about setting, characterization, and word choice, this collaboration, too, embodied many of the same contradictions inherent in Eliot’s individual creative relationships, especially in regard to the level of agency the plays demand from spectators. Of all the plays, the early dramas probably reflect this most strongly. They, for example, aspire most overtly to the idealized communal relationship between artist and audience drawn up in essays like ‘‘Marie Lloyd’’ and the prose on Shakespeare. Eliot used his first full-length drama, Murder in the Cathedral, partly to explore the Christian supposition that the people of the congregation form the real foundation of the Church. In that play, the Chorus of the Women of Canterbury joins with the audience and participates in the action that surrounds Becket’s martyrdom. Indeed, the two primary focal points of the drama occur when the Archbishop delivers his Christmas Morning homily and when the murderous Knights later turn to address the audience. The audience collaborates in both moments, for it becomes the symbolic and literal focal point when its members are asked to judge the actions of the stage characters. The language and action actually demand a response from viewers, and in many respects those reactions help determine individualexperiences of the play. Sensitive to the drama of the Mass and its ability to involve the congregation in its action, Eliot benefited from having the original production of Murder in the Cathedral staged in the Chapel House at Canterbury. Becket’s actual death less than fifty yards away helped establish physical and historical associations that made the audience more receptive to the theme than it would otherwise be in a secular space. Spectators, performers, and playwright are inextricably linked by the English heritage foregrounded by the setting. In this respect, Eliot employs history successfully in the manner explained by Louise Blakeney Williams in her study of early

164


modernist ideologies of the past (though Eliot is not included in her rendering): ‘‘if [art’s] content was derived from a common national heritage of the past, art could appeal to a large audience and unify society by providing a subject matter that all people, rich and poor, would understand and enjoy.’’30 The language here echoes, of course, Eliot’s discussion of his theory of levels, in which intellectual and emotional content becomes integrated so as to allow the widest possible access to the drama. Given Eliot’s increasing interest in establishing a common national culture based on a set of shared values, it makes perfect sense that he sought structure, order, and unity through historical precedent. While some might see experiments like Murder in the Cathedral as not truly collaborative experiences – viewing them perhaps as liturgical exercises in which audience members are not collaborators in any active sense, but instead passive consumers of epiphanies staged for their edification and guidance: the work asks for their assent rather than active participation – it is clear that Eliot himself constructed the performance as a shared enterprise whose most important impact would be to unify his English audience in a collective processing of a historio-religious event. What is perhaps most surprising is that Eliot abandoned the successful method in subsequent plays, which demand much less of their audiences. Variable and fluid, the early dramatic texts, at least, invite their audiences into the process of creating meaning and also help set the stage for Eliot’s work on Four Quartets, which would serve as the culmination of his career collaborating with private and public auditors.

CHAPTER

5

The Possum and the ‘‘creating critick’’: Eliot’s collaboration with John Hayward

When Eliot’s friend and eventual roommate of over a decade, John Hayward, signed his lengthy letter of 1 August 1941 responding to Eliot’s first draft of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ he chose a rather curious way of doing so: ‘‘Love from yr. old creating critick: John’’ (CFQ 236). That self-characterization follows the lead of Eliot’s essays, which conceive of the critical, editorial act as a creative one. Part of Eliot’s intent in early collections like The Sacred Wood to reestablish criticism as a professional calling equal in stature to that of creative writing was motivated by the belief that the time had come to offer a counterpoint to the Romantic exaltation of the poet. But that valuation of the critical faculty also arose out of Eliot’s conception of the creative process in collaborative terms. He understood that the contributions of auditors had always helped give shape to his work by providing personal encouragement and critical direction. Yet Hayward’s self-representation in the 1941 letter is somewhat uncharacteristic, for he usually portrayed himself in modest terms when writing Eliot, tended to downplay his own critical faculties, and elevated the text above the personalities involved in the collaborative discussion. Even in the letter cited above, Hayward begins his comments by calling into question the usefulness of his perceptions: ‘‘whatever critical faculty I possess is momentarily distempered by the work it has [had] to do in the past fortnight’’ (234). But it is possible that by 1941, having now participated in the evolution of the previous two quartets and having become increasingly involved in their development, Hayward was feeling confident that his many comments, suggestions, questions, and objections regarding the drafts had made a substantial difference to their final success. In fact, as the manuscript materials show, Hayward became one of Eliot’s central collaborators, ultimately helping the poet over a longer period of time and on more of Eliot’s works than any other ally. He served in many of the same capacities as Pound had earlier and was thanked just as publicly, at least initially, though the tenor of that relationship would finally differ in some significant ways from the Eliot–Pound alliance. The major difference in this 165

166


culminating relationship is that Eliot, now collaborating fully from a position of authority, required a collaborator who could assist in the creative work but do so with total deference and admiration – in Hayward he found the perfect partner for this final stage of his career. In addition, Hayward was someone in whom Eliot could place his full trust, so much so that by 1938 the poet was asking Hayward to serve as his literary executor.1 Not threatening like Pound or Vivien, Hayward served as the compliant, devout servant. Unfortunately, that submissiveness ultimately allowed Eliot to erase Hayward from his life upon his marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957 (which apparently took place without his roommate’s knowledge) and even to minimize Hayward’s long-term assistance on his work through actions like dropping dedications in the publication of Four Quartets in Collected Poems that acknowledged his friend’s earlier support. THE TARANTULA TAKES HIS PLACE AT ELIOT’S SIDE

It is a commonplace to consider how the fifth section of each of Eliot’s quartets treats didactically problems embedded in the use of language. In that part of ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ the issue becomes the indeterminacy of words. They move, like music, ‘‘[o]nly in time.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘[w]ords strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish.’’ Ultimately, they ‘‘[d]ecay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still’’ (CPP 175). Although there are many ways to read these lines and that ambiguity itself acts out the message of the slipperiness of language, they also speak to Eliot’s career-long difficulty fixing specific meanings in his poetry. As a poet who often collected stray lines and fragments of verse, inserting them into different contexts to test their worth, Eliot understood that ‘‘[o]nly by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness’’ (175). For this reason, Eliot sought to discover in a poem like The Waste Land any number of ordering systems of allusion that he could overlay onto the poetry in the hope that the words would ‘‘stay in place.’’ He even added footnotes that suggested sources for those allusions and invoked external frames of reference as a kind of extratextual stabilizing device. As a system of signification that has no meaning in and of itself, language depends on external entities to activate its sense by establishing particular contexts. Recognizing the overwhelming demands of this task, Eliot habitually looked outside himself for agents that would assist him in constructing this system during the process of composition. Major auditors – Browne

The Possum and the ‘‘creating critick’’

167

on the plays, Pound on The Waste Land, and Hayward on Four Quartets – fulfilled that function by helping Eliot locate boundaries that had previously been obscured. Usually, the goal became to give form to that which was shapeless: so that ‘‘the words are finally arranged in the right way’’ (OPP 98) or ‘‘where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others’’ (CPP 197). Eliot conceived of that ideal condition as one of harmonious unity: ‘‘[t]he complete consort dancing together.’’ Under such circumstances, ‘‘[e]very phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph’’ (197). The burden to achieve such perfection causes the words in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ actually to ‘‘crack’’ under the strain of composition, so much so that their meaning crumbles away before the eyes of the poet and he is forced to search elsewhere for the proper sense. To make matters worse, the words fail to locate themselves permanently, for other ‘‘[s]hrieking voices / Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, / Always assail them’’ (175). This external presence furthers the pressure upon the signifying possibilities of language and enlarges the subsequent burden upon the poet. Such public voices (consisting of hostile critics and indifferent readers) accentuated Eliot’s long struggles with audience, from the early modernist distaste for a wide, popular audience to his later wish (partly unfulfilled) in the plays for wider acclaim. Here in ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ fresh from his first play, still unsure of what lay ahead, and not yet conceiving of the project as a set of four poems, Eliot overlaid onto the anxiety of creation a further insecurity about the public reception of his work. Indeed, that worry was not wholly misplaced. Right around the time of The Family Reunion, Virginia Woolf privately expressed doubts about the merits of Eliot’s second play, a stance that contrasts sharply with the polite reserve of her letters. After arguing in her diary that the drama has a ‘‘clever beginning, & some ideas; but they spin out: & nothing grips: all mist – a failure,’’ she cites a recently published negative review to reinforce her position.2 Eliot’s anguish over those ‘‘shrieking voices’’ partly explains why he depended on an initial private audience of auditors to test his work in the comfort and security of that discreet group, even if its members did nothing more than validate the work by simply reading it. Another way to understand the haunting lines on ‘‘shrieking voices’’ is to locate them internally as a manifestation of the pressures of composition. The goal then for the poet is to arrange the language in such a way as to achieve silence or stillness. The words still retain their power but are contained by the stabilizing influence of form. The achievement is thus that ‘‘appeasement’’ or ‘‘absolution’’ mentioned by Eliot in ‘‘The Three Voices of Poetry,’’ which describes the ‘‘bring[ing] to birth [the poem] in order to obtain

168


relief,’’ a moment bordering on ‘‘peace’’ (OPP 98, 100). These auditors helped facilitate that birth by relieving the weight of those interior voices, in effect countering from the outside, if only temporarily, the internal struggle. One of those auditors, John Hayward, was probably uniquely qualified to perform this role on Eliot’s most ambitious poetic project. Born in 1905, a generation after Eliot, Hayward was crippled by a form of muscular dystrophy that limited his movement as an adult and eventually restricted him to a wheelchair in his mid-twenties.3 After specializing in Modern Languages at Gresham’s School, Holt, Hayward attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he had the opportunity to meet the 1926 Clark Lecturer at an awkward breakfast with five other undergraduates. Ever the conversationalist, Hayward spoke up to interrupt the uncomfortable silence by asking, ‘‘Mr. Eliot, have you read the last volume of Proust?’’ Eliot replied, ‘‘No, I’m afraid I have not.’’4 In that same year, while still an undergraduate, Hayward published an edition of the complete works of Rochester, and so acquired a scholarly distinction at a relatively young age. Other editions would follow: one of Herrick, a couple of Swift, and most notably one of Donne’s Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1929). The last publication contains an introduction in which Hayward thanks Eliot, among others, for his advice.5 The Donne volume brought Hayward special renown, for not only was it immediately recognized as an example of brilliant editorial scholarship but it was coupled in a positive review in The Criterion with another edition of Donne, edited by Herbert Grierson, the academic who did the most to restore the reputation of the metaphysical poets during this time. That gave Eliot cause to associate Hayward in a 1931 essay with other accomplished Donne scholars, specifically commending his prose selections in the edition.6 Following his move to London after King’s, Hayward became a fixture in that city’s literary and social scene, continuing his writing and editing, producing editions and a few anthologies, and eventually becoming associated in 1952 with The Book Collector, a journal he helped direct and later edit until his death nine months after Eliot’s own passing. After King’s, Hayward resumed contact with Eliot in 1927, when he offered to do some reviewing for The Criterion. By the early 1930s, the two had become such close friends that Hayward felt he could propose in 1935 that they share a flat, since Eliot had left his wife upon departing to America to deliver the Norton lectures at Harvard in 1932–3.7 Both men were regular participants in a social group (consisting of Hayward, Eliot, Geoffrey Faber, and Frank Morley) whose members, mostly directors at


169

Faber, shared an interest in poetry, Sherlock Holmes, and high- and lowbrow humor. They usually met at 22 Bina Gardens, home of Hayward, which drew visits from a wide range of literati. One such guest, Virginia Woolf, drew a portrait of Hayward in her diary entry of 19 March 1937 that shows why his temperament and surroundings might have appealed to Eliot, both as professional collaborator and eventual roommate. Hayward, writes Woolf, ‘‘sits askew in a 3 cornered chair. Cant get up. His room is an uncreative room: spik & span: too tidy. Carrington painted him a book case: the books all ranged in sizes. 2 glass horses on the Victorian mahogany table: flowers separately springing: a dish of carefully arranged fruit.’’ After considering the apartment, Woolf turns her attention to Hayward’s visage: ‘‘Has a great thick soft red lip: frozen green eyes; & angular attitudes like a monkey on a string.’’8 Hayward spent most of the war at Merton Hall, Cambridge, where, while continuing his various literary pursuits, he also taught at a girls’ school and produced Love’s Helicon, an anthology exploring the various facets of love. After that, he and Eliot finally did become roommates in a flat in Chelsea at 19 Carlyle Mansions, from March 1946 until January 1957, when Eliot married for a second time. As Lyndall Gordon observes, during those eleven years of rooming together, Hayward’s role in Eliot’s life expanded drastically. He evolved into not only a literary collaborator, but the primary protector of Eliot’s privacy and his fellow sufferer (ENL 208–11). The character of the Eliot–Hayward relationship is extremely complicated, and a comprehensive treatment of their years together remains to be written. One observer, Anthony Powell, a contemporary of the two men, feels that biographies (like Peter Ackroyd’s fine study, for example) underemphasize the importance of this cohabitative arrangement, and he argues that each man had a significant effect upon the other. That influence extended beyond the literary and social realms, as well, to include matters of health, so that the relationship developed, on one level, into one of hypochondriacal collaboration.9 Eliot’s own reading of the alliance would seem to reinforce that view, for he once signed an advance copy of The Confidential Clerk on 14 March 1954, ‘‘Inscribed to John Hayward, the clerk’s most kind nurse by T. S. Eliot.’’10 On the other hand, given Hayward’s limited movement and Eliot’s own reclusiveness, the men spent less time together than one might expect. While Hayward would often entertain or conduct business in the sitting room of their flat, Eliot would just as often retire behind the closed door of his own bedroom. The two would sometimes attend parties together and Eliot would take Hayward for a weekly stroll in his wheelchair. Powell’s reminiscence

170


captures the contradictory disposition of Eliot’s companion: ‘‘Hayward, whose temperament was at once nervous and dominating, could at times approach the positively tyrannical. Indeed, holding court at a party, he had much about him of Ham [sic], the seated autocrat in Samuel Beckett’s End Game [sic], regal yet immobile, continually dispensing a rich flow of comment, imperious, erudite, malicious.’’11 The main advantage to Eliot of such a personality, aside from possessing a partner in suffering, was in being able to depend on Hayward’s strong presence to deflect attention away from himself, relieving him of the burden of public performance. Gordon suggests of the alliance that ‘‘the benefit was in Eliot’s favour. Hayward protected him from the outside world: for some years he took all phone calls’’ (ENL 208). Hayward became, in effect, responsible for controlling access to Eliot. He carried out that role even in matters such as how Eliot would be portrayed in his Times obituary. Although C. Day Lewis ultimately wrote the text, Hayward provided three pages of facts on which Lewis based the piece and he extensively annotated Lewis’s draft of the obituary.12 Hayward’s sharp, erudite wit, his scholarly love of language, and his extensive knowledge of English poetry sealed the friendship and allowed Eliot to qualify Hayward as fit to assist him in his creative and critical undertakings. This process of certification was essential in establishing Hayward, in Eliot’s eyes, as a potential collaborator who had, like Pound, the proper training to serve as a worthy reader in the poet’s conversational circle. One anecdote, cited by Gardner, illustrates not only Eliot’s habit of seeking pre-publication audiences amongst his private circle to test out his poetry, but his tendency to enforce fierce restrictions on just who was sufficiently entitled to have his or her critical opinion taken seriously. The retrospective account, unearthed in the papers of William Plomer, details a reading of ‘‘East Coker’’ that occurred apparently in the winter of 1940, soon before the poem’s initial appearance in the Easter supplement of The New English Weekly: Leonard said that when Tom Eliot was living in Emperor’s Gate (‘‘surrounded by curates’’) he sent the Woolves a typescript of one of his longer poems (I think one of the Four Quartets) and sent copies to Mary Hutchinson and McKnight Kauffer. He invited them all to read it critically and then assemble and make their opinions known to him. Whatever Mary Hutchinson and Kauffer said he dismissed as of no interest, but when it was Virginia’s turn she said she thought too many lines ended with a present participle. ‘‘That’s a good criticism, Virginia,’’ he said. Leonard remarked sardonically that, all the same, ‘‘Tom only made one or two alterations.’’ (CFQ 5 n. 5)


171

Leonard Woolf ’s final observation misses the point, at least in the context of the model of collaboration drawn in this study. The actual discussion of a poem served just as valuable a function for Eliot as alterations to a manuscript. It reasserted the Renaissance ideal in which drafts are performative scripts that become the occasion for conversational commerce. That exchange helped reaffirm the identities of the participants, an especially compelling point for a poet so tortured by his own artistic persona. It gave Eliot an opportunity to consult his work, but do so from a different angle. No longer the solitary artist suffering under the burdens of composition, Eliot could operate as a social being choreographing responses to his work. Given the discussion above concerning the anxiety with which Eliot associated the fixing of his language, such occasions allowed him to confront his material through the collaborative framework of certified readers like Woolf and Hayward. Other contributors to Four Quartets included Frank Morley, who annotated a draft of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’; Herbert Read, who introduced Morley to Eliot, and who commented on a draft of ‘‘East Coker’’; and Geoffrey Faber, the most active reader after Hayward, who furnished especially helpful criticism on drafts of ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ and ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ Faber’s reading of a late draft of ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ is of particular interest, since some of his commentary caused Eliot to alter the form of the poem as it was being prepared for The New English Weekly. Faber annotated fairly widely by questioning confusing phrases, offering alternative phrasings, objecting to awkward syntax, and prompting the correction of Eliot’s spelling errors.13 Like Hayward, he often flagged Eliot’s repetitive phrasing. Faber also departed from Hayward’s example by submitting much lengthier and less definitive glosses, even though the editorial voice does become more assured as he works his way through the poem. On the other hand, as with Hayward’s comments, Eliot was perfectly capable of ignoring Faber’s objections. For example, he passed over both men’s objection to the inversion in the line ‘‘often together heard.’’ But perhaps Faber’s most useful role was in highlighting particularly problematic points in the poem, and so in effect helping actuate change by giving Eliot the impetus he required to rework a line. This collaborative outcome fits into Eliot’s earlier constructions in the prose criticism of authorial passivity in search of prompting. One example of this occurs when Faber responds to the line, ‘‘And through the fog the pretemporal ground swell / Clangs’’ by underlining ‘‘pretemporal.’’ He provides a fairly lengthy and tortured discussion regarding whether or not he understands the image, and complains about the terminal ‘‘al’’ deflating the effect of the same sound that concludes the line.

172


This results in Eliot rewriting the line to achieve a more direct, less confusing image: ‘‘And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning, / Clangs / The bell.’’ The change also alters the meaning somewhat by relocating the ground swell in a more specific, actual time. No longer lurking in some shadowy, unknowable state of pretemporality, it now is tied specifically to both the present moment and the beginning of time. Finally, Faber was not above encouraging his colleague as a way of softening editorial criticism, providing a much needed enthusiastic response that so helped Eliot during the difficult time of composition. He began one objection to the tone of a passage by noting, ‘‘I find all this passage very impressive’’ (CFQ 133). Hayward’s scholarly success had already made him a suitable candidate to serve as one of Eliot’s auditors. But just as important was his participation in the Bina Gardens group that had started to meet in Hayward’s flat from the mid-1930s onwards. These occasions are memorialized in Noctes Binanianæ, a privately printed collection of verses celebrating the personalities involved.14 The poems, composed primarily in 1937–8, have usually been either ignored by Eliot’s readers or dismissed as childish diversions not suitably dignified for the future Nobel laureate. Ackroyd calls the whole affair ‘‘sufficiently tedious in an English public school fashion . . . It does not make particularly amusing reading.’’15 Yet I would argue the document is enormously useful in a number of ways. The volume, for example, offers insight into the nature of the Eliot–Hayward association at a time when that friendship was maturing. Importantly, that relationship is deepening within the confines of a group of male friends that enacted the Renaissance exchange culture in which manuscripts circulated as performative surfaces, making themselves available for alteration. Such a situation made Eliot unusually comfortable and it helped him to see further the benefits of non-traditional forms of authorship, especially those with a grounding in collaborative approaches to composition. By invoking the tradition of male conversational exchange by adapting its title from the Blackwood’s series Noctes Ambrosianæ, the collection also associates creativity with the communal. In a handwritten note to his copy of the pamphlet, John Hayward noted that the poems circulated in manuscript form among the various authors for a number of months until they were printed, circumstances acknowledged in the subtitle of the volume, in appropriately mock-archaic vocabulary and syntax that consciously invoke the tradition: ‘‘Certain Voluntary and Satyrical Verses and Compliments as were lately Exchang’d between some of the Choicest Wits of the Age.’’ The sequence in Noctes Binanianæ acts out this premise. Consisting of a series of poems


173

composed by different hands, to which Eliot contributed eleven items, they are arranged so that individual pieces serve as answers to the poem that precedes them. The poems focus upon the personae the men adopted in their meetings, as represented by the nicknames that correspond to each individual’s personality. Hayward appears as Spider or Tarantula, Morley as Whale, and Faber as Coot. Eliot surfaces either as Possum or Elephant, in honor of his prodigious memory, especially when it came to reciting whole sections verbatim from the Holmes canon, one of the group’s central, shared preoccupations. In recognition of this talent, Eliot’s bookplate pictured an elephant’s head on it. While such monikers might at first seem ridiculously juvenile, they served an important function as masks that freed up the individuals to perform under these temporarily artificial circumstances. A carnivalesque release accompanied the adoption of the animalistic characters and protected the participants (who, after all, had professional relationships, too) as they poked fun at each other’s bodily idiosyncrasies, in some cases in brutally aggressive fashion. In a poem by Morley called ‘‘A Refutation’’ (it directs Coot to praise Whale’s efforts for the Firm rather than Elephant’s), the writer makes a scathing reference to Eliot’s vow of celibacy as well as the poet’s large, sensitive proboscis by offering that his only working ‘‘part’’ is his long trunk. In a later piece, Eliot draws a portrait of a maniacal tarantula, a revolting creature that comes out only at night, ready to sting his prey with a piercing gaze, only to have that look collapse under the weight of his muscular disorder. Eliot’s self-representations are just as deprecatory, and they offer one of the few places in all of his work where Eliot writes about his own physical appearance. This fact alone testifies to the liberating quality of this exercise. The opening poem of the collection, for example, emphasizes Eliot’s conspicuous ears (so much so that they propel him along if the wind catches them correctly), his prominent nose, his false teeth, his fondness for cheese and solitaire, and his abhorrence of writing by hand and preference for typing. These exchanges ultimately helped sanction Hayward as a chosen male collaborator, able to hold his own with Eliot in whimsical poetic language, which was the accepted currency of this small circle. Although physically incapacitated, Hayward was the member of the Bina Gardens group who shepherded Noctes through the publication process, soliciting manuscripts, arranging the order of the poems, and finally distributing the twenty-five numbered copies. Hayward extended the tone of mock scholarly seriousness in his own copy of the verse collection by annotating in his own hand certain obscure allusions, as if he were preparing for his future role of

174


glossing the French editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets. As with these later projects, Hayward used the majority of the notes to identify either individuals or place names. He typically reveals the identity of nicknamed persons or tries to indicate the relevance of named writers, as when he describes Auden and Spender as two ‘‘young poets protected by the author’’ of the poem ‘‘The O’Possum Strikes Back.’’16 Hayward is preoccupied with significant locations as well, making sure to indicate where Faber spent his weekends or revealing the identity of Morley’s favorite wine shop. Yet, in keeping with the combative tone of this decidedly masculine enterprise, Hayward also makes sure to reinforce the belittling of each participant’s habits mentioned in the text proper. He makes fun of Faber’s poor golf game and love of sunbathing or Eliot’s fondness for Burgundy and whisky. In retrospect, one immediately wonders what Hayward’s motivation was for providing commentary on such an obscure, private document that has little meaning for anyone other than the participants. But that feature helps foreground the curious way in which Hayward viewed his collaborative relationship with Eliot. He acted as the keeper of his reputation and also as a link to the outside world, all the while within the guise, vocabulary, and conventions of scholarly detachment. HAYWARD AS EDITOR

The editorial correspondence of Eliot and Hayward in 1939 also consisted of somewhat weightier matters than the publication of Noctes Binanianæ. It was during this time that Hayward reviewed some of Martin Browne’s comments on The Family Reunion.17 This occurred on the eve of the decade in which Hayward would become Eliot’s foremost confidant, collaborator, and finally, editor, that last role publicly signifying Hayward’s place as an indispensable assistant. Indeed, the financial arrangements for one of these projects, which dictated that Eliot and Hayward each receive fifty percent of the royalties from the publication, demonstrate a symbolic and actual contractual alliance between collaborators engaged in a shared enterprise.18 Although the profession of editing has perhaps lost some of its cachet in contemporary valuations of literary occupations, in Eliot’s opinion the task was central. He viewed the act as ‘‘a piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism’’ (SE 281), which itself was an activity in The Sacred Wood that Eliot tried to equate with the creative endeavor. In an important unpublished speech marking the opening of the Livre Anglais Exhibition Bibliothe`que Nationale in Paris on 16 November 1951, Eliot was even more outspoken in his defense of scholarly editing. He held up books as


175

tools in the hands of writers, but tools that had little value if they were not first honed and sharpened under the expert guidance of an editor. Similarly, authors hope that their own works, according to Eliot, will ‘‘become tools for later generations; and he depends upon the scholar to safeguard them to this end.’’19 During the period from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Hayward was extraordinarily active in his advancement of Eliot’s work, not only collaborating on Four Quartets, but preparing a 160-page collection of Eliot’s criticism, writing supplementary notes for French editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, compiling material for a privately printed edition of Eliot’s juvenilia (Poems Written in Early Youth), and assisting Eliot with the revised second British edition of his translation of Anabasis. For the first of those projects, Points of View, Hayward gathered together mostly excerpts from Eliot’s prose criticism through 1939 and separated the writing into four sections: ‘‘Literary Criticism,’’ ‘‘Dramatic Criticism,’’ ‘‘Individual Authors,’’ and ‘‘Religion and Society.’’ If one ever required evidence that the editorial act is a creative one, this volume should suffice. Only two of the offerings – ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ and ‘‘The Penseés of Pascal’’ – are printed in full, leaving it to Hayward to shape the presentation of material in the remaining 115 pages. Not only did he remove passages as short as one paragraph from their original context, but he assigned titles to the selections, so that a brief passage from the 1927 essay ‘‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’’ on the unity of feeling and thought in Greek drama becomes stamped with the imposing heading ‘‘Greek Drama,’’ at once suggesting this is the representative comment on the topic from the pen of Eliot.20 What is so remarkable is that despite Eliot’s many warnings to readers throughout his career that they must bear in mind the unity of a literary text, must survey the whole of an author’s work, and must be wary of taking material out of context, his approval of Hayward’s project suggests Eliot was willing to give sanctioned collaborators considerable latitude to operate within his work and even shape its eventual development, outcome, and reception. So although Eliot had by this time written dozens of pages of criticism on Shakespeare, the only essay providing ‘‘representative passages . . . designed as an introduction to the author’s work in prose,’’ as the editor’s note explains, are two passages from the 1932 essay on John Ford, stressing the unity and development of Shakespeare’s work.21 Hayward’s sequencing of the essays in a particular order also affected their meaning and thus helped shape their reception. Even the very title of Points of View ironically highlights the assault on notions of single authorship that the project unintentionally advances. Although it implies that the reader

176


can expect the pages to comprise the ideas of Eliot, they are rigorously contained, shaped, and even altered by the editorial sieve through which Hayward has passed them. While it is clear that neither man intended the double entendre in the title, the viewpoints, in this case, are those of author and editor, literary critic and his collaborator. The volume exposes Hayward’s own prejudices concerning Eliot’s work – The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism seems a favorite text, as it is represented in nine different selections, the most of any work. It also yields enormous insight into the way Hayward perceived Eliot as a writer and the persona he hoped to shape and deliver to the public in this highly crafted presentation. Following Pound’s role as an advocate, Hayward tries to stress Eliot’s versatility and development by classifying his work along the four major lines mentioned above. In the ‘‘Literary Criticism’’ chapters, of the fourteen selections, only three are not drawn from the early to mid 1930s, suggesting Hayward wanted to present Eliot as a voice of mid-career reason rather than as the name-calling reviewer of The Athenæum days. The slightest category follows next, that on ‘‘Dramatic Criticism,’’ which contains a mere ten pages. The narrowness of this section surprises, since the topic had been a major preoccupation from the beginning of Eliot’s career and, by this point, he had authored two major plays and had had a hand in two other dramatic pieces. The longest portion of the book – that on individual authors – is unusual in that its first selection consists not of a treatment of a particular writer, as in the remaining ten contributions, but of a passage detailing a model of literary history: the discussion of the dissociation of sensibility from ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets.’’ That choice not only betrayed Hayward’s fondness for the metaphysicals, but it revealed his belief that readings of individual authors in the subsequent ten pieces should be understood in light of Eliot’s system drawn up in that early essay. The category also highlights Eliot’s tendency to examine and reshuffle the canon, armed with the authority of the well-read, historically informed, practicing poet with taste.22 The other curious feature of the third part is the printing of ‘‘The Penseés of Pascal’’ – a meditation on Pascal’s life, French literary history, and Christian philosophy – as one of only two essays reproduced in their entirety. This was one of the most personal decisions of the editor and most likely a result of Hayward’s interest in and knowledge of French literature, language, and culture. The final grouping, ‘‘Religion and Society,’’ acknowledges these preoccupations of Eliot’s post-conversion criticism. In it, the inclusion of the relatively early ‘‘Marie Lloyd’’ properly tries to ground some of these interests in Eliot’s ideas of the 1920s. A brief passage entitled ‘‘War,’’ from an obscure essay, seems almost required given the circumstances in


177

1941, even though Eliot consciously avoided discussing or writing overtly about the topic for most of his career. At best, the essay seems a forced selection that, in the end, concerns itself more with the causes of war and their location in the spiritual corruption of society than with martial conflict itself. Hayward’s efforts on Points of View make it clear that Eliot afforded his collaborator an enormous amount of responsibility and freedom when it came to evaluating his work and making careful, representative, thoughtful selections from that material. Although Eliot himself never reprinted After Strange Gods, he sanctioned Hayward’s selection of three passages from the text in Points of View. In the preface to a later volume, On Poetry and Poets, Eliot would pay tribute to Hayward’s suggestion that he include the 1926 TLS essay on John Davies. While this is not that remarkable in and of itself, when set against the contents of the rest of the volume it becomes striking. All of the other chosen essays had been written after the publication of Selected Essays (1932), the previous major collection of Eliot’s prose. They also all derive from the period after Eliot had converted to the Anglican Church, after he had taken British citizenship, and after he had staged his first drama. It is a testament to the authority Eliot periodically ceded Hayward that he was willing to break up the essential unity of On Poetry and Poets by enacting Hayward’s suggestion. Eliot would authorize an expanded version of his literary criticism in the 1953 volume, Selected Prose, also edited by Hayward in much the same fashion as Points of View. Hayward retained the methodology of arranging the material into categories and employed the same process of providing headings for many of the excerpted selections. He signified that procedure in the table of contents by attaching an asterisk to his invented titles to distinguish them from essays that retained Eliot’s own designation. This new volume encompasses a much wider scope than Points of View, drawing from essays written between 1917 and 1951, and printing eleven of them in full, partly a response to the volume’s publisher, Penguin, which had wanted an edition less dependent on excerpts than Points of View and one that would run between 145 and 175 pages in all.23 The project continues to reveal much about the relationship between the two men. It maintains the patterns established in Points of View and provides an updating of the standing of Hayward and Eliot a dozen years after that first anthology. For example, Hayward once again prints the three excerpts from After Strange Gods, even adding a fourth to Selected Prose, one on ‘‘Man and his Environment’’ in which Eliot recalls his ‘‘local feelings’’ on revisiting New England. Hayward’s bias against the dramatic criticism

178


continues. He eradicates the entire (brief ) section previously devoted to drama, retaining only three scant items from that category. This might not seem unusual until one recognizes that of the only five selections from Points of View that did not make it into Selected Prose, four of them originated in the ‘‘dramatic criticism’’ category. Hayward does attempt to counter his slighting of Shakespeare in Points of View. He adds two more discussions of the dramatist to the ‘‘Individual Authors’’ cluster in Selected Prose. He also corrects the curious omission of any material on Milton in Points of View by offering two complete contributions, ‘‘Milton I’’ and ‘‘Milton II,’’ titles invented by Hayward that survive in subsequent volumes like On Poetry and Poets. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism remains a favorite text, with eleven representations, appropriate enough since Hayward tended to stress Eliot’s ability to illustrate the practical uses – literary, social, historical, and religious – of poetry and criticism. Other than in his titling of the essays, Hayward’s most powerful influence over the pieces is in deciding how to excerpt passages from the original, full-length essays so as to shape their presentation to the reader – the method in this volume, with a few minor exceptions, follows the text constructed in Points of View. In the four passages from After Strange Gods, which cannot be understood fully outside of their context within that difficult volume, Hayward’s decisions about what material will represent that book shape readers’ perceptions of it enormously. In other cases, Hayward’s exclusions combined with seemingly trivial printing errors creep in to alter Eliot’s text radically. The extract from ‘‘Blake’’ (1920) in Selected Prose, for example, reproduces exactly the text of the Points of View selection, which marked omitted material with a line break. Yet the 1953 version omits the line break, runs sentences together, and therefore gives no indication that a major portion of Eliot’s original had been dropped. In this instance, the eradicated passage consists of a key discussion of the characteristics of Blake’s early poetry, essential to an essay about the development of his mind. A second omission, on how Blake as a ‘‘naked’’ man is subject to certain poetic challenges, especially those involving long poems, is marked simply by an asterisk in the middle of the page. Eliot had repeated the word ‘‘naked’’ four times in the original piece in The Athenæum and it appeared in the title of that review. We can only speculate about Hayward’s reasons for suppressing this interesting material. It is written in the poet’s least reserved voice and offers significant insight into Eliot’s own poetic struggles – perhaps that is reason enough. Certainly Hayward’s introduction in exceptionally frank language tries to explain away some of the unattractive sides of Eliot’s critical persona; its ‘‘dogmatic assertions,’’ ‘‘didacticism,’’ and


179

‘‘occasionally pontifical, or seemingly condescending’’ attitude are all attributable to foibles or can be erased by Eliot’s well-meaning intentions.24 Yet more important for my study, this moment and the entire methodology highlight a casualness about editorial procedures in both volumes, and suggest a certain attitude toward texts as malleable, provisional works that can be molded to fit specific circumstances depending on the needs of different audiences. Such a view grows directly out of Eliot’s experiences over the years with collaborators who have assisted the poet on his work and with other writers who have benefited from Eliot’s own discerning commentary on their efforts. In the latter case, for example, a writer like Marianne Moore, whose Selected Poems of 1935 was edited by Eliot, had her poem ‘‘The Fish’’ stripped, according to George Bornstein, of its ‘‘original bibliographic and contextual codes . . . to be replaced by ones that emphasize formalism and aesthetics over social engagement and politics,’’ simply due to its reordering within the volume and the way in which Eliot characterized the poem in the introduction.25 Hayward’s influence upon Eliot’s prose sometimes reached beyond just overseeing the repackaging of previously published material. In fact, the collaboration with Hayward on essays like Eliot’s 1951 preface to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots has been little remarked upon, a surprising fact given the extensiveness of Hayward’s direct alterations of a text like that. In fact, the sweep of the comments on the proof copy of this essay, held in the Hayward Bequest at King’s College, is breathtaking. They extend from rather mundane issues such as proper paragraphing, simple grammatical errors involving verb tense and agreement, punctuation problems, and layout difficulties, to more substantive areas concerning repetition, awkward syntax, stylistic quirks, and word choice. Hayward’s commentary resulted in changes by Eliot in all of these areas. He hit Eliot especially hard on the repetition problem, circling like words in different places and drawing long lines connecting them in excess of a half dozen times. When Hayward saw the word ‘‘person’’ twice in a sentence he brought it to Eliot’s attention. Eliot’s use of ‘‘struck’’ and ‘‘striking’’ in a sentence discussing a paradox in Weil’s personality prompted a similar reaction. Eliot responded to Hayward’s objection by cutting ‘‘striking.’’ Hayward was also bothered by Eliot’s habit of beginning sentences with ‘‘And.’’ He sometimes flagged so many words in a clause that it forced Eliot to adopt a much more concise and powerful wording. This occurred with Eliot’s original definition of collectivity – ‘‘the sub-human monster into which modern totalitarianism in all its forms tries to transform the people’’ – which resulted in the revised definition: ‘‘the monster created by modern totalitarianism.’’26 As for

180


wording problems, Eliot sometimes adopts Hayward’s suggested alternative right off. At other times he seems stubbornly resistant, choosing a different rendering almost, it seems, so as not to give in to Hayward’s control. Strangely, Eliot’s own copy of the proofs is very lightly annotated, consisting of two changes in punctuation, the deletion of a terminal ‘‘s’’ and a four-word phrase, and the insertion of a paragraph mark and ‘‘be.’’ Hayward makes as many changes in the first paragraph of his copy. This indicates that Hayward did much of the editorial grunt work at this point, since the final printed version demonstrates that the majority of Hayward’s almost 100 annotations were either adopted outright or responsible for causing an alteration in the text in some way. Eliot responded to Hayward’s efforts in his typical fashion, using the emendations as prompts, employing some of them in a straightforward fashion. In other places, he uses his friend’s struggle to revise a sentence as a signal to himself to rework the lines in an entirely new way. The enthusiasm with which Hayward attacked a text was so great, in fact, that Eliot wrote him a subsequent note dated 24 December 1951, in which he announced: ‘‘For your files. At this stage, comment would be unwelcome,’’ that last word heavily underlined by the writer.27 Although Eliot usually appreciated Hayward’s collaboration, he wanted to signal clearly when such assistance on a project was not required any further. HAYWARD’S ROLE IN FRENCH TRANSLATIONS OF ELIOT’S POETRY

Hayward’s standing in the eyes of Eliot was assured enough by the 1940s that he secured the task of creating supplemental notes for Pierre Leyris’s translation of The Waste Land, which appeared in the 1947 edition of Poe`mes 1910–1930. The edition places the English version of Eliot’s poetry against a facing page of translated verse and breaks up that pattern only at the end of La Terre Vaine. It sets Eliot’s original notes in regular type and intersperses additional notes by Hayward (also translated by Leyris) in italics, with those additions being keyed to poem’s line numbers in the same fashion as Eliot’s commentary. Though the alternate typefaces of the two separately authored notes suggest difference, the physical running together of the texts and their like attachment to line numbers frustrates that intention. As Leyris remarks in his note at the beginning of the section, ‘‘Ces notes ont une double origine’’ [‘‘these notes have a double origin’’], an observation with rich, unintended multiple meanings.28 The intrusion of Hayward into the actual text of The Waste Land a quarter century after its


181

initial publication illustrates yet again Eliot’s comfort with the essential provisionality of poetic meaning, so much so that in the case of this translation he is willing not only to allow a severe alteration of part of The Waste Land that has provoked fervent critical discussion, but to invite another author into that territory to modify it utterly. In fact, Hayward’s presence hovers so strongly over Poe`mes 1910–1930 that Leyris dedicated the volume to him. The project reveals Hayward as an authorial double, one who occupies the space once taken by Eliot when the poet originally constructed notes to his poem to position its reception, to establish his authority, to wrestle with the poem’s multiple voices, and even to inject some humor into the stark landscape that makes up The Waste Land. That is not to say that Eliot turned his roommate loose to rework the entire poem. Rather, Eliot was deeply involved in this transcontinental collaboration, meeting Leyris in both France and England for working sessions on the poem, reviewing and annotating a draft of Leyris’s translation of The Waste Land with Hayward, and contributing at least two specific alterations in wording involving the title (La Terre Vaine for Leyris’s original La Terre Gaste) and the ‘‘Unreal City’’ designation (‘‘Cite´ Fantoˆme’’).29 Yet as in the Points of View collection, Hayward asserts his critical authority when given the chance. In this case that takes place right at the start of the notes section, where Hayward presages Eliot’s notes with two passages of criticism that immediately force the reader to point his or her interpretation in a particular direction, much the way an epigraph to a poem or novel prejudices a reader’s response before he or she confronts the primary text. More remarkable is the tone of definitiveness employed by Hayward in introducing the notes. He heads the two passages ‘‘Sujet’’ and ‘‘Technique,’’ as if lecturing a group of pliable undergraduates, the very tone of the Points of View edition, which itself was designed as a sort of introduction to Eliot. The first quotation is taken (uncited) from the work of Helen Gardner and, as promised by the heading, tells the reader what the poem is about: ‘‘Le proble`me de l’histoire et du mećanisme du temps est l’un des grands the`mes de La Terre Vaine’’ [‘‘The problem of history and the time process is one of the great themes of The Waste Land ’’]. Not only does the passage instruct the reader about the general theme, it attempts to identify a more complicated subtext: ‘‘il s’y meˆle au de´sir du salut cosmique et personnel’’ [‘‘it is mingled with the desire for cosmic and personal salvation’’].30 The effect is startling because it runs completely counter to Eliot’s own reticent approach in the original incarnation of The Waste Land and in subsequent comments about the poem in which he vehemently insisted that the reader find his or her own way into and through the text. Whereas

182


Eliot had always stressed the openness and flexibility of the poem’s boundaries, Hayward’s first critical act in this ‘‘version’’ of The Waste Land is to close up many of those gaps. This exercise continues in subsequent notes (discussed below) that incessantly try to position the poem in very definite ways and guide the reader’s attention in particular directions. Although Leyris saw Hayward’s notes as ‘‘un faisceau d’explications qui éclairent la structure, les allusions et le cadre londonien du poe`me sans violer son secret’’ [‘‘a beam of explanations which illuminate the structure, the allusions, and the London framework of the poem without violating its secret’’], they certainly bring the reader much closer to unlocking that mystery.31 In fact, Hayward’s rendering of the poem was most likely influenced by other academics beyond Gardner. His personal copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935 contains extensive annotations in his own hand that match up almost exactly with the notes to the Leyris edition and tell us much about Hayward’s biases concerning the poem’s content. One such note, for example, reminds Hayward to consult Mathiessen, Leavis, and Brooks; yet these critical influences remain interred in Hayward’s private copy, for they do not surface overtly in the French commentary.32 The second prefatory note included by Hayward, under ‘‘Technique,’’ is drawn from Eliot’s own work, his 1942 essay ‘‘The Music of Poetry.’’ It contains Eliot’s discussion, in the last paragraph of the essay, of how poetry might be organized around some of the same patterns found in music. However, Hayward omits a sentence in the middle of the passage where Eliot cautions readers about making too much of the music-poetry analogy. Following his work with Eliot on Four Quartets a few years earlier, Hayward must have been particularly taken by the idea of a long poem or sequence containing different movements and different themes with complex relationships to each other: ‘‘il y a des possibilite´s de transitions dans un poe`me comparables aux diffe´rents mouvements d’une symphonie ou d’un quatuor; il y a des possibilite´s d’arrangement contrapunctique’’ [‘‘there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement’’].33 In encouraging readers to heed the poem’s transitional moments and thematic juxtapositions, Hayward is imposing an artificial structure upon a sequence written over a series of years. It recalls Eliot’s own attempts in the notes to The Waste Land to suggest an overriding mythic framework. In addition, in citing Eliot’s essay, Hayward calls on the authority of the author to position interpretations of the poem in a very particular direction, leaving less room for the reader to operate.


183

Throughout the subsequent notes Hayward reveals an interest in clarifying, explicating, solidifying, actions the original version of the poem resists. He often puts forward simple explanations about a place described (‘‘La sce`ne est Munich et ses environs’’ [‘‘The scene is Munich and its environs’’]), locates the source of an individual character (‘‘Le Marin Pheńicien. Type du dieu de la fertilite´ que l’on jette annuellement dans la mer pour symboliser la mort de l’e´te´ ’’ [‘‘The Phoenician Sailor. A type of fertility god that is thrown into the sea annually to symbolize the death of summer’’]), or highlights sources of Eliot’s imagery beyond those identified by the poet. This is especially evident in Hayward’s elucidation of the many British allusions unfamiliar to French readers, an aspect of Hayward’s work that pleased Leyris.34 Twenty of Hayward’s fifty-seven notes consist of annotations of specifically British allusions, most of them place names or locales. These geographical glosses also tend to be the most extensive notes: the body of them easily makes up more than half of the commentary. But the unintended effect is to foreground the Britishness of the poem by underscoring that feature in the notes, while minimizing other national resonances. For example, Eliot originally attached a note to the lines ‘‘‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!’’ (CPP 63) that asks readers to consult the Dirge in Webster’s The White Devil. Although Cornelia’s lines in that play refer to a wolf, Eliot has in effect domesticated the image. If we take Eliot at his word that Weston’s From Ritual to Romance helped influence much of the symbolism of the poem, then the metaphor also evokes Sirius, the Dog Star, for Weston points out the importance of Sirius to the fertility rites of the Egyptians. But Hayward’s addition to Eliot’s note forestalls that broader echo, instead grounding the scene in a specific national setting: ‘‘Le jardin suburbain. L’Anglais et son chien’’ [‘‘The suburban garden. The English man and his dog’’].35 The commentary actually runs at cross-purposes to some of Eliot’s stated goals for the poem. It elevates a narrow, almost personal, native perspective over the international and broadly mythic. Just as Pound’s editorial efforts on the drafts of the poem sought to suppress the overt Englishness of the poem, Hayward restored that emphasis belatedly in the foreign edition. These notes give Hayward enormous freedom in helping shape the visual landscape of The Waste Land, imposing his historical and geographical vision upon the poem at key moments. In many places, he plays the history professor, lecturing an audience on the historical circumstances surrounding Moorgate, Highbury, or a City church. Another way Hayward foregrounded the British strains of the poem was by including footnotes that alluded to other British texts. He made sure, for example, to

184


add one to the final line of ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ that pointed out Eliot was echoing Ophelia’s departing words. Elsewhere, Hayward glosses the appearance of the nightingale earlier in that section by asking the reader to consult ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’’36 Surely an error for ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ this reference shows to what degree Hayward would go to situate Eliot’s poem in an overt British tradition. As with the Gardner quotation, Hayward’s annotations also attempt throughout to shape the thematic elements of the poem; to touch upon issues like the prevalence of war, the impossibility of rebirth, and the sterility of the landscape; and even to note in one place an ‘‘Exemple de re´-introduction d’un the`me’’ [‘‘example of the reintroduction of a theme’’].37 One theme in particular that seemed to interest Hayward was the sexual undertones of the poem. He points out that motif whenever given the opportunity, framing ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ by highlighting the consequences of violent or loveless sex, by associating the discussion of false teeth in that same section with vulgar working-class jokes on the subject, by locating Tiresias as an expert in sexual matters, by identifying the typist of ‘‘The Fire Sermon’’ as a ‘‘souillon’’ or ‘‘slut,’’ and by characterizing the activity taking place in Spenser’s marriage-song as ‘‘une partouse’’ or ‘‘orgy.’’ Finally, the notes even inject the personal into the poem in a way that Eliot was always loath to do. Hayward glosses the ‘‘Unreal City’’ section by noting Eliot’s familiarity with that section of London due to his position at Lloyd’s and annotates the reference in the poem’s final lines to a boat responding to the hand of the skilled sailor with the observation: ‘‘T. S. Eliot fut dans sa jeunesse un amateur de yachting expe´rimente´ et passionne´: ce fait biographique n’est pas sans lien avec l’imagerie marine dont il se plaiˆt a` faire usage’’ [‘‘T. S. Eliot was in his youth an experienced and passionate amateur yachtsman: a biographical fact that influenced his employment of and delight in sea imagery’’].38 Just seeing the poet’s name itself, entrenched within the boundaries of the poem, is evidence enough – alarming almost – that something terribly different is going on here. The mythic elements of The Waste Land are reduced to personal experience, narrowing the potential reach of the poem. But this constriction resulted, in part at least, from Hayward’s tendency to admire and respond to the confessional strains in Eliot’s poetry, even if the poet himself tried to suppress or distance them. A typical example of this occurs in one issue of his ‘‘Tarantula’s Special News-Service,’’ a monthly letter Hayward wrote to Frank Morley (who had left Faber for New York in 1939 to become Editorial Director of Harcourt, Brace) apprising him of the literary scene in London. There, Hayward praised ‘‘East Coker,’’ which he thought even better than ‘‘Burnt Norton’’


185

in part because of its many confessional moments that are ‘‘poignantly selfrevealing’’ (CFQ 17). Finally, Hayward employed the notes to contextualize La Terre Vaine within the larger body of Eliot’s work, by repeatedly comparing sections of the poem to relevant passages from other Eliot works, both poetry and prose. Given Hayward’s choice of selections on Shakespeare in Points of View, it is clear he took to heart Eliot’s repeated comments about a writer’s greatness being measured through his ability to develop over time. Hayward saw it as one of his critical tasks to highlight that quality in Eliot’s poetry, and the structure of Hayward’s own notes enact that ambition by framing them with quotations from two of Eliot’s essays, ‘‘The Music of Poetry’’ and ‘‘Thoughts After Lambeth.’’ At various times he calls the reader’s attention to ‘‘Gerontion,’’ ‘‘The Hollow Men,’’ ‘‘Ash Wednesday,’’ ‘‘Sweeney Agonistes,’’ ‘‘Journey of the Magi,’’ Murder in the Cathedral, ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ and ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ believing that considerations of these works not only would help further a reader’s understanding of The Waste Land, but would serve as an indication of Eliot’s poetic success within the rigid critical criteria that he had developed in the essays. Usually these titles are referenced only once, as if Hayward were working from a checklist, trying to allude to as many different major pieces as possible over the broadest possible time span. Yet the effect again alters the perspective by contextualizing the poem in a body of work evolving over a career rather than positioning The Waste Land as an early, strikingly experimental poem from a still-relatively unknown poet trying to distinguish himself from the writers of the preceding 150 years. Hayward’s commentary tries to fix the poem in an artificially neat framework set up around a personal literary tradition. He furthers this historical recentering of the poem by alluding at the end of his notes to a comment on faith from ‘‘Thoughts after Lambeth’’ (1931), and so injects retrospectively a consciously Christian element into a pre-conversion poem that assimilated a variety of Eastern and Western religious traditions. The definitive tone established in the opening epigraphic allusions also returns strongly in these final moments, in the note to line 431, where Hayward glosses the quotation from The Spanish Tragedy by beginning ‘‘Ces mots signifient’’ [‘‘These words mean’’], before backing off a little and continuing, ‘‘ou visent a` sugge´rer, que tout ceci semblera folie au monde moderne’’ [‘‘or are meant to suggest, that to the modern world all this will seem like madness’’]. That tone culminates in the reference to ‘‘Thoughts after Lambeth,’’ which promises that faith will renew and finally rescue civilization from selfdestruction, and in the Hayward remarks immediately following and

186


closing the notes section. There Hayward vigorously dismisses critics who resist an optimistic reading of the poem’s redemptive features, declaring with monumental assurance: ‘‘Ce n’est pas, comme certains critiques l’ont suppose´, un poe`me de de´sillusion’’ [‘‘It is not, as some critics have supposed, a poem of disillusionment’’].39 In effect, Hayward grabs the last word away from the poem and attempts to nudge his way into the interpretive transaction that takes place between reader and text. Ultimately, this overlaying of Hayward’s notes onto and into Eliot’s text results in a series of on-going palimpsestic conversations: that of Eliot (in his notes) with his own text and reader; Hayward (in his notes) with the translator, the text, and the French reader; and finally Hayward with Eliot, bringing us full circle to the collaborative alliance that first got underway twenty years earlier, during an awkward breakfast meeting at King’s College. One surprising result of this collaboration is how apparently receptive Eliot’s poem is to Hayward’s intrusions. It is as if the foreign language has returned The Waste Land to its pre-publication status as a passive vessel waiting for direction from the strong hand of Pound. And in some respects, that image helps illuminate Hayward’s work on the text. Eliot saw translated works as especially provisional, serving different functions depending on the nature of the circumstances surrounding the original. This required different approaches from the translator/editor at different times and is very much in keeping with Eliot’s own comments about his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabasis, a project that once again engendered uncertainty in Eliot about the relationship between authority and passivity in the creative process.40 While an American reader of The Waste Land, for example, would benefit just as much as a French reader from the type of illuminative commentary carried out by Hayward, it seems as if the foreign language helped initiate and finally sanction this particular collaborative exercise. Hayward would continue his editorial work on Eliot’s poetry three years later for another Leyris edition, Quatre Quatuors, for which he added supplementary notes and, as Eliot’s chosen delegate, helped Leyris finetune the text proper. The latter role also allowed Hayward to reenact the earlier collaboration with Eliot on the development of the sequence.41 Although Hayward did not have Eliot’s own footnotes to contend with this time, he essentially followed the same path established in his work on La Terre Vaine. Yet in this case, he made his intent clear from the very start, explaining the function of the annotations on their first page: ‘‘Les notes qui suivent ne se proposent pas de servir de commentaire aux Quatre Quatuors, mais simplement d’aider le lecteur de cette traduction a` discerner les principales


187

allusions du texte’’ [‘‘The notes that follow are not meant to serve as a commentary on Four Quartets, but simply to help the reader of this translation to recognize the principal allusions in the text’’].42 Hayward claims not to be interested in offering critical analysis of the poems but volunteers his services rather as an assistant to the reader, ready to explain some of the more obscure allusions. The glosses themselves do more than that, though, and ultimately work toward recentering the text, explicating its meaning, and locating it in a specific time and place. Hayward works against the poem’s preoccupation with the inability of language to accomplish that task and thus challenges the belief that ‘‘every attempt’’ at capturing experience in words in the poem is ‘‘a different kind of failure’’ (CPP 182). As with the previous set of notes, Hayward then cites the criticism of Helen Gardner as appropriate material for readers in search of further guidance. In this case, he sends Eliot’s audience to Gardner’s The Art of Poetry, which had been published in England during the previous year.43 But he qualifies this endorsement at the end of the note by citing Eliot’s earlier work as the ultimate guide to the meaning behind the Quartets, always believing that one of his most useful tasks as an editor was to contextualize Eliot’s poetry in the larger body of work. Hayward opens the explicative part of the notes by citing a long passage from The Art of Poetry, in which Gardner details the significance of the four place names that serve as titles of the individual quartets. Hayward’s decision to headline the commentary with Gardner’s words signals both that he would follow much the same procedure as he had three years earlier on La Terre Vaine and that he would be particularly interested, for example, in highlighting specific locations in the poems so that they are snatched from the airy ambiguity of the verse and pegged to a precise map. This is a curious imposition on Eliot’s poetry (especially the later work), which usually moves in the opposite direction, taking specific locales from the poet’s experience and generalizing them, universalizing the environment so that it becomes more accessible to a greater number of readers, no matter what their backgrounds. Hayward’s notes fight that tendency in their insistence on specificity, partly due to a belief that a foreign reader’s enjoyment of a poem depends on definite information about its allusions, especially those involving place, and partly due to an assumption that poetic meaning derives from the personal, from the individual poet’s encounter with such places. The commentary also tries to accomplish other goals prevalent in the earlier project, like identifying speakers, highlighting Eliot’s debt to influential writers from Homer to Swift, Virgil to Mallarme´, glossing literary

188


and historical allusions, colloquialisms, and epigraphs, and finally locating the poem definitively in the personal. At one point Hayward even quotes from a letter Eliot wrote to an American student explaining how the sequence evolved over time so that individual poems began to assume a correspondence with the four seasons and the four elements. It may be the only occasion in Eliot’s corpus in which he sanctioned the use of one of his letters to clarify the meaning of his poetry in the very body of that work. The note reintroduces Eliot into the finished poem, instead of allowing him the distance from that text he usually cultivated once it was completed.44 This signals the huge faith Eliot placed in his collaborators once they were invited into his ‘‘private poetry-workshop’’ (OPP 106). Although Eliot often expressed the opinion that a writer’s remarks on his own work were suspect, he allowed such supplemental material in Hayward’s ‘‘version’’ of his poem. Hayward seems especially preoccupied with establishing the locales associated with each of Eliot’s Quartets, appending an explanation of individual titles at the start of the notes for the respective poems. But in this case, while still demonstrating the historical relevance of the places, Hayward emphasizes the personal connotations for Eliot, noting his own experience with or connection to the geographies: his visit to Burnt Norton on holiday in 1934; his ancestral roots in East Coker; his sailing days as a boy off the coast of Massachusetts, near the Dry Salvages; and his visit to the chapel at Little Gidding in May 1936. Even glosses of particular lines sometimes appear compelled to exaggerate the personal resonances of some of the poem’s imagery in places that don’t necessarily demand such explication. In explaining the opening lines of ‘‘The Dry Salvages,’’ for example, Hayward identifies the Mississippi river, mentions Eliot’s birthplace, and then editorializes: ‘‘Il est clair, d’apre`s les vers 11–14, que la pre´sence de cette grande voie était profonde´ment ressentie chez lui ’’ [‘‘It is clear from lines 11–14 that the presence of this great waterway was felt deeply’’].45 A key difference from Hayward’s notes in the earlier Leyris translation of The Waste Land is that this commentary stands alone in Quatre Quatuors, undiminished in its authority by the concurrent presence of Eliot’s own glosses. As a result, Hayward’s annotations seem to fill that vacuum with their own erudite standing, especially in notes elucidating literary and historical allusions, which tend to be the lengthiest in the collection, as they were in the notes to La Terre Vaine. They reveal a fully confident editor, secure in his standing in this collaboration of partners and steadfast in his highly particularized presentation of Eliot’s work.


189

HAYWARD AND FOUR QUARTETS

One of the direct positive consequences of the Second World War was that it prompted written correspondence between Eliot and Hayward about Four Quartets. Since conversation between friends was impeded by the flight of many Londoners to the English countryside, letters became the preferred mode of contact. These circumstances have left an accurate record of the evolution of the poems, at least those three quartets that follow ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ which was first published in 1936. But this collaboration has received less attention than the Eliot–Pound union because of the restrictions that have existed around the Eliot–Hayward correspondence. An especially avid bibliophile, Hayward kept careful records of his contacts with Eliot. Although many of Hayward’s own letters are not extant, he bound up the various drafts with most of the corresponding letters discussing those materials. Helen Gardner’s indispensable catalogue of the exchanges between the two men, The Composition of Four Quartets (1978), details at great length the effect Hayward (and others, to a lesser degree) had on the poem. Although Gardner does a masterful job of charting the evolution of the drafts, the book is also very much a document of its time.46 Nevertheless, the drafts and excerpts presented by Gardner are obviously invaluable for a study of the collaboration between Eliot and Hayward on Four Quartets and show in great detail the many different roles Hayward played in helping shape the poems. As Eliot’s friend Mary Trevelyan indicates in her unpublished memoir, The Pope of Russell Square, 1938–58, Eliot ‘‘depended greatly on John as his literary critic and seldom felt quite easy in his mind about anything he had written unless John approved’’ (quoted in ENL 209). Like Pound, Hayward had his own prejudices and idiosyncrasies; but those quirks were usually outweighed by genuine love of the poetry and an overriding desire to keep Eliot’s best interests in mind. I would, therefore, disagree with critics who have disparaged the assistance Eliot received on Four Quartets. C. K. Stead, for example, who has very few kind words for Four Quartets, suggests the ‘‘probability of a major disaster in English literary history’’ if Eliot found himself during the writing of The Waste Land having ‘‘to consult, not Pound, but the kind of people he consulted while writing Four Quartets.’’47 Such observations fail to acknowledge what this study shows: that Eliot’s theory and practice of creative composition actually required the presence of collaborators and that he sought out collaborators who performed very specific functions that arose in a particular time and place. Trying to locate the ‘‘better’’ collaborator misses the point entirely, since Eliot cultivated very different types of

190


assistance over the years that depended on the nature of the project and his own standing in relation to that work, its genre, his audience, his personal circumstances, and the collaborator. It is also helpful to remember that the relationship between writer and reader serves both parties and their respective needs, a truism Virginia Woolf observed in ‘‘The Humane Art,’’ where she writes: ‘‘All good letter-writers feel the drag of the face on the other side of the page and obey it – they take as much as they give.’’48 Critics tend to assume implicitly that collaboration operates in one direction, a benefit to the author who consumes advice as if sucking on a straw, instead of as a cooperative arrangement that fulfills the varied desires – literary and personal – of both participants. Perhaps Hayward’s greatest accomplishment during his assistance on Four Quartets was not an editorial one but one of a personal nature, for he tried his very best (like Browne before him) to boost Eliot’s confidence when he sensed it flagging and, as a result, kept the poet moving forward when he became paralyzed by an artistic crisis, medical calamity, or a case of nerves. Eliot depended on collaborators for such reassurance as early as his work with Pound, whom Eliot thanked for his supportive words on The Waste Land drafts: ‘‘Complimenti appreciated, as have been excessively depressed’’ (L1 504). This encouragement was even more important for a writer like Eliot, who saw the creative act as a painful and uncontrollable task. Indeed, that is partly what attracted Eliot to his other activities like his job at Lloyd’s, his position at Faber, his public readings, and the many other social engagements that so worried friends and colleagues because it kept the poet from his ‘‘real’’ work. But, in fact, that side of Eliot’s life became an important complementary element. The association of writing with depressive solitude also encouraged Eliot to expand the boundaries of composition to include his collaborators in the equation, thus transporting writing from the solitary to the social realm, which he much preferred. Eliot suffered his usual crisis in confidence during the early work on ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ Hayward’s response to it also sheds an instructive light on the two men’s relationship during the evolution of the sequence. In a letter of 14 July 1941, which followed the first letter to Hayward and the initial draft of the poem, Eliot included some additional ‘‘provisional results’’ while also expressing misgivings about his task: My suspicions about the poem are partly due to the fact that as it is written to complete a series, and not solely for itself, it may be too much from the head and may show signs of flagging. That is a dilemma. Anyway, however doubtful of it I have been, I had to finish it somehow or it would have stuck in my crop and


191

prevented me from turning to other tasks. 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. (CFQ 22–3)

The letter begs for some validation from an outside agent, with its tired complaints and vacillating questions about the usefulness of his work. It assumes that a dialogue with others serves a fundamental role in the creative process and, in effect, forces that conversation to occur by employing in the letter open-ended questions that demand responses. Collaboration serves as a key stage in the creative process, after which an unsuccessful attempt had to be banished to storage before being dragged out for another assault. Thus we find Hayward in his letter of 1 August 1941 encouraging Eliot when the end of the tunnel must have seemed far away: ‘‘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. I sympathize with you most keenly and closely’’ (CFQ 235–6). Hayward slyly puts Eliot in the position of offering Hayward reassurance, even though the ostensible intent of the letter is just the opposite. He then tries to comfort Eliot by acknowledging his particular problem with closure (an obstacle in ‘‘Prufrock,’’ The Waste Land, and other works) as a universal one that plagues all writers. Finally, he skillfully blames the artistic impotence on Eliot’s health problems, thus distancing Eliot from one of the major sources of the poet’s insecurities. Although only a few lines, these key sentences toward the end of Hayward’s first response to ‘‘Little Gidding’’ show how attuned he had become to Eliot’s creative psyche and reveal Hayward’s recognition that Eliot needed not only specific, critical suggestions during those difficult periods of composition, but also some massaging of the ego to soften any bruises he may have felt when considering those possible revisions. In many respects, this may have been Hayward’s most successful tactic, so different from the bluster of Pound, who approached The Waste Land drafts like a domineering tutor trying to bend and sometimes hammer into shape the writings of a precocious pupil without any apparent attempt to placate the fragile psyche of his charge. Hayward himself saw this confidence-building as important because he chose, in effect, to frame his entire argument about ‘‘Little Gidding’’ inside words of encouragement. He not only ended his letter with this inspiring tone, but essentially

192


began his comments on the poem with more general words of praise that are clearly meant to counter some doubts articulated by Eliot at some earlier time. After apologizing for a delay in responding to Eliot, Hayward explains: 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. I need hardly say that it has given me intense satisfaction and pleasure to read it even in its present unfinished condition. As a whole, it has moved me no less than its predecessors. (CFQ 234)

Like the ending of his letter, these early comments accomplish a number of tasks for Hayward. The overriding goal seems to be to put the drafts in some perspective, by repeatedly referring to their unfinished state. In light of that position, they should thus not yet be held up to the standard of the previous, finished quartets. In noting no less than six different times the poem’s status as a work in progress (‘‘unfinished,’’ ‘‘unpolished,’’ ‘‘potentially,’’ ‘‘revised,’’ ‘‘rewritten,’’ ‘‘present unfinished condition’’), Hayward not only sets up later in the letter his own suggestions for revision but calms Eliot by reminding him that this early stage of composition is no time for judging the poem as one might a completed text. He does, though, turn right around and do just that, by claiming to have responded just as powerfully to this poem as to the earlier one. With three quartets already published, a body of completed work loomed as an intimidating shadow over Eliot’s shoulder as he worked on the final poem. Yet so as not to call into question his own credibility and to help make room for his own critical annotations, Hayward confesses that the poem might be weaker than the earlier efforts. Perhaps his most useful move, however, is to connect this fourth poem to the success of the others and thus legitimize the project – ‘‘to be brought to perfection as the culminating poem of the series.’’ In duly highlighting that quest for perfection, Hayward allowed Eliot an easy excuse for any early missteps as merely the necessary burden one must endure in a quest towards that higher standard. Apparently that goal was achieved after a year-long delay, during which the manuscript incubated, for Eliot thought of the fourth quartet, in retrospect, as the ‘‘best of all’’ the poems, which were themselves his best work.49 Hayward performed these various pep talks with great tact and enthusiasm, and also assisted Eliot in offering specific editorial advice about the


193

shape of the poems. His critical acumen was perhaps not as highly developed as Pound’s, but it was also not quite as rigid. Whereas Pound had used his editing as a way of imposing a specific critical program upon receptive poems written by a relatively young poet, Hayward first met Eliot while a student at King’s, a circumstance that resulted in a different hierarchical relationship. And given his status as an editor, scholar, and reviewer, rather than professional poet, Hayward was not as personally invested as Pound in the editing process. This allowed him to put Eliot’s needs ahead of his own desires. However, lacking the mantle of the practicing poet also gave Hayward less authority to attend to poetic issues in the drafts, one reason he sometimes restricted his comments to topics of punctuation, grammar, usage, spelling, and vocabulary. Editorial undertakings like the Points of View volume and the Leyris editions of the poetry gave Hayward a forum in which to assert his own tastes aggressively, so his efforts on Four Quartets show more restraint. This relative discipline is notable also in light of Hayward’s typical approach to such matters. As his obituary notes, his editorial advice to others was ‘‘acute and practical, endlessly painstaking – and sometimes uncomfortably frank; for there was an undeniable vein of acidity in Hayward’s make-up.’’ He was known as a man who ‘‘feared nobody, and never pulled a punch.’’50 When he does venture into the poetic realm, Hayward’s comments tend to be fairly tame but practical. For example, he observed that an early line of ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ (‘‘You cannot face it for long at a time’’) contained too many consecutive monosyllables, causing Eliot to change it to ‘‘You cannot face it steadily.’’ Again, he expresses dissatisfaction with the verse without offering substitutions, writing next to some early lines of the same poem simply, ‘‘weakly expressed’’ (CFQ 136–7, 145). Nevertheless, like Eliot’s earlier mentor, Hayward was not above striking out particular lines, albeit with less frequency than Pound. For example, the lines of section II in ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ beginning ‘‘It seems, as one becomes older / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence – / Or even development’’ (186), originally opened with ‘‘One has to repeat the same thing in a different way / And risk being tedious’’ (132). Hayward called Eliot’s attention to the line and the poet subsequently canceled it in the second draft. Hayward’s ear is good here, for the first draft is quite flat and the message vague. Eradicating the opening part, especially the ambiguous references to ‘‘thing’’ and ‘‘way,’’ makes the meaning much sharper. It immediately focuses the reader on the relationship between the individual speaker and his personal history, which is the primary thematic concern of the stanza. The emendation also exchanges a tone of definitiveness at the

194


opening of the stanza for one of momentary tentativeness that fits in well with the overall tone of the sequence. Although attuned to Eliot’s need for encouragement, Hayward could also make his objections in concrete, forthright terms. The first part of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ describing the sensually sweet hedges of May, contained in some early drafts the following line: ‘‘In the may time, the play time of the wakened senses’’ (CFQ 162). Hayward complained ‘‘‘in the may time, the play time’: this is a rather dangerous conjunction, maytime and playtime (cf. Baby & Maybe) being a favourite stand-by in Tin Pan Alley. I should feel happier if this jingle were omitted’’ (235). Eliot finally canceled the line after it had managed to survive three drafts. Although he usually responded to Hayward’s queries by trying to justify the choice of language, Eliot’s response in this case was rather deflated: ‘‘I agree about the playtime jingle: I wanted the Children hint again: but perhaps it is too close to the Playbox Annual.’’ That allusion to children refers to the opening paragraph of a letter from Eliot noting how the image of ‘‘the children in the apple-tree’’ was meant to link ‘‘New Hampshire’’ and ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ an echo he hoped to recall in ‘‘Little Gidding’’ as well (163). There is perhaps also a sexual suggestiveness in the ‘‘jingle’’ that made Hayward uncomfortable. Hayward was just as valuable to Eliot when he asked direct questions of the poet. This gave Eliot a chance to rethink his approach and also draw from his memory the events that had initially prompted the verse, an essential maneuver when composing a poetic sequence grounded so rigorously in private experience. In the first stanza of a draft of ‘‘East Coker,’’ for example, amidst complaints of supposed misspellings like ‘‘wainscoat’’ for ‘‘wainscot’’ and the archaic ‘‘aresse’’ for ‘‘arras,’’ Hayward queried ‘‘field-mouse.’’ Eliot’s response is typical of many of his answers to Hayward: a combination of justification and pleasant recollection that seemingly grounded the poet’s memories in a past with which he was uncomfortable revealing overtly in previous works. If nothing else, these epistolary exchanges offer a detailed blueprint demonstrating how Eliot captured personal experience and universalized it in the poetry. Many of those experiences also possess a distinctly American flavor, a significant fact in light of Eliot’s attempts later in his life to realign himself personally and professionally with his native land. He responded: Fieldmice. They did get into our country house in New England, and very pretty little creatures too: we always restored them to the Land, and only slew the housemice. But the particular point here is that the house is supposed to have been long deserted or empty. Do housemice go on living in an unoccupied house? If so, I had better alter this; because I admit that in a tenanted house the fieldmouse is an exception. (CFQ 97)


195

Nevertheless, despite the tentativeness, the reference stood. The poet was no doubt more secure in the allusion, once given the opportunity to articulate its source and defend it. In its final form, the image appears in the following passage: Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. (CPP 177)

Eliot retains the image of the field-mouse that had such personal resonance for him because it so powerfully illustrates the desolation of the formerly great house, a subject that he also took up tangentially in The Family Reunion. While the house used to be a place of ‘‘living’’ and ‘‘generation,’’ it now crumbles before our eyes through a series of syntactical assaults. The compound objects of the final three lines hammer away at the house’s foundation through the coordinating conjunction that begins each line. The field-mouse, oblivious to the history of this depopulated, silent space, acts as a cruel foil to previous generations of inhabitants that no longer remain. There are countless examples of Hayward making brief suggestions for changes of wording that are probably of little interest to even the most serious student of the poem. The point is that Eliot depended on his auditor and fell into a natural ‘‘conversation’’ with his correspondent about the evolution of the drafts. Eliot did sometimes fall into the habit of keeping score, as when he responded on 2 September 1942: ‘‘According to my figures, I have altered nine passages according to your suggestions, rejected six suggestions and remained uncertain about two others’’ (CFQ 25). But then Eliot always was rather particular about details, part of what drew him and the fastidious Hayward together. He saw in Hayward a kindred spirit who was willing to debate even the most obscure point and keep a detailed history of that debate. In addition to those small details, there were many larger questions to be asked of Hayward as well, such as whether to publish ‘‘Little Gidding’’ separately or bring it out in a complete package with the earlier poems (CFQ 22). Eliot saw in Hayward, like Pound, a colleague with an acutely well-developed sense of the literary marketplace, given his professional involvement in that arena, and he drew on that knowledge widely, even going so far as to ask Hayward to review the advertisements for The

196


Cocktail Party and sending his alterations of that text to Browne.51 Similarly, Eliot used Hayward as a sounding board as he pondered a title for the collection, which he thought at one point might be called ‘‘KENSINGTON QUARTETS,’’ in honor of the period in which he lived in that part of London, 1933–1940. He writes in a letter to Hayward of 2 September 1942 asking him to consider the ramifications of the title: ‘‘I have had a fancy to have Kensington in it. How great is the resistance to ‘quartets’? I am aware of general objections to these musical analogies: there was a period when people were writing long poems and calling them, with no excuse, ‘symphonies’ . . . But I should like to indicate that these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word ‘quartet’ does seem to me to start people on the right tack for understanding them’’ (26). Appearing seven months after Eliot lectured at Glasgow University on ‘‘The Music of Poetry’’ and three days after the lecture’s publication, this letter sought to impose an order upon the sequence retrospectively, through the musical analogy, in a fashion similar to Eliot’s attempts in the notes to The Waste Land to construct a detailed (though quasi-artificial) symbolic system based on Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Five days later, Hayward penned a partial retort to Eliot’s question in a letter to Morley, who in his position at Harcourt, Brace would publish the first edition of Four Quartets the following year. Hayward agrees with the usefulness of ‘‘quartet,’’ but offers doubts about the use of ‘‘Kensington,’’ feeling that it might suggest a kind of private joke because most readers were unaware of Eliot’s connection to Kensington (26). Given his efforts in the French translations of Eliot’s poetry, Hayward’s interests were to clarify and explicate rather than obscure the meaning in private allusion. Hayward shared his objections about the title in a letter of 8 September, to which Eliot replied the following day, acknowledging the criticism. Eliot perhaps sensed that to attach a place name to the wide ranging sequence (when the individual poems already imply significant place connections) would have grounded the collection too narrowly in a specific time and locale, and thus limited the allusive possibilities and readers’ potential experiences of the poem. Hayward could consider key issues like the title of the sequence as well as more mundane matters involving a factual oversight. For example, he objected, in a draft of ‘‘East Coker,’’ to the phrase ‘‘and the star fades’’ (CFQ 98). Eliot’s response was ‘‘Star fades. You are right,’’ a comment Gardner takes to mean that Hayward probably observed that a morning star can not fade at dawn (99). Eliot had been probably trying to extend the


197

theme of the transitory nature of life, power, and success that he had introduced at the opening of ‘‘East Coker’’ in the crumbling house and failing light imagery. It made sense to continue the idea at this stage of the cycle. But Eliot had become so wrapped up in constructing the intricate symbolic system that he overlooked the physical impossibility of the effect. In fact, so dependent had Eliot become on this type of careful, close reading that he playfully teased Hayward for not catching the famous ‘‘hermit crab’’ blunder in ‘‘The Dry Salvages.’’ The error, a mistake for ‘‘horseshoe crab,’’ which Eliot must have remembered finding on the New England coastal beaches as a boy, slipped past the many readers of the drafts, readers of The New English Weekly version, and those of the American first edition. It finally surfaced in the British edition, and prompted Eliot to write a letter to The New English Weekly telling readers to make the correction themselves in their own copies.52 He then tweaked Hayward privately by expressing surprise that his friend did not spot the error (125). This situation demonstrated that there were certain drawbacks to becoming too dependent on collaborators to vet your poems, especially when it came to discussing American details with an almost exclusively British audience. Part of Hayward’s value was his tenacity and relentlessness when he came upon a phrase that troubled him, a habit that evolved partly from his exacting standards when it came to issues of grammar. He sometimes questioned a series of words in two or three successive drafts or went back and forth with Eliot trying to decide between one word or another. This forced Eliot to examine his work and build a case in his own mind for retaining or rejecting the language. Such a strategy resulted in a more secure writer, since it allowed Eliot either to validate a decision to retain material armed with his own evidence or to confirm a choice to change or eradicate content that another person had agreed was weak. The tone of the correspondence is vastly different from that in Eliot’s letters to Martin Browne. The discussions concerning obscure meanings of words, slight sound changes, or proper suffixes lack the constant posturing that makes up the Eliot–Browne correspondence, which is marked by Browne’s overwrought solicitousness and Eliot’s posing as a stage neophyte forever unsatisfied with his efforts. And it is quite different from the Eliot–Pound exchanges, where Pound charges ahead to make his point and Eliot nervously tries on, at least in his early letters, a costumed voice that mimicked his elder’s. Instead, Eliot and Hayward discuss matters familiarly and comfortably, with each man seemingly focused upon the text at hand rather than on their personal relationship.

198


Eliot’s public dedications to Hayward single out Hayward’s specific attention to vocabulary and syntax, the two overwhelming preoccupations of his letters. His assistance with the former was especially important to Eliot. The poet often struggled while revising drafts to find the right word for the sound and the sense of the line, and scrolled through alternatives until finally finding an arrangement that suited him, often with Hayward’s help. In commentary on a troublesome line from section II of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ for example, Eliot confesses: ‘‘It is surprisingly difficult to find words for the shades before morning; we seem to be richer in words and phrases for the end of day’’ (CFQ 177). Eliot tried to capture the sense in many different ways through successive drafts, trying at various times, ‘‘dawn,’’ ‘‘first faint light,’’ ‘‘lantern-end,’’ before ultimately adopting one of Hayward’s suggestions: ‘‘the waning dusk.’’ Hayward’s solution highlights the transitional nature of this pre-morning time but does so by using ‘‘dusk’’ in an unusual way. It represents not the descent into the darkness of twilight – the expected usage – but the darkness on the other side of that cycle, so that we are moving away from darkness rather than into it. Yet the confusion that materializes as we attempt to see in partial darkness, rather than partial light, remains. The temporal and optical tensions resulting from Hayward’s phrase are almost Miltonic in character and must therefore have gratified Eliot, since it would look back (even if obliquely) to the explicit allusion in ‘‘East Coker’’ to Samson’s opening words in Samson Agonistes : ‘‘O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark’’ (CPP 180). During such moments, when Eliot headed up a compositional deadend, ‘‘[e]very word sticks out, and the tax upon one’s vocabulary is immense. Syllables and terminations also give one great trouble’’ (CFQ 64), as he explained to his collaborator. Hayward helped alleviate this difficulty by flagging a problematic phrase or word and listing potential alternatives down the side of a typescript. This sometimes provided Eliot with a solution or simply allowed him the opportunity to respond to the query by thinking out loud about possible choices. So when Hayward received the first draft of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ on 7 July 1941, he marked a line from the second stanza of section II, ‘‘The scorched and unemployable soil,’’ offering in the margins ‘‘parched’’ as an alternative to ‘‘scorched’’ and three options for ‘‘unemployable’’: ‘‘acarpous,’’ ‘‘unavailing,’’ ‘‘unserviceable.’’ The final version of the line, ‘‘The parched eviscerate soil,’’ employs that first suggestion for ‘‘scorched,’’ and adopts a fourth alternative suggested by Hayward for ‘‘unemployable’’ (167). In many other cases, Eliot either ignored Hayward’s proffered alternatives or engaged his friend in a spirited debate about his own wording. This was just as valuable since it


199

gave Eliot an opportunity to articulate the exact sense he hoped to achieve. In lines from the ‘‘compound ghost’’ section of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ that read ‘‘I was still the same, / Knowing myself yet being someone other – / And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed / To compel the recognition they preceded,’’ Eliot and Hayward exchanged a series of comments about the final word of the sentence. Eliot finally rejected Hayward’s various alternatives – ‘‘portended’’ and ‘‘predicted’’ – and explained that the substitutions conveyed different meanings than he intended. The sense he wanted was ‘‘to be aware that it is someone you know (and to be surprised by his being there) before you have identified him. Recognition surely is the full identification of the person’’ (180). Time is more sharply demarcated in Eliot’s version of the line. Hayward’s options blur the distinction between sound and recognition, and thus minimize the element of surprise that Eliot hopes to convey in this encounter with an apparition at dawn. Hayward possessed an extensive knowledge of vocabulary and grammatical issues that caused Eliot to depend on his attention to these details to make sure he had the exact meaning he desired. The correspondence on ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ most active during summer 1941 and summer 1942, illustrates these qualities especially well. One particularly troublesome passage, that beginning ‘‘[i]n the uncertain hour before the morning’’ in the final version (CPP 193), offers insight into the nature of Hayward’s role as he helped cultivate the poem through his collaborative conversation. In a first manuscript, Eliot pictured his dove making an ‘‘incomprehensible revelation,’’ a phrase he changed to ‘‘incomprehensible descension,’’ an echo of John 1.32 (‘‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’’) that sets up the ‘‘dove descending’’ image that follows in section IV. It also probably alludes to Charles Williams’s The Descent of the Dove, which Eliot had reviewed during the year of its publication in 1939. Hayward flagged the wording in his letter of 1 August 1941 as a ‘‘mouthful (and earful)’’ (CFQ 235). Eliot responded four days later suggesting he might improve the first half of the phrase because upon rereading the poem he noticed an excess of ‘‘IBLES,’’ but that he hoped to retain the second word, and quoted a definition of the word from the Oxford English Dictionary. The key aspect of the meaning involved a star disappearing below the horizon, which introduced yet another metaphor into the passage that featured the interplay between light and dark, morning and evening, time present and time past. Hayward offered some alternatives like ‘‘inexplicable’’ and ‘‘indescribable,’’ but they failed to solve Eliot’s suffix problem. A year later, Eliot forwarded a draft with the phrase omitted completely and the line rewritten as ‘‘[h]ad passed beyond the horizon of his homing’’; the accompanying

200


letter of 27 August 1942 expresses regret at losing the astronomical term, while once again instructing Hayward on the definition. At this point, Eliot claimed to desire a ‘‘simpler line.’’ This was a case where Hayward’s alternative wordings suggest he did not see quite the sense Eliot wished to convey, hence Eliot’s reiteration of the definition. In cases like this, Hayward nevertheless served as a valuable auditor to Eliot, allowing Eliot to work out on paper whether or not he had achieved a desired effect. The final version of the line, ‘‘[h]ad passed below the horizon of his homing’’ (CPP 193), possesses the advantage of retaining the connotations of ‘‘descension’’ while also eliminating one of the ‘‘ibles.’’ It creates a more accessible line where one is needed and satisfies Hayward’s request to pen a line that is not a ‘‘mouthful.’’ As a stickler for correct English, Hayward spent much of his energy querying Eliot’s punctuation, usage, and even capitalization. They engaged in an extended conversation, for example, about how to acknowledge quotations from Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing, trying at various times inverted commas, capitalizing the quotations, or restoring the archaic spelling, before finally settling on the compromise of capitalizing just a few words from each quotation (CFQ 70–1). Certain Eliotic tendencies also seemed to annoy Hayward. For instance, Hayward disliked the omnipresent Eliotic ‘‘which’’ in place of ‘‘that’’ to introduce restrictive clauses, a complaint Eliot acknowledged in a correction to The New English Weekly version of ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ This alteration, however, failed to survive into the Faber and Four Quartets printings, where ‘‘which’’ resurfaces (205). While Eliot would always entertain emendations of his work by trusted collaborators, he was the final arbiter. Hayward was also forever bothered by Eliot’s stylistic practice of repetition, often citing it in his versions of the drafts by underlining the offending words. In a related observation, Hayward circled eleven definite articles in six lines of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ bothered how ‘‘overpacked’’ the lines were (228, 235). Despite the varied character of Hayward’s observations, he remained a restrained reader respectful of the process of composing poetry and fully knowledgeable of his place within the collaborative hierarchy. He was responsible for deletions of many lines in Four Quartets, but he achieved that via a different route from Pound, who favored broad brushstrokes through whole stanzas. Hayward’s strategy was to query a line, sometimes offering a justification for his objection, but leaving it to Eliot to perform the physical cutting. A version of part II of ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ ending ‘‘Now about the future’’ prompted Hayward’s question: ‘‘Abrupt end to sect. II?,’’ to which Eliot responded simply by removing the line entirely.


201

About the most aggressive Hayward gets is to point to a very early version of part III of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ as ‘‘Too didactic?’’ (CFQ 229). A testament to the respect Hayward held for Eliot is that Hayward put aside his complaints when Eliot either ignored or forgot the comments when resuming work on the poem a year after this draft. But the fact of the matter is that bits and pieces of Four Quartets that have prompted hundreds of pages of criticism on Eliot’s poetry originally emerged as direct results of Hayward’s involvement. Consider, for instance, the curious explanations appended to the beginning of ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ (a result of Hayward’s ignorance of the place name and of the word ‘‘groaner’’) or the merging of Swift and Yeats in the ‘‘compound ghost’’ section of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ (a result of Hayward quoting from the epitaph on Swift’s tomb in a late reading of the poem) or the final line of the Quartets, altered and improved upon by Hayward’s specific suggestion (see 120, 193, 224). The sequence as we know it is a very different and far richer poem as a result of Hayward’s involvement. Eliot was the first one to point that out in early editions of the Quartets, though the familiar apprehension about how to measure that assistance also surfaced. Eliot’s dedications to Hayward at the beginning of both the American and English versions of the sequence not only thank his friend for his enormous contribution, but they try to locate the specific qualities Hayward brought to the collaborative arrangement. The American edition, which arrived first, restricts its praise to Hayward and speaks somewhat vaguely of his ‘‘general criticism and specific suggestions during the composition of these poems.’’ For the British edition, which appeared the following year, Eliot made two specific alterations: he recognized other collaborators and he tried to specify more exactly the contribution of Hayward. As in the dedication to Pound in The Waste Land, Eliot seems to have needed time to gain some distance from the collaboration before he could acknowledge its benefits fully in a public fashion. The text, in its entirety, reads: ‘‘I wish to acknowledge my obligation to friends for their criticism, and particularly to Mr. John Hayward for improvements of phrase and construction.’’53 Yet for some reason, Eliot chose to suppress this acknowledgment in later volumes, like the 1963 Collected Poems, which drops the dedications altogether. One might associate this public abandonment of Hayward with the peculiar circumstances of Eliot’s second marriage, which he apparently carried out without informing his roommate of over a decade.54 Locating the nature of Hayward’s involvement helps us better understand to what degree Eliot initially welcomed collaboration and the fundamental role it played in

202


bringing his work to fruition, but it also shows us how deeply the poet fought to reconcile the beneficial nature of these key alliances with his own attraction toward solitude, evasiveness, and authority. Exploring the role of collaboration in Eliot’s work allows us to view a creative mind at work, in discussion with others. The witnessing of that discussion leads us to perhaps the essential benefit of such an approach: it helps us better comprehend a great body of poetry. COLLABORATING WITH THE READER IN FOUR QUARTETS

Four Quartets extended Eliot’s life-long attempt at collaborating with his reader in a way that mimicked, in some respects, his relationship with his writer-friends. As Hayward once observed in a 1948 unpublished BBC talk on Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot requires from his readers ‘‘attentive and intelligent co-operation.’’55 Looking back upon the Quartets in an interview with The Paris Review (in answer to whether Eliot’s later work appealed to a larger audience than the earlier poetry), Eliot commented that Four Quartets was a simpler poem, more like ‘‘conversing with your reader.’’ This response was prompted originally by Eliot’s observation that the plays had helped bring him to this point.56 That characterization became literally true in the case of the ‘‘hermit crab’’ allusion, when he solicited his readers to make a change to the text, thus drawing them into the conversation he had already been having with auditors like Hayward. Eliot’s late work attempts to establish a link with the audience in a direct fashion that mimicked the relationship with his other collaborators (or at least the theorizing of those associations), as a positive, co-nurturing process benefiting both sides and ultimately elevating the final poetic product above those creating it. In fact, of all the collaborative relationships that Eliot engaged in, his alliances with the reader proved least threatening to Eliot, especially later in his career; consequently, he usually idealized that bond most exuberantly. Four Quartets gave Eliot a chance to construct a collaborative model absent of the many tensions and negotiations that marked his work with Pound, Vivien Eliot, Browne, Hayward, and others. The project was appealing because it put Eliot in the authoritative position of orchestrating the initial textual movement, but then comforted by that position, he turned over control of the meaning to his reader. Unlike Auden, who feared in his elegy to Yeats that the poet’s words would be ‘‘modified in the guts of the living,’’ Eliot welcomed and even actually sought out that communion with his audience at this juncture of his professional development.57


203

Indeed, the opening poem of Four Quartets seems to invite the reader into the process of creating meaning in its opening stanza. The speaker in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ remarks: ‘‘My words echo / Thus, in your mind’’ (CPP 171). The typically ambiguous pronouns could refer to any number of individuals, as they do in The Waste Land; but in this case, the reader seems particularly implicated. That self-reflective commentary also points to the procedures surrounding the composition, transmission, and reception of the poem. Those lines are the first to follow immediately from the fragment composed originally for the Second Priest in Murder in the Cathedral, which makes up the opening fourteen lines of ‘‘Burnt Norton.’’ Immediately after locating the reader, the poem’s speaker invites his audience to join him in pursuit of those past experiences reverberating in the garden, identifying the quest as a shared enterprise between reader and speaker by joining them through the firstperson plural: ‘‘shall we follow . . . Into our first world’’ (171, emphasis added). That pronoun form is especially prominent in the other quartets as a reminder of the reader’s presence in a way that does not take place in a poem like The Waste Land. There, the plural pronoun surfaces either in the midst of specifically identified characters or in references to ambiguous personages in the past tense, both strategies virtually excluding the potentiality of readerly participation in the experience. In Four Quartets, identification does not transpire so specifically and occurs most often in the present (the ‘‘compound ghost’’ section of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ is a rare exception). Elsewhere, it emerges in the subjunctive mood, which establishes contingent circumstances that create especially open spaces for the reader to occupy. Indeed, that connection with the reader frames the entire experience of Four Quartets, for Eliot returns to an image from the opening of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ to close ‘‘Little Gidding’’ in its last stanza, where speaker and reader ‘‘arrive where we started,’’ in the garden of memory, amidst river, voice, and children. As at the start of ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ subsequent quartets contain the second-person pronoun in their opening sections: in the third stanza of ‘‘East Coker’’ and the second stanza of ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ It is one of the structural oddities of the sequence, which is so concerned with unity in other ways, that Eliot omits the device in the opening of ‘‘The Dry Salvages,’’ even though he unites speaker and reader in that poem’s second stanza through another pronoun: ‘‘the river is within us’’ (CPP 184). Nevertheless, in three of the four poems, Eliot’s phrasing can lead readers to assume they are being explicitly summoned into the poem. Unlike The Waste Land, which employs a multitude of voices to suppress the authorial consciousness, Four Quartets confronts its reader on singularly personal terms. This occurred to such a degree that a confessional poet like Robert Lowell, who claimed he wept

204


when Eliot died, could notice approvingly that ‘‘Eliot’s real all through the Quartets. He can be very intelligent or very simple there, and he’s there, but there are no other people in the Quartets.’’58 No longer hiding behind a mask of impersonality or assumed voices, Eliot engages his audience confidently as a fellow collaborator in search of truth. While Eliot knew that journey must be taken by each of us alone, he invited readers to accompany him as he sought to outline in poetry his own visions of a time when ‘‘[a]ll manner of thing shall be well’’ (198). Even more importantly, those invitations seek to establish relationships through the binding experiences offered by sensory moments, for they are commonalties accessible to and shared by all readers. In the opening lines in the poems in which individual readers are addressed as ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ refers to sound, ‘‘East Coker’’ to sound and sight, and ‘‘Little Gidding’’ to sight and (probably) smell, though the phrase describing white hedges ‘‘with voluptuary sweetness’’ (CPP 191) is sufficiently ambiguous to leave open that question. Nevertheless, ‘‘voluptuary’’ itself raises the idea of sensory perception as the key here, for it creates a physical landscape that can be shared no matter what a reader’s background. The effect is assisted by the relatively simple vocabulary employed by Eliot through the sequence. Gone, for the most part, is the consciously inflated vocabulary that surfaced periodically in the early verse, a language that is almost comic in its intentional obscurity. Gone are the tenebrous references in a wide range of foreign languages. Instead we get monosyllabic words and linking verbs: physical description presented plainly, ‘‘[t]he formal word precise but not pedantic’’ (197). In numerous places, Eliot resists Hayward’s suggestions of a more complicated word as a substitute for a simple one. In the moments of poetic obscurity that do surface in the drafts, Eliot assents to Hayward’s objections to eradicate the confusion. This occurred especially notably with drafts of passages that eventually became the ‘‘dove descending’’ section of ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ Eliot and Hayward exchanged a series of letters during the summer of 1941 in which Hayward persistently expressed discontent with the section. At one point he complained ‘‘I can’t fit it into the scheme of the poem as a whole . . . In its present form it has an obfuscating effect – rather as if you had thrown out a smoke-screen to prepare for the next stage.’’ Next to the lines themselves, Hayward jotted, ‘‘obscure & too little of it’’ and ‘‘non sequiturish?’’ Eliot apparently agreed, for he saved only one stanza of the grouping for the opening of part IV and followed Hayward’s ultimate suggestion to extend its treatment (CFQ 216, 231). The effect is to weed out vague and distracting references to things like an ‘‘invisible watery sign’’ and concentrate upon the


205

image of the dove descending that had been established earlier in ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ In cases like this, Hayward helped to focus Eliot’s attention on the kernel of the passage that was most consistent with what had come before it. Eliot also employed rhetorical devices in Four Quartets that frame the problems raised by the poems as ones that are communal in nature, involving both reader and speaker. The repeated use of questions, for example, not only implies the presence of an audience but invites its members to offer potential solutions as their answers. They function as prompts to help initiate the shared recovery of immediate experience. This tactic is particularly appropriate within a poem so concerned with language’s inability to communicate. In some cases, the speaker addresses the audience literally, as if in ongoing conversation. In the middle of ‘‘East Coker,’’ the recollection of ‘‘[t]he laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy’’ prompts him to acknowledge: ‘‘You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?’’ (CPP 180, 181). The moment foregrounds the relationship between speaker and reader as a subject of the poem; and the allusion to echoes in the garden of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ highlights the sequence’s intertextuality. It further encourages the reader to take an active role in the unfolding of the poems. The question to the reader sets off an almost hysterical consideration of his place, for the next eleven lines contain sixteen separate references to ‘‘you,’’ an occurrence repeated in the second and third stanzas of ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ Recognizing the consequences of ‘‘pointing to the agony / Of death and birth’’ (180), the speaker demands a companion, a double, a brother. Finally, that use of ‘‘you’’ also accommodates Eliot’s private, pre-publication readers like Hayward, so that the conversational aspect embedded in the lines discussed above can also be understood as a kind of meta-transcription of Hayward’s and Eliot’s discussions during the compositional process. It reenacts almost verbatim similar dialogues that appear in the correspondence surrounding the poem. The speaker’s mention of an unidentified objection about repetition then can be linked to Hayward’s periodic frustration over that very habit in Eliot’s poetry; and the speaker’s subsequent answer, ‘‘Shall I say it again?,’’ becomes then a playful taunt directed towards his collaborator. It is not by chance, then, that Eliot seems to have stocked his poem with many different figures of collaboration. On the most simple level, the poem is overrun with images of paired figures dancing across the page in shared enterprises. (Indeed, dance itself is one of the most recurrent metaphors in the poem.) Those images run from the very concrete to the very abstract. The second section of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ encompasses both

206


types as it moves from sometimes incongruous twosomes like garlic and sapphires or more natural parings like boarhound and boar to more abstract doubles like flesh and fleshless, arrest and movement, past and future, and ascent and decline. These duos have less meaning alone than jointly, for in their coming together these opposites locate the still point at which remembrance occurs. The movement that is so omnipresent in ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ can only be made sense of, can only ‘‘reach / [t]he stillness,’’ when the presence of another is introduced to balance that motion. The companion exists as a reference point who throws into focus that which spins about it. Since the ‘‘moment in the rose-garden’’ can be remembered only in this way, collaboration between different agents is central to poetic success. Although the experiences described by Four Quartets are extremely personal in nature, they are presented by speakers who always look outside themselves for validation of those experiences. The repeated claim by speakers that they are unable to use language to articulate experience adequately (‘‘every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure’’ [CPP 182]) positions them as struggling writers in search of talented editors. When one descends ‘‘[i]nto the world of perpetual solitude’’ (174), the poem seems to offer community as a solution to this modern dilemma. Even the first epigraph from Heraclitus attached to ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ suggests this. It warns: ‘‘although the Word is common to all, most people live as if each had a private intelligence of his own.’’59 As Hulme’s interpretation of Bergson suggests, the goal is to ‘‘come into direct contact with sense and consciousness . . . Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. In the centre of one’s own mind, we should hear constantly a certain music.’’60 Eliot, though, seems to have arrived at a position in which this progress can occur only in and through the presence of another. While the poem’s epigraph and all of the quartets suggest that language is a barrier to be overcome, language is also the one thing that ties us to other humans – in it rests our salvation. The central embodiment of this theme occurs in the Dantescan encounter with a shade identified as a ‘‘familiar compound ghost’’ in ‘‘Little Gidding’’ II and it is that meeting which serves as the richest metaphoric figure of collaboration in the entire sequence. In fact, it should be understood as the culminating union in the quartets, the concord towards which the poem has been building from its start. The scene reconstructs London during the Blitz and sets against that background a rendering of the Brunetto Latini meeting in Inferno XV and an exchange of that shade for a Yeatsian figure, complete with echoes of


207

Yeats’s poetry towards the end of the passage. The meeting is actually set up in section I of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ where the speaker makes repeated reference to an unidentified ‘‘you,’’ as in the opening of ‘‘Prufrock.’’ As with that early poem, the presence of the companion is somewhat provisional. In the case of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ that provisionality is due to the fact that the presence of the other individual occurs only in the conditional, and therefore exists in the mind of the speaker as a wish. But it is a strong wish, for in the two stanzas that begin with the conditional phrase ‘‘If you came this way’’ (CPP 191, 192), the desire is essentially fulfilled by the speaker when he establishes the companion in his own mind. The need for fellowship is so great that the speaker moves seamlessly from the modal auxiliary verb ‘‘would,’’ which is typically used for speculation in conditionals, to the present: ‘‘If you came this way . . . you would have to put off / Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report’’ (192). It is as if no barriers exist between the speaker’s imagined future and his present, as long as the imagination can mediate transition between those two states. Whatever the identity of this companion – reader, fellow poet, stranger, an imagined version of the speaker’s self – he is nowhere to be found at the start of section II. Instead, as in the opening of the first section, the speaker meditates upon the natural world around him. It seems as though the mental action that results in the generation of a partner can get under way only through the speaker’s engagement with nature. In this case, the focus is upon an apocalyptic, post-bombardment landscape in which the four elements die before our eyes. The passage presents a very generalized location as houses and towns rot at their foundations. Then, with the introduction of a shadowy figure walking towards him, the speaker’s senses awaken and he attempts furiously to ground his reader in a specific time and place: In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin Over the asphalt where no other sound was Between three districts whence the smoke arose I met one walking, loitering and hurried As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.

(CPP 193)

208


I count at least seven separate references to time and three to place in the eight-line clause that precedes the introduction of the speaker in the sentence. The shift from the general landscape of the previous stanzas to this rigidly specific locale alerts the reader that the senses of the speaker have sharpened and that an important engagement is about to occur. This emphasis indicates that we are entering the world of Dante where the sensory experience of time and space are so important. The movement through Dante’s allegorical world often occurs as if one were following a roadmap carefully explicated by a guide, an effect duplicated by Eliot. The difference is that Dante often begins individual cantos by referring to himself, whereas Eliot withholds the identification of his speaker in this passage until the ninth line. One consequence is that the reader is fully engaged with the surroundings before he is reminded of the presence of the speaker describing that environment, a technique practiced by Wordsworth in a poem like ‘‘Resolution and Independence.’’ As if to invite his reader to share this experience even further, Eliot then describes looking upon the stranger in a way that attempts to link speaker and reader in a common behavior: And as I fixed upon the down-turned face That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge The first-met stranger in the waning dusk I caught the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many.

(CPP 193)

Part of the difficulty of the poetry in this section is that the sentences are almost completely stripped of commas, as if the impressions are emerging faster than they can be given syntactical order. Commas belong after ‘‘face’’ and ‘‘dusk,’’ so that the second and third lines become a relative clause. But the clause is not modifying a noun; rather it describes how the speaker is looking upon the stranger. The problem is that the clause originally began ‘‘[w]ith that pointed narrowness of observation / We bear upon the first-met stranger at dawn’’ (CFQ 176), so that it functioned properly as an adverb clause modifying the action. Eliot altered the wording without correcting the syntax. But this confusion is appropriate here since it only deepens with the introduction of the double. As with Dante’s affectionate homage to Brunetto, the writer who influenced his development, Eliot turns to a ghost of his past. Yet that figure is unnamed and quickly breaks up into multiple identities, the ‘‘compound ghost’’ accessed through memory. While Yeats is present in this multiple personality, so too are the figures


209

of Eliot’s collaborators, both living and dead. Certainly Pound would have to be one of those masters, in addition to more distant influential collaborators like Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, and many others. These are figures ‘‘[b]oth intimate and unidentifiable’’ – they embody that contradiction between intimacy and distance that so often emerged in Eliot’s collaborations. The careful choice of Inferno XV upon which to situate the action also reflects Eliot’s uncertainty about collaborative procedures, for as Blake Leland has shown, Dante’s canto operates as ‘‘a site of writerly anxiety’’ and it evinces ‘‘an ambivalent mix of affection for and rejection of the influential literary predecessor.’’61 Thus Eliot’s speaker fashions a method through which he can deal with that struggle: ‘‘So I assumed a double part, and cried / And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’’’ (CPP 193). What appears in Dante as a fairly straightforward scene of reconciliation here becomes much more complicated. The speaker seems unable to approach his master as himself but needs, instead, to create a provisional version of himself to undertake the task. He must work with another to generate the language necessary to communicate and this spinning off of an alternative self has the ancillary benefit of allowing the speaker to witness this intimate scene from a safe distance. The subsequent words succeed in bringing about recognition from which follows a ‘‘concord’’ as the partners ‘‘trod the pavement in a dead patrol’’ (194). Eliot’s efforts in ‘‘Little Gidding’’ II attempt to pay homage to Dante’s ability of ‘‘making people comprehend the incomprehensible . . . enriching the meaning of words and showing how much words can do’’ (TCC 134), which has the ultimate effect, according to Eliot, of making available a greater range of emotions for the entire populace. Another way in which Eliot brings that about in Four Quartets is through allusion. But that sequence, unlike the early poetry, uses allusion in a less threatening, exclusionary manner, since the meaning of a passage does not necessarily depend on the reader’s identification of the reference. In the quartets the allusive strategy suggests a more receptive poetic climate to the reader prompted by Eliot’s desire later in his career to seek out a collaborative alliance with his audience. An early poem like The Waste Land uses allusion to construct boundaries and obstacles to understanding, by insisting that the key to meaning is embedded in a privileged knowledge of those earlier texts. The notes also help to reinforce that point. Although, as I argue above, early manuscript versions of The Waste Land evince an impulse towards accessibility by stressing the personal and the dramatic, Eliot succumbed to Pound’s efforts to eradicate most of those moments. Four Quartets attempts to tear down impediments created by allusion by minimizing the

210


importance of locating its source and by presenting the borrowed material in such a way that it will be accessible to readers no matter what their experience with the previous text. So the second section of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ is just as understandable, just as dramatic, and just as powerful without recognition of the Dantescan and Yeatsian echoes, even though an awareness of them does arouse another level of enjoyment – but understanding does not depend on that knowledge. Indeed, an early draft of the section contains a literal translation of Dante’s recognition of his old mentor – ‘‘Are you here, Ser Brunetto’’ – but Eliot changes that finally to the more general ‘‘What! are you here?,’’ even though Hayward objected to the erasure. Eliot’s letter to him justifying the change specifically mentions that he was hoping to move away from too ‘‘precise’’ a definition of the figure and that he wanted to establish more of a Purgatorial effect. As Gardner remarks of the evolution of this section, he may have begun with Yeats in mind, but he ‘‘worked towards a greater generality’’ (CFQ 64–5, 67). The result is a kind of poetic enactment of the ‘‘theory of levels’’ that Eliot was working out in his dramatic pieces, constructing his verse in such a way so as to allow different ‘‘classes’’ of auditors to appreciate the work. When Four Quartets does resort to allusion, it is more likely to invoke extremely well-known passages, like the references to Milton and Dante in the first lines of sections 3 and 5 of ‘‘East Coker.’’ Though a review of the Eliot–Hayward correspondence immediately suggests how carefully Eliot considered the role of previous texts in his sequence, Eliot departed from his earlier method by not using those allusions as devices to obscure the poem’s speaker or to conceal the personal. In many cases, the allusion is slightly altered or misremembered, so that it reflects upon the poet rather than on the original work. For instance, Eliot erroneously cites Dante’s epithet for the Virgin, ‘‘Figlia del tuo figlio’’ as ‘‘Figlia del suo figlio,’’ an error that survived through multiple drafts and The New English Weekly version (CFQ 140–1). In fact, in numerous cases in his conversations with Hayward, Eliot worried that drafts of the poems did not express the personal enough. This is a stark departure from the early reticence and distancing devices that tried to obscure the identity and voice of the author. In a long letter of 5 August 1941 to Hayward about the evolution of ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ Eliot keeps returning to this issue, explaining first that the poem ‘‘needs some sharpening of personal poignancy’’ and then later suggesting that the major fault of the poem lies in his inability to shape into poetry personal recollection of experience: ‘‘The defect of the whole poem, I feel, is the lack of some acute personal reminiscence’’ (173, 24). Explicit allusion would only serve to move the reader even further away from this stated objective.


211

The final section of each quartet dramatizes the struggle with words, ‘‘a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating’’ (CPP 182). That theme offers readers another way ‘‘into’’ Eliot’s poem, for such sentiments demonstrate and even insist on the inability of language to convey absolutes. We are implicitly invited to help provide meaning to the poem by bringing our own experiences and interpretations to bear upon it. Four Quartets acted out for Eliot the fundamental provisionality of poetic language, not only because it was an on-going, developing sequencein-progress, whose meaning shifted with the addition of each subsequent poem, but because Eliot himself saw poetry as a fluid medium rather than a fixed object. That fluidity is demonstrated in the publication history of the sequence. ‘‘Burnt Norton,’’ whose catalyst was a set of discarded lines from a play, appeared singly in Collected Poems 1909–1935 and then as a Faber volume in 1941. Eliot went through with republishing ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ as a separate volume even though ‘‘East Coker’’ had already appeared in an issue of The New English Weekly in 1940 and elsewhere in an abbreviated form (an eighteen-line excerpt in Poetry). This suggests that at least in 1941 he had still not envisioned a sequence of quartets. ‘‘The Dry Salvages’’ appeared in that year, both as a New English Weekly and Faber issue, and Eliot repeated the same strategy in 1942 with ‘‘Little Gidding.’’ Finally the complete series emerged intact, first in a 1943 Harcourt, Brace edition and then the following year from Faber. In one other comment to Hayward in fall of 1942, Eliot explained that he wanted to print ‘‘Little Gidding’’ separately in The New English Weekly, between the publication of the American and English editions of Four Quartets, because it would allow him further opportunities to make changes to the text.62 Once again, it seemed less important to Eliot that he be able to enact specific revisions than he be able to witness its reception within a supportive environment. That would then prompt or stimulate further alterations, if necessary. This partly explains the somewhat unusual choice of journals in which to issue the final three quartets. Eliot believed The New English Weekly helped advance a collaborative culture amongst artists in the same way as The Criterion. Although he began to write for The New English Weekly in earnest in 1935, in his ‘‘Views and Reviews’’ column, Eliot made an explicit connection between The Criterion and the one founded by Orage in early 1939 when Eliot’s journal folded, by using The New English Weekly to continue his ‘‘Commentary’’ pieces from his earlier quarterly.63 The collaborative circle advanced by The Criterion was intact even at this late date, simply in an altered format. Not only did it support Eliot’s poetic efforts, but it seemed to encourage the conception of poetry

212


as an ephemeral medium, with the journal simply harboring the poem temporarily, before it emerged in a different form and forum. Eliot’s view of art as a collaborative exercise saw texts as performative canvases on which writers and readers came together at a single point in time to generate a temporary meaning that had a particular value to each of the participants in a given moment. Ultimately, such attitudes devalue the text as object at the same time they value the process of creating meaning. Eliot, however, arrived at such a theory through the practice of writing, which illustrated for him the benefits of emphasizing the interaction among author, friends, editors, and audiences, among other potential collaborators. In his mind, texts were not fixed monuments to be reconstructed by editors faithful to an author’s intention but fluid objects that evolved over time and place, and which could support the intrusion of a voice like Hayward’s in the notes to La Terre Vaine and Quatre Quatuors or accommodate the specific needs of many different readers through the years. Collaboration was a solution that freed Eliot from the horror of writing and speaking his poetry into a void. Without a double to assist him in his quest, Eliot would have been forever stuck in a kind of provisional, prepublication purgatory. We would have been left with what greets us in ‘‘Little Gidding’’ as Eliot’s companion, the ‘‘familiar compound ghost,’’ fades into the sound of the horn: utter silence.

CONCLUSION

Placing collaboration in perspective: Voice and influence in the late essays

The essays written during the wartime years and the two decades following Four Quartets often seek to make sense of the collaboration Eliot had engaged in during the first twenty-five years of his career. Having benefited enormously from the assistance of both living and dead collaborators, Eliot used many of these essays to step back from that experience and place it in personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Those essays, for example, are overly preoccupied with questions of voice and influence. They continue the early attempts to pin down the author’s place within the creative act and maintain the prejudice of refusing to accept too much responsibility for the generation of imaginative material. Even to the end, Eliot configured himself as an author not in complete control of his language and one who forever looked outside himself for stabilizing figures. But most remarkably, these essays consistently express fear and bewilderment toward the created text, and they most often represent poems as unruly children who are out of reach of their paralyzed parent. Eliot’s late essays often take up subjects that had occupied the writer throughout his career. But they sometimes do this from a slightly different position. For instance, he adapted the model of authorial passivity to accommodate the religious vocabulary that became so prevalent in his essays in the second half of his life. In ‘‘The Aims of Poetic Drama’’ (1949), for example, after arguing that all poetry contains meanings that even the author is unaware of, Eliot constructs an elaborate analogy employing a textas-child metaphor, only with a Christian slant. Extending the early practice of highlighting the author’s powerlessness, Eliot thinks of himself as an imperfect human controlled by a higher order: ‘‘But in really creative writing, the author is making something which he does not understand himself. Only God understands the creature; in human creation humanity is only an instrument. Men and women do not necessarily understand their own children, merely because they have begotten and borne them; they have to try to learn to understand what they have created. If this is true of physical 213

214


generation, why not of artistic creation also?’’ In positing the author as a mere tool, Eliot assigns understanding to God, while writers struggle to comprehend their creations. Eliot first seems to allocate some power in the hands of his writer, only to minimize it in a second sentence by designating humanity as an ‘‘instrument.’’ Later in that same paragraph, Eliot observes that the writer is particularly powerless in poetic drama because ‘‘poetry both imposes a form to which the author must submit himself, and releases more unconscious force, than prose can.’’1 Eliot believed his dramatic work benefited from verse because it somehow provided a framework that was, paradoxically, liberating. It allowed Eliot to establish conditions that would help him access poetic material that was beyond his own conscious understanding and, in addition, placed the reader in a position in which he could collaborate with the author in shaping meaning. One of the consistent features of these late essays is Eliot’s tendency to emphasize his own lack of control over the creative process. This continues in ‘‘The Three Voices of Poetry’’ (1953), another essay in which Eliot steps back from his work in an attempt to understand how poetry gets written. Eliot begins by distinguishing among three separate voices that depend upon the audience to whom the poet is speaking. The first is the poet addressing no one or himself; the second is the poet addressing a specific audience; and the third is the poet assuming the voice of a dramatic character addressing another dramatic character. This fracturing of the poet’s voice not only points us to the three major types of poetry Eliot had been writing during his career but it continues Eliot’s life-long habit of evasive maneuvers that assign responsibility for the creation of poetry to someone or something removed from Eliot himself. The most interesting comments in the essay concern the third voice, for that is the voice that gave Eliot the most trouble. When he characterizes the first two voices, Eliot defines them with the certainty of the linking verb: ‘‘[t]he first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small’’ (OPP 89). But when he arrives at the third voice, the language is less confident and the result less assured. While he continues the parallelism through the linking verb, the creation of the poetic material is not a given as in the first two instances: ‘‘[t]he third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse’’ (89, emphasis added). This outcome occurs because Eliot sees himself having less control over the creation of such dramatic characters. While the author can initiate the creative process by establishing a form for the drama, he actually ends up serving the character. Eliot continually returns to this idea in ‘‘Three Voices,’’ when

Placing collaboration in perspective

215

he argues that the character ‘‘elicit[s] from the author latent potentialities of his own being’’ and that the author ‘‘is influenced by the characters he creates’’ (94). Later, the author seems wholly subservient to his entire cast of characters: ‘‘The fact that a number of characters in a play have claims upon the author, for their allotment of poetic speech, compels him to try to extract the poetry from the character, rather than impose his poetry upon it’’ (95, emphasis added). Even though Eliot has invented these imaginary personalities, they seem out of his control. He is instead forced into the position of responding to the needs of external agents rather than taking active charge of the creative process. In ‘‘Three Voices,’’ the writing of poetry is not something to be enjoyed but a problem to be solved, a burden to be borne, a beast to be tamed. This is one of the reasons Eliot was so receptive to collaboration: it gave him a potential solution to the vexing issue of creation by offering him specific alternatives to textual problems that he could choose to employ or cast aside. In effect, it gave Eliot some much needed control over a procedure that resisted that very quality by recasting the creative process from one involving generation of original material to one of reaction, arrangement, and synthesis. Returning to the birthing metaphor that Pound proposed over thirty years earlier to describe his editing of The Waste Land, Eliot explains the terror he experienced during the creative process: He [the poet] is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief. Or, to change the figure of speech, he is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of form of exorcism of this demon. In other words again, he is going to all that trouble, not in order to communicate with anyone, but to gain relief from acute discomfort; and when the words are finally arranged in the right way – or in what he comes to accept as the best arrangement he can find – he may experience a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable. And then he can say to the poem: ‘Go away! Find a place for your self in a book – and don’t expect me to take any further interest in you.’ (OPP 98)

Remarkably, Eliot’s model of the creative process in this essay varies little from that in early essays like ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ and ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry,’’ even though here he is working from a metaphor suggested by Gottfried Benn’s lecture Probleme der Lyrik. Eliot positions himself as the powerless, passive mother whose ‘‘exorcism’’ of the poem-child depends on an external agent who will assist in the

216


‘‘arrangement’’ of the words in the correct way. The author has such a lack of agency and will that he ‘‘accepts’’ the arrangement that he ‘‘finds,’’ rather than actively hammering the verse into shape. The frustration with the poetic material results in part from the verse’s internalization within the mother-poet and its resultant lack of identity. The poet is still configured as a kind of ‘‘receptacle’’ as in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ and relief comes from the actual birthing of the child, after which ‘‘appeasement’’ and ‘‘near annihilation’’ transpire. Yet the relief is short-lived, for a post-partum horror soon befalls the poet-parent as he recognizes something of himself in the child. The revulsion emerges because Eliot strove to erase himself from his work and that attempt inevitably failed. Strategies like the theory of impersonality tried to negate that personal origin by either ignoring it or assigning its source or inspiration to some other parentage, as happens with the notes to The Waste Land. So painful was this recognition that he encouraged scholars later in ‘‘Three Voices’’ to avoid ‘‘biographical research’’ because they will ‘‘be getting further and further away from the poem’’ and that the ‘‘attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the poem’’ (98–9). He thus reinforces New Critical approaches to his work even though the source of Eliot’s interest in the theory had more to do with his own complicated interpretation of the creative process in terms that demanded the eradication of the personality before composition could begin. Eliot ends his essay with the essential paradox raised by its discussion: ‘‘The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden’’ (102). Eliot recognized that there was no way to suppress the emergence of the personal in his work. But that did not stop him from attempting to control, shape, and even alter that element through his collaboration with friends, actors, and audiences, and also idealize those relationships in prose renderings that posited collaboration as a solution to the many problems of authorship. Eliot was so taken around this time by the embryo metaphor that it appeared elsewhere the same year as the ‘‘Three Voices’’ lecture in a BBC Foreign Service talk on ‘‘The Idea of a European Society’’ in 1953. In the unpublished script for that broadcast an unusually confessional discussion of the creative process stresses the writer’s inability ultimately to identify those parts of a poem over which he had control, or for which he was responsible. The bringing to birth of the poem gets underway only because the writer first finds himself uncomfortable, and that feeling can only be eradicated through the expulsion of the fetus.2 While Eliot attempts to identify the parts of the process he consciously directed, he finally decides


217

that the exercise is never fully under his command. As in all the birthing metaphors, it is implicit that the poet-mother will look to a midwifecollaborator to help bring about the delivery. Eliot had always conditioned himself to view the artistic persona as a figure requiring either assistance or animation via an influence or another external entity. Even earlier passages resort to metaphors that support this outlook. In a passage from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, for example, Eliot discusses writing under certain conditions of ‘‘ill-health, debility or anaemia.’’ This leads him to establish an image of material incubating within the poet’s mind, though we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on. To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative : that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden. (UPUC 144–5)

This discussion is enormously contradictory, for it insists on co-opting a metaphor to clarify an experience only to have that metaphor collapse upon itself. At first, readers encounter what appears to be a comparison between imaginative material incubating within the poet’s mind and the egg, which once it cracks reveals the final form of the poem. As in the ‘‘Three Voices’’ essay, Eliot represents this instant of delivery as a relief. Yet he abruptly cancels that affirmative moment here by designating it as ‘‘something negative,’’ more an erosion of ‘‘barriers’’ than a positive exercising of inspiration, since inspiration is too active to fit into Eliot’s model of passive creation. Finally, he attempts to reassert fully the impotency of the author by employing passive voice – an ‘‘obstruction is momentarily whisked away’’ – to signal the extraction of the poetic material by an unidentified agent. The entire passage distances the authorial self from the creative material, while at the same time assigns responsibility for its generation to an external surrogate. The theory ultimately serves not only as another collaborative version of creation but as a reassertion of impersonality as an operating procedure, for creation is a negative process, meaning surrender, erasure, and destruction of the self. Long a device of writers anxiously dispatching text-children into the hostile world of readers (popular enough to have its own genre, the envoy), the gestation trope held a particular appeal for Eliot because it accommodated

218


his vision of the creative process as a collaborative one. He also modified the metaphor to discuss influence, and almost intuitively invokes the ability of influence to impregnate: ‘‘the difference between influence and imitation is that influence can fecundate, whereas imitation – especially unconscious imitation – can only sterilize’’ (TCC 18). This comment appears in Eliot’s 1961 lecture ‘‘To Criticize the Critic,’’ which is printed in the book of the same title. In fact, To Criticize the Critic and On Poetry and Poets, which collect most of Eliot’s major late essays, both take influence as one of their primary subjects. In his later prose, Eliot often reflected upon one of the major preoccupations throughout his career – how to initiate composition under conditions inhospitable to that activity. The solution usually rested in finding a collaborator who could assist in getting gestation under way. Although we usually think of influence as moving in one direction, with a writer ‘‘falling under’’ the influence of another, Eliot conceived of the relationship in more equal, reciprocal terms, at least in prose accounts of the procedure. He was predisposed from ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ to see such an effect operating both ways, even though he also typically positioned himself in a passive, subservient, receptive role in retrospective examinations of the creative process. Eliot reasserted this point in a 1946 discussion of some of Pound’s work, and reminded readers that it ‘‘takes at least two to make an influence: the man who exerts it and the man who experiences it,’’ terms that accent the literary predecessor as the active agent within the relationship.3 What is remarkable about Eliot’s discussions of influence is that he so often characterizes the work of earlier, great writers in terms stressing it as a living, breathing entity, as if Eliot’s admiration of the material has animated it. In one unpublished lecture to a Methodist girls’ school, Eliot talked at length about enacting a ‘‘personal relationship’’ with these dead writers, initiating ‘‘friendships’’ that will change both them and us, an echo of the ‘‘Tradition’’ lecture that addresses poetry in terms that allow Eliot to engage in a collaborative conversation with these literary ancestors.4 In ‘‘What Dante Means to Me’’ (1950), influential precursors like Laforgue and the Elizabethan dramatists are spoken of as ‘‘an admired elder brother’’ and ‘‘playmates,’’ respectively (TCC 126, 127). They are active companions capable of assisting the poet in much the same way as contemporary collaborators like Pound and Hayward. Such influences are so animated that Eliot describes circumstances under which a dead writer ‘‘first introduce[s]’’ himself to Eliot (126). In ‘‘Goethe as Sage’’ (1955), portraits of Goethe and Blake on the mantle in Eliot’s office come alive through his vivid description of their effect upon him. A writer like Goethe lives through his works, to the point that Eliot


219

declares: ‘‘I feel a wiser man because of the time that I have spent with him’’ (OPP 226). Also central to Eliot’s conception of influence is the mature/immature dialectic, a favorite method of categorizing a poet’s various stages of development. Within this system, which appears in Eliot’s work from the early prose onwards, poets move through a process of maturation as they broaden their experience with other texts, from an adolescent phase of immaturity to a more adult stage of maturity. About this poetic development, Eliot says in an early essay ‘‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion’’ (SE 206). Rather than employing a Romantic model of a poet inspired by his excited imagination, Eliot’s version resituates the focus of creative production outside of the poet’s mind, as a continual recycling project that focuses not upon the quality of material provided but upon the way in which it is situated within the new form. As often happened in Eliot, the problem of creation is cast as one of form: how will the poet weld his material together or make it cohere? This model also depends upon a collaborative approach that ignores questions of textual ownership by making all literary material available for appropriation. For Eliot, texts exist provisionally and may always be co-opted to serve some other textual performance. Eliot used his later essays to develop this system more fully, beyond the dialectical stage into a three-stage process in which a writer moves from adolescence to fuller appreciation to eventual maturation. In ‘‘Goethe as Sage,’’ he articulates a series of phases born out of his own experience. In the first, adolescent stage, the writer comes under the influence of a powerful precursor; it is a period of excitement that impairs his critical judgment, inflames the personality to the point that it intrudes upon the reading process, and makes him incapable of understanding the ‘‘relationship between oneself and the author in whose work one is engrossed’’ (OPP 208). At that point, one is ‘‘enraptured, invaded, carried away by one writer after another’’ (210). The writer is powerless in the face of this influence and finds himself involved in a kind of negative collaboration in which he struggles to control even the direction of his pen. During the second stage, advancement starts to occur when one’s taste broadens. This development is activated in part because one’s passions begin to cool; a critical sensibility starts to emerge accompanied by ‘‘that power of self-criticism’’ (208). Finally,

220


the third stage occurs with the full exercise of critical judgment, when the author can view other texts with a detachment that allows for full appreciation, negative or positive. Eliot described this final stage elsewhere as a time ‘‘when we cease to identify ourselves with the poet we happen to be reading,’’ and when the ‘‘poem has its own existence, apart from us’’ (UPUC 34). Unlike the adolescent writer, whose tastes are ‘‘determined by personal needs’’ (OPP 252), the mature poet can cultivate the impersonal on his way towards proper appreciation and creation.5 Conversely, as Eliot explains in ‘‘Goethe as Sage,’’ that third stage also allows us to better understand ourselves by discovering reasons for our earlier prejudices. In that respect, influence operates as a key to the soul. Eliot’s focus upon the adolescent state of mind as a model for problematic methods of reading tended to generate the most agitated prose in his renderings of influence. At times the tone of his prose seems to be acting out the very pressures he discusses. By Eliot’s descriptions of the third stage of maturation, the tone is cool, detached, almost relieved. First stage accounts, on the other hand, embrace an inflamed rhetoric, especially since Eliot usually assigns problematic writers to that stage. This occurred either because of his own involvement with those writers (Shelley’s poetry ‘‘intoxicated’’ the young Eliot [UPUC 96]) or because of faults he perceived in troublesome authors. In ‘‘From Poe to Vale´ry’’ (1948), for example, Poe appeals to readers approaching adolescence because his own ‘‘emotional development has been in some respect arrested at an early age.’’ Eliot claims that the ‘‘variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire’’ (TCC 35). The period of adolescence is so destructive that it can permanently ruin our understanding of an author, which is the sole reason Eliot believes Lawrence was capable of writing brilliantly on James Fenimore Cooper. Lawrence came to Fenimore Cooper very late in life and was thus unimpaired by the typical adolescent experience with that writer, according to Eliot in the 1953 address ‘‘American Literature and the American Language’’ (52). That is not to say, however, that poets who have achieved maturity – Virgil, Shakespeare, Vale´ry, the later Yeats – can necessarily produce great work simply as a result of that status. Instead, they need the cooperation of various other elements to enable the writing of a classic. ‘‘A classic can only occur,’’ argues Eliot in ‘‘What is a Classic’’ (1944), ‘‘when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind’’ (OPP 55). Following Arnold’s lead in ‘‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’’ Eliot limits the potential of the individual writer working without the assistance of positive influences and


221

proper conditions. Since Samuel Johnson, for example, wrote during a period that was just starting to mature, his work suffered under the burden of trying to develop within an era that lacked the historical sense necessary for the production of classics (167–8). So while writers do struggle with their own work, in part the success of that work has been already determined by the foundation laid down by precursors; without that proper preparation, subsequent writers can do little to achieve a classic. Likewise, Eliot used an author’s placement in an inhospitable period as an explanation for the inferiority of his work. For example, he refers to Cowley as a ‘‘victim of his time’’ or wonders with amazement how John Davies ‘‘could produce so coherent and respectable a theory as he did,’’ given the chaotic nature of Elizabethan England.6 Periods can even be unaccommodating to particular genres, like the long poem (TCC 34). Thus Eliot’s influence model works positively and negatively, with mature writers hoping to take advantage of the work of precursors, but also struggling to avoid suffocating under the weight of that presence. It very much acts out the conflict Eliot felt about all collaborative procedures. He realized they were necessary to his success, but he struggled to accommodate threatening features of that collaboration, which most often involved questions concerning the loss of control. His sympathetic 1940 account of Yeats’s battle with influence captures this friction. In recording how the young Yeats had to struggle for freedom from the influence of the inferior work produced at the end of an era, Eliot adds a personal reflection: ‘‘only those who have toiled with language know the labour and constancy required to free oneself from such influences’’ (OPP 261). A later account stresses the positive aspect of falling under such adolescent spells, for they provide the ‘‘intense excitement and sense of enlargement and liberation which comes from a discovery which is also a discovery of oneself ’’ (TCC 22). Like his collaboration with friends, readers, actors, and other living persona, Eliot’s relationship to his influences is ultimately positive. Those alliances, though, required Eliot to wrestle with the challenges presented by inviting such collaborators into his creative world and finally establishing conditions under which they could help free Eliot to complete his work. Positive influence, according to Eliot, helps execute or realize creation by acting as a stimuli. In one discussion of Donne, Eliot pauses to observe how ‘‘poets who are beginning to write find a particular poet . . . with whom or which they have close sympathy, and through whom or which they elicit their own talents.’’7 That drawing out of embedded material surfaces in the essays from ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ onwards, where the poet’s mind has to be activated through the presence of a collaborator.

222


Thus, in models of influence, as in earlier models of creation, the writer finds himself again placed in the passive position. Yet here he is usually rendered more vulnerable, a kind of porous, static, unprotected artist under assault by a foreign body. One version of this experience occurs in ‘‘Religion and Literature’’ (1935) when the poet feels a ‘‘kind of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the stronger personality of the poet’’ (SE 394). Another version from four years earlier focuses upon assimilation, so that poets ‘‘who have something in them’’ may experience a ‘‘finding of themselves by a progressive absorption in, and absorption of, and rejection (but never a total rejection) of other writers,’’ what Eliot calls, somewhat confusedly, the ‘‘absorptive and rejective faculty.’’8 The absorption works both ways in a kind of ecstatic union in which authorial and textual barriers collapse to allow for a merging of elements; and the path of creative success proceeds through a collaboration which has as its ultimate goal rejection. As with Eliot’s many models of collaboration, he saw influence as a necessary evil. Influence operated as liberating process, but it did so in often painful ways. Consequently, Eliot strove to control influence by understanding its process. This is why he devoted so much of his prose criticism to the topic, for Eliot often wrote about what he feared. In the end, he observes, ‘‘it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by any one literary personality’’ (394–5). Readers of Eliot’s poetry looking for reasons why the ratio between Eliot’s prose and poetry is so askew might want to ponder a comment like this, which suggests Eliot used his prose as a prophylactic against complete control by an outside agent. To a writer for whom collaboration was so central, this protection allowed him to engage in collaborative relationships with other writers and be assured that such an association would not entail a complete loss of authority. Eliot also spilled an enormous amount of ink in the 1940s and 1950s discussing the notion of religious community. And while it is not the purpose of this study to explore Eliot’s religious writings, it is important to point out that this particular concern grew naturally out of earlier secular essays, like ‘‘Marie Lloyd,’’ which sought to idealize the way in which individuals could come together under a system of shared values. The arguments made along these lines that are most relevant for my study of collaboration are those that unfold in The Idea of a Christian Society, which collects a series of lectures delivered in March 1939 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This call for a society organized around Christian ideals, which has puzzled, upset, and even amused Eliot’s friends, associates, and readers over the years, actually makes much more sense when set against his life-long preoccupation with collaboration. Partly an outgrowth


223

over his frustration that culture is no longer as unified as in the past, this sentiment is expressed in language that echoes prior essays on the author’s relationship with his audience. In the 1939 talks, Eliot laments the ‘‘absence of any common background of knowledge,’’ which then raises a problem for the writer: ‘‘we aim at a hypothetical popular audience which we do not know and which perhaps does not exist’’ (CC 30–1). In effect, the problems of society become the problems of the author. The solution adopts many of the same approaches taken earlier in discussions of tradition, influence, and authorship. One needs to identify the threats to continuity, unity, and community, and then establish a system that allows for the advancement of those ideals. In the case of these lectures, Eliot singles out liberalism as the primary threat to order and tradition. He equates liberalism with chaos because it has worked toward breaking down the traditional social habits of the English people. Two key disruptions take place under this system, according to Eliot: urbanization acts to counter the positive effects of the parish system – which Eliot sees as a model of community – by making individuals susceptible to mass culture; and liberalism takes the position that religion is a private affair and not connected in any overt way to public life, which acts as another threat to community. The call for a return to a more uniform, religious culture in which members subsume excessively individualistic qualities under the umbrella of a larger, controlling group or system and thus end up sharing values that allow them to communicate – while distasteful to some – operates along the same lines as previous secular arguments that both idealized the author’s sympathetic relationship with his audience and identified collaboration as a solution to artistic challenges. The impetus to give in to external agents was a deeply ingrained part of Eliot’s personality. What is remarkable is that he adapted that characteristic into a range of literary theories involving tradition, creation, and reception and also arrived at a series of compositional procedures that used the quality to his advantage. While Eliot took full responsibility for his poetic, dramatic, and critical productions, he realized how their completion usually depended on the assistance of collaborators. Untangling these relationships as they are revealed in Eliot’s texts not only helps us better understand the theory and practice of that art but it has an ancillary, beneficial effect of humanizing one of modernism’s colossal voices and allows us to become one of the poet’s many guests, accepted and accepting.

Notes

INTRODUCTION: REACHING THE STILLNESS OF MUSIC

1 The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 171, hereafter cited parenthetically as CPP. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to Create,’’ New York Times Book Review, 29 November, 1953, 5. 3 Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 20. 4 M. Thomas Inge, ‘‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship,’’ PMLA 116 (2001), 629. 5 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 95, hereafter cited parenthetically as L1. 6 Herbert Read, ‘‘T. S. E. – A Memoir,’’ T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Delta, 1966), p. 13. 7 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn. rev. (1951; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 233, hereafter cited parenthetically as SE. 8 Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 171. 9 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (1957; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 91, hereafter cited parenthetically as OPP. 10 Anthony Powell, Faces in My Time (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 191. 11 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘George Herbert,’’ Spectator, 12 March 1932, 361. 12 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 12 (1932), 76–7; T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets,’’ Nation & Athenæum, 12 February 1927, 666. 13 Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 70, hereafter cited parenthetically as CFQ. 14 Helen Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 1. 15 During his 1949 attack on Eliot and Pound during the Bollingen Award controversy, Robert Hillyer complained that in the United States, Eliot is ‘‘enhedged with nebulous divinity,’’ while Wallace Stevens claimed that the poet’s figure loomed so large that it had struck Stevens mute: ‘‘I don’t know what there is (any longer) to say about Eliot. His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty’’ (Robert Hillyer, ‘‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award,’’ The Saturday Review of Literature, 11 June 224

Notes to pages 15–27

225

1949, 28; Wallace Stevens, ‘‘Homage to T. S. Eliot,’’ The Harvard Advocate, December 1938, 41). 16 T. S. Matthews, Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 174. 17 Henry Sherek, Not in Front of the Children (London: Heinemann, 1959), pp. 142, 223. 18 [T. E. Hulme], ‘‘A Tory Philosophy,’’ The Commentator, 3 April 1912, 295. 19 Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 148, 147. 20 Ibid., p. 142. 21 Michel Foucault, ‘‘What is An Author?,’’ Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, ed. Josue´ V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141–60. 22 Barthes, Image–Music–Text, p. 146. 23 Valerie Eliot, E. Martin Browne, and Helen Gardner have edited or authored the most important studies outlining the poet’s collaboration on The Waste Land, the drama, and Four Quartets, respectively. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harvest, 1971), hereafter cited parenthetically as TWLF ; Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), hereafter cited parenthetically as MP; Gardner, CFQ. Jewel Spears Brooker is the only Eliot scholar who has contextualized Eliot’s collaborative impulses within his larger theoretical and cultural programs. Brooker’s 1981 essay, ‘‘Common Ground and Collaboration in T. S. Eliot,’’ is reprinted in Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 65–78. 24 Lorraine York, Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing: Power, Difference, Property (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 4–5. 25 See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), the foremost proponent of this view. 26 My view positions collaboration as a separate form of creation rather than ‘‘a mere subset or aberrant kind of individual authorship,’’ to cite Jeffrey Masten’s observation of the phenomenon in the Renaissance (Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 16). 27 Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 215–16. 28 Ibid., pp. 20–1.

1

‘‘ S P E A K I N G

A S O U R S E L V E S ’’

1 Quoted in Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 5.

226


2 Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001), pp. 360, 262. 3 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), p. 43. 4 Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, ed. Joseph Killorin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 75; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. III (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 38. 5 John Middleton Murry, ‘‘The Eternal Footman,’’ The Athenæum, 20 February 1920, 239; Edgell Rickword, ‘‘A Fragmentary Poem,’’ The Modern Movement: A TLS Companion, ed. John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 75. 6 Clive Bell, Old Friends: Personal Recollections (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957). 7 W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, ‘‘T. S. Eliot, ’10, an Advocate Friendship,’’ The Harvard Advocate Anthology, ed. Donald Hall (New York: Twayne, 1950), pp. 318–19. 8 Anthony Powell, Journals, 1982–1986 (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 230. 9 Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 196; Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 91; Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988), hereafter cited parenthetically as ENL. 10 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘T. S. Eliot Talks About His Poetry,’’ Columbia University Forum 2, no. 1 (1958), 12. 11 Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 12 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Method of Mr. Pound,’’ The Athenæum, 24 October 1919, 1065. 13 T. S. Eliot, Preface to This American World, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), p. xiii. 14 Anthony Powell, Faces in My Time (London: Heineman, 1980), p. 191. 15 Herbert Read, ‘‘T. S. E. – A Memoir,’’ T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Delta, 1966) p. 15. 16 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Full Employment and the Responsibility of Christians,’’ Christian Newsletter, 21 March 1945, 7–12. 17 Harry Thurston Peck, ed., Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities (New York: Cooper Square, 1965), p. 1040. 18 The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 124, 158, hereafter cited parenthetically as L. 19 Aiken, Selected Letters, p. 65. 20 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 11 (1932), 274; L1 572. 21 T. S. Eliot, [Autobiographical Note], Harvard College Class of 1910 Fourth Report (1921), 107; [Autobiographical Note], Harvard College Class of 1910 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report (1935), 219, 220–1; [Autobiographical Note], Harvard College Class of 1910 Fiftieth Anniversary Report (1960), 133. 22 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘T. S. Eliot Talks About His Poetry,’’ 12.


227

23 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 29, hereafter cited parenthetically as UPUC; OPP 26. 24 For a fuller discussion of Eliot’s theory of impersonality, see Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 44–7. On the ‘‘historical sense,’’ see James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 25 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Shakespeare and Montaigne,’’ Times Literary Supplement, 24 December 1925, 895. 26 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Hawthorne Aspect,’’ The Little Review, August 1918, 49; ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 13 (1934), 453. 27 T. S. Eliot, Preface to Collected Poems, by Edwin Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. [4]; T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), p. 36, hereafter cited parenthetically as TCC. 28 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), pp. 287, 296, 294. 29 Ibid., p. 291. 30 T. S. Eliot, [‘‘Essay on Causality’’], Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691.14 (18), p. 2. 31 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry,’’ Shama’a 1, no. 1 (1920), 9, 11. 32 Ibid., 10, 11. 33 Ibid., 12. 34 The Selected Poetry of Keats, ed. Paul de Man (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. 337–8. 35 The most useful studies of Eliot’s complicated attitudes toward the Romantics include George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); John Paul Riquelme, Harmony of Dissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Edward Lobb, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). For necessary background, see also C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Vintage, 1957); and Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 36 Eliot, ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry,’’ 16. 37 Eliot glosses this line from The Waste Land with a note citing Bradley’s comment that ‘‘the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul’’ (CPP 80). 38 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 7th edn. rev. (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 32, 27, hereafter cited parenthetically as SW. 39 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 15, hereafter cited parenthetically as ASG.

228


40 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Practice of Poetry,’’ ed. A. Walton Litz, T. S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review, ed. James Olney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 11. 41 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Poetry and Propaganda,’’ Bookman 70 (1930), 598; T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Need for Poetic Drama,’’ The Listener, 25 November 1936, 994. 42 In such an economy, ‘‘the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a name for oneself,’’ according to Pierre Bourdieu’s rendering of the model, ‘‘a known, recognized name, a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects (with a trademark or signature) or persons (through publication, exhibition, etc.) and therefore to give value, and to appropriate the profits from this operation.’’ Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 75. 43 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19. 44 The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957), p. 225; Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 173, 174. 45 Richard Aldington, Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington–Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, ed. Ian S. MacNiven and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1981), p. 122. In a 1949 piece for a Polish weekly in response to a question about Conrad’s influence, Orwell argues that these foreign writers ‘‘civilised English literature and brought it back into contact with Europe, from which it had been almost severed for a hundred years,’’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), vol. IV, p. 489. 46 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘In Memory of Henry James,’’ The Egoist 5, no. 1 (1918), 2 and 1; Ezra Pound, ‘‘Modern Georgics,’’ Poetry 5 (1914), 129. James Buzard, ‘‘Eliot, Pound, and Expatriate Authority,’’ Raritan 13 (1994), explores an expatriate authority that has been typically ‘‘claimed by visitors like the ethnographer and antitourist’’ (114). 47 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne,’’ The Listener, 19 March 1930, 502–3. 48 According to Gail McDonald, this appropriation was not restricted to the languages of science. In her reading, Eliot and Pound cultivated the rhetoric of business, and even misogyny, in seeking to ‘‘enhance the status of poetry.’’ They ‘‘were bent on professionalizing literary studies and freeing the humanities from the taint of gentility and femininity.’’ McDonald, Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. viii. 49 Pound, ‘‘Modern Georgics,’’ 129. For an example of Eliot’s early condescension towards the novel form, see his review of Alec Waugh’s poetry in which Eliot mentions that the young writer has written a novel: ‘‘That is a bad beginning, but something might be made of him’’ (‘‘Shorter Notices,’’ The Egoist 5, no. 6 [1918], 87).


229

50 In his memoir of Eliot, Herbert Read recalls their first meeting in autumn 1917 when Eliot ‘‘seemed anxious to make excuses for his own civilian status’’ (Read, ‘‘T. S. E. – A Memoir,’’ p. 12). 51 Eliot, ‘‘In Memory,’’ 2. 52 See Christopher Herbert, ‘‘Science and Narcissism,’’ Modernism/Modernity 3 (1996), 129–35, for a discussion of early twentieth-century attacks on anthropocentrism. 53 On modernist anxieties concerning the emergence of the ‘‘masses’’ in various guises, see Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 54 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth,’’ Dial 75 (1923), 482. 55 On modernism’s attraction to Futurist connections of art and science, see Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 7–8. On Eliot’s suspicions of Futurism, see his review ‘‘Charleston, Hey! Hey!,’’ Nation & Athenæum, 29 January 1927, where in discussing John Rodker’s The Future of Futurism, he questions the over-mechanization of society and associates an excessive interest in the future with ‘‘demoralization and debility’’ (595). 56 Paul Vale´ry, ‘‘On Literary Technique,’’ The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 315, 317. 57 T. S. Eliot, introduction to The Art of Poetry, by Paul Vale´ry, p. xii. 58 ‘‘Professionalism in Art,’’ Times Literary Supplement, 31 January 1918, 49–50. Leonard Diepeveen, whose work I came upon while preparing my manuscript for press, offers a cogent summary of the amateur v. professional debate (The Difficulties of Modernism [New York: Routledge, 2003], pp. 96–104). Menand’s Discovering Modernisms also contains a comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of the professionalization of literary studies in the modern period (pp. 97–132). 59 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Three Provincialities,’’ Tyro 2 (1922), 13. 60 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Professional, or. . .,’’ The Egoist 5, no. 4 (1918), 61. 61 Oscar Wilde, ‘‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’’ Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), p. 1090. 62 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Preface to Modern Literature,’’ Vanity Fair, November 1923, 44. 63 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), p. 96. 64 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘London Letter,’’ Dial 70 (1921), 449, 451. 65 Richard Aldington, ‘‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot,’’ Literary Studies and Reviews (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924), p. 190; Ezra Pound, ‘‘Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application,’’ The New Age 30 (1922), 284. Pound repeats this exact phrase in a letter of 14 March 1922 to Eliot (L1 512). 66 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant,’’ The Egoist 5, no. 3 (1918), 43. See also, ‘‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, I,’’ where Eliot identifies this

230

67 68

69 70 71 72

73

74 75

76 77


Georgian provincial narrowness as ‘‘almost politically English’’ (The Egoist 4, no. 8 [1917], 118). T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Post-Georgians,’’ The Athenæum, 11 April 1919, 171. See Richard Altick’s discussion of the expansion of mass reading audiences in the late nineteenth century (The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957], pp. 294–317 and 365–76). See also Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). Q. D. Leavis opens her study Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932) by describing a ‘‘contemporary situation’’ that would have so alarmed modernists interested in a select audience for its work: ‘‘In twentieth-century England not only every one can read, but it is safe to add that every one does read’’ (p. 3). Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. vii; Eliot, ‘‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant,’’ 43. T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Kipling Redivivus,’’ The Athenæum, 9 May 1919, 298; Ezra Pound, ‘‘This Constant Preaching to the Mob,’’ Poetry 8 (1916), 145. John Milton, Paradise Lost, VII, 32–4, 31. Eliot had earlier declined the offer to become assistant editor of The Athenæum in part because he would not be able to control the selection of contributors or have a say in the policy of the journal (see L1 283). T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,’’ Chapbook 2, no. 9 (1920), 9–10. Whether or not The Criterion lived up to this ideal is an open question. Aiken’s version of the collaborative conversation appears in Ushant: ‘‘The various cliques formed or fell apart, new coteries rose and fell; but central among them, and in the end omnipotent, was the group that erratically and fluctuatingly arranged itself, or rearranged itself, round the Tsetse’s quarterly, and the luncheons and dinners that intermittently celebrated its appearances’’ (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1952), p. 232. Herbert Read recalled the purpose of these meetings as ‘‘to build up some kind of ‘phalanx’ [consciously invoking a word from one of Eliot’s letters to Read] whose unity would be reflected in the pages of the magazine’’ (‘‘T. S. E. – A Memoir,’’ p. 19). For a full discussion of Eliot’s editing of The Criterion, see Agha Shahid Ali, T. S. Eliot as Editor (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986). T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Leadership and Letters,’’ Milton Bulletin 12, no. 1 (1949), 7–8. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 31. Wall later observes that ‘‘[c]oterie circles thus encouraged a ‘con-verse-ation’ (‘verse’ from the Latin ‘vertere,’ meaning ‘to turn’), a turning back and forth of scripted messages between writers’’ (p. 33), a gloss that helps us understand Eliot’s overuse of that very same word, which appeared more often than not in discussions about the advantages of collective authorship. [Leonard and Virginia Woolf], ‘‘Is This Poetry?,’’ The Athenæum, 20 June 1919, 491. Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, p. 230; Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 66.


231

78 T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harvest, 1968), p. 193, hereafter cited parenthetically as CC.

2

A CONVERSATION ABOUT

‘‘ T H E

L O N G E S T P O E M ’’

1 In Lawrence Rainey’s reading, Pound believed ‘‘literary modernism could best present itself as a shared language through a centralization suggesting the coherence of its ambitions . . . [and thus he] endeavor[ed] to unite the works of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and himself under the umbrella of a single publisher. Such a project would facilitate the perception of modernism as an idiom both collective and capable of individuation: an identifiable, distinctive, and serviceable language.’’ Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 85–6. 2 The most detailed examinations of the Pound–Eliot collaboration on The Waste Land include Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters (New Haven: Henry W. Wenning/C. A. Stonehill, 1970); Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 6; Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce and Company (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapter 6; Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), chapter 4; and Marshall McLuhan, ‘‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land,’’ New Literary History 10 (1979), 557–80. Other key discussions include those by Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), pp. 86–119; C. K. Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 84–128; Grover Smith, The Waste Land (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 35–83; and A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 310–18. 3 Introduction to Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 24. 4 Ezra Pound, ‘‘Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application,’’The New Age 30 (1922), 284. For extended discussions of Pound’s role as patron, see Cary Wolfe on ‘‘The Politics of Patronage,’’ in The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 141–52 and Lawrence Rainey, ‘‘From the Patron to il Duce: Ezra Pound’s Odyssey,’’ in Institutions of Modernism, pp. 107–45. 5 Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 162. 6 Ezra Pound, ‘‘T. S. Eliot,’’ review of Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot, Poetry 10 (1917), 264–71. Pound actually subsidized the printing of Prufrock. See L1 179, note 4, and B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 279. 7 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I: T. S. Eliot,’’ interview by Donald Hall, The Paris Review 21 (1959), 55.

232


8 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 50, hereafter cited parenthetically as LE. 9 T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), pp. 351, 359, hereafter cited parenthetically as IMH. It is not my purpose to engage in a detailed discussion of Pound’s effect upon these early poems. Those interested in exploring this topic more fully may profitably consult Ricks’s ‘‘Preface’’ and notes to IMH or Chris Buttram Trombold’s ‘‘Earlier Versions of Eliot’s Early Verse: The Newly-Published Drafts in the Berg Collection,’’ Journal of Modern Literature 21 (1997), 89–108. 10 The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 198. 11 The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 129, hereafter cited parenthetically as SL. 12 Quoted in Gallup, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, p. 30. 13 Eliot, [Autobiographical Note], Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report, 221. 14 Ezra Pound and James Laughlin, Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 122. 15 Hillyer, ‘‘Treason’s Strange Fruit,’’ 9–11, 28; ‘‘Poetry’s New Priesthood,’’ The Saturday Review of Literature, 18 June 1949, 7–9, 38. 16 Hillyer, ‘‘Poetry’s New Priesthood,’’ 7, 8, 38. 17 Michael Coyle, who discusses the negotiations on this volume in some detail, refers to this as a ‘‘recuperative project’’ in which Eliot engaged in ‘‘a kind of re-formation of Pound’s career’’ retrospectively. Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 27. 18 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,’’ The Athenæum, 3 October 1919, 972. 19 Van Wyck Brooks, Opinions of Oliver Allston (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), pp. 211–46. 20 In discussing Eliot’s ‘‘acute sense of insecurity,’’ C. K. Stead notes that ‘‘[a]t the centre of Eliot’s character there is uncertainty – that is why throughout his life he put such emphasis on submission to an external authority.’’ Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, pp. 89, 88. 21 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Mysticism of Blake,’’ The Nation & Athenæum, 17 September 1927, 779. 22 In ‘‘William Blake and the Imagination,’’ Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1986), Yeats writes that Blake ‘‘spoke confusedly and obscurely . . . because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world he knew.’’ Although Blake ‘‘was a man crying out for a mythology,’’ the world in which he lived failed to provide that system; thus he ‘‘had to invent his symbols’’ (pp. 111, 114). 23 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Literature and the Modern World,’’ in America Through the Essay, eds. A. Theodore Johnson and Allen Tate (New York: Oxford University Press,


233

1940), p. 382; T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Note on ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata’,’’ Dock Leaves 6, no. 16 (1955), 23. 24 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Ezra Pound,’’ Poetry 68 (1946), 330, 331. 25 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Function of a Literary Review,’’ The Criterion 1 (1923), 421. 26 At the start of that partnership, Pound ‘‘was the more pliable poet,’’ according to James Longenbach, who has documented their time together in Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. xiii. 27 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry,’’ Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.1.b, p. 12. 28 Michael North, who has explored these linguistic games as an example of racial masquerade, explains that ‘‘dialect became in their correspondence an intimate code, a language of in-jokes and secrets’’ and a signal of their ‘‘collaboration against the London literary establishment and the literature it produced . . . [it] became, in other words, the private double of the modernist poetry they were jointly creating and publishing in these years.’’ North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 77. 29 Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 106. 30 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Eeldrop and Appleplex,’’ The Little Review Anthology, ed. Margaret Anderson (New York: Horizon Press, 1953), p. 102. 31 Ibid., pp. 102, 105. 32 Compare Wayne Koestenbaum’s reading of The Waste Land manuscript as a ‘‘hysterical discourse’’ that sought ‘‘Pound’s curative arrival.’’ This reading highlights a feature in the poetry that I have identified in Eliot’s prose criticism, which implicitly positions Eliot in the role of passive female, even after the completion of the final text. At the conclusion of Koestenbaum’s reading, The Waste Land remains passive and ‘‘invites a reader to master it . . . requiring a reader-as-collaborator.’’ As a feminine text, it desires, he claims, a male reader (Double Talk, pp. 114, 137). 33 Pound thus becomes, in Pierre Bourdieu’s examination of the ideology of creation, the ‘‘person who can proclaim the value of the author he defends . . . and above all ‘invests his prestige’ in the author’s cause, acting as a ‘symbolic banker’ who offers as security all the symbolic capital he has accumulated (which he is liable to forfeit if he backs a ‘loser’).’’ Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 77. 34 Arthur Waugh, ‘‘The New Poetry,’’ Quarterly Review 226 (1916), 365–86; Ezra Pound, ‘‘Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot,’’ The Egoist 4, no. 5 (1917), 73. 35 Carol Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001), pp. 264, 315. 36 H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 240. 37 Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, p. 101. 38 Eliot identified his two greatest debts to Pound as first, his influence on Eliot’s criticism, and second, ‘‘his criticism of my poetry in our talk, and his

234


indications of desirable territories to explore. This indebtedness extends from 1915 to 1922, after which period Mr. Pound left England, and our meetings became infrequent’’ (‘‘On a Recent Piece of Criticism,’’ Purpose 10, no. 2 [1938], 92). In retrospective evaluations of his relationship with Pound, Eliot tended to restrict Pound’s influence to the years 1915–22, as he did above or in Ezra Pound at Seventy (Norfolk: New Directions, [1956]), a publicity brochure designed to help sell Pound’s books. 39 Eliot, ‘‘On A Recent Piece of Criticism,’’ 93. Elsewhere, Eliot describes placing before Pound ‘‘a sprawling, chaotic poem’’ which he cut in half (‘‘Ezra Pound,’’ 330). 40 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Introductory Essay,’’ London: A Poem and The Vanity of Human Wishes, by Samuel Johnson (London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh MacDonald, 1930), p. 9. 41 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 178. 42 Stillinger argues the decision most likely was Pound’s, since it accords with objections he made to similar sections in later parts of the manuscript, a position with which I tend to agree (Multiple Authorship, p. 128). Next to one canceled quatrain describing a youth ‘‘whom we say / We may have seen in any public place,’’ Pound justifies his cut by writing simply ‘‘Personal’’ (TWLF 45). 43 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Kipling Redivivus,’’ The Athenœum, 9 May 1919, 298. 44 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, 2nd edn. (Orchard Park, New York: Broadview, 1999), p. 92. 45 Conrad’s works enjoyed great popularity during the years Eliot composed The Waste Land. In The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), for example, Paul Fussell concludes about the reading habits of the soldiers at the Western Front that ‘‘most of the troops preferred anything of Conrad’s, perhaps because . . . his works offered characters caught in something like the troops’ own predicament’’ (p. 163). The Petronius reference was also at the time not as obscure as it might seem, since it probably arrived via Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of the passage in his Collected Works (1886). 46 Richard Badenhausen, ‘‘In Search of ‘Native Moments’: T. S. Eliot (Re)Reads Walt Whitman,’’ South Atlantic Review 57, no. 4 (1992), 77–91. 47 John Hollander discusses this suppression in The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 104–5. 48 In The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), Hugh Witemeyer calls this volume Pound’s ‘‘summary farewell to London’’ (p. 161). 49 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘John Dryden,’’ The Listener, 16 April 1930, 688. 50 Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ 53. 51 Ibid., 52–3. 52 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 63.


235

53 Pound tended to eradicate such graphic moments from Eliot’s earlier verse, too, as when he crosses out ‘‘castrate’’ and pencils in ‘‘enervate’’ in a draft of ‘‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’’ (IMH 378). 54 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Conversation with T. S. Eliot,’’ interview by Leslie Paul, The Keynon Review 27, no. 1 (1965), 21. The root of ‘‘maieutic,’’ which means to act as a midwife, effectively calls on Pound’s earlier characterization of himself in that role. 55 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,’’Chapbook 2, no. 9 (1920)9. 56 Coyle, Ezra Pound, p. 12. 57 The most extensive treatment of this husband–wife collaboration is Loretta Johnson, ‘‘A Temporary Marriage of Two Minds: T. S. Eliot and Vivien Eliot,’’ Twentieth-Century Literature 34 (1988), 48–61. Other works that do not focus on the collaboration but shed important light on Vivien’s writing and her relationship with Eliot are Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow and Victor Li, ‘‘‘And Still She Cried’: Vivienne Eliot’s Pseudonymous Prose Contributions to The Criterion,’’ Prose Studies 10 (1987), 72–84. 58 Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. edn. (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1970), p. 211; Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, p. 346. 59 Blake Morrison, ‘‘The Two Mrs. Eliots,’’ The Independent on Sunday, 24 April 1994, 7. 60 Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, pp. 78, 319. 61 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, p. 196. 62 Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, rev. edn. (La Salle, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1984), p. 121; Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, p. 78; Agha Shahid Ali, T. S. Eliot as Editor, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 45. 63 Four drafts appear in Vivien Eliot’s personal papers, bound up in a notebook. See Vivien Eliot, [Miscellaneous papers], MS. Eng. misc. c.624, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 20–43. 64 F. M. [Vivien Eliot], ‘‘Letters of the Moment – I,’’ The Criterion 2 (1924), 220–2, hereafter cited parenthetically as LM1; Letters of the Moment – II,’’ The Criterion 2 (1924), 360–64, hereafter cited parenthetically as LM2. Valerie Eliot points out that Eliot drafted the two prose paragraphs in a black exercise book in his hand (TWLF 127 n. 3). Vivien Eliot also contributed to The Criterion under the pseudonyms Feiron Morris, Fanny Marlow, and Felix Morrison, among others. 65 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, pp. 214, 218. 66 Later in the play, Virgilia herself laments her inability to speak to her husband (4.2.15–16). 67 Late in the play, Shakespeare employs a metaphor that implicitly identifies the most prominent marriage in Coriolanus as that between the title character and Rome, which is why his banishment and subsequent alliance with the Volscians is a kind of violation of that earlier pact. After Coriolanus’s exile from Rome, Nicanor explains to one of the Volscians that ‘‘the fittest time to

236


corrupt a man’s wife [Rome, in this case] is when she’s fall’n out with her husband’’ (4.3.30–1). Shakespeare unites Coriolanus and Aufidius when the latter claims his joy in seeing the former is greater ‘‘[t]han when I first my wedded mistress saw / Bestride my threshold’’ (4.5.122–3). Aufidius’s servants continue this metaphor (although they reverse the genders in the relationship) by remarking that ‘‘Our general himself makes a mistress of him, sanctifies himself with’s hand, and turns up the white o’ th’ eye to his discourse’’ (4.5.204–6). Finally, Menenius refers to Coriolanus as ‘‘my lover’’ (5.2.16). 68 Janet Adelman’s splendid essay, ‘‘‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,’’ Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature, eds. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108–24, has helped inform my reading of Shakespeare’s play. 69 Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, pp. 272–81, 348–53. 70 In an early draft of the letters, the auditor is identified not as Volumnia but as ‘‘Irene Pearl,’’ a reference to Irene Pearl Fassett, Eliot’s secretary at Faber & Gwyer and a close friend of Vivien Eliot. Ten book reviews appear in The Criterion under her name, which was employed pseudonymously by Vivien (possibly in collaboration with Fassett) to allow her to earn extra money by writing for her husband’s journal. See Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, pp. 340, 360. 71 Vivien also criticized Joyce as an egoist, in a letter to Mary Hutchinson (L1 497). 72 Ackroyd details some of the better-known attempts by Vivien to embarrass Eliot publicly (T. S. Eliot [London: Sphere Books, 1985], pp. 184–5, 217). She had earlier used another of her Criterion pieces to offer a rather cruel, public caricature of her husband (Vivien Eliot, ‘‘Feˆte galante,’’ The Criterion 3 [1925], 559). 73 Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow, p. 275. 74 Later in the play, in a scene in which Virgilia is literally absent, Volumnia declares: ‘‘I am in this / Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles’’ (3.2.66–7). 75 Charlotte Eliot had died the year before Eliot took up the subject in ‘‘Triumphal March.’’ 76 Vivien Eliot, [Miscellaneous papers], 23. 77 Quoted in Morrison, ‘‘The Two Mrs. Eliots,’’ 7. 78 Edgell Rickword, ‘‘A Fragmentary Poem,’’ The Modern Movement: A TLS Companion, ed. John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 75. 79 Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 40. Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 87. See also Colleen Lamos on Eliot’s habit of ‘‘citationality’’ in Deviant Modernisms: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 61–78. 80 Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, p. 72. 81 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Note on Ezra Pound,’’ To-day, September 1918, 7.


237

82 The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963), p. 224. 83 Barthes sees intertextuality as a key to his attack on the author since it expands the range of potential meanings in a text, from one (emanating from the Author-as-God) to infinite. Because ‘‘[t]he text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,’’ he writes, ‘‘the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them’’ (Image–Music–Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) p. 146). 84 Ezra Pound, ‘‘The Renaissance: I – The Palette,’’ Poetry 5 (1915), 227. 85 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘View and Reviews,’’ The New English Weekly, 20 June 1935, 190. 86 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Idealism of Julien Benda,’’ The New Republic, 12 December 1928, 107. 87 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), p. 149. 88 [T. S. Eliot], ‘‘Style and Thought,’’ Nation, 23 March 1918, 768, emphasis added. 89 T. S. Eliot, Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Literature (Oxford: Frederich Hall, 1916), reprinted in Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 27. 90 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘‘A Dream within a Dream’,’’ The Listener 25 February 1943, 243; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Philosophy of Composition,’’ Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. F. C. Prescott (New York: Gordian Press, 1981), p. 151. 91 Eliot, ‘‘‘A Dream within a Dream’,’’ 243. 92 Eliot, ‘‘The Mysticism of Blake,’’ 779; Eliot, introduction to The Art of Poetry, pp. xiii, xii. 93 Mark Rose, ‘‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,’’ Representations 23 (1988), 58–9. On the relationship between genius and changes in copyright law, see Martha Woodmansee’s discussions in ‘‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984), 425–48 and in ‘‘On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,’’ The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, eds. Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 15–28. 94 In one unpublished lecture, entitled ‘‘Types of English Religious Verse’’ (1939), Eliot lauds the ‘‘impressively impersonal’’ poetry of the seventeenth century that emits no autobiographical impulses nor evinces any self-consciousness on the part of the poet, to the point that the ‘‘writer vanishes from his own mind, in the presence of what he contemplates.’’ This changes utterly within the Romantic era, after which time poets become conscious of themselves. Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.1.c, p. 14.


238

95 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 83, 84, 142. 96 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Commentary,’’ The Criterion 2 (1924), 235. 97 Lawrence Rainey has shown that unpublished correspondence of Eliot suggests the notes were far more integral to the poem at a much earlier stage than is usually thought (Institutions of Modernism, p. 103). A. Walton Litz reports how the notes were used by Eliot’s friends during private readings as the poem circulated in typescript (‘‘The Waste Land Fifty Years After,’’ Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land, ed. Litz [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], p. 9). 98 Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 181. 99 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Note of Introduction,’’ In Parenthesis, by David Jones (New York: Chilmark Press, 1962), p. vii; Eliot, ‘‘A Note on Ezra Pound,’’ 6. 100 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 275. 101 Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 120. 102 T. S. Eliot, introduction to The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, by G. Wilson Knight, 4th edn. (London: Methuen, 1967), p. xx. 103 Todd K. Bender, Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Bronte¨ (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 51, 74. 104 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 178. 105 Ezra Pound, ‘‘Paris Letter,’’ Dial 74 (1923), 276–8. 106 Ezra Pound, ‘‘Prefatio Aut Cimicium Tumulus,’’ in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 389.

3

‘‘ H E L P I N G

THE POETS . . .WRITE FOR THE THEATRE

’’

1 Robert Crawford, The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 177–80. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Vale´ry,’’ Le Serpent, by Paul Vale´ry (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1924), p. 14. 3 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth,’’ Dial 75 (1923), 483. 4 Ibid., 482, emphasis added. 5 Ibid., 483. 6 Ibid., 481. 7 For the fullest account of Eliot’s conception of his journal, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 8 ‘‘[F]ine art,’’ wrote Eliot, ‘‘is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art’’ (‘‘Marianne Moore,’’ Dial 75 [1923], 595). 9 Ford Madox Hueffer, England and the English: An Interpretation (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1907), p. 352. On the importance of ‘‘sympathy’’ to early


239

modernist thinking about the relationship between artist and audience, see Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 25–6. 10 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The English Tradition: Address to the School of Sociology,’’ Christendom 10 (1940), 228–9. 11 This evolution helps highlight Eliot’s particular position within Michael Levenson’s model of modernist evolution. Levenson suggests modernism matured from an individualist, anti-traditional art to a classicist model that gives in to restraint, authority, order, and the collective as ways to place the individual under control. See A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 79, 211. See also James Longenbach’s discussion, following the lead of Ju¨rgen Habermas, of the modernist dilemma: as its ‘‘art came to seem divorced from the culture at large . . . artists paradoxically put greater pressure on art to perform substantive social work’’ (‘‘Modern Poetry,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson [Cambridge University Press, 1999], p. 103). Edward Said accounts for the shift somewhat differently, by tracing Eliot’s move from a failed ‘‘filiation’’ in the face of modern aridness and sterility to one of ‘‘affiliation’’ with institutions and communities (The World, the Text, and the Critic [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983], p. 17). 12 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Religious Drama and the Church,’’ Rep 1, no. 6 (1934), 4. 13 Woolf reports in her Diary of 20 September 1920 that Eliot had shared with her this desire. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. II, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 68. 14 T. S. Eliot to Hallie Flanagan, 18 March 1933, in Flanagan, Dynamo (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), p. 83. 15 Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, ed. Theodor Gaster (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 80. 16 Desmond MacCarthy, ‘‘‘Sweeney Agonistes’,’’ The Listener, 9 January 1935, 80–1. 17 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Audiences, Producers, Plays, Poets,’’ New Verse, December 1935, 3. 18 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 12 (1932), 78. In a subsequent ‘‘Commentary’’ (The Criterion 12 [1933]), Eliot argued that Communism and the Catholic Church provided ‘‘something in it which minds on every level can grasp’’ (644). 19 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,’’ Drama, n.s. 36 (1955), 16. 20 T. S. Eliot, introduction to The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, by G.Wilson Knight, 4th edn. (London: Methuen, 1967), p. xv. 21 The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963), p. 135. 22 T. S. Eliot, introduction to Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, by S. L. Bethell (London: P. S. King and Staples, 1944), p. 9. 23 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924) pp. 147, 135.

240


24 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist,’’ Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691(32), pp. 9–10. 25 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 11 (1932), 677. 26 Ezra Pound, ‘‘Prefatio Aut Cimicium Tumulus,’’ in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 389. 27 ‘‘The Writer as Artist: Discussion between T. S. Eliot and Desmond Hawkins,’’ The Listener, 28 November 1940, 774. He first expressed this sentiment in the 1937 ‘‘Byron’’ essay (OPP 201). 28 Eliot, ‘‘The Writer as Artist,’’ 774. 29 Eliot, ‘‘The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry,’’ Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.1.b, p. 23. 30 See, for example, ‘‘Johnson as Critic and Poet’’ (OPP 185) or ‘‘Milton II’’ (OPP 159). 31 See, for example, Eliot’s declaration that Europe’s survival depended on ‘‘continual new creative activity in the arts and sciences and the maintenance of civility in social life’’ (Preface to Dark Side of the Moon [London: Faber and Faber, 1946], pp. 7–8). 32 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Note on ‘In Parenthesis’ and ‘The Anathemata ’,’’Dock Leaves 6, no. 16 (1955) 22. Eliot’s later anti-obscurist stance did not go unnoticed. George Orwell, always seeming to try to curry favor with Eliot, defended him against attacks by Harold Laski in his Faith, Reason and Civilisation (1944), a work that claimed Eliot wrote obscure poetry for a select audience. Orwell argued that Eliot was ‘‘one of the few writers of our time who have tried seriously to write English as it is spoken,’’ using as support two lines from Sweeney Agonistes, which he contrasts with a particularly turgid sentence of Laski’s (The Collected Essays, vol. III, p. 137). 33 Since Eliot’s renown evolved in the form of a rather extreme cult of the author – ‘‘[t]he press and the timeservers have labelled him ‘God’ and God he will remain,’’ wrote Richard Aldington in 1957 (Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington–Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, ed. Ian S. MacNiven and Harry T. Moore [New York: Viking, 1981] p. 33) – he is more often cited as typical of those authorial presences Barthes and Foucault sought to assassinate in their seminal essays. 34 This stance eradicated the ‘‘limits’’ to interpretation under Barthes’s model, in which ‘‘[o]nce the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’’ (Image–Music–Text, p. 147). 35 Foucault imagined the disappearance of the author-function as an idealized future when ‘‘[a]ll discourses . . . would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.’’ Under such circumstances, the primary question becomes ‘‘who can appropriate [the text] for himself?’’ (‘‘What is an Author?,’’ p. 160). That Foucault arrives ultimately at the issue of utility is no mistake, for once ownership is open to question, the text becomes potentially a more useful and accessible entity to many more people, shifting the balance of power from author to reader. 36 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ interview by Donald Hall, The Paris Review 21 (1959), 54.


241

37 Eliot, introduction to The Art of Poetry, p. xvii. He follows the comment about pleasure in poetry by calling into question the notion of intentionality: ‘‘What the poet meant it to mean or what he thinks it means now that it is written, are questions not worth the asking.’’ 38 ‘‘T. S. Eliot Discusses His New Play,’’ The Glasgow Herald, 27 August 1949, 14. 39 Eliot remarked that ‘‘it is always pleasant to find that what one has written has meant such a variety of things to different people’’ (‘‘Talking Freely,’’ interview by Tom Greenwell, The Bed Post: A Miscellany of The Yorkshire Post, ed. Kenneth Young [London: Macdonald, 1962], p. 47). Compare Eliot’s letter to the editor of TLS of November 2, 1962, where he objects to ‘‘biographical notes, and the editor’s critical opinions’’ intruding upon a reader’s first encounter with a poem (841). 40 T. S. Eliot, introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 333. 41 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Aims of Poetic Drama,’’ Adam: International Review 200 (1949), 16. 42 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Commentary,’’ The Criterion 4 (1926), 628. 43 Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 174. 44 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Wanley and Chapman,’’ Times Literary Supplement 31 December 1925, 907. 45 Eliot, introduction to The Wheel of Fire, p. xiv. 46 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama,’’ Arts and Letters 3 (1920), 37–9. 47 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Dramatis Personae,’’ The Criterion 1 (1923), 304. Henry Sherek recounts the first rehearsal of The Cocktail Party, when Eliot explained to the actors: ‘‘I will now read the play to you to show you how I want my lines spoken’’ (Not in Front of the Children [London: Heinemann, 1959], p. 141). 48 Eliot, ‘‘Dramatis Personae,’’ 305. 49 This chronology is less significant in light of Ronald Schuchard’s forceful demonstration that Hulme’s philosophy helped shaped Eliot’s thinking about his own classicism as early as 1915–16. Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. 52–69. 50 Hulme, Speculations, p. 47. 51 Eliot, ‘‘The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry,’’ 3. 52 In the fullest account of the influence of dance and ballet upon Eliot’s work, Nancy D. Hargrove locates in Geoffrey Whitworth’s The Art of Nijinsky (1913) a source for Eliot’s ideas in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ particularly Whitworth’s argument that a dancer’s genius can be measured by his ability to subordinate himself to the whole of the performance. Hargrove, ‘‘T. S. Eliot and the Dance,’’ Journal of Modern Literature, 21 (1997), 61–88. 53 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘An American Critic,’’ The New Statesman, 24 June 1916, 284. 54 Quoted in Michael J. Sidnell, Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 46. 55 Eliot, ‘‘Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,’’ 21, 20. 56 Ibid., 20. Even Eliot’s emended typescript draft of the essay reveals a tortured ambivalence concerning issues like intention, revision, and authority. For


242

example, for the final version of the piece, Eliot suppressed both a reference to Martin Browne, whom he claimed told him to reread Craig’s dialogues, and a discussion of a playwright’s ‘‘obedience to his producer’’ and ‘‘compliance with the comment of friends’’ in making changes to his work. T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Art of the Theatre: Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues,’’ typescript draft, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.1.d, pp. 1, 3.

4

A DRAMATIST AND HIS MIDWIVES

1 Michael J. Sidnell, Dances of Death:The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 50. I am indebted to Sidnell’s work for most of the background material on Eliot’s relationship to the Group Theatre. 2 Ibid., pp. 93–5. 3 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Future of Poetic Drama,’’ Drama 17 (1938), 3. 4 In an interview with John Lehmann, Eliot explained that ‘‘I remember once more feeling I’d written myself out just before ‘The Rock’ was commissioned. I had to write it – I had a deadline – and working on it began to make me interested in writing drama.’’ Eliot, ‘‘T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to Create,’’ 5. 5 T. S. Eliot, Preface to Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay, 1668 by John Dryden (London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh MacDonald, 1928), p. x. 6 Ibid., p. x, emphasis added, p. ix. 7 Ibid., p. x. 8 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Commentary,’’ The New English Weekly, 5 December 1940, 76. 9 Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 66. See also Carol Seymour-Jones, who methodically catalogues the psychological, sexual, and medical afflictions that pressured Eliot’s marriage (Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot [London: Constable, 2001]). 10 Thus Eliot departs somewhat from Wayne Koestenbaum’s illustration of how male authors confront the difficulty of understanding the creative process through metaphorical parallels. Koestenbaum explains that male collaborators usually appropriate the feminine in their search for ‘‘literary power,’’ often ‘‘raid[ing] heterosexual intercourse for metaphors of fecundity. . .their desire resembles ‘womb-envy’’’ (Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 6). 11 Quoted in Nevill Coghill, ‘‘Some Comments on the Play, taken from the Author’s Private Correspondence,’’ in Eliot, The Cocktail Party, ed. Coghill (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), pp. 192–3. 12 T. S. Eliot to Martin Shaw, quoted in MP 13. 13 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ interview by Donald Hall, The Paris Review 21 (1959), 57. 14 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Need for Poetic Drama,’’ The Listener, 25 November 1936, 995. 15 E. Martin Browne, interview by William B. Wahl, Poetic Drama Interviews: Robert Speaight, E. Martin Browne & W. H. Auden, ed. Wahl (Salzburg: Institut fu¨r Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976), p. 45.


243

16 Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ 61. 17 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Prefatory Note,’’ The Rock (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), p. 5. 18 Henzie Raeburn, interview by Wahl, Poetic Drama Interviews, p. 41. Raeburn says Eliot ‘‘stuttered through his scripts, all his first scripts with us’’ (p. 48). 19 T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, early draft of the final act, with notes by E. Martin Browne, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691.7(72), 5 pp. An early draft containing fragments of Act One has similar staging notes by Browne (bMS Am 1691.7[83]). 20 E. Martin Browne, ‘‘T. S. Eliot in the Theatre: The Director’s Memories,’’ The Sewanee Review 74 (1966), 142. 21 Marion Cole, Fogie: The Life of Elsie Fogerty (London: Peter Davies, 1967), p. 165. 22 T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, prompt copy with notes and corrections by Ashley Dukes, T. S. Eliot Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 23 T. S. Eliot to E. Martin Browne, 7 September 1949, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691.7(41), p. 1. For Browne’s impulse to cut, see MP 45 note 1. 24 T. S. Eliot to E. Martin Browne, 11 March 1938, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691(6). The emendations are in blue ink, and have been identified as John Hayward’s in a note added by Valerie Eliot on 11 January 1974. 25 T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion, fourth typescript draft, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, D.4. 26 Henry Sherek recounts reading the first draft of The Elder Statesman and being somewhat disappointed at its unpolished state. He explains that he and Browne worked on the script primarily by cutting it and removing ‘‘a device in the third act which was impracticable’’ (Not in Front of the Children [London, Heinemann, 1959], p. 221). 27 Faber to Eliot, in Coghill, ‘‘Some Comments on the Play,’’ pp. 190–2. 28 Eliot, ‘‘Prefatory Note,’’ p. 5. Browne recalls that Howson complained Eliot’s language for his character was not authentic cockney (MP 14). 29 Sherek, Not in Front of the Children, p. 222. 30 Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 40.

5

THE POSSUM AND THE

‘‘ C R E A T I N G

C R I T I C K ’’

1 Carol Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001), pp. 513–14. 2 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. V (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), p. 210. 3 Gardner discusses the circumstances of Hayward’s relationship with Eliot at some length (CFQ 5–8). For a fuller account of the living arrangement between the two men, see also ENL 205–12, and T. S. Matthews, Great Tom:

244

4

5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16 17


Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 155–61. For a range of details concerning Hayward’s accomplishments, see his obituary, ‘‘John Davy Hayward,’’ King’s College Annual Report, November 1965, 30–3. Matthews, Great Tom, p. 124. Hayward had written Eliot the previous year, inviting him to lecture at Cambridge on the Heretics. In a letter of 2 October 1925, Eliot politely declined. John Hayward, introduction to Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, by John Donne, ed. Hayward (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1929), p. xvi. T. O. Beachcroft, review of The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert Grierson, and John Donne: Complete Poems and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward, The Criterion 9 (1930), 747–50; T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Donne in Our Time,’’ A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spencer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), p. 4. Ronald Schuchard, ‘‘Editor’s Introduction,’’ in T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 26. Hayward wrote eighteen different reviews for The Criterion, from February 1928 to January 1939, at which point the journal folded. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, p. 71. Anthony Powell, Journals, 1982–1986 (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 230; Chris Buttram Trombold sees Hayward as a substitute for the role previously played by Vivien, that of a ‘‘partner in physical debility’’ (‘‘The Bodily Biography of T. S. Eliot,’’ Yeats Eliot Review 15, no. 2 [1997], 40). T. S. Eliot, The Confidential Clerk (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.8.15. Anthony Powell, Faces in My Time (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 120. See the Lewis draft with alterations in Hayward’s hand as well as the accompanying correspondence between the two men in the Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, M.2. The Morley draft, which does not appear in Gardner’s book, is in the Houghton Library. For Read’s involvement in ‘‘East Coker,’’ see CFQ 93, 96, 99; for Faber’s reading of ‘‘The Dry Salvages,’’ see CFQ 123–4, 127, 131, 133, 143, 145 and the typescript fourth draft in Magdalene College, Cambridge. T. S. Eliot, Noctes Binanianæ (London: Lund Humphries, 1939). Hayward’s copy (see note 16 below) possesses in Hayward’s hand identifications of the authors of the individual poems that make up the volume. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 235. T. S. Eliot, Noctes Binanianæ, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.8.63, p. 3. Hayward would later provide commentary on The Elder Statesman that altered the first act, for which Eliot offered him thanks in the preface to that play. In that note, dated November 1958, Eliot explains that Hayward’s criticism led to the ‘‘reconstruction’’ of the first act (The Elder Statesman [New York: Noonday, 1964], p. 8).


245

18 Discussions concerning royalties for the volume, Eliot’s Selected Prose (1953), take place in a series of letters to John Hayward from Penguin and from Faber between 21 September 1950 and 10 July 1951, held in the Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, M.8.1. 19 T. S. Eliot, [‘‘Speech at the Bibliothe`que Nationale’’], 16 November 1951, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.2.s, p. 5. 20 T. S. Eliot, Points of View, ed. John Hayward (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 61. 21 Ibid., pp. 5, 62–5. 22 In his introduction to a later edition of Eliot’s prose, Hayward uses his opening paragraph to identify two key qualities in Eliot the critic: his ‘‘unusual capacity for judgement’’ and ‘‘an independence of mind powerful enough to recognize and to interpret for [his] generation its own values and categories of appreciation’’ (John Hayward, Introduction to Selected Prose, by T. S. Eliot, ed. Hayward [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1953], p. 7). 23 See letters by A. S. B. Glover to Peter du Sautoy (2 October 1950) and to John Hayward (30 October 1950), and by David M. Herbert to Hayward (23 August 1951), Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, M.8.1. 24 Hayward, Introduction to Selected Prose, pp. 11, 12. 25 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 99. 26 T. S. Eliot, Preface to The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), page proofs corrected by John Hayward and dated 7 November 1951, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, p.39.c.1, p. xi. 27 The note is included in the Hayward Bequest folder containing the annotated page proofs mentioned above. 28 T. S. Eliot, Poe`mes 1910–1930, trans. Pierre Leyris (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1947), p. 135. 29 Joan Fillmore Hooker, T. S. Eliot’s Poems in French Translation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 62, 73, 68. 30 Poe`mes 1910–1930, p. 135. 31 Ibid., p. 17. 32 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), annotated extensively in John Hayward’s hand, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.9.47, p. 59. 33 Eliot, Poe`mes 1910–1930, p. 136. The full passage from ‘‘The Music of Poetry’’ appears in OPP 38. 34 Leyris to Hayward, 16 May 1946, in Fillmore Hooker, T. S. Eliot’s Poems in French Translation, p. 188 note 46. 35 Eliot, Poe`mes 1910–1930, p. 141. 36 Ibid., p. 142. 37 Ibid., p. 145. 38 Ibid., pp. 148, 144. 39 Ibid., p. 158, 159.

246


40 Eliot translated St.-John Perse’s Anabasis in 1930 and then again for a revised edition in 1949. Perse himself had already performed a more modest translation of Eliot’s work for the French publication Commerce, which published the first part of ‘‘The Hollow Men’’ in 1924. Given Eliot’s own anxieties about the author’s passive position in the creative process, it is not surprising that the prefaces to each edition wrestle with the relationship between the author and the translator and attempt, at one point, to elide authority questions by stressing the collaborative relationship between the two men and settling on the designation of Perse as a ‘‘half-translator’’ (Eliot, Preface to Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. T. S. Eliot, 3rd edn. rev. [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949], p. 12). 41 See Fillmore Hooker, T. S. Eliot’s Poems in French Translation, who devotes four chapters to the evolution of Quatre Quatuors (pp. 105–64). 42 T. S. Eliot, Quatre Quatuors, trans. Pierre Leyris (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1950), p. 129. 43 In The Composition of Four Quartets, Gardner says that Hayward ‘‘knew my book well and used it for his notes’’ (CFQ 44 note 40). In The Art of T. S. Eliot, Gardner thanks Hayward, ‘‘who first suggested I should write this book and has been most generous in his assistance in both large and small matters’’ ([New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959], p. iii). 44 Eliot wrote a letter dated 19 January 1949 to an undergraduate student at Swarthmore, William Matchett, in reply to a series of questions posed by Matchett during the writing of his senior thesis on Four Quartets. Since this occurred during the period Eliot and Hayward shared the Chelsea flat, Hayward must have either seen Eliot writing the letter or come across a carbon in Eliot’s possession. In a footnote on the development of the sequence, Gardner quotes Eliot’s response to Matchett but does not mention Hayward’s use of those same words in his note to Quatre Quatuors (CFQ 18 note 8). I am indebted to Professor Matchett for sharing with me copies of this correspondence. Later in the notes to Quatre Quatuors, Hayward cites another excerpt from a 1943 Eliot letter to a Professor Hausermann, which suggests a source for some imagery in ‘‘East Coker.’’ 45 Eliot, Quatre Quatuors, p. 139. 46 Gardner’s book does not comment significantly on the theoretical implications of collaboration and does not locate that partnership in the larger framework of Eliot’s career as a whole, a structure that suggests collaborative activity as a central component of his success as an artist. Instead, Gardner justifies the project by noting how it allows us to follow ‘‘the progress of the poem’’ and to watch Eliot ‘‘moving towards his final text, give information about the sources and the concerns that lay behind the poem, and clarify the poet’s intentions’’ (CFQ 3), sentiments that endorse the notion of final authorial intention and all its attendant baggage that this study has called into question. 47 Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, p. 127. 48 Virginia Woolf, ‘‘The Humane Art,’’ Collected Essays, vol. I (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 102.


247

49 Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ 64. 50 ‘‘John Davy Hayward,’’ 32. 51 See T. S. Eliot to E. Martin Browne, 23 May 1949, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1691.7(32). 52 T. S. Eliot, letter to the editor, The New English Weekly, 25 January 1945, 112. 53 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), [p. v]; Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 5. 54 See ENL 251–3 on Hayward’s shock upon learning of Eliot’s second marriage, news of which the poet apparently kept from his roommate, though there is some dispute concerning the circumstances surrounding Eliot’s departure. 55 John Hayward, ‘‘Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917,’’ corrected typescript of 4 August 1948 broadcast, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, M.9, p. 15. 56 Eliot, ‘‘The Art of Poetry I,’’ 63. 57 W. H. Auden, Selected Poems: New Edition, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 81. 58 Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), pp. 48, 265. 59 The translation of the passage is Denis Donoghue’s, in his essay ‘‘On ‘Burnt Norton’,’’ Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2. 60 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), p. 147. 61 Blake Leland, ‘‘‘Siete Voi Qui, Ser Brunetto?’: Dante’s Inferno 15 as a Modernist Topic Place,’’ ELH 59 (1992), 969. 62 Eliot to Hayward, 10 October 1942, Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge. Compare similar comments in a letter of 12 February 1941 in CFQ 147. 63 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Commentary: That Poetry is Made with Words,’’ The New English Weekly, 27 April 1939, 27–8. Readers understood the allusion in Eliot’s title; for example, a letter to the editor from E. W. F. Tomlin responding to Eliot’s first column expresses thanks to Eliot for continuing his ‘‘Commentary’’ columns in The New English Weekly (11 May 1939, 66). CONCLUSION: PLACING COLLABORATION IN PERSPECTIVE

1 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Aims of Poetic Drama,’’ Adam: International Review 200 (1949), 16. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Idea of a European Society,’’ Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.2.u, pp. 3–4. 3 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Ezra Pound,’’Poetry 68 (1946), 336–7. 4 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Prize Day Address at the Methodist Girls’ School, Penzance,’’ Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge, H.1.a, p. 4. 5 Much of Eliot’s language was co-opted by Harold Bloom for his own model of how poets (mis)appropriate each other in collaborative exercises that end up

248


bolstering their own work (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975]). 6 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘A Note on Two Odes of Cowley,’’ Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, ed. John Purves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 238; OPP 135. 7 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Donne in Our Time,’’ A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spencer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), p. 6. 8 T. S. Eliot, Preface to Transit of Venus, by Harry Crosby (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931), p. v.

Index

Ackroyd, Peter 31, 106, 169, 172 Adelman, Janet 236 Aeschylus Choephoroi 77 Aiken, Conrad 10, 11, 29, 31, 35–6, 48, 105, 134 Ushant 230 Aldington, Richard 44, 49, 51, 56, 64, 88, 116, 117, 121, 240 Anderson, Margaret 59 Aristotle De Anima 47 Arnold, Matthew 56, 113, 118 ‘‘Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The’’ 30, 220 Arts and Letters 60, 87 Athenæum, The 60, 176, 178, 230 Auden, W. H. 202 Dance of Death, The 142 Austen, Jane 50 Barthes, Roland 17, 107 ‘‘Death of the Author, The’’ 17–18, 237, 241 Baudelaire, Charles 100, 118 Becket, St. Thomas a` 163 Beckett, Samuel 162 Bell, Clive 29–30 Bell, George 151 Bender, Todd 107 Benn, Gottfried 215 Bergson, Henri 101, 127, 206 Blackwood’s Magazine 59, 172 Noctes Ambrosianæ 59, 172 Blake, William 11, 26, 69, 103, 117, 120, 139, 140, 178, 218, 233 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The 69 Bloom, Harold 248 Bodenheim, Maxwell 10 Book Collector, The 168 Bornstein, George 179 Bourdieu, Pierre 228, 233–4 Bradley, F. H. 79, 118, 228 Brecht, Bertolt 142 Brooke, Rupert 54 Brooker, Jewel Spears 225

Brooks, Cleanth 182 Brooks, Van Wyck 68 Browne, E. Martin 8, 25, 134, 147, 174, 196, 242 as advocate 151 as encourager 152 as mentor 150–1, 152–3 collaboration with Eliot 19, 25, 143, 146, 149, 149–60, 197 effect on Eliot’s drama 153–9 Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, The 150, 225 Browning, Robert 32, 85 Brunetto Latini 206, 208 Bush, Ronald 227 Buzard, James 228 Byron, George Gordon 38 Carrington, Dora 169 Chapbook 83 Chapman, George 83, 135 Chaucer, Geoffrey 81 Chesterton, G. K. 53, 54 Cloud of Unknowing, The 200 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 101, 102, 148 ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ 103 ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’ 103 Collaboration allusion as collaboration 8, 13, 23–4, 98–100, 209–11 and anthologies 10 as co-dependency 14, 88–9, 169, 189–90 as attack on notion of solitary authorship 17–18, 48–9, 73–5, 100–5 definition of 7–8 primary vs. secondary collaborators 23, 160–2 role of collaborators 6–7 theories of 12–13, 17–18, 20–1, 48–9, 74–5, 98, 99, 106, 189–90 Collins, Wilkie 153 Congreve, William Way of the World, The 93 Conrad, Joseph 78–9, 234 Heart of Darkness 78–9, 82–3, 104 Cooper, James Fenimore 220

249

250 Cornford, F. M. Origin of Attic Comedy, The 123–4 Coterie 68 Cowley, Abraham 221 Coyle, Michael 87, 232 Craig, Gordon 140, 141 Crawford, Robert 113 Criterion, The 10, 11, 23, 37, 59, 61, 66, 76, 77, 86, 88, 91, 92, 105, 112, 118, 144, 168, 236, 244 as collaborative vehicle 58–9, 62, 117, 211–12, 230 Daniel, Arnaut 63 Dante Alighieri 120, 208, 209, 210, Inferno 40, 77, 206–9 Purgatorio 63 Davies, John 221 Delany, Paul 64 Dial 62, 76, 77, 86, 88, 105, 116, 118 Dickens, Charles 108, 153 Our Mutual Friend 81 Diepeveen, Leonard 229 Donne, John 50, 168, 221 ‘‘The Extasie’’ 5 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) 49 Doone, Rupert 140–1, 153, 155, 161 Dryden, John 144, 145 Of Dramatick Poesie 144 Dukes, Ashley 156, 159, 160, 161 Egoist, The 50, 60, 64 Eliot, Charles William 36 Eliot, Charlotte Champe 27, 30, 91, 92–3, 236 Eliot, Henry Ware 36, 88, 109 Eliot, Henry Ware, Sr. 27, 46, 50, 64, 69 Eliot, Thomas Stearns adoption of poses by 13–14, 28–37, 63, 94–5, 173, 197 amateur vs. professional culture, debates 53–5, 129, 142 and actors 21–2, 127, 136–41 and America 34–5, 35–6, 49, 79–80, 100–1, 112, 194 and the cult of the author 14–15, 162 and disinterestedness 30, 45 and England 34–5, 49, 53, 79–81, 182 and Harvard 30, 34, 37, 67, 78, 100–1, 126, 168 and Romanticism 17, 22, 53, 54, 69, 92, 101–5, 112, 114–15, 128–30, 139, 148–9, 165, 219, 227 as alien 34–6 as editor 58, 68, 230 as expatriate 49

Index authorial originality, attacks notion of 12–13, 47–8, 100–5 authority, cultivation of 48–57, 130 collaboration ambivalence towards 13–14, 19–20, 21–2, 43, 46–7, 106, 123, 134–41, 143, 201–2 and conflict between authority and passivity 7, 12–13, 15, 18, 26, 39–41, 43, 47, 48–9, 63, 68, 86–7, 106, 112–13, 114, 118, 119–20, 130–1, 143, 147, 152, 213–14, 215–16, 217, 246 and conversation 57–61, 75, 171, 172–4, 195, 205, 230–1 and drama 16, 24–5, 111–12, 121–7, 142–64, 214 and dramatic monologue 31–3 and fertilization 40, 56, 61 and influence 8, 41, 47–48, 98–100, 217–22 and intention 42, 44, 63, 74–5, 106–7, 111–12, 130–4, 162 and religion 15–16, 26, 213–14, 222–3 and suppression of the personal 12–14, 39, 40–1, 44–5, 98, 99, 103–4, 108, 114–15, 122–3, 133–4, 137–9, 204, 216, 217 and textual intimacy 95–7 and tradition 40, 42, 47–8 as advancement of community 15–16, 24–5, 100–1, 112, 123–4, 129–30, 164, 222–3 as performance 13–14, 17–18, 21, 25, 58–60, 73, 94–5, 105–7, 171, 172–4, 197, 212 as ‘‘poetics of exchange’’ (see also Wall, Wendy) 58–61, 171, 172–4 as solution to isolation 11, 69–70, 212 as stabilizing influence 8, 14, 69–70, 75–6, 103, 116, 137–8, 139–40, 215 idealizing of 7, 16, 22, 24, 58–61, 109–10, 111–12, 119–20, 143, 202, 216 metaphors for 1–7, 18–19, 39–40, 44–5, 71–2, 205–9 use of the word 8–9 with audience 15–16, 24–5, 105–7, 118–20, 121, 124–34, 162–4, 202–12 composing, difficulties of 3–4, 11–12, 37–8, 92, 144, 146–7, 148–9, 190–2, 214–16, 242 composition as a process of ordering, views 12 creative and critical, on relationship between the 38, 113–15, 165 creative process as painful, on 39, 115–17, 215–16 criticism as a collaborative activity, on 115

Index detachment of 28–37, 46–7, 49 dissociation of sensibility 45, 46, 47–8, 176 drama, anxieties about 136–41, 144–5, 145–6, 150, 214–15 early work, renouncement of 9–10, 24–5, 47, 120–1, 125, 130, 142 epigraphs 8, 14, 76–9, 132 feminine, attitude towards the 50, 55, 147, 148 general reading public, attitude towards the 56–7, 127–30, 128–30 Georgian poetry, on 56–7, 107 impersonal theory of poetry 44–5, 216 (see also collaboration and suppression of the personal) isolation of 27, 116, 148–9, 190 literature and science, compares 50–5 nationality, attitude towards 34–6, 53 objective correlative 28, 32, 45 occupations of 29, 36–7 prose criticism, use of to argue for the social utility of poetry 51–2, 128–30 to examine his creative procedures 18–19, 22, 111, 112–17, 213–23 to manage attitudes towards collaboration 18–19, 22, 24–5, 26, 111–12, 112–17, 134–41, 213–23 reception of 14–15, 26, 30–1, 36, 38, 48–9, 59–60, 84, 98, 105, 134, 167–8 rootlessness of 28–9, 34–6, 49 ‘‘theory of levels’’ 109–10, 125–7, 139, 164, 210 works After Strange Gods 47, 138, 177, 178 ‘‘Aims of Poetic Drama, The’’ 213–14 ‘‘American Literature and the American Language’’ 220 Ara Vos Prec 29, 36, 60 ‘‘Ash Wednesday’’ 185 ‘‘Aunt Helen’’ 64 ‘‘Baudelaire’’ 138 ‘‘Ben Jonson’’ 41 ‘‘Boston Evening Transcript, The’’ 64 ‘‘Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry, A’’ 58, 87 ‘‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’’ 65, 77 ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ 1–7, 19, 166, 167, 171, 184, 185, 189, 194, 203, 204, 205, 206, 211 ‘‘Charleston, Hey! Hey!’’ 229 Cocktail Party, The 15, 132, 146, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156–7, 157–8, 161, 162, 195, 241 Collected Poems (1963) 201 Collected Poems 1909–1935 1, 182, 211

251 Collected Poems 1909–1962 132 ‘‘Commentary, A’’ (1926) 134 ‘‘Commentary, A’’ (1932) 127 ‘‘Commentary, A’’ (1933) 240 ‘‘Commentary, A’’ (1934) 41 Complete Poems and Plays, The 132 Confidential Clerk, The 153, 157, 158–9, 169 ‘‘Cooking Egg, A’’ 65, 93 Coriolan 93 ‘‘Cousin Nancy’’ 64 ‘‘Cyril Tourneur’’ 122 Dante 120 ‘‘Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A’’ 140, 144–5 ‘‘Dry Salvages’’ 171–2, 188, 193–4, 197, 200, 201, 203, 211 ‘‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’’ 71, 119 ‘‘East Coker’’ 170, 171, 184, 194–5, 196–7, 198, 203, 204, 205, 210, 211 Elder Statesman, The 15, 27–8, 31, 159, 245 Elizabethan Essays 122 ‘‘English Tradition, The’’ 120 ‘‘Essay on Causality’’ (unpublished paper) 43–4 Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry 66 Family Reunion, The 78, 145, 147–8, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159–60, 162, 163, 167, 174, 195 ‘‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’’ 108, 122, 138 Four Quartets 1, 19, 20, 25, 37, 147, 158, 166, 182, 189–212 (see also Quatre Quatuors and titles of individual poems) and direct language 204–5 and the personal 203–4 and provisionality 211–12 and sensory experience 204 allusion in 209–11 dedications in 166, 201 metaphors for collaboration in 205–9 reader’s role in 21, 132, 202–12 ‘‘From Poe to Vale´ry’’ 220 ‘‘Frontiers of Criticism, The’’ 101, 105 ‘‘Function of Criticism, The’’ 112–17 ‘‘Gerontion’’ 32–3, 43, 65, 76, 77, 78, 84, 86, 185 ‘‘Goethe as Sage’’ 218, 219–20 ‘‘Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues’’ 141, 242 ‘‘Hamlet and His Problems’’ 45, 93, 102, 122 ‘‘The Hawthorne Aspect’’ 41 ‘‘Hippopotamus, The’’ 64 ‘‘Hollow Men, The’’ 79, 185, 246 ‘‘Hysteria’’ 31, 148 Idea of a Christian Society, The 112, 222

252 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (cont.) ‘‘Idea of a European Society, The’’ 216–17 ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Art of Poetry 53, 241 ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 87 ‘‘John Ford’’ 175 ‘‘John Marston’’ 10, 122 ‘‘Journey of the Magi’’ 185 ‘‘Kipling Redivivus’’ 75 ‘‘Literature and the Modern World’’ 51 ‘‘Little Gidding’’ 12, 165, 171, 185, 190–2, 194, 195, 198–200, 201, 203, 204, 204–5, 206–9, 210, 211, ‘‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’’ 2, 10, 28, 31–2, 43, 63, 65, 78, 80, 82, 84, 94, 100, 191, 207 ‘‘Man of Letters and the Future of Europe, The’’ 51 ‘‘Marianne Moore’’ 239 ‘‘Marie Lloyd’’ 8, 16, 112, 118–20, 126, 129, 137, 163, 176, 222 ‘‘Memory of Henry James, In’’ 50–1 ‘‘Metaphysical Poets, The’’ 45, 176 ‘‘Milton I’’ 178 ‘‘Milton II’’ 178 ‘‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’’ 65 ‘‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’’ 44–5, 51, 104, 215 Murder in the Cathedral 3, 16, 78, 78–9, 122, 124, 142, 145, 153, 154–5, 155–6, 161, 163–4, 185, 203 ‘‘Music of Poetry, The’’ 131, 182, 185, 196 ‘‘New Hampshire’’ 194 Noctes Binanianæ 59, 172–4 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 61, 112 ‘‘Ode’’ 93 ‘‘On the Eve, A Dialogue’’ 88 On Poetry and Poets 177, 178, 218 ‘‘Penseés of Pascal, The’’ 175, 176 ‘‘Philip Massinger’’ 107, 122 Poems (1919) 60 Poems (1920) 36, 65, 68 Poems 1909–1925 113 Poe`mes 1910–1930 180, 181 Poems Written in Early Youth 175 Points of View (edited by John Hayward) 175–8, 181, 185, 193 ‘‘Portrait of a Lady’’ 10, 64 ‘‘Possibility of Poetic Drama, The’’ 137 ‘‘Post-Georgians, The’’ 56–7 ‘‘Preface’’ to The Dark Side of the Moon 240 ‘‘Preface’’ to Of Dramatick Poesie 144–5 ‘‘Preface’’ to This American World 34 ‘‘Preface’’ to The Need for Roots 179–80

Index ‘‘Professional, Or . . .’’ 53–4 Prufrock and Other Observations 10, 31–2, 64, 201–2 Quatre Quatuors (Four Quartets) 20, 26, 174, 175, 186–8, 212, 247 ‘‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, I’’ 229 ‘‘Religion and Literature’’ 222 Rock, The 16, 142, 143–4, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 161–2, 242 ‘‘Romantic Aristocrat, A’’ 46 Sacred Wood, The 48, 120, 128, 134, 165, 174 Selected Essays 114, 118, 144, 145, 177 Selected Essays 1917–1932 122 Selected Prose (edited by John Hayward) 177–9, 245 ‘‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’’ 175 ‘‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’’ 122 ‘‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’’ 127 ‘‘Shorter Notices’’ 229 ‘‘Sir John Davies’’ 177 ‘‘Social Function of Poetry, The’’ 51, 129 Sweeney Agonistes 77, 109, 123, 124, 126, 140, 142, 151, 161, 185 Terre Vaine, La (The Waste Land ) 26, 174, 175, 180–6, , 187, 212 ‘‘Thomas Middleton’’ 122–3 ‘‘Thoughts After Lambeth’’ 185–6 ‘‘Three Voices of Poetry, The’’ 26, 140, 167, 214–16, 217 ‘‘To Criticize the Critic’’ 218 To Criticize the Critic 60, 218 ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ 8, 19, 39–43, 50, 98, 104, 114, 117, 128, 175, 215, 216, 218, 221 ‘‘Tradition and the Practice of Poetry’’ 47 ‘‘Types of English Religious Verse’’ 238 ‘‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’’ 115–16, 117 Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The 44, 51, 121, 126, 131, 176, 178, 217 ‘‘Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant’’ 56 Waste Land, The 14, 19, 21, 23–4, 29, 36, 50, 59, 60, 103, 111, 113, 119, 130, 131, 148, 156, 166, 189, 191, 203, 215 (see also La Terre Vaine) and audience 118, 120–1 and collage 107 drafts of 62–3, 71–2, 73–6, 76–87, 89–90, 94, 96–7, 108, 109–10, 152 dramatic elements of 108, 108–10 epigraph to 76–9 gender relations in 90, 95–6 literary allusions in 93, 96, 98–100, 107, 209–10 native tradition in 79–81

Index notes to 20, 55, 82, 96, 105–7, 125, 181, 196, 216 reader’s place in 15, 203 voices in 20, 33–4 ‘‘What Dante Means to Me’’ 218 ‘‘What is a Classic?’’ 220 ‘‘Whispers of Immortality’’ 65 ‘‘William Blake’’ 51, 69, 178 Eliot, Valerie (neé Fletcher) 63, 88, 158, 166, 225, 235, 243 Eliot, Vivien (neé Haigh-Wood) 3, 8, 20, 147, 166 collaboration with Eliot 23, 87–97 marriage to Eliot 27, 88–97, 147–8 ‘‘Letters of the Moment’’ 89–95 Eliot, Rev. William Greenleaf 36 Ellmann, Maud 227 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 112 Faber, Geoffrey 8, 59, 161, 168, 171–2, 173, 174 Fassett, Irene Pearl 236 Fenollosa, Ernest 70 Flanagan, Hallie 123 Fogerty, Elsie 143, 156 Ford, Ford Madox 67, 119 Ford, John 103, 122 Foucault, Michel 17, 241 Frazer, James George Golden Bough, The 103, 196 Frost, Robert 49 North Boston 49 Fussell, Paul 234 Gardner, Helen 170, 181, 187, 189, 210, 225 Art of Poetry, The 187, 246 Composition of Four Quartets, The 189, 247 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 66 Gautier, Theóphile 65 Georgian poets 10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 218 Gordon, Lyndall 31, 35, 70–1, 89, 147, 169, 170 Grierson, Herbert 50, 168 Group Theatre 140–1, 142–3 Hale, Emily 1, 3 Hall, Donald 152 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 239 Hardy, Thomas 139 Hargrove, Nancy D. 242 Hart-Davis, Rupert 15 Hawkins, Desmond 128 Hayward, John 8, 12, 13, 20, 21, 27, 59, 147, 168–9, 210, 218 as advocate 176 as editor 174–80

253 as emotional supporter 179, 190–2 as nurse 169 as protector 169–70 as shaper of Eliot’s critical persona 19, 176, 178–9, 245 British elements, highlighting of in Eliot’s work 183–4 collaboration with Eliot 19, 25–6, 158, 165–202, 245 effect on Four Quartets 193–201, 204–5 notes to Eliot’s work in French translation 180–8 personal elements, his highlighting of in Eliot’s work 184–5, 188 Heraclitus 206 Herrick, Robert 168 Heywood, Thomas 122 Hesse, Hermann 62 Hillyer, Robert 67–8, 224 Hogg, James 59 Homer 40, 83, 108, 187, 209 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 139 Housman, A. E. 44 Hulme, Thomas Ernst 17, 101, 127, 138, 206, 242 ‘‘Romanticism and Classicism’’ 127 Speculations 138 Huyssen, Andreas 57 Hutchinson, Mary 8, 12, 65, 78, 170 Inge, M. Thomas 8 Iser, Wolfgang 106 Jackson, H. J. 74 James, Henry 36, 41, 49 John of the Cross, St. 77 Johnson, Samuel 221 Jones, David 130 Jonson, Ben 122 Joyce, James 59, 73, 106, 115, 139 Ulysses 51 Julian of Norwich 200 Jung, Carl 67 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Judgment 45 Kauffer, McKnight 170 Keats, John 5, 45, 103 ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ 5, 184 ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ 184 Kellond, Ellen 97 Ker, W. P. 121 Keynes, Maynard 30 Koestenbaum, Wayne 233, 243 Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The 185

254 Laforgue, Jules 218 Lamb, Charles 108 Specimens 108 Lamos, Colleen 237 Langbaum, Robert 31 Larbaud, Valery 62 Laski, Harold 240 Laughlin, James 67 Lawrence, D. H. 139, 140, 220 Leavis, F. R. 182 Leavis, Q. D. 230 Leland, Blake 209 Levenson, Michael 239 Lewis, C. Day 170 Lewis, Wyndham 59, 99, 126 Leyris, Pierre 180–1, 183, 186 Little Review, The 59, 64 Lindsay, Vachel 64 ‘‘The Chinese Nightingale’’ 64 Little Review 71 Litz, A. Walton 238 Lloyd, Marie 118, 121, 135 Longenbach, James 227, 233, 239 Lonsdale, Frederick 158 Love, Harold 98 Lucretius 114 Lowell, Robert 204 Lowes, John Livingston 101 MacCarthy, Desmond 124, 142 McDonald, Gail 228–9 McGann, Jerome 98, 225 Mallarme´, Ste´phane 187 Marinetti, F. T. 52 Marlowe, Christopher 122 Marvell, Andrew ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’’ 81 Massine, Leónide 137–8 Masten, Jeffrey 48, 225 Masters, Edgar Lee 10 Matchett, William 246–7 Mathiessen, F. O. 182 Meisel, Perry 48 Mellon, Paul 67 Menand, Louis 31, 229 Meynell, Alice 53–4 Middleton, Thomas 122–3 Milton, John 15, 139, 178, 198, 210 Paradise Lost 37, 57 Samson Agonistes 198 Modernism aesthetic principles of 38 and collaboration 9–10, 24–5, 62, 67–8, 70–1, 72–3, 117 and limited editions 59–60

Index and literacy rates 57 and little magazines 59–60 and mass culture 57 and originality 104 and science 51, 52, 53–5 Monro, Harold 10, 56 Monroe, Harriet 62, 63, 65 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem 41 Moore, Marianne 179 ‘‘Fish, The’’ 179 Selected Poems 179 Morley, Frank 8, 59, 159, 160, 168, 171, 173, 174, 184, 196 Morrell, Ottoline 62, 91 Murry, Gilbert 140 Murry, John Middleton 29 Nesbitt, Catherine 136 New Age 64 New English Weekly, The 170, 171, 197, 200, 210, 211–12, 248 Newton, Eric 143 North, Michael 233 Orage, A. R. 211 Orwell, George 49, 228, 240 Others: A Magazine of New Verse 64 Pascal, Blaise 133 Pater, Walter 118 Perse, St.-John 246 Anabasis 175, 186, 246 Peters, Harold 109 Petronius 14, 79, 234 Satyricon 77 Pierce, Stella 143 Plomer, William 170 Poe, Edgar Allen 102, 220 ‘‘Philosophy of Composition, The’’ 102 ‘‘Raven, The’’ 102 Poel, William 140 Poetry 64, 66, 100, 211 Pope, Alexander 89 Essay on Criticism, An 115 Rape of the Lock, The 81 Pound, Ezra 8, 9, 10, 13, 20, 21, 25, 29, 50, 56, 150, 158, 165, 166, 170, 176, 189, 195, 209, 215, 218, 224 and Bel Esprit 64 and drama 108–9 and dramatic monologue 32 and nationality 35, 100 and patronage 72–3 authoritative role in collaborative relationship, adopts 28, 71–2, 86–7, 186, 191, 197

Index Bollingen Award controversy 67–8 collaboration with Eliot 10–11, 14, 19, 23, 34, 53, 59, 62–87, 108–10, 111, 112–17, 152, 153–4, 190, 200, 201–2, 231, 234 collaboration with Yeats 70 effect on Eliot’s early work 64–5 effect on The Waste Land 76–87, 108, 109–10, 183, 209–10, 234 stylistic biases of 81–6, 127–8, 193, 234, 235 works ABC of Reading 82, 86 Cantos 62, 67, 70, 79, 99 Catholic Anthology, The 10, 64, 73 ‘‘How to Read’’ 86 Hugh Selwyn Mauberly 70, 80 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 68 ‘‘Pisan Cantos’’ 67 ‘‘Retrospect, A’’ 52 ‘‘Sage Homme’’ 71–2 ‘‘Serious Artist, The’’ 52 Spirit of Romance, The 63 ‘‘This Constant Preaching to the Mob’’ 57 ‘‘Three Cantos’’ 65 Powell, Anthony 30, 34, 169 Proust, Marcel 168 Quinn, John 36, 66, 68, 72 Raeburn, Henzie 153, 162, 243 Rainey, Lawrence 231, 238 Read, Herbert 8, 34, 171, 229, 230 Richards, I. A. 131 Richmond, Bruce 58 Ricks, Christopher 65 Rickword, Edgell 29, 98 Rodker, John 10, 60 The Future of Futurism 60, 229 Rose, Mark 103 Rothermere, Lady 58, 66, 73, 88 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 102 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 234 Russell, Bertrand 95, 101 Mysticism and Logic 101 Said, Edward 239 Schiff, Sydney 8, 65 Schuchard, Ronald 21, 22, 242 Scott, Walter 77 Seymour-Jones, Carol 88, 95, 242 Shakespeare, William 41, 48, 50, 81, 107, 108, 109, 126, 163, 175, 178, 185, 209, 220 Coriolanus 90–1, 93, 236 Hamlet 50, 93, 102, 184 King Lear 104 Tempest, The 81, 98

255 Shaw, Martin 143, 161, 162 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 102, 127, 220 Defence of Poetry, A 41–2 Sherek, Henry 161, 162, 241, 243–4 Shiff, Sydney 87 Sitwell, Osbert 60 Spenser, Edmund Prothalamion 81 Stead, C. K. 75, 189, 232 Stevens, Wallace 224 Stillinger, Jack 8, 74, 99, 234 Strachey, Lytton 30 Swift, Jonathan 168, 187, 201 Tennyson, Alfred 32, 81 Thayer, Scofield 62, 86 Tourneur, Cyril 122 Trevelyan, Mary 189 Trombold, Chris Buttram 244 Twain, Mark Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The 133 Tyro, The 83 Underhill, Evelyn 14 Mysticism 14 Vale´ry, Paul 103, 220 ‘‘On Literary Technique’’ 52–3 Vendler, Helen 14 Vinci, Leonardo da 46 Virgil 187, 209, 220 Vittoz, Roger 62, 91 Wall, Wendy 59, 230–1 Waugh, Alec 229 Waugh, Arthur 73 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 64 Webb-Odell, Rev. R. 151 Webster, John Duchess of Malfi, The 136 White Devil, The 183 Weil, Simone 179 Need for Roots, The 179 Westminster Gazette 88 Weston, Jessie L. 183 From Ritual to Romance 183, 196 Whitman, Walt 80 ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’’ 80 Whitworth, Geoffrey 242 Wilde, Oscar ‘‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’’ 54 Williams, Charles Descent of the Dove, The 199 Williams, Louise Blakeney 163, 239

256 Williams, William Carlos 35, 48 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester 168 Wilson, John 59 Witemyer, Hugh 235 Woolf, Leonard 59–60, 108, 170 Woolf, Virginia 29, 59–60, 78, 108, 167, 169, 170 ‘‘Humane Art, The’’ 190 Wordsworth, William 40, 43, 128–9 ‘‘Preface’’ to Lyrical Ballads 128–9

Index Prelude, The 128 ‘‘Resolution and Independence’’ 208 Wycherley, William Country Wife, The 92, 93 Yeats, William Butler 59, 69, 70, 81, 108, 142, 201, 202, 207, 209, 220, 221 ‘‘William Blake and the Imagination’’ 233 York, Lorraine 19

T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration

eliot-ts-thewasteland

eliot-ts-poems

Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration (Businessweek Books)

Collaboration

TS 16949:2002 Edition

T.S. Eliot

Ts-11 Iskra

George Eliot

T.S. Eliot

eliot-danielderonda

Encyclopedia of E-collaboration

Virtual Teamwork: Mastering the Art and Practice of Online Learning and Corporate Collaboration

Virtual Teamwork: Mastering the Art and Practice of Online Learning and Corporate Collaboration

The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism

eliot-millonthefloss

eliot-middlemarch

eliot-adambede

eliot-silasmarner

Eliot Fintushel - Milo and Sylvie

Works of T. S. Eliot

Mastery and escape: T.S. Eliot and the dialectic of modernism

Eliot Fintushel - Bone Women

Creative Collaboration

George Eliot and the British Empire

Nonprofit Organizations: Challenges and Collaboration

Creative Collaboration

George Eliot and Victorian Historiograph

Collaboration and Networking in Education

Ray Eliot: The Spirit and Legend of Mr. Illini

T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration

eliot-ts-thewasteland

eliot-ts-poems

Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration (Businessweek Books)

Collaboration

TS 16949:2002 Edition

T.S. Eliot

Ts-11 Iskra

George Eliot

T.S. Eliot

eliot-danielderonda

Encyclopedia of E-collaboration

Virtual Teamwork: Mastering the Art and Practice of Online Learning and Corporate Collaboration

Virtual Teamwork: Mastering the Art and Practice of Online Learning and Corporate Collaboration

The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism

eliot-millonthefloss

eliot-middlemarch

eliot-adambede

eliot-silasmarner

Eliot Fintushel - Milo and Sylvie

Works of T. S. Eliot

Mastery and escape: T.S. Eliot and the dialectic of modernism

Eliot Fintushel - Bone Women

Creative Collaboration

George Eliot and the British Empire

Nonprofit Organizations: Challenges and Collaboration

Creative Collaboration

George Eliot and Victorian Historiograph

Collaboration and Networking in Education

Ray Eliot: The Spirit and Legend of Mr. Illini

Recommend Documents