The Path to the Wasteland
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And if and Perhaps and But.
T.S. Eliot, Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mizra
Murad Ali Beg
The Waste Land was published when Eliot was
thirty-four. Behind it lay a strenuous history of intellectual,
emotional and spiritual experiment, but only three years later he was to ask
that no biography of him be written. The private derails were not to be made
public
Throughout his life, Eliot stressed the ‘impersonal’ element
in his writing, the idea that true poetry is an escape from personality rather than an expression of it. It follows that
we must learn to see his work not as the
outpourings of an overcharged soul, a
revelation of the private experiences he was so careful to protect, but
as a series of artefacts, well-made
verses that communicate matured
experience through a range of traditional
knowledge. At first sight this may seem
passionless. It is not. Under the prim exterior, the beautifully urbane manners,
was a fermenting, deeply
subjective man fully aware of:
The awful daring of a
moment’s surrender
Which an age of
prudence can never retract
But precisely because such experiences are for all of us so very personal, their
significance perhaps not clear until many years later, Eliot would have said
that in themselves they are
little capable of being directly analysed or used as the immediate subject of mature poetry. As we shall see, this in
its turn had a profound effect on Eliot’s idea of what a poet does, what a poem
is and what both reader and writer derive from verse at all.
Thus, though the details of Eliot’s life remain interesting
- the details of a poet’s life always do - it would be naive to assume that they explain the poetry. That poetry
is, to repeat, a reinvestigation of the traditions of
intellectual, emotional and spiritual life activated not by the scholar’s
desire to pin the past down but
by the poet’s need to find himself and belong to what he has inherited.
Repeated reading of The
Waste Land will make this feeling clear. On a first acquaintance, it is a
most baffling poem - disconnected arbitrary full of references and quotations not
only in English but in a wide range of lndo-European tongues stretching back to
Sanskrit. It is even supplemented by a set of notes. But in places it is instantly vivid and moving. The last
section of ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ much of ‘A Game at Chess’ and the central
episode of ‘The Fire Sermon’ have an immediate impact. And it is just this power to raise feeling
that urges as on. We come slowly
to feel our way towards an appreciation of at least some of the powerful juxtapositions
in the work and wish to understand more. We begin to want to deepen our experience of the poem by exploring
its more difficult aspects. We
shall find that if we do so by recognising the emotion and drama of the supporting ideas - the sense of longing, fear and final triumph behind the
vegetation rites, or the ceremonious
dignity of Spenser - then we shall
not be hoarding intellectual lumbar but acquiring things permanently valuable
which confirm and enrich our first impression of the poem. It is for this
reason that a lengthy account of Eliot’s intellectual sources has been included
here. These, as we have seen, are
more important to the poetry than the
details of his life. It is vital that
they eventually be known and experienced. And it is oar our imaginative experience that is important - a
response which Eliot’s poem can deepen. Dante,
Baudelaire, Shakespeare and the rest are not neutral clues in a donnish
word-game but an essential part of oar
intellectual selves, the coinage of intelligent exchange. They are the foundations of the order and tradition within which
Eliot worked, and they are a common inheritance. They are ours. The Waste Land presents many of them as
something once infinitely valuable but now increasingly remote. If we bring our
own experience of them to Eliot’s
work, however, we shall begin to meet
him on common ground. In the end,
Eliot’s conscious reworking of traditional knowledge should lead as to read the Collected Works not as a diary or a crossword puzzle
but as a series of meditations. To adopt a title from his favourite, Donne,
they are a record of the
‘progresse of the soule’
Having said this, it
is clear that the aspect of Eliot’s life which we mast trace is the
intellectual one: what ideas was Eliot nurtured among,
what did he reject, modify or discover? This is also a means at approaching
Shakespeare, about whose private life we know even less. A knowledge of the people to whom he wrote the Sonnets
might be interesting – it would certainly
have the thrill of good gossip – but it would add not long to the stature of the poems, whose value
lies precisely in their brilliant recasting of age-old themes into a timeless beauty. This is equally true of The Waste
Land.
The tradition into which Eliot was born - in 1888 - was that of the high-minded Puritanism of
nineteenth Century America: bland, useful and, at its worst, rather smug. His mother wrote religious verse; his grandfather
had been a leading force in the
We have seen that
Eliot had begun to write, and it is
clear from these early poems that, under the urbane surface, Eliot’s
spiritual instincts were deeply troubled. After a year in
The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock belongs to the over-cultured world of Eliot’s Harvard days, though its location could be any English speaking upper class
suburb and urban backstreet. This is a poem about vision and moral turpitude, the fine web of social graces that
binds itself round the narrator until
the invitation to a rawer experience at the opening is lost oil in genteel
tittle-tattle. The narrator cannot follow Emerson’s injunction to ‘affront and
reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid
contentment of the times.’ Instead, the mild-mannered, balding Prufrock accepts his reluctant impotence. He can forge no link between the salon, the
slums and the sea. He is no prophet, no hero. Caught in a polite, delicate world of tea and subordinate clauses,
his vision of submarine delights is purely private, the fantasy of a fading
gentleman. What visions
he does hare are of a guessed-at, but
unlived life. He is the American cousin
of the French Symbolists’ sad
daddy, particularly that of Jules Laforgue, whom Eliot had briefly sketched before:
… Life, a little
bald and grey,
Languid, fastidious and bland,
Waits, hat and glove, in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the absolute.
The French Symbolist poets were of great importance to Eliot’s development. By the time he
came to write The Waste Land, he had absorbed a wider range of influences, but in 1908, when he first came across
Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist
Movement in Modern Literature, he encountered an argument which suggested a way of putting spiritual vision before mere realism. The world may become –as Baudelaire had sometimes seen it – a ‘forest
of symbols’. All the things of the material
world can, in this theory, be made into images of the inner world of the poet.
We see this in such works as Rhapsody on
a Windy Night where the universe
is an outward, visible sign of the poet’s spiritual condition.
Through it he can penetrate the mysterious world of
emotional experience, explore it
not always with hysterical extravagance,
but often, like Laforgue,
with a wry defeatism that is sometimes flippant, sometimes
scathing, as Prufrock himself is.
Eliot had gone to Pans to became a poet He returned to Harvard to study philosophy, His
thesis work was closely concerned with the problem that was
to preoccupy him throughout his life:
the relation of chaotic subjective
experience to a higher and absolute
coherence. From this period
stems the idea that the limited, individual consciousness is not
reality. The matter is a complex
one, and Eliot’s use of Bradley (the philosopher on whom he wrote has doctoral thesis) eventually
becomes that of a poet applying philosophy as a tone or colour to his thought
rather than that of the rigorous professional logician. Nonetheless, it is here that we can begin to see Eliot moving away from purely subjective
poetry and towards the communal,
universal truth enshrined in tradition. Some of the poems of this late Harvard period again show
the religious tension that Eliot was experiencing.
Eliot taught for two years in the Harvard
philosophy school, but, as we have
seen, he came to object to its divorcing
philosophy from religion. The latter was increasingly occupying him. He was now reading Dante again and
committing long sections to heart He had worked on Indian philosophy, in particular the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gua: he was also reading widely in European mysticism and
the lives of the saints. His Harvard poems reflect this These
later works are not as fine as Prufrock.
Maturing is not the same as regular
bettering. They are riddled with images at martyrdom and glimpses at
divine reality, but they are not convincing. They discuss fleeing a world that has not yet
been fully or agonisingly lived in. The
great human strength of The Waste
Land is the known awfulness
of the real world. Its varieties of brutal deadliness have been felt along
every nerve. In the Harvard poems
there is only an intellectual position:
sincere no doubt, but
thin and rather pretentious. Circumstances
were soon to change this, and Eliot kept
his early drafts. Several years
and a welter of experience later,
he was able to rework lines like these from The Death of Saint Narcissus more effectively:
Come under
the shadow of this gray rock -
Come in under the shadow of this gray rork.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak,
or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:
I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs
And the gray shadow on his lips.
In 1914 Eliot
returned to
Pound was a brilliant sponsor of young literary talent, and Eliot was one of his finest disciples
among the
Sexual inhibition - which
is not the same as a lack of sexual
drive - is clear in many of Eliot’s early
works. Something of this can be seen in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but other and earlier poems
show a fear of women, such as his rather Swinburnian stanza from Circe’s Palace:
Around her fountain which flows
With the voice of men in pain.
Are flowers that no man knows
Their petals are
fanged and red
With hideout streak and stain.
They sprang from the limbs of
the deed -
We shall not come here again.
In other works, such
as La Figlia Che Piange, Eliot takes an alternative stance: the safe and
melancholy delcicacy of a moment, which for all its beauty of epithet,
is again rather Victorian. The girl in this poem is less a real woman than a pose from a late-nineteenth-century
painting. Thirdly, and perhaps mare deadly, Eliot’s women are charming but pretentious. It is these vacuous ladies of Prufrock’s world, talking of Michelangelo, or the cloying artistic hostess in the Portrait of a Lady, who
under stress, lead to the
neurotic, febrile woman of the first part of ‘A Game of Chess’.
The fourth
type of Eliot’s early woman is the
common good-time girl: the clerk’s
victim in The Waste Land, and, in such Sweeney poems as Sweeney Erect and Sweeney Among the
Nightingales, someone more brashly vulgar and, to the poet, offensively sexual. Such, are the girls in Mrs. Porter’s ‘rooming house’, where
Sweeney is a regular visitor, as he is shown to be again in The
If the women of many of the early poems are
demonic or, more often, trivial, the women in Sweeney Agonistes say much about revulsion from physical love. They
are degrading and the degraded man is Sweeney, the barely articulate sensualist
who says.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts, when you
come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
Sweeney is modern, sensual man whose sexual instincts though strong, cannot lead to a vision of an improved world. His interest in women is bestial, and the women he is interested in are low, tawdry
creatures. Sweeney is no more than hair, eyes and mouth as he takes his vicarious pleasure:
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs
Jack-knifes upwards at the knees,
Then straightens out
from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow
slip.
This is sex at its most empty, the degrading fear and
passion that underlies the
neurosis shown in such sections of The Waste
Land as lines 95-106 or
196-206.
The satirical poems which describe the collapse of European culture
have great elegance but are riddled with disturbing anti-Semitism, a crude and
rather sensationalist presentation of the idea that a Jewish economic conspiracy
was undermining traditional values. This idea, as we have seen, may have been derived
from Ezra Pound. A poem such us Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar juxtaposes the cultured ex-patriot
American, touring Venice with his guidebook and memories of Ruskin, with Bleistein
- ‘Chicago, Semite Viennese’ - and Sir
Ferdinand Klein, a womanizing financier. The confection of quotations at the
start suggests the rich cultural past of
The most powerful of
these early poems is Gerontion, which Eliot at one time considered as a section of The
Thoughts of
a dry brain in a dry season
These varieties of anguish may be partly a reflection of the fact that Eliot’s first
marriage was a cruel disaster. To the shy and somewhat tortured
don, Vivienne Haigh-Wood’s vitality and
lack of inhibit ion were perhaps
challenging and exciting; but if we read the earlier poems to find ‘the pattern … of the personal emotion,’ then we come away with the clear impression
that women’s sexuality and his own response
to it troubled Eliot deeply. He had been brought up in a puritanical
home, he had lived an intense intellectual
and spiritual life, and he was only twenty-six. A year after his marriage he
wrote:
For the boy whose
childhood has been empty of beauty, who has
never known the detached curiosity for beauty, who has been brought up
to see goodness as practical and
to take the line of self interest in a code of rewards and punishments, then
the sexual instinct when it is aroused may
mean the only possible escape from a prosaic world.
But sex was not an escape.
Vivienne’s mental arid physical well-being
were extremely precarious, and
Lyndall Gordon comments well that Eliot’s marriage - and
with it the very poor stale of
his finances - was ‘to be the grim underside of has life, the secret inferno to be traversed before he might
be worthy of the genuine awakening only Christianity could supply’.
A line of Eliot’s own from this time is most poignant: ‘It is terrible.’ he wrote, ‘to be alone with another person.’ Terror
and neurosis, are the powerful subjects of the first section of ‘A Game of Chess’.
The First World War
kept Eliot in