TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0306> <title> 1950s: Reflections:Mr. Eliot </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> TIME Magazine March 6, 1950 Reflections: Mr. Eliot </hdr> <body> <qt> <l>How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot,</l> <l>With his features of clerical cut,</l> <l>And his brow so grim</l> <l>And his mouth so prim</l> <l>And his conversation, so nicely</l> <l>Restricted to What Precisely</l> <l>And If and Perhaps and But...</l> <l>How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!</l> <l>(Whether his mouth be open or shut.)</l> <l>--T.S. Eliot</l> </qt> Few Americans have had the dubious pleasure of meeting Thomas Stearns Eliot. To most of them, he is an expatriate, obscurely highbrow poet who wrote an unreadable poem called The Waste Land and fathered a catch-phrase about the world ending not with a bang but with a whimper. Thanks to a Broadway hit called The Cocktail Party, his name at last was beginning to be more frequently encountered. Some of the higher-browed reviewers had called the play "esoteric." But the people who crowded to see it night after night were not predominately highbrows (there are not enough highbrows in New York to make a play a hit), and they did not, apparently, find the play esoteric--perhaps because they did not find Christianity esoteric. Mr. Eliot himself was, as usual, far from Broadway. Last week, just returned from a holiday in South Africa, and with a slight tan covering his bookish pallor, Mr. Eliot was back in his accustomed London haunts, primly pacing his familiar round. His day began at 8 a.m. At noon, after a man-sized breakfast of tea, porridge, bacon and eggs, he set out for his place of business, the publishing firm of Faber & Faber, in Bloomsbury. He left his flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea (Expatriate Henry James used to live in the flat just below) wearing an impeccable dark blue suit and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, walked one block to the No. 49 bus stop. When the bus came, he mounted to the upper deck, unfolded his London Times to the crossword puzzle, and fell to. Before he did, he might well have shot an apprehensive glance at his fellow travelers. Not long ago, on this same bus, a large woman had sat down next to him, had peered at him, peered again, and exclaimed: "Gracious me, aren't you Mr. T.S. Eliot?" Aghast, he had looked up, admitted his identity, and at the next stop, clutching his newspaper, he had fled down the narrow stairs, hurried to the nearest tube station and gone underground. Why should anybody want to meet Mr. Eliot--even halfway? More particularly, why should Americans bother about this Missouri-born American who talks like an Englishman, has not lived in the U.S. for the past 36 years, and gave up his U.S. citizenship to become a British subject? There are many possible answers. Perhaps the simplest answer is: Because T.S. Eliot is a civilized man. He is more; he is a commentator on his age who is considered by some more important than Gabriel Heatter or Walter Winchell--or even Walter Lippmann. There are many different Mr. Eliots--the shy and the friendly, the sad and the serene and the Mr. Eliot who expresses complex thoughts in complex (if catchy) rhythms. There is even a human Mr. Eliot who loves Bourbon and the Bible, both of which he used to keep on his night table (in austerity England he settles for pink gin). St. Louis Blues. Thomas Stearns Eliot began his journey through the waste land in the heart of a land of plenty. The youngest, most coddled of seven children, he was born (1888) in St. Louis, a city filled with the disorder of growth and a booming faith in the nation, in business, in machine-driven progress. The Eliot's were New Englanders; they had come to Massachusetts around 1670 from East Coker, Somerset. T.S. Eliot's grandfather moved from Boston to St. Louis, founded the city's first Unitarian Church, as well as Washington University. The Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot could be a stern shepherd; one of his more memorable sermons was entitled: "Suffering Considered as Discipline." But young Tom Eliot's Irish Catholic nurse considered Unitarianism too thin a spiritual cloak against the cold winds of the world; she liked to take him along to her own church, a block away from the Eliots' red brick house on Locust Street. Tom's father was a wholesale grocer who became president of the St. Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Co. There was neither smoking nor drinking in the Eliot household. The Eliots were a literary-minded family; evenings, Tom, his brother and his five sisters would cluster around father as he read Dickens to them. Tom's mother wrote a dramatic poem on the life of Savonarola. Tom Eliot was a frail and quiet child. Often, when friends wanted him to come out and play, they found him curled up in a big leather armchair, reading. He went to Smith Academy in St. Louis, later moved on to Milton Academy near Boston. Wherever he was, he felt out of place. He wrote later: "I had always been a New Englander in the Southwest and a Southwesterner in New England. In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds...of Missouri; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the hay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts." At 18 Eliot went on to Harvard. Babbitt & King Bolo. Professor George Santayana taught him philosophy and Professor Irving Babbitt, the ardent revivalist of the classic past, taught him French literature, got him interested in Sanskrit and Oriental religions (Eliot later devoted two years to their study); Bertrand Russell taught him logic and later introduced him to the London literary world as his "best pupil." Eliot breezed through his course in three years, spent the fourth year working for his M.A. But he was no bookworm. Although he was shy, he made a point of going to dances and parties; Poet Conrad Aiken, a fellow student, recalls seeing tall, dapper Tom Eliot for the first time reeling out of the office of the Harvard Lampoon, where a punch party was in roaring progress. In his junior year Eliot decided that he was too puny, took boxing lessons, once proudly sported a lustrous shiner. He also delighted his classmates (including Walter Lippmann, Heywood Broun, John Reed, Stuart Chase, Alan Seeger) by writing risque doggerel about a mythical King Bolo and his Queen ("that airy fairy hairy-'un/ Who led the dance on Golder's Green/ With Cardinal Bessarion"). In addition to chronicling the doings of King Bolo, he contributed romantic verse to the Harvard Advocate. After Harvard, Eliot went to study in Paris for a year ("on the old man's money") and in a Left Bank flat wrote his first significant poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the portrait of an aging man reviewing a life frittered away between timid hopes and lost opportunities: <qt> <l>For I have known them all already, known them all,</l> <l>Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons.</l> <l>I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...</l> <l>Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?</l> <l>I shall wear white flannel trousers, and I walk upon the</l> <l>beach.</l> <l>I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each...</l> </qt> Did 23-year-old Tom Eliot feel his own life slipping away? He returned to Harvard for three more years' graduate work. In 1914, of all years, he won a traveling fellowship and went to Germany. He barely managed to avoid being caught by the war, and went on to Britain. It turned out to be a long stay. Sweeney & the Nightingales. After a year at Oxford, Eliot taught history, Latin, French, German, arithmetic, drawing and swimming in English schools, where he was known as "the American master." He also tried to teach the boys baseball while they tried to teach him Rugby and cricket. In 1915, he married a pretty ballet dancer, Vivienne Haigh, daughter of a British artist. He volunteered for duty with the U.S. Navy, but his ensign's commission did not come through until after the Armistice. He gave up teaching and went to work for Lloyds Bank of London. Friends think that, had he stayed in the City, he might have risen to be a director of the Bank of England. (Later, he gave up his bank job to join the publishing firm of Faber & Gwyer, now Faber & Faber). But Eliot the banker, in his bowler hat, black coat and sponge-bag (checked) trousers, was only one of several simultaneous incarnations. There was also the dreamily peripatetic Mr. Eliot who walked on the beach wearing, like Prufrock, white flannel trousers and reading Virgil or Dante. Above all, dogging the steps of the other Messrs. Eliot, was the increasingly cynical young man who writes verse as polished and as sharp as a Guardsman's sword. He created a gallery of unforgettable characters; Mr. Apollinax, the faun-like, fragile embodiment of the dry intellect (whose "laughter tinkled among the teacups"); Apeneck Sweeney, the dumb incarnation of a brutal age; Grishkin, the musky, eternally feline feminine: <qt> <l>Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye</l> <l>Is underlined for emphasis.</l> <l>Uncorseted, her friendly bust</l> <l>Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.</l> </qt> More and more clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling of European civilization; more and more sharply, his verse photographed the human ruins--an old man waiting for death in a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where, in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "the nightingales are singing near/ The Convent of the Sacred Heart..." Few people were listening to nightingales, in the dawn after World War I, when Eliot began to work on The Waste Land. Their song came only faintly to Eliot himself, whose sense of general calamity was intensified by private troubles. By 1920, partly because of overwork in his dual career of banker and poet, Eliot was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While resting under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, he finished The Waste Land. He sent it for criticism to his friend, brilliant, erratic Poet Ezra Pound (Eliot's avowed admiration for Pound [who "discovered" him] has provoked bitter criticism. Last year a jury of fellows of the U.S. Library of Congress, including T.S. Eliot, awarded the annual $1,000 Bollingen Prize for the "highest achievement of American Poetry" to Ezra Pound, who was then in an insane asylum and under indictment for treason [he had spent the war in Italy as propaganda broadcaster for Mussolini]. Some critics attacked Eliot as being chiefly responsible for the award, but the jury emphatically denied that Eliot had nominated Pound for the award, or had exerted any influence on his behalf.), who blue-penciled it down to half its size. The poem first appeared in 1922, in the first issue of The Criterion, the small literary magazine which T.S. Eliot was editing with Lady Rothermere's backing (Until it folded on the eve of World War II, The Criterion, though its circulation never exceeded 900, was one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the English-speaking world.) The Waste Land turned out to be the most influential poem of the 20th Century. The Patched Mirror. The Waste Land is easier on the ear than on the mind. It is like a kaleidoscopic mirror held up to the age--a patched mirror which at first seems to reflect only a heap of broken images, but which, to a longer view, blends them into a single bizarre picture, at once as strange and as familiar as one's own face (or one's own city) seen in a recurring nightmare. The broken bits of mirror reflect bittersweet scenes of past summers, and brown, foggy glimpses of London; a hysterical woman in an ornate boudoir like a candlelit tomb; women in a pub talking of postwar problems ("Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart./ He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you/ To get yourself some teeth..."). Some of the splinters mirror images from other poems, from legend or from history. These references invite the reader to measure the squalor of his day against past splendors--Elizabeth and Leicester in a red and gold barge on the Thames contrasted with an anonymous London girl of today, in a canoe on the same Thames, being seduced without pleasure, without interest ("My people humble people who respect/ Nothing...). Determining the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted--"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih, meaning: "The Peace which passeth understanding." The Lost Generation. Some of the critics reviewing The Waste Land sniffed that it was indeed a piece that passed all understanding (in its first issue, baffled, brash, bumptious TIME reported that The Waste Land was rumored to have been written as a hoax). But it brought Eliot a literary notoriety that passed into fame. The "lost generation" embraced his sharp, unsentimental lyricism; they voted Eliot their most representative poet (a distinction which Eliot himself coldly rejected). The age recognized itself in the patched mirror; Eliot had touched a hidden spring in the century's frightened, shut soul--and that soul began to open up to him a little. One English girl sums up Eliot's impact on her youth. "Somehow Eliot put the situation into words for us, and it was never so bad again. Each in his own prison, but Eliot in the next cell, tapping out his message, if not of hope, at least of defiance. We would not measure out our lives with coffee spoons." T.S. Eliot, no more than his age, has emerged from the waste land, but he has managed to rebuild, for himself, the broken chapel in its midst. For a time, Eliot delighted the Greenwich Village atheists by seeming to tackle the road of easy cynicism; in The Hippopotamus (1920) he squirted heavy sarcasm at the church ("The hippo's feeble steps may err/ In compassing material ends,/ While the True Church need never stir/ To gather in its dividends.,.."). Yet it was to the church that Eliot turned. He gives a large but ironical measure of credit for his final conversion to his former teacher, Bertrand Russell. Eliot read one of his essays, A Free Man's Worship, in which the philosopher gushily described the way he--and a lot of other thinkers--saw the human condition on the hustle and Russell of the scientific age. Man and his hopes and fears, according to Russell, are the product of "accidental collocations of atoms," his sense of sin a trait inherited from the beasts of prey, his life determined by blind, unfriendly forces without plan or purpose, his whole existence on his planet--which is doomed to freeze to death when the sun dies--probably only a cruel practical joke of God. What can man do in this abysmal fix? Says Russell in effect: whistle a pretty symphony in the dark. Man must worship his own visions of beauty and goodness which now and then pop into his brain. (Russell does not say whence they pop); in other words, man must worship man. After reading this arid credo Eliot decided that the opposite direction must be the right way. In 1927, he was confirmed in the Church of England. The same year Eliot also became a British subject. It was no more a sudden decision than his deciding to join the church. Says he: In the end I thought: 'Here I am, making a living, enjoying my friends here. I don't like being a squatter. I might as well take the full responsibility.'" 1,000 Lost Golf Balls. Critics and fans who had idolized the bitter, brittle Eliot were appalled when in 1930 he published his first religious poem, Ash Wednesday, the sternly beautiful statement of a man who has found his course ("Because I do not hope to turn again..."). Undeterred, the "new" Eliot continued to write his faith into his poetry. T.S. Eliot, ex-banker and successful publisher, has himself raised the question: What are poets good for? The 20th Century is not sure. Eliot thinks that by rights a poet should be useful; he ought to guard the language against becoming barbaric and that he ought to be entertaining. But the poet must also, as Eliot puts it, "make us from time to time a little more aware..." Against the modern heresy of automatic progress Eliot asserts the Christian insight that sinful man is never safe from evil. Against the notion of quantitative culture (i.e., the more you read, the more you know), Eliot asserts that culture means knowing a few things well rather than knowing many things a little. In his pageant, The Rock (1934), he has made his clearest, most striking admonition to his fellow man. Excerpts: <qt> <l>Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?</l> <l>Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?</l> <l>The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries</l> <l>Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust...</l> </qt> <qt> <l>The Word of the Lord came into me saying:</l> <l>O miserable cities of designing men,</l> <l>O wretched generation of enlightened men,</l> <l>Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,</l> <l>Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:</l> </qt> <qt> <l>I have given you hands which you turn from worship,</l> <l>I have given you speech, for endless palaver,</l> <l>I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,</l> <l>I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,</l> <l>I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust...</l> </qt> <qt> <l>In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels</l> <l>The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,</l> <l>The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,</l> <l>And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:</l> <l>Their only monument the asphalt road</l> <l>And a thousand lost golf balls..."</l> </qt> The Door Against Evil. In an age that equals optimism with faith, it is fashionable to call Eliot a pessimist. Eliot is a Christian and therefore, in a sense a "pessimist" about the nature of man. Yet in his "pessimism" Eliot is far more hopeful about man's future than most of the more secular prophets. On a recent trip to Germany, German youth enthusiastically responded to his talks about the need for an integrated Christian community in Europe. ("The hell with Oswald Spengler!" cried one Hamburg student, in sudden rebellion against one of the century's foremost gods of gloom.) Eliot believes that there is only one way out of the waste land--and that is not the middle way. He believes that the Western nations must choose between a pagan society and a truly Christian society. By a Christian society he does not mean rule by the church, but a society that really lives by Christian principles, which what he calls the "Community of Christians" (a kind of spiritual elite) forming "the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation." In his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, Eliot reminded his audience that a faith can live only if the faithful are ready, in the extreme of need, to die for it. While lesser men feebly tried to bolt the door against evil, Thomas conquered evil by submitting to death and martyrdom. It is a meaningful lesson for a civilization anxiously trying to bolt the door against evil whose champions are notable ready to give their lives for its triumph. Eliot does not believe that the world can succeed in forming a non-Christian, "rational" civilization--though it is now trying to. Says he: "The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide." The world came fairly close to suicide in World War II. During the London blitz, Eliot spent two night a week as a fire- watcher on the roof of his office building. From his perch above what he has often called the "unreal city," Eliot observed, with terror and compassion, the relentless fires. Had London's people (and with them, Western civilization) gone down then, Eliot's verse would have served as a magnificent and tender epitaph: <qt> <l>...Ash on an old man's sleeve</l> <l>Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.</l> <l>Dust in the air suspended</l> <l>Marks the place where a story ended...</l> </qt> Polyphiloprogenitive. The war only slightly disrupted Eliot's ordered and somewhat lonely life. His wife, who had been in a nursing home since 1930, died three years ago. Since the war, Eliot has shared a flat in artistic Chelsea with his good friend, Writer-Critic John Hayward (brilliant, witty Hayward, almost completely paralyzed, manages to get about London in a wheelchair). Eliot has the simple but expensive habits of an English gentleman (although English gentlemen usually consider him a typically American gentleman). He dresses well, likes claret and good cheese. As a church warden at St. Stephen's in Kensington, he performs his duties conscientiously. Now a full partner in the firm of Faber & Faber, he takes his work as publisher as seriously as his work as poet ("writing poetry is not a career," he says). He is known as the firm's best and most prolific writer of book jacket blurbs. He has little sympathy for poets who starve in garrets (It isn't necessary"), but he frequently helps out of his own pocket (Not a badly lined pocket, as poet's pockets go. Friends estimate that Eliot makes about 4,000 pounds ($11,200) a year, including some 2,500 pounds of royalties from his books and plays. His income from The Cocktail Party in Manhattan is about $1,600 a week.), an aspiring poet who submits work to him. As precisely as an Eliot rhyme clicking into place at the end of the line, 4 o'clock each day brings tea with friends or business acquaintances in Eliot's rather shabby, faded office, where he is enthroned on a rickety wooden chair behind a massive desk. At 6:30, he leaves for home, dines with Hayward unless he has a pressing engagement, and returns to his room for what he has called "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings," Eliot admits that he will find numberless little things to attend to rather than buckle down to work. Eliot types all his verse. He is a slow worker and tireless reviser. He loves words, and when he comes across a particularly fine specimen he stores it away for future use; sometimes he also makes up words, e.g., "polyphiloprogenitive" (Eliot refuses to say what he meant by it. Literally, "loving numerous offspring."). To his friends (who call him Tom or "Old Possum"), T.S. Eliot is a considerate, avuncular Puck who writes rhymes about cats to entertain their children and likes to address letters in verse ("Postman, propel thy feet/ And take this note to greet/ The Mrs. Hutchinson/ Who lives in Charlotte Street..."). Eliot is a devoted Sherlock Holmes fan, is apt to emerge from his room clad in Holmesian dressing gown and slippers, and address his startled friend: "My dear Hayward, I am put in mind of the incident in Bosnia, at the time of our struggle with the Professor over the Crown Prince's jewel..." He also loves practical jokes. For years, Eliot patronized a small store which specialized in exploding cigars, squirting buttonholes and soapy chocolates. Once, on the Fourth of July, at a solemn board meeting of Faber & Faber he set off a bucketful of firecrackers between the chairman's legs. In a Harvard class history, Eliot has made some frank self- revelations: "...I play a bad game of chess and like such games as poker, rummy and slippery Ann for low stakes...I never bet because I never win...I cannot afford yachting, but I should like to breed bull terriers. I am afraid of high places and cows..." Civilization and Poetry. Today, at 61, Mr. Eliot is secure and honored in his high place as one of the foremost men of English letters. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the Order of Merit (one of the highest British orders, limited to 24 members). In his critical essays, he has rendered Olympian judgments. Fellow critics swarm about Critic Eliot like an army of Lilliputians, trying to tie him down to some systematic "school"; when he stirs to reverse one of his previous unfavorable decisions (as he has been known to do, notably in the case of Milton), the swarm is agog for months. As a playwright, Eliot is still a little dazed by the footlights. He resorts to chalk and blackboard to work out his plots. Says he: "My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down." (The Cocktail Party is his first play to be produced on a large commercial scale. His only other full-length play, apart from Murder in the Cathedral; The Family Reunion, the story of a modern Orestes haunted by the Furies.) His collected poems fill only a thin volume--he believes that a poet ought to write as little as possible--but they are as different from most other 20th Century poetry as the sound of bronze-pure bells from the shrilling of a telephone. An age which reads in a hurry and likes to understand familiar meanings with headline speed has accused Eliot of being obscure; much of his poetry does require close attention, but none of it is as catchy as a song hit. Is Eliot a great poet? His own age would not call him so, and doubts that posterity will. In his revulsion from vulgarity and muddled sentimentality, he has perhaps moved away too far from the heat of emotion and the sweat of action. His attitude toward the U.S. is significant. He remembers it fondly, sometimes signs his name Tom (Missouri) Eliot, and like to sing U.S. folk ballads, though he has a hard time staying on key. But he does not seem to understand America (although he comes to the U.S. on frequent visits), shrinks from its materialistic gusto. If it ever was, civilization is nothing now to write poems about. T.S. Eliot is a thinking and a feeling man, and a Christian; he is not a happy man. The commentator on a tragedy cannot be expected to sound like a radio announcer lip-deep in molasses. He may sometimes crackle, but he will never snap or pop. Eliot's indirect influence is wide and deep, but incalculable. He has shown two generations of poets how to write. He has shown that a man can be both clever and religious. More interesting than Eliot's influence on others, however, is the influence of others (notably his Christian predecessors) on Eliot. One compelling reason why the audiences crowd his Cocktail Party is that they recognize it, in the sense that people always recognize it, in the sense that people always recognize a compelling restatement of the old and certain truths. They like Eliot for being clever, and at the same time clear; but what counts most is the common sense, the humility and the hope expressed in such lines as these: <qt> <l>The best of a bad job is all any of us make of it,--</l> <l>Except of course, the saints...</l> </qt> </body> </article> </text>