Big Tom

Frank Morley

Eliot Stephen Spender (Fontana Modern Masters 80p) Stephen Spender in this introduction to Eliot's poetry makes good advantage of having been born twenty-one years later than Eliot, close enough in time to have had several decades of knowing this 'Master' in person, yet not so old as to be subject to what George Saintsbury once called the "common and not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship the delusion of those who have hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles." Thus with no twinge Spender opens with the suggestion that "ritualistic" is the word that consistently describes Eliot's attitude to life. It is this suggestion which is to ease the reader's transition from Eliot's poetry before AshWednesday to his poetry afterwards;

In his poetry up to Ash-Wednesday Eliot saw the destruction of past rituals and tneir replacement by ones which were mockeries of them as the most characteristic feature of modern life. Prufrock portrays a society in which liveS are "measured out" not by the sacraments but "with coffee spoons."

After his conversion Eliot found it possible to write about life outside time in which Beatitude was capable of being imagined: he did this in the Four, Quartets.

When Herbert Read and other of Eliot's earlier companions felt that after The Hollow Men Eliot's poetry became for the most part 'moralistic', that feeling can be dismissed as due to companionship-fallacy. If Herbert Read wrote: "All the poetry that follows, including the Four Quartets, is, in spite of flashes of the old fire, moralistic poetry" such comment only shows that Read was suffering pain of adhesions and was failing to move on. Spender moves forward with contented feeling that "the peculiar tension of the Four Quartets is the result of the poet's refusal to be moralistic while, at the same time, as a Christian recognising that religion is more important than the poetry. . . The inner drama of Four Quartets consists of a serious jocular confrontation between the autonomy of language in poetry and the divine word of religion, between the word and the Word." The 'subject matter' of Eliot's later poetry becomes of increasing importance, yet Spender insists that Eliot "never lost the sense that whatever the poem 'said,' it was the being poetry and not the saying that mattered. The conflict between the meaning of a poem, as belief, philosophy, report on an emotion experienced, and the poem as being nothing but itself the poetry was one which preoccupied him all his life. If it remained something of an unresolved problem, the fact that he left it unresolved is important."

The hint from the start is that Spender's introduction will build towards regarding the Four Quartets, and in particular 'Little Gidding' as "not only Eliot's masterpiece" but also "the end of his poetic quest for the true ritual." The three-sided motions of Eliot as poet, critic, dramatist are seen as all moving under one dominant motion. A reason why the essays of The Sacred Wood were forcing attention even before the publication of The Waste Land made Eliot's name famous, was that his early critical writings had in them the passionate appeal of being "the prose branch of the poetic quest." Spender's ninth chapter, The Point of Intersection of the Tfmleless,' lingers over the final active movement of that quest as transmitted by 'Little Gidding.' Spender rightly advises his readers to consult also Helen Gardner's The Art of T. S. Eliot for further detailed study of the background and development of each of the quartets with its several movements, but for the excellence of Spender's own comments I might single out for special admiration what he has to say about the terza rima passage intittle Gidding' where the poet meets a Dantesque "familiar compound ghost" with whom he has a grave conversation. How should one attend to lines which Spender quotes?

So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'

Although we were not. 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.

Since the "compound" ghost has been declared to be "both one and many," "both intimate and unidentifiable," Spender refuses to puzzle too much over individual identification. The poetry flows on with the poet "both inside historic time and outside it," "the fusion being effected by the scene which is an air raid warning in war time London":

And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding, In concord at this intersection time, Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

'Little Gidding' is treated by Spender as, for Eliot, "the furthest point in his spiritual and poetic exploration, his meeting with death."

The plays that were written after 'Little Gidding' have only secondary interest for Spender. Following publication of the Four Quartets Eliot "lived for another twenty years": After 'Little Gidding', though, we have the sense of Eliot's life and work going gently down an incline on the farther side of a mountain. This was accomplished with much grace and public acclaim. He wrote partly because the theatre really was new territory for him, and partly out of a sense of duty and benevolence. He did so without repeating himself and with some striking successes.

"Putting this another way", Spender continues in his Epilogue, "after 'Little Gidding' Eliot stopped writing out of the centre of his ritualistic sensibility and wrote out of the periphery of conscience." It is possible that Spender is affected here by a 'Fallacy of Companionship' such as I mentioned as affecting Herbert Read. Read, feeling thor-' oughly 'with' Eliot's poetry of its first twenty years, found it less possible to go along wholeheartedly on Eliot's then subsequent poetic journey. Spender, with his attentiveness to ritualistic sensibility, is the more ready to follow Eliot's journey after Ash-Wednesday, "exploring experiences which point to the possibility of a life where eternity intersects with time." About that journey Spender is interpretive; he finds much that delights him to say and that is a delight to hear; but it is for Spender Eliot's "last imaginable journey." As after The Hollow Men Read expressed disinclination to follow Eliot's turn to 'moralistic poetry', so Spender hesitates to follow Eliot's turn "down an incline" after 'Little Gidding.'

Poet, critic, dramatist at the various different stages all the triangular pieces are here combining in motion. What Spender has managed is to give to the triangles a biographical vitality. Old friends can recognise Eliot 'to the life.' The 'triangular' motif is cleverly and actively captured by James Lowe in the cover painting used for this paperback. In Eliot's boyhood in America there was an active children's book character, drawn by Carolyn Wells, and named Triangular Tommy. James Lowe has caught and given life to the same motion and by that cover painting Eliot would, I think, have been amused.

Frank Morley was a director of Faber and Faber during the 'thirties, and was a close collaborator of T. S. Eliot.