Gift Horse and Aged Eagle
T. S. Blot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday.
Edited with an introduction by
Neville Braybrooke. (Hart-Davis, 21s.) THERE is a nip in the air by now. Granted that he is a writer of deep and original gifts and that there is a point beyond which he is unlikely to diminish in importance, the signs are that Eliot is in for a time of relative disfavour with the audience which has stood by him faithfully early and late, for whom he was their dearest cultural asset. His less attractive sayings—the sneering about Lawrence or liberalism, the sparks of anti-Jewish prejudice —are no longer given the benefit of the doubt, carefully ignored or made part of the oracle. With the readers of serious or difficult books his ponti- fical standing is not what it was. On the other hand, of course, with the general public, and with the sort of people and the sort of papers who were once his bitterest and dirtiest detractors, his reputation is at high noon. Now that his latest play is here and Henry Sherek is his Hagerty, we see bulletins about his health, we know that he likes to dance and watch the yachts in Kensington Gardens—not a day goes by without news of the mystery of his dryness and dullness. As publicity, it almost looks like an exercise in derision, partly because the journalists virtually seem to be laugh- ing up their sleeves as they harp on the weakest aspects of his literary character and because the exercise is founded on considerations that have very little to do with the real grounds of his great- ness as a writer. The enthusiasm for Eliot is one in which you do not have to read him. His new fame dwells a bit on the recent plays, which scarcely a single qualified or interested person has said they liked, but very little on the earliest and best in his achievement. It is not just a question of the sour grapes of an elite readership being
swamped out by the acclamations of a huge second public. This second fame is simply a form of stardom largely based on commercial interests and the usual appetite for saints and panjandrums. It is a painful and embarrassing spectacle.
The present birthday tribute strikes me as very much the creation of this second public—its sub- ject is Eliot as a kind of very austere celebrity. Any comparison with the Rajan symposium some years ago should settle this straight away. The essays here are all at sixes and sevens; apart from an air of pallor and crooked knees there is no view of Eliot, nor are there any interesting disagree- ments. Big names appear to the extent, in one case, of a few stammering disclaimers. The poem by Djuna Barnes has to be seen to be believed. Very few of the contributions are from those critics to whom we are indebted for a clearer sense of Eliot's writings, and of the schoolchildren who say how much they like them or the professionals who have televised the verse or set it to music neither has much to offer by way of replacement. The editor does not seem to have proof-read very well : we are told in his own piece how 'a plain statement such as "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was not meant to be"' has passed into com- mon speech. He also writes a pretty childish introduction himself, stressing the charnel-house and abnegation side of Eliot and setting the general tone of cloudless sycophancy. Typical of this is one bizarre sentence from another essay, a sentence about the Library of Congress recordings which seems to contain an actual parody of the master's voice, 'In the stony silence, broken only by the asthmatic coughing of his audience, you
can hear without prejudice to the clarity of his diction Mr. Eliot's tongue is beautifully in his. cheek.'
The better contributions arc by Iris Murdoch, Rose Macaulay, Robert Speaight, who has sensible doubts about the recent plays, and John Betjeman, who reminds us, somehow startlingly, that the topography of The Waste Land is that of the City and the Thames. The successful critical pieces are by Stevie Smith and G. S. Fraser. Miss Smith writes about Murder in the Cathedral, completely herself, as if she were alone and on oath with a suddenly discovered text, giving a firm account of the rhetoric of abjectness and fear which dominates the play and which she sees no reason to call by any other name. This is exactly the frankness which should come much more freely now in the discussion of Eliot's verse. G S. Fraser is severe, too, though he appears to have had to get very excited in order to be so : he deals well and openly with that narrowness of feeling which led the poet into unpleasant early effects like the seduction scene in The Waste Land.
Even if they are sometimes produced by a resentment of this new fame, severities of this kind are all to the good. They are in the interests of any true admiration of his work, and if the anthology fails to praise the right things in Eliot, it at least gives us some idea of what it is far better not to praise at all. It is sad to feel that severity and rudeness have become positively wel- come, caustics to burn away those parasitic latter- day accretions. The points of criticism, however, are drops in the collection as a whole, in its ocean of respect. It doesn't do to look a gift horse in the mouth, and any act of homage, especially to Eliot, rates a measure of immunity. Some tributes, on the other hand, are better than-others.
KARL MILLER
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