Eliot's entire corpus

BOOKS

C. B. COX

When in 1948 T. S. Eliot was leaving for Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, an American reporter at the airport asked him: 'Mr Eliot, what book did they give you the Nobel Prize for?' I believe it's given for the entire corpus,' he replied. 'When did you pub- lish that?' the man wanted to know. When he'd gone, Eliot said to his companion, Robert Giroux: 'It really might make a good title for a mystery—The Entire Corpus.'

Giroux tells this story in his contribution to T. S. Eliot : The Man and his Work (Chatto and Windus, 36s), edited by Allen Tate, a collection of appreciative essays, personal reminiscences, poems of tribute and literary criticism, most of which were originally pub- lished in a special number of The Sewanee Review. As we read the anecdotes, the bio- graphical estimates, T. S. Eliot remains as much a mystery as he always was, appearing to his acquaintances in personae as various as the shadowy characters in his early poetry. To many he was silent, reticent, withdrawn. How are we to square this poet of Olympian aloofness with the gay, witty companion, who sent Eartha Kitt a bouquet of roses and idolised Joe Louis, who loved music-hall and, on a festive occasion, sang for his companions 'What Did Robinson Crusoe Do with Friday on Saturday Night?'

The reminiscences start with the being, met by I. A. Richards in 1920, utterly and perfectly bank-like, so formal in dress that Virginia Woolf once described him com- ing to lunch in a four-piece suit. We see him presiding over convivial luncbes for Criterion contributors, suffering and lonely when he left his first wife, Vivien, in 1933, and finally serenely happy, the Elder Poet, in his second marriage. Perhaps Frank Morley's is the best summary : 'If Tom at times could be a pretty spry sort of fellow, at times he could be as sleepy as the rock-python (and in forty years we watched him change some skins).'

As we look at the entire corpus, it's fitting that these essays, like two previous collections for his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays, should be so contradictory, that no one has yet fixed him 'in a formulated phrase,' sprawling on a pin.' In his best poetry, Eliot's investigation of consciousness is of its very nature unsuited to glib definition or logical explanation. This is perhaps why his poetry, especially The Waste Land, is still often not properly under- stood, even today, after so much academic thesisifying. Most commentators fail by de- manding a kind of order and coherence, the poetry is not intended to provide. In 'The Frontiers of Criticism,' Eliot himself attacks those who mistake explanation for understand- ing—'the lemon-squeezer school of criticism.' To an undergraduate who asked him: 'Please, sir, what do you mean by the line: "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree"?' Eliot answered: 'I mean, "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.". .

In this collection, critics as eminent as Conrad Aiken and G. Wilson Knight fall into this mistaken desire for the wrong type of coherence. Aiken's early review of 1923 is re-

printed, in which The Waste Land is called 'a brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion'; Aiken suggests that the 'plan' would not greatly suffer by the elimination of 'April is the cruellest month' or Phlebas or the Thames daughters. Wilson Knight was shocked when Eliot said he had deleted, on Ezra Pound's advice, an extended piece of sea-poetry from the section 'Death by Water': 'It was now clear why The Waste Land was so fragmentary. That it is inartistically so may be seen from the relegation to a note of an organically needed statement regarding the function in the poem of the bisexual Tiresias.'

Unfortunately, Eliot's note that Tiresias is 'the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest' has encouraged seekers after logical coherence. In the most popular recent academic study, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, Grover Smith engages in fantas- tic inventions to make each part fit a total pattern. His attempts to explain the notoriously difficult hyacinth girl passage are a superb mis- use of intellect: 'At his meeting with the hyacinth girl in The Waste Land, Tiresias as the quester has omitted to ask the indispensable question of the Grail initiation. Evidently he has merely stood agape while she, bearing the sexual symbol—the spike-shaped blossoms representing the slain god Hyacinth of The Golden Bough—has awaited the word he can- not utter . . . Eliot diversified the pattern slightly, for the hyacinth is a male symbol, and then, too, the quester himself has given the flowers to the hyacinth girl. But the effect is the same as in the Grail narratives.'

Such jugglery is really quite unnecessary, for a condition of uncertainty about the precise relevance of the images is essential to our reading experience. As we pass from Grail to Biblical reference, from Madame Sosostris to Cleopatra, our minds seek a rational explana- tion, but are continually frustrated—deliber- ately so. The poem concerns a defeated quester. As we -read the poem, this should be our own experience; so the incantatory rhythms, the dream, nightmare and mirage effects, sug- gest explanations, but prevent final verification. Stephen Spender, in an essay reprinted here from Encounte.r, tells how he heard Eliot say that when writing The Waste Land he seri- ously considered becoming a Buddhist: 'A Buddhist is as immanent as a Christian in The Waste Land.'

Frank Kermode finds in this poetry 'a habit of mind that looks for analysis, analysis by controlled unreason.' His closely argued study of modernism, 'A Babylonish Dialect,' is the star in Allen Tate's collection, thirteen pages of quite staggering brilliance. He begins with mottoes from Yeats: 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,' In dreams begin re- sponsibilities.' Yeats made no order, but showed that our real lives begin when we have been shown that order ends: 'it is for the dreams, the intuitions of irregularity and chaos, _of the tragic rag-and-bone shop, that we value him, and not for his "system" or his "thought." ' Kermode applies this to Eliot, whose reconcil-

ing of contraries—his schismatic traditionalism, his romantic classicism, his highly personal im- personality—makes him more akin to Milton than to Dryden. Eliot is the poet of the image, the objective correlative, which resist subjec- tion to prose systems of thought; so, in a sense, his longing for traditional order that ended in the Anglo-Catholic Church stands in opposition to the imaginative effect of his pre- conversion poetry : 'One of the really distinc- tive features of the literature of the modernist anni mirabiles was that variously and subtly committed writers blocked the retreat to com- mitment in their poems.' The Waste Land re- sists an imposed order.

For this poetry that denies the consolations of predictable form, Kermode takes a definition from Simone Weil—`decreation.' Completely different from 'destruction,' decreation' implies the deliberate repudiation of the naturally human, and so naturally false 'set' of the world; this is what Stevens called clearing the world of 'its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.' All we who write about The Waste Land im- pose, wrongly, a man-locked set of ideas on the poem, but Eliot pushes his 'objective correla- five 'out into the neutral air.' This `decreation' of what for centuries has been thought 'human' and 'natural' is still the liveliest source of vitality in poetry, particularly in Robert Lowell, though, alas!, almost unknown in recent English writing.

Kermode's packed style makes summary an injustice. The best essay here on Eliot's critical writings, by Mario Praz, is in tune with Ker- mode's approach. Praz stresses Eliot's em- piricism, that he has not scrupled to contradict himself—witness the famous recantation of his attack on Milton: 'Although he knows how to argue with extreme subtlety about his likings and dislikings, his real guide is not logic but intuition. In fact, all his critical discoveries take the shape of a myth or an image.' Four Quartets moves closer to commentary, but the image is still dominant. 'Unheard music,' un- seen eyebeam,"the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden,' all create a special kind of awareness, best understood (as Leonard Unger establishes in an excellent study of Eliot's imagery) by the analogies to music. The true end of Four Quartets remains a state of en- lightened mystification : We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Neville Braybrooke surveys Eliot's juvenilia. All the surviving early poems have now been gathered into Poems Written in Early Youth (Faber, 12s 6d), including a schoolboy Byronic exercise, in which a ghost carries off a luxury- loving Abbot, and, more fascinating, early imitations of Laforgue and 'The Death of Saint Narcissits,' of which parts were used in The Waste Land. The invitation 'Come in under the shadow of this grey rock' leads to the dis- covery of the bloody cloth and limbs of Saint Narcissus. The poem hints at the burden of self- consciousness and a nausea for the body. When we turn to the plays, we begin to enter a different world. E. Martin Browne and Robert Speaight contribute entertaining essays to Tate's anthology, but the best study of the drama is by Helen Gardner. She is particularly illuminating on The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk. But here, in the 1950s, at

last the mysterious Eliot, in life and poetry, begins to drift away, and we are left with the perfect Christian gentleman, the man of generosity and love, in the serenity of his last years. At this time his life offers the key to the entire corpus; in G. Wilson Knight's words, 'No poet has been more deeply honest.' But, as always, Ezra Pound deserves the last word: 'Who is there now for me to share a joke with? Am I to write "about" the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? or my friend "the Possum"? Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago : READ HIM.'