BOOKS

The cult of T. S. Eliot

Peter Ackroyd

S. Eliot has been for 60 years a 1 paradoxical and elusive figure. His is the central poetic achievement of the 20th century: if one does not understand his modernism, and his later retreat from modernism, then one understands nothing. And yet, as Michael Grant explains in his excellent introduction, 'Many critics have recognised a profoundly unsettling and baf- fling quality about his writing'. Conrad Aiken, who knew him well, described his temperament as 'bafflingly peculiar'. The naming of Eliot is, then, a difficult matter — he has remained deep, inscrutable and singular.

These volumes are a record of that in- scrutability. In the early part of his career he was criticised by some with an in- temperateness which suggested that those who attacked him did not really know why they were doing so: it was the wounded cry of those who felt their certainties about the nature of poetry to be at risk. By the For- ties, however, Eliot was being greeted with an uncritical enthusiasm which, in its turn, suggested that praise had become an automatic response from those who did not at all understand what it was they were praising.

It has to be said that much of this mindless enthusiasm has emanated from the literary departments of the major univer- sities. As a way of avoiding any disciplined recognition of the exceeding oddness of the poetry, they proceeded to elicit from The Waste Land or Four Quartets a number of `themes' or 'myths' or 'symbols' which could then be manoeuvred in a game of musical chairs. And such is the peculiar tonelessness of Eliot's poetry — the voice withdraws, offers itself and then retreats that critics have over the years imposed their own voices upon it, marshalling the lines within the order of their own con- cerns. The poetry became a ground on which they could build their own potting sheds of 'disillusionment' or `despair', their own small chapels perilous. I have a suspi- cion that the real nature of Eliot's poetry has' yet to be described.

But that is not the point of the 'Critical Heritage' series. Here we have a record of the hundreds of reviews and essays which marked the first publication of Eliot's books. Michael Grant's labour must have been extraordinary, assiduously moving from a little magazine here to a newspaper cutting there. In the process he has placed Eliot's work in an unfamiliar context. For these immediate responses to his poetry and

plays were the ones with which he was in- timately engaged: these cuttings were the stuff of his anger or ambition; the stan- dards they evinced were those which, whether he liked it or not, he was being measured by.

The first critic who discussed Eliot in public print was Arthur Waugh, who fulminated against the 'unmetrical in- coherent banalities' of Prufrock. Ezra Pound denounced Waugh's writing as `senile slobber', but Waugh was in a sense right. Eliot's verse was not in any genuine sense unmetrical, but certainly it possessed elements of incoherence and banality — the fact that such qualities were deliberately in- troduced, and that they reside at the centre of the poem, was a revelation not vouchsaf- ed to Mr Waugh — but then it was not one vouchsafed to some of Eliot's later and ard- ent admirers.

A book of this kind also punctures, by in- direction, some of the myths which have surrounded Eliot's career. It is, for exam- ple, generally assumed that Eliot woke up to find himself famous the morning after the publication of The Waste Land — that he was viciously attacked for its obscurity, just as he was treated as a conquering hero by the undergraduates who chanted 'Shan- tih shantih shantih' in the colleges of Ox- ford and Cambridge. In fact, the first reac- tions to that poem were, as Michael Grant explains, 'serious and questioning'. The Times Literary Supplement, not well known for its modernist sympathies, an- nounced that 'We have here range, depth and beautiful expression'. But even before this, Eliot was considered a most important poet, a force to be reckoned with. In a review of Poems 1920, two years before the publication of The Waste Land, Louis Untermeyer reported that Eliot threatened `to take on the proportions of a myth'. And even earlier, in the Observer, Robert Nichols wrote of Eliot's literary criticism that 'It is hardly to be matched in British or North American letters today'.

The progress of Eliot's career, evinced in these statements, is wonderful to behold deliberate, steady advance with such force of will behind it that it became, by the For- ties, unstoppable. In fact, Four Quartets was hailed in some quarters as a 'classic' as soon as it appeared. He was by then a national institution, although it was prec- isely at this point that practising writers themselves first began to entertain doubts about the nature of Eliot's achieve- ment.

He was, however, an institution prin- cipally in England. It is perhaps not as paradoxical as it seems that Eliot, the American poet ,in extremis, should

throughout his life have been treated with more respect by English rather than American critics. The English, with a few exceptions, tended to take his work at face' value; the Americans expressed reservations which grew over the years and which have never been laid to rest.

Certain pieces stand out in this collec- tion. Conrad Aiken's review of The Waste Land, in 1923, is a model of its kind and has, I think, never been bettered. He sug- gested then that the poem succeeds `by vir-

tue of its incoherence, not its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations'• No amount of scholarly reconstruction and

exegesis has been able to overturn the essen-

tial rightness of that early judgment. Mid- dleton Murry's essays were, also, to the point. In a review of 1920, he describes Eliot as 'the chameleon who changes colour infinitely, and every change is protective'• And in an essay written a year before Eliot's baptism into the Church of England, Murry suggested that his 'self-tortured and utter nihilism' could only be contained `by an act of violence, by joining the Catholic Church'. A similar perceptiveness is found in an essay by V. S. Pritchett who describes Eliot and Pound as 'the last fling of a liberal civilisation, though they were at the time iconoclasts in violent reaction against it' One is grateful for such essays and they prove, if proof were needed, that artists — and indeed journalists — who turn to reviewing are on the whole more percipient than their academic colleagues. It is one of

the disadvantages of Eliot's reputation, after all, that it has become buried beneath scholarly commentary, and can hardly sus-

tain the weight it is forced to carry. One could put the point differently by noting that the safe or conventional judgments of Eliot's work have not significantly altered in the last 40 years: the same themes are elicited for commentary, and the same passages quoted for praise. With the possi- ble exception of Tennyson, Eliot's is the first case in literary history of a writer being embalmed immediately after his death.

The reasons, however, are not hard to find. Starved of any sense of the transcendental in their own discipline,

many of the 'Eng. Lit.' academics go to his work in order to bolster their own claims for literature as a moral force, as some kind of 'criticism of life'. Without religion, and with a philosophy which had no sense of the numinous, some of the more frightened of

20th-century minds have turned to the ap- parently authoritative nature of Eliot's writing and treated it as a new form of theology, a species of moral discourse which will in its turn make literary criticism respectable. As a result, the poetry has been diluted into a thin wash of 'great truths • That odd, bewildering man has been quite forgotten but, more importantly, the baftl- ing qualities of his poetry have been subverted in favour of pious generalities and otiose exegesis. Someone will have to start again from the beginning.