T.S. Eliot

...High school and college debating teams would especially benefit from such a sourcebook...

...The problem, however, is that the basic ingredient has come to be in dangerously short supply, and the product itself is far more polluting in its manufacture and immeasurably more polluting in its use...

...The saving grace is the easygoing conversational style of writing...

...Instead the remarks remain on the level of the descriptive and mechanical, e.g.: "Undoubtedly the most dramatically decisive change was the scrapping of the scene with which the poem opened, of Sweeney-like buddies having a night out on the town...

...That would be a mistake...

...The effective but chilling image Commoner devises is that of a society "fleeing as fast as we can out across thin ice in the hope of outrunning the spreading cracks that are created as we run...

...There is one voice--the voice of the poet in the poem, who suffers...

...Nevertheless, in appraising contemporary social policy and the claims of egalitarianism, we must begin somewhere...

...To take another example from the same discussion: reviewing a catalogue of some "secondary voices" he remarks, "such voices are symptoms: symptoms of attitudes, reflexes, neuroses," which are "the results of the state of the civilization to which deeper voices, voices of the Biblical and Greek world, bear witness...

...Those, to be sure, are important parts ot the problem...

...the third, only in its infancy before the war, now spews forth from its capital-intensive, energy-intensive maw a vast array of products, many of which have replaced the labor-intensive products of an earlier day...

...Eliot's poems and prose and fundamental aesthetic...

...detergents were introduced not because they were more effective but because they were more profitable...

...Some skeptics may doubt whether the minions of ideology will be repulsed or converted by an army of statistics...

...Spender's ostensible purpose in writing-as signified by what the book contains--is to explain T.S...

...the danger of it is that the reader may get lazy...

...The technique then is to draw Eliot down to his level, and to pretend that there's nothing more...

...BOOK REVIEW T.S...

...Roger Freeman helps us to begin with the facts...

...Description is everywhere substituted for analysis: the eventual opening ("April is the cruellest month") is "arresting...

...But so sweeping an effort, he says, is not going to come about through the normal processes of capitalist democracy, for it is capitalism itself that must be swept away...

...He may of course be wrong...

...Well before the Arab oil embargo and its attendant disruptions, very deep-seated changes had been occurring in the basic chemistry of American capitalism: both profits and the productivity of capital had begun a longterm decline of which there is no reversal in sight...

...Having quoted one of the focal passages from "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the one which includes" the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new...

...A few more examples...

...Spender then contradicts his "organic" description by a contrary metaphor ("mechanism") and judges that after all the whole is poetic and not worth serious attention: "this picture of the tradition as a system like a functioning mechanism can be taken seriously on the imaginative level but not literally as a scientific working model...

...But each of Spender's remarks betray the opposite sensibility-fragmentary and diachronic: the tradition is seen as "an organic system of relations established in the past which adapts itself in an evolutionary way to new conditions through objective procedures taking place in the mind" of the living...

...The rest of the book is of a piece with this: condescending to the subject, descriptive...

...It is both serious and witty, in the manner of metaphors of the metaphysical poets...

...Instead we get a ballet of banalities about "the quest" and "the need for redemption...passionately realized in Eliot's poems...

...It isn't that Procter & Gamble didn't make a profit on their pre-war laundry soap (basic ingredient, palm oil, a renewable resource...

...But it is far deeper, more pervasive, more intractable than that...

...And even that is not all of it...

...Commoner's answer, then, to his own great question is that they cannot...

...The necessary assumption is that poetry is after all a matter of refinement and sensibility--an attitude shared by most Bloomsburyites-and consequently, aside from his exquisite taste, that there remains really no reason for regarding Eliot!s as serious art in the sense he and Pound and Lewis used the term...

...I have now said enough to persuade many readers to dismiss the book unread...

...And as the supply of energy falls and the price escalates, it is not at all clear how we can avoid the kind of inflation that brings whole societies to ruin...

...Spender's book on Eliot provides neither--a pity as the Bloomsbury connection, which Spender had unique opportunities to observe both as poet and participant, could use much more elucidating...

...Civic groups, businessmen's organizations, editorial writers, and other politically conscious individuals should read this work and ponder its contents...

...Only a fundamental redesign of these systemic relations can avert the impending collapse...

...So there is little if any comfort to be derived from supposing that Commoner just doesn't know what he is talking about...

...But it must be admitted that he seldom lapses into such contradictions...

...Any passage or chapter will serve to demonstrate...

...work of art among them...

...It is a synchronic, simultaneous whole...

...But this key part of his argument is by no means obviously mistaken...

...Failing such a demonstration, we should have at least to concede that the American economy is heading for serious trouble...

...Cornmonet's prescription becomes very hazy at this point, but evidently he envisions something like an idealized version of British or Swedish socialism as an appropriate system for dealing with the problem...

...But we expect from a Spender something that qualifies as serious rather than what one gets from one who "is promising...

...Perhaps those outbursts of satiric invective by Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God and The Roaring Queen, will in the long run remain our most accurate account of the Bloomsbury group and its pretensions...

...It goes without saying that many economists disagree with this analysis, making much of the fact that Commoner is by profession a biologist, not an economist...

...Both the strengths and weaknesses of his argument show up most clearly in his discussion of the incongruence between private profit and public good in certain major industries...

...Or more precisely, can these institutions arrest or escape from the apparently inexorable drift toward economic collapse occasioned by, broadly speaking, the energy crisis...

...We might expect a discussion of poetic, of structure, of shifts in tone or intent, or of changes in perception of the overall function of the poem...

...And one other fact needs to be considered: for all normal cleaning chores, soap is every bit as good as detergent...

...Books that puff these themes and approaches already clog the shelves (we can be thankful that the age is now passing in which bright young assistant professors are expected to complete their journeymanship by "doing a book" on each of the moderns...

...Certainly there is more wit and judgment, more playfulness and incisive perception in any of Lewis' observations than anywhere in this book...

...Since the end of World War II the first two of these have become sharply more capital-intensive and energy-intensive...

...The burden, it seems to me, is on his critics to demonstrate that we really will be able to pay increasingly high prices for energy withol:t precipitating a ruinous inflation, and that the productivity of capital is not on an ominous decline...

...A serious poet has no business handing us predigested packaged sentiments: in fact it's hard to believe that Spender wrote this...

...As a result the price of energy is on the rise and the productivity of capital is on the decline...

...Spender knows better than this...

...The merits of the book are few, and are rather obscured by the consistent emphasis on aesthetic sensibility as a substitute for artistic percipience...

...What has happened, within barely a generation, is that the largest part of our total productivity has become energyintensive in a way that would have been unimaginable prior to World War II...

...Still, it is a valuable synthesis, an impressive compendium of statistics and analysis which should be widely distributed...

...In every case the motivating force is higher profit...

...The heart of Commoner's deeply pessimistic thesis is that large segments of industry have become increasingly capitaland energy-intensive at a time when both capital and energy are coming to be in shorter and shorter supply...

...As I said before, we deserve to be given better than this by someone of Spender's stature...

...The chapter on "The Waste Land," for example, is written with Valerie Eliot's disclosure of Pound's collaborative emendations in view...

...That is surely a legitimate and defensible motive...

...The danger of remaining on the surface is that it is too easy to fall into contradictions, as "By putting the prophetic statement first, Eliot makes it prophecy and not social satire...

...He is at his best in talking about the massive social irrationalities of agriculture, transportation, and the petrochemical industry...

...both trends will only intensify, with economic collapse as the certain consequence...

...The contemporary voices become illustrative symptoms of the state of the civilization...

...A plunge into the deep, cold waters of reality is inevitable...

...BOOK REVIEW The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis by Barry Commoner / Alfred A. Knopf / ~10 Karl O'Lessker Among the many virtues of Barry Commoner's new book, the most important is this: he forces us to confront that greatest of all political questions, can our free institutions survive...

...The same descriptive superficiality characterizes the rest of his remarks on Eliot's artistic endeavors...

...Organic" Erie McLuhan is a ~,raduate student in literature at the University of Dallas...

...With an impressive array of data to support him, he argues that "complex interactions among the three basic systems--the ecosystem, the production system, and the economic system" are now so irrational as to constitute "a fault that lies deep in the design of modern society...

...All of which may be true enough, but we do, I think, deserve better from another poet...

...These are fairly conventional descriptive cataloguings, and a reasonable prelude to a deeper discussion --but they represent virtually all that Spender has to offer on the subject...

...Perhaps not...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 27 might have done, but the rest, again descriptive (of the passage as known from the outside only), is just plain wrong...

...one of the classic modes of satire (Varronian or Menippean) is diagnostic and illustrative...

...But this conceals the real purpose of writing such a treatise which soon reveals itself as showing that the author can be just as much an aesthete as his subject...

...Eliot by Stephen Spender / Viking Press / $8.95 Eric McLuhan One always approaches a book by one poet about another with mixed feelings, expecting either choice gossip or some sort of artistic inside track...

...The term "energy crisis" is deceptive...

...Consider the popsicle-stick...

...real literary folk will detect the facade immediately...

...This overlooks the coordinate fact that his economic data were produced by perfectly reputable economists--those employed by Chase Manhattan Bank, the Brookings Institution, Business Week, etc...

...Of the most important, the most crucial aspects of Eliot's work, his experiments with language and with the updating of sensibility, there is not a word--aspects which we would expect another poet to be most concerned with and to be able to tell us most about...

...I can think of few other current books which assemble so much significant information and commentary in such a concise and practical form...

...It sounds as if it has only to do with a dwindling supply of domestic oil coupled with sharply higher prices for imported oil...

...It is a book for tourists and the paths it takes are well beaten...

...There is enough of unique value in it to compensate many times over for its mistakes...

...Spender's comments reveal .that he misses (or bypasses) the point entirely: Eliot's notion of the tradition is that which persisted from Quintilian at least until the time of Bonaventure...

...it's that they could make a higher profit on laundry detergent (basic ingredient, petroleum...

...Here then is an almost perfect,, if ~J:, very dramatic, example of the incongruence Karl O'Lessker is professor of political science and of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...

...The reader already acquainted with Eliot, and with the better literature that has grown up around his work, will find little or nothing new in Spender (with the possible exception of some of the remarks in chapter ii, "Education, Harvard Style" and in chapter xi, "Politics") and nothing of consequence...

...The familiar wooden implement, made out of a plentiful and immemorially renewable resource, has now virtually disappeared--replaced in most markets at the very beginning of the Energy Crisis, by plastic...

...The Growth of Araerican Government is neither a profound philosophical treatise nor a pioneering work in political economy...

...And there is no reversal in prospect...

...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976...