T.S. Eliot

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

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

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

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

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

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

...BOOK REVIEW T.S...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...Consider the popsicle-stick...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...A few more examples...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...Spender knows better than this...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...Perhaps not...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...That would be a mistake...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...work of art among them...

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