T.S. Eliot: A Memoir

...Richard's words, a "persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was the problem of the last...

...Both men shared a literary background, a devotion to Catholicism and its traditions in the Church of England, and hoth were well read in Indian philosophy...

...Too much of Sencourt's information is not taken from Eliot, but rather is gathered through hearsay or his deductions from incidents he heard about...

...Nothing to it...

...The Sporting Life This Great Game by Jacques Barzen Prentice-Hall, $14.95 I T IS FREQUENTLY said that football has become the "national pastime...

...Those who cherish memories of the Polo Grounds will especially be interested in the scenes beneath Coogan's Bluff half a century ago...

...Soncourt died in 1969, leaving the unfinisl~ed map.u,~cript~ ~mpng his ~ffects to be found by a professor Donald Adamson (of whom we are told nothing) who edited its contents and had this book published...

...Kenner argues that such interpretations are based on the Genetic Fallacy that supposes the meaning of the poem is found in the poet's experiences, the books he reads, the women he frequents, and so forth...

...If you make solid contact, and the struck ball eludes nine agile men, you get to first base...

...Jacques Barzen, who prefers baseball, describes football as "violence watched from a distance...

...But those who think there is no violence in .baseball should try to make the double play pivot at second base with Boog Powell rolling in with disruptive malice aforethought...

...Sencourt has not divulged any new information, new insights or refreshing reasons behind Eliot'.~ marriage to a woman whose personality was so obviously different from his...

...Seneourt was just not writing that kind of book, nor does it appear that he was capable of doing so...

...On this passage, Pound had advised Eliot that "Porto has done this so well that you cannot do it better: anti if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope vnless you can write better verse than Pope - - and you can't...

...unsettling to the many who have accepted the "grim" and "prim" image of the poet...

...While the new humanism has receded, there has been an onslaught from the New Left...

...This book leaves too much of Eliot's life still shrouded in the mystery that originally brought many to it...

...Sencourt was not in the position to copy down at length Eliot's raw and undistilled wisdoms on a medley of subjects...

...No first down for team A, so out comes team A's field goal kicking team and team B's field goal blocking team...

...Matthew's, which Harper & Row plans to publish two years from now...

...Was it the militant Jackson's refulgent "love" that produced his record of armed robberies and alleged murders that wouM arouse the envy of Ai Capone...

...Often his joking, Sencourt observes, "would also exceed the permitted bounds...

...Black radical George Jackson, killed in an attempted escape from San Quentin, was shot, croons Dylan, because the prison guards "were scared of his love...

...To return to Divonne-les-Bains: Sencourt, who was suffering from nervous problems, was also a patient there...

...In a real sense "the music died," as Don McLean observes in "American Pie...

...There were over 400,000 persons at White Lake, New York, but not one instance of violence...

...In an unending stream they came, thick, colorful volumes on the quarterback, the running backs, this league and that league, the Super Bowl and the good old days...

...Adamson does tell us in his Foreward that he altered thd 0rlginal manuscr~p~ very little, restricting himself to the rearrangement of a few paragraphs and the addition of footnotes for clarity's sake...

...In any case though, Sencourt will not be very helpful to those who engage in this sort of analysis...

...And why did he choose to leave Vivienne, his new wife in England, while he visited his parents in America...

...Although Sencourt has not written a scholar's paradise of information, he has managed to pen a pleasingly written account of Eliot's life...

...Additionally, it seems curious that Sencom't would argue for the retention of such lines of astonishing mediocrity as: Full fathom five your Belistein lies, Under the flatfish and the squids Graves Disease in a dead ~ew's eyes ! When the crabs have eat the lids...

...According to Hugh Kenner, Sencourt was not privileged to reed the poem before its publication...

...Poet or conservative, whichever appellation may most please the reader, Eliot did hold an almost undeniable sway over English letters during the last decades of his life...

...If'Kenner is correct in his estimate of Sencourt, then Sencourt might have been nothing more than an undesired hanger-on to Eliot...

...Now we at least have a book that helps us explain our prejudices...

...The gossipy anecdotes, which please him so, will keep the reader who enjoys that sort of thing from becoming bored...

...Woodstock seemed to be a restatement of the humanist themes of love, peace and non-violent protest...

...As Hugh Kenner, a critic who has written much of Eliot, flatly states, Sencourt "wasn't privy to as much of the story as he and his posthumous sponsors let on...

...Eliot...

...With ~ such farcical fustian as "Rubber Ducky," "Gimme Dat Ding" and "Chick-a-Boom" also selling millions, it makes a degenerate and competitive market for the humanists to compete in...

...Elapsed time, five seconds...

...The point is temptingly believable...

...Eliot: A Memoir by Robert Sencourt edited by Donald AdAmson Dodd, Mead & Company, $8.95 I F THERE HAS BEEN a principal conservative thinker in me twentieth century," Russell Kirk has written, "it is T.S...

...sell your motl~er for a Hershey barGrow up looking like a car...

...More disturbing is the violent and revolutionary orientation of the Mothers of Invention, Chicago, and most prominently, the Jefferson Airplane...

...In addition to the cantankerous caterwauling of the New Left, the new humanism is still being vigorously crowded by the bubblegummers...

...It reached its acme one morning when the Fabers found themselves presented with a pair of human ears...

...On the one hand they protest materialism and condemn capitalist society while simultaneously demanding $50,000 for a one night stand...

...The 1970s have produced several artists to replace the retired humanists of the 1960s...

...Satisfactory answers to such questions, perhaps, will never be forthcoming, taving been interred seven years ago with the poet...

...Why did Eliot leave his native America to seldom return ever again ? Why did his parents object to him spending a year at the Sorbonne...

...Plunge off tackle, gaining not quite two yards...

...With this in mind, 14 The Alternative May 1972 Valerie Eliot felt that she was unable to waiver control over the copyrights Therefore, Se~court had not been permitted to quote [reely from Eliot's published and unpublished materials...

...Adding to this feast has been the recent publication of the original manuscript of The Waste Land which attracted considerable scholarly attention...

...In a decade dominated by various forms of mayhem, including the "television war," football gained in popularity and pretensions to the point that its fans began to advertise it as the "real" national pastime, a "now" substitute for the distinctly non-now grace and stateliness of baseball...

...Football fans slouched in front of their television sets, watching flickering images of their well-padded heroes collide, like to say that baseball is not for he-men...

...In my opinion, this section serves only to permit Sencourt to indulge his private fantasies as a literary critic capable of passing judgment on T.S...

...He is the Invisible Poet in an age o! systematized literary scrutiny, much of it directed at him...

...Although the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express have gone to pasture, we are now afflicted by the Jackson Five, the Osmond Brothers and Daddy Dewdrop, who swamp their pre-teen listeners in a mucilaginous mire of chicle...

...Kirk once even tried to entice the venerable old poet to join him on a trip to "Egypt, perhaps, or Cyprus...

...Those who think baseball is a game without manly danger should stand at the plate while Juan Marichal puts a 110 m.p.h, velocity on a very solid baseball that crosses the plate on a trajectory that seems to begin at third base and passes four inches from one's ribs...

...If the incident is true, then Eliot might well be am~ ag one of the most psychopathologically interesting people since van Gogh...

...But Eliot stuck fast to his beloved England, and Kirk lost his "grand chance of achieving immortality by association...

...His style, throughout, is lucid and straightforward...

...In its vacuous thirty-four lines, the phrase "My baby does the hanky panky" is repeated twenty-four times...

...Eliot's works...

...Before the nauseated listener can reach a brown bag, the Airplane belch further nihilistic dithyrambs which include an attack on private property, a demand that the older generation get up against the wall and a fervent exhortation that society be torn down...

...Last August, greed and hypocrisy were transcended by George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Rlngo Starr, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell in a fund-raising rock concert for the starving Pakistani refugees...

...Their acquaintance lacked the intimacy and affection that characterized the Boswell-Jobnson relationship...

...This Great Game is pretty and informative...

...Why did he abruptly give up an academic career after eight years' preparation...

...Had Sencourt's judgment on the quality of the deleted lines been based upon an inspection of the original Waste Land manuscript...

...Team A has the ball third-and-two on team B's twenty yard line...

...This annotated edition, complete with Ezra Pound's blue pencil markings and an introduction by the present Mrs...

...Readers who had hoped that Sencourt's book would be a aort of Boswellian treatment of the Eliot personality are hound to be disappointed...

...Eliot's desire for privacy was legendary and his poetry for all his defense of the objective correlative, classicism and tradition was highly personal and was sometimes "very near the limits of coherency...

...It had not...

...That description helps explain why the 1960s, which were unkind to many institutions and people, were so kind to football...

...The Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel and the Cream are hopelessly separated...

...In 1967, the Manichaean-Fugs were only mildly ridiculous when they surrounded the Pentagon and.chanted, "out demons out...

...Matthiessen has written that to identify a poet's life with what he wrote is "misleading" and "disturbing...

...Having met in the early fifties, Kirk and Eliot would often lunch together at the Garrick Club in London, or meet at Eliot's publishing house on Great Russell Street...

...He makes the rather ez cathedra statement that Ezra Pound committed a disservice when he blue-pencilled out about 500 lines from The Waste Land, "cutting out among other things a long passage in imitation of Pope...

...Eliot, whose age this is in humane letters...

...And football, which consists of very short convulsions of action followed by much longer committee meetings, would rank somewhere below lawn bowling...

...Lou, the woman in the "pub" talking boldly of abortion, was suggested to Eliot in 1914 by the rough, crude charwomen he met while living with Vivienne on Crawford Street...

...In their consummate imbecility, the Airplane neglect to suggest a course of action after society is destroyed...

...Valerie) Eliot, will not be ignored (in spite of the expensive coffee table price tag) by any serious Eliot Students...

...In Rats' Alley T.S...

...There are some marvelous old early parks, fans and heroes...

...Despite this competition the new humanism attracted high caliber musicians who catered to a receptive market...

...Fortunately there are some bright spots on the horizon...

...Now baseball has struck back with an adornment for the thinking man's coffee table...

...But "The Invisible Poet" is still with us...

...In "Volunteers," a recent album, a costive Grace Slick grunts, "Hey now its time for you and me----Got a revolution-Up the revolution...

...In the bubblegum battle of thebladders, Denny Osmond's rendition of 'tOne Bad Apple," a variation of his wounded wombat imitation, has sold over a million records...

...The Eliots were there recuperating from what appears to have been emotional exhaustion...

...Sencourt adds little to what had already been previously known about Vivienne.-Any reader even faintly acquainted with Eliot's life knows that Vivienne grew progressively unstable during their marriage and her deteriorating condition caused Eliot much pain...

...If you fail to do this only seven out of ten times you are a star...

...Ironi-cally, they started out as-humanist...

...Eliot and Sencourt were introduced by a doctor who hoped that their common interests would serve the interests of mutual therapy...

...Most critics would agree...

...Anxious Eliot scholars awaited this book's appearance hoping that Soncourt would reveal previously unknown information on the enigmatic and complex first Mrs...

...Many critics, and wise ones I believe, have warned against this kind of analysis...

...Men of similar dispositions and attudes, they became fast friends...

...In "Lather" and "Rejoyce" they added an antimaterialistic tinge to their lyrics (e.g...

...True, baseball is not a game of constant action...

...Recently published this winter was Russell Kirk's biography...

...What possible pleasure could these lines have given that was missed by their absence...

...These tendentious warblers couple their anarchy with hypocrisy...

...Hence, Sencourt's hook suffers from a certain unevenness of structure and theme...

...Also, the new Jesus movement provides a potent symbol for the embattled humaniSts...

...Other biographies about to be published are Bernard Bergonzi's, which Macmillan promises for next year, and T.S...

...The kick is a 16 The Alternative May 1972...

...Bud Folsom is a graduate student at the University o[ Nebraska...

...At times, Sencourt digresses from this anecdotal level to become a literary critic...

...Out comes the chain crew for a measurement...

...Such occurrences are cause for hope...

...The nation's publishers bought the subversive doctrine about football as "the new national pastime," and before long the fans were being supplied with pretty football picture books that weighed about as much as Bubba Smith, and caused coffee tables to groan like injured linemen...

...Yet, even if we accept Sencourt's point here at face value, we are confronted with the obvious fact that it is on this very important point of information that Sencourt most notably fails to inform us...

...Alas, I fear that they are likely to be disappointed...

...The pictures and essays will be useful in our crusade to keep football in perspective and in its place...

...Eliot's mood in the poem does seem to suggest, in I.A...

...For a friendship that spanned some thirty-seven years, there is lacking the evidence that they maintained close regular contact during most of that time...

...If you fail only sixty per cent of the time, you are a superstar...

...According to rock impresario Bill Graham, it was this greed that forced the closing of New York's Fillmore East...

...Huddle...

...2.868 inches in diameter) that is moving over 100 m.p.h, and is rising or dropping, or curving while rising or dropping...

...Consider the action in this familiar football sequence...

...Eliot would struggle with his ill-fated marriage until 1933 when he would abruptly separate from her...

...Con~idering the awful difficulties that critics have encountered when they try to assess Eliot's achievement, Kenner observed in 1959 that "opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of the twentieth century has not freed itself from a cloud of unknowing...

...A drug overdose destroyed artists Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Al Wilson (of Canned Heat) and possibly Jim Morison (of the Doors...

...Batting...

...With increasing frequency they have emitted musical expletives and intellectual halitosis...

...As a picture book This Great Game is a striking success...

...The same questions seem to persist...

...Its hundreds of splendid photographs are shown through a dozen lively essays...

...Recently, however, the Airplane abandoned humanism for the barbarism of Attila the Hun and Jerry Rubin...

...Some of Sencourt's recollections of Eliot throughout their subsequent acquaintanceship will be...

...Vivienne's insonmia attacks were increasing and Eliot was growing depressed over the state of his marriage...

...The music of James Taylor, Elton John, Carole King, Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot preach a nonviolent gospel of peace and individual freedom...

...Those diligent detectives who are forever looking for clues to the meaning of The Waste Land will find a few tasty morsels of information in this book...

...Were there personal reasons, related to his homelife, which compelled Eliot to leave the country...

...The memoir untortunately was prevented from becoming a complete official biography because of Eliot's expressed wish during his lifetime that no such official biography should be written on him...

...Together with the essays by eight sportswriters, two novelists, an umpire and a manager, they tell baseball's story, which is that baseball is uniquely pleasing to the eye and mind...

...Would such a man make a reliable witness to a'man's life...

...Even Bob Dylan has temporarily forsaken humanistic protest for the perverted New Left logic contained in "George Jackson...

...The photographs -- hundreds of them _9 -- capture the special action, violence, grace and danger of baseball...

...Perhaps the recent drug deaths, the emergence of the bubblegummers, the rise of the New Left and the ridiculously inflated costs will conduce music back to its proper course - - that of entertainment or humanistic protest...

...And the better maulings can be re-savored on instant replay if one is watching football on a television screen, for which its compact action is well-suited...

...Also, little is told to clarify the nature of his relationship with his parents...

...This story may lose something in the retelling, but I failed completely to understand how Eliot could ever find such a ghastly pr~entation t o b e amusing...

...What has made his book particularly distinguishing is that Sencourt had met Eliot during the late twenties and therefore he knew Vivfenne, Eliot's first wife...

...Eliot's sense of humor, moreover, had a touch of the macabre as well...

...The line "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Latauen, echt deutsch," which has baffled many, was inspired by a Lithuanian girl who amused Eliot bv declaring that in spite of her Russian nationality she was a real German...

...The publishers commissioned Leroy Nieman to do some original action portraits of eight superstars, and the paintings explode with color and energy...

...It appeared that the upcoming decade of the 1970s might reinforce the explicit humanism of the 1960s...

...You just make solid contact with a round bat (not to exceed 2.75 inches in diameter) on a round ball...

...The Alternative May 1972 15 Moreover, we cannot escape the conclusion that Sencourt perhaps misleads the reader on the warmth and intimacy that Eliot supposedly felt for him...

...Sencourt first met Eliot in 1927, at Divonne-les-Bains, a place reputed for dealing with nervous disorders...

...In Eliot's later years, Kenner observes that Eliot had instructed his secretaries not to admit Sencourt...

...The several Eliot biographies that are now currently awaiting publication are proof of the durability of interest that persists for "The Invisible Poet...

...Soncourt has not contributed to lifting that "cloud of unknowing" which has surrounded him...

...Sencourt argues that The Waste Land cannot be fully understood without knowing something of Eliot's first marriage...

...To me, that is what makes this book such a great disappointment...

...Twenty-two beefy men mauling one another is as entertaining as a horse opera or a situation comedy...

...This is very annoying to us baseball fans, who think baseball is esthetically superior and better for the soul...

...If not, I may eventially have to content myself with old Glen Miller recordings and the Lawrence Welk show...

...A few years ago, in songs like "My Best Friend," "Somebody to Love:" and "Let's Get Together," the Airplane preached the new humanist gospel of social concern and peace...

...It would not be difficult to conclude (especially for the scholar who revels in this sort of pop Freudianism) that Eliot probably transferred some of his private agonies into his poem...

...But if constant action were the standard of sports excellence, the roller derby would he the most excellent sport...

...Sencourt, continues Kenner, was a loquacious bore...

...However, so long as interest-in Eliot endures, there will be many who feel that they must know more of Eliot., the man, in the belief that such knowledge provides a proper understanding of his poetry...

...A decade before, Bertrand Russell had observed that Vivienne was "a person who lives on a knifeedge, and will end as a criminal or a saint...

...Mixed with his anecdotes and gossipy tidbits are some rather mediocre efforts at literary analysis...

...Led by the feculent Grace Slick, the Airplane exemplify the crudest form of hypocrisy and nihilism...

...Football, unlike baseball, is a game which can hold the attention of persons who do not know much about it...

...Consider, if you will, Eliot as a practical joker...

...From all appearances, Sencourt seems to have been an intellectual lightweight who could not have written a brilliant and perceptive exposition of Eliot's social and literary thought: Furthermore, the nature of their friendship would not have really permitted this...

...Like Russell Kirk, Robert Sencourt claims in his Memoir that he also was an intimate friend of Eliot...

...Eliot, it appears, was in the habit of placing "woopee" c .ushtons on the seats of friends and cracking ribald jokes...

...Since Woodstock, however, there has been a near collapse of the new humanism in a wake of drug-induced deaths, greed and a humanist retreat from the music market...