CULTURE AND T. S. ELIOT

...Even today Eliot would be stoned in Madrid—at least his religious colleagues were some few months ago—discussed violently in Rome (although we have read in the Commonweal, not of Rome but of New York, a very intelligent and comprehensive article about this very book), and he would be jailed or liquidated in Moscow...

...The Catholic religion in the 17th century was represented in Spain and in other countries of Europe by a Church given over to barbarism...

...From that opinion we infer that the speaker is a Stalinist...

...The readers must not think that all this is byzantinism...

...This refers to the plane of civilization as I understand it rather than to that of culture...

...All Eliot asks of the world is a respectful attention to the values in the midst of which a poet like Eliot can feel at ease and poetry like The Waste Land can be listened to...

...All this is undeniable that its revelation and denunciation in what they have of religion goes against the .church, apd in what they have of cul: ture goes against civilisation...

...u»Hh I am unable finally to reconcile his poetic work...

...Or they will tell us that he is a "decadent liberal," an opinion, like so many others, shared by Stalinists and Fascists alike...

...Talking to acquaintances abtVut Eliot there are those who say, shrugging their shoulders: "He is a Fascist...

...ALL THE PROBLEM COULD BE...

...In modern times the religion represented by the Church raised a protest "in the name of culture" against the sentencing of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary...

...Is not the cultured man obliged to denounce the assassination of the priest of Aineto and on the other hand to warn that most of the movies, theatre and literature "produced in the name of civility" are working toward the slow and unrelenting cretinization of the masses...

...a civilized man I desire the increasing taking' part by the widest sections of the population in the management of society...

...The lack of unity and the disagreement among those four terms become more evident if we consider that the same Church in Spanish America acted just as it did in Spain and yet it represented civilization to the indigenous populations which in most of the countries still practiced cannibalism and lived in primitive terror...

...Culture comes from the mountains, like religions: Brahmaputra, Sinai," Olympus, Parnassus...

...For the poet to be conscious of this and to become alarmed at the dangers that threaten a culture in which he is integrating his own universe, is the most natural and logical thing in the world...

...THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT of those preoccupations is deeply moving...

...i On the other hand, in the name of civilization the American masses arebeing educated with a literature, art, theatre, and movies generally inferior to the capacity of assimilation and to the needs of the average sensibility...

...iwiii of division may be due to ¦assSsaco and may also lead to tyranny: either excess will preventfpTthoi development in culture...

...Eliot starts from there and certainly all those who see a little further than their noses agree with him...

...Every day Jesus is crucified in the name of civilization, and a sage or a poet is frustrated...

...I rejoice—as a relatively civilized man—to see that Eliot in spite of his conservative attitude accepts that the "whole of the population should take an active part in cultural activities," and as a supposedly cultured man I share his opinion that culture and religious senumentto together in history...

...Mannheim says, according to a note of Eliot's: "The crisis of culture in liberal democratic countries is due in the first place to the fact thai the fundamental social processes, which previously favoured the development of the culturally creative elites, now have the opposite effect, i.e...

...But one should specify that culture can be and is today to civilization what the Catholic religion is to the church...

...In that sense culture interests me more than civilization, although for this latter I pay taxes, I have gone to war, I shave (since a beard would offend my neighbors in the city) and I am careful of my speech...

...Wise men, poets and saints are culture, to me...

...But two months later, in •Aineto, a village in the Pyrenees of Aragon, General Franco's,police, without legal accusation of any kind, assassinated the parish priest, Padre Rocatallada, for having given help to hungry and fugitive guerrillas...

...For the cultured man the notions of social class, race, or even nation, do not count...

...Not at all...

...that is accessible to our sensibility jea# reason...

...But Eliot loves equilibrium and soon thereafter he declares: "Basses ef unity may be due to asSiiasiiiii and may lead to tyranny...

...In Man and Society Dr...

...One can be a cultured man and not civilised...

...To discuss—and to differ—it is necessary first to establish at least a minimum accord...

...The highest goal of a culture is to produce a poet, as its most solid justification is the suppression of unnatural pain, that is, of the poverty and misery caused by defects in the social system...

...If some believe that the anxiety is excessive and the alarms unjustified let them consider that only a few years ago, in the middle of Europe, men who had been reared in occidental culture, in our very own culture, were reduced to an irrational hunger in which they could not resist at times the temptation of cannibalism...

...Like Eliot I. have religious respect for all and faith in a superior order from which proceeds the little order...

...Some critics seem to forget this when they judge his "definition of culture" as the occasional opinion of a cafe or club-orator who speaks according to the huntor of his digestion...

...One of the most grave, according to him, is the disintegrating tendency born of specialisation...

...The Nazis discovered pieces of human viscera in the pockets of some prisoners whom afterward they punished with the gallows "in the name of culture...

...have become obstacles to the forming of elites because wider sections of the population lake an active part in cultural activities...

...The poet has more right than anyone else to reduce the universe to the measures of his fantasy or of his capricious desire...

...That is one of the things that most perturb Eliot, and in the difficulty of comprehension of no few critics we see that it will continue to be so for many generations still...

...And further on he adds: "It is, of course, true that the principle of achievement was combined with the two other principl»»—blood and property—in earlier periods, but it is the important contribution of modern democracy as long as it is rigorous, that the achievement principle increasingly tends to become the criterion of social success...

...As a man of culture I believe that the masses sometimes dangerously^ confuse social success with achievement...

...gives to Eliot's attitude v- copfaemistic and conservative ton...

...Civilization is a way of looking at life and of living in society...

...For me civilisation comes from cities rounded in valleys and lowlands: Athens, Rome, Paris, London...

...The first thing Eliot proposes is definition of the dangers...

...But it surprises me a little enf seems to me unjust to confuse deliberately the concepts of culture, church, religion and civilization...

...Philosophers start out from innate general notions that everyone accepts...

...It comes nearer to the meaning given today to culture by anthropologists, with iheir well-learned history of art and their timidly romantic focus...

...Nevertheless Eliot's poetical work has its greatest charm in its excesses and Eliot's idea that religion and culture go together and that they cannot help going together if we aspire to some form of salvation can also be extremist...

...4 THE UNITY ELIOT establishes tacitly among the four terms -culture, civilization, religion, church -- seems to have been denied by reality in thp past as in our own time...

...Furthermore, the concept of "culture" does not mean to Eliot what it means to the ordinary professor or to the "exemplary citizen...

...He sees the turbid reverse side of culture as well as its congruent side and he speaks of the dangers that threaten it rather than of its achievements...

...For the civilized man, yes...

...And the world of the great cultural heritage—in which Eliot seeks refuge, taking a conservative attitude — is parcelled, divided, subdivided, and filled with frontiers and flags...

...When he speaks of culture in his book I understand civilization...

...That same tendency manifests itself in "regionalism," in satellite cultures...

...viewed by RAMON SfNDfft Tt S. ELIOT SPEAKS OF CULTURE with the gravity of his age and , poetical deserts...

...Let no reader think that Eliot's conformity is beatific, Panglossian, or even academically conservative...

...Naturally above all this Eliot expresses his opinions which are his and which, because they are his, have a representative value, an echo that is like a distant vibration of his Waste Land or Murder in the Cathedral...

...The cultured attitude and the interests of culture ha(f to oppose the Church...

...To prefer the system of the hegemony ot elites, or the opposite, that of the supremacy of the masses, is a problem of civilization...

...perhaps, in the practical relation between culture and civilization—that is, between what we could call the creative man (there is no creation without a certain destruction) and the citizen consumer, usufructuary and conformist...

...That manner of confusing them, including in culture "civility" and "urbanity" and in the Church the sense of social justice, or as Eliot humoristically says, incorporating dogs and horses in Engljsh religion and bishops in English culture (I don't know why not in zoology, se as to make the terms equivalent) seems to me to be oversimplifying the problem...

...Nor is it what was understood by culture in the tradition of the great poets (free imagination vigorized by inheritance creating new relations among objects, sensations, affections, notions...

...With that they forestall—think the representatives of "civility"—nonconformism and nonconformist disorder among the citizens, it is in the name of "urbanity" and "civility" that emotional standards which correspond, so they say, to the mentalities of ten year old children, are established for adult men...

...Heroes, political chiefs, sociologists, professors, citizens, neighbors, form the confused multitude in whose order civilization prospers...

...Let no one believe that this attitude is frivolous or that I point it out frivolously...

...I ACCEPT ALL ELIOT'S points of view except his Initial manner of understanding culture...

...In order to disagree when speaking of culture it is necessary first to stand on some common evidence such as the followipg: "We possess a culture which through the centuries has been improving human relations...

...That culture is in danger...

...Eliot accuses humanity of being distracted...

...And the Church has not said a word about this saa and barbarous act...

...That conformity, which in a conventional and Philistine writer would have no importance, in Eliot takes on especial eloquence...

...Obviously the world is not so propitious for the poet...

...Culture is ¦ a way of living, alone or accompanied, that comprehends a concrete attitude before death...

...Ramon Sender's laseai novel is The Saner...

...On the whole Eliot's attitude is that of a con* formist...

...1 suppose that In future writings Eliot will make it clear so as to grant us, his readers, the pleasure of being totally In agreement with his "definitions" as we are with Ms prose...

...And it is this simpi ('ration which...

...Culture can be identified in the individual independently of his outer acts while one's way of eating, bathing and dealing with his neighbors for me are forms of civilization...