On Making the Masterpiece

...She recognized merely "the brilliant dexterity of the verse...

...There may be relatively little here that is absolutely new...

...In her earlier work on Eliot, Gardner had this provocative footnote: "An aversion to cats as strong as Mr...

...An additional major problem for me is a certain schematic paradox-mon-gering, beginning right with the second Heraclitean epigraph to "Burnt Norton," and sometimes appearing as an adaptation of a mystical text, as in the following, derived from St...

...Eliot complains: "It is surprisingly difficult to find words for the shades before morning...

...True, as Denis Donoghue has observed, "the poignancy of misgiving" makes the dogma less marmoreal and "keeps the poetry human," but there is also the circumstance Donoghue adduces, apparently without misgivings, that Eliot "writes of objects and experiences as if he had already left them —with whatever degree of reluctance —behind...

...It is absorbing to follow in this rigorously researched and e.xemplarily laid-out book (for $32.50, however, the publisher might have given us a photograph or two of the manuscripts) Eliot's relentless pursuit of the mot juste...

...He could also blithely write "asphalte" and "pig-stye," and "pentagon" for pentagram...

...Her quotation from Inferno XV differs from my text in the Bodley Head Dante, but I am not qualified to determine which reading is better...

...that and Eliot's eagerness for suggestions bordering on assistance resulted in one of the best documented records of composition by—what shall I call it...

...Moreover, Geoffrey Faber was right (as Dame Helen implies) to question the loose and ambiguous syntax in, for example, verse 99 of "The Dry Salvages," where Faber wondered, "Who does the 'not forgetting...

...the "sun" in Roger Fry's translation of a sonnet by Mallarme should, of course, be "sin"—a misprint, but reprinting Fry's feeble translation is bad judgment...

...All this in defiance of Hayward's, and apparently even Eliot's, identification of this symbolic personage with Adam...

...We then observe him as he toys with "after lantern-end," "daybreak," "lantern-out," and "lantern-down," and starts fiddling (his word) with "the antelucan dusk" and other far-fetched possibilities...

...Eliot replied, on October 2, 1942, "I changed 'barrier' to 'hindrance' but I am thinking of changing it back again, because it seems a little insolite [sic] to speak of a hindrance between two points, doesn't it...

...After nevertheless accepting Hayward's recommendation, Eliot, at the last minute, went back to "barrier" for the poem's publication in the New English Weekly...

...The poem has its undeniable beauties, but it seldom has that basis in sensuous reality that usually underlies even the most cerebral verse of a Mallarme or Valery...

...Had not Eliot himself virtually said as much when, with the publication of "Little Gidding" asaplaquette on December 1, 1942, he stopped writing serious poetry, although he was to live for another 23 years...

...there was no way of surpassing, or indeed equaling, this poetic testament...

...in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax and grammar...

...Even though The Composition of "Four Quartets" does not aspire to be an exegesis of the poem, it does supply interpreters of the work with invaluable data...

...Significantly, though Gardner knew Eliot, she was too awed by him to ask outright who the "millionaire" was...

...is clearly the masterpiece of Eliot's first phase, as the Four Quartets are of the second...

...more significantly yet, she notes that Eliot "would probably have evaded siding with either of his readers...

...There have been two or three book-length explications of Four Quartets, and innumerable shorter exegeses, but the publication of Dame Helen Gardner's The Composition of "Four Quartets" gives us at last the Entstehungs-geschichte, the full account of the writing of this work, some eight years in the making—taking into account the interruption of five years between the first quartet, "Burnt Norton" (1935), and the second, "East Coker," The heart of Dame Helen's book derives from a study and comparison of the numerous drafts, hand- or typewritten, that Eliot gave either to his close friend and, in some ways, mentor, John Hay-ward (who left them to King's College, Cambridge), or to Magdalene College, Cambridge...

...Clearly, he felt that with Four Quartets he had said it all...

...In fact, George Williamson's assurance to the contrary, 1 doubt whether Four Quartets is more than intermittently "a lyric...

...Eliot treated Milton, as a musician, whose subject-matter is of no interest...

...then that became "first faint light...

...Luckily, the work is not all metaphysic, as we are happily instructed by an epistolary exchange Gardner quotes with relish...

...I wonder, by the way, whether such solemnity is a function of rhythm or, rather, of diction and, indeed, content...

...Gardner points out that the poet-critic repudiated his attack on D. H. Lawrence (as, earlier, he had patched up his quarrel with Milton), and was prepared to testify at the trial of Lady Chal-terley's Lover that "when he spoke of the author of that book as 'a very sick man indeed,' he was very sick himself...

...To quote Churchill again, "Some of us may miss the vigour and the irony of the younger Eliot and feel that the rhythmic movement of the Quartets, though distinguished, is a little slow and inclined at times to an almost pulpitarian solemnity...

...in) the haunting blank verse passages of The Waste Land," continues: "I wish that he had stopped at The Hollow Men, his honest and (indeed) heartbreaking declaration of poetic bankruptcy, to the approved Receiver of poetic bankruptcy, the Hippopotamus Church...

...It is partly for this fanatical dedication to his art thai Eliot elicited tributes like (he one from Harold Nicolson, who doubted whether "any poet less selfless and saintly could have rescued our generation from apathy and cynicism...

...He goes on: "Since statement qualifies, [Eliot] must at once correct it by introducing its opposite and measuring its claims against what he has already said...

...But to the true believers, the orthodox Eliot boosters, among whose number can be found many a major poet and critic of the Western, as well as the Eastern, world, the magnum opus is almost invariably Four Quartets...

...But whether that influence was entirely salubrious is still a matter for debate...

...Yet, after her first meeting with Eliot, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that "he believes...

...To an older generation of scholar critics, men like E. M. W. Tillyard and H. W. Garrod, Eliot was a bete noire...

...But the good Dame Helen herself slips up on rare occasions: The book Writers at Work is named correctly once, and once as Writers and their Work...

...I do not get the significance of autumn Hayward complains at one point, and Eliot responds: '"Autumn weathei' only because it was autumn weather...

...On the whole, the book is a marvel of typographical accuracy...

...And again: "Under the terms of this metaphysic .. . any two opposites...

...Those who dislike Eliot, like Rossell Hope Robbins, who wrote a whole book...

...But there is much useful information from out-of-the-way sources sedulously tracked down, abundantly quoted and shrewdly commented upon...

...When Dame Helen proposes new literary sources, however, she is on less firm ground than when she lists those put forward by other commentators, which she has valiantly assembled through extensive research...

...Though she modestly denies having prepared a critical edition of Four Quartets, she has done that and a good deal more...

...But here is Robert Graves: "Eliot's Four Quartets, taken in a lump, are lengthy enough and adult enough and religious enough and philosophical enough to pass as a masterpiece...

...Ger-melshausen is by Gerstacker, not Ger-starker...

...Graves, who concedes that Eliot "had once been, however briefly, a poet...

...Too bad that Thomas Hardy, who had been bracketed with Lawrence in the attack, did not benefit from a like retraction...

...are co-equals, sharers, partners...

...Browning may have found itself echoed in "Burnt Norton" because it occurs in a story by Kipling, also a minor source...

...The T. S. Eliot Myth, against him, put it more sourly: "The major difference in Eliot's borrowings in the early and later poetry is that in the latter his sources and analogues are from minor writers and non-imaginative authors...

...And it is precisely in TheDehumani-zation of Art that Ortega y Gasset defined the role of the modernist poet, in this case Mallarme, as disappearing, volatilizing as a man, in order to be "converted into a pure anonymous voice, which speaks disembodied words...

...But the rare new things are important ones: Gardner establishes the significance of Emily Hale, a friend from Eliot's Harvard undergraduate days, who may have accompanied the poet on a trip to New Hampshire in 1933, and whom he definitely saw during several subsequent summers in England...

...On the other hand, how pleasant to find that Eliot's mind could change...

...Dame Helen shows how, through an accident in the printing, Eliot's intended (and eminently appropriate) line break after verse 128 of "East Coker" disappeared forever...

...When, at last, he "fell back" on one of Hayward's versions, he remarked: "1 perceive that these belong to that almost inevitable residue of items...

...yet a slightly younger academic like R. C. Churchill entitled the supplementary chapter he contributed to the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature "The Age of T. S. Eliot...

...the plural of Perkins is "the Perkinses," and not, as she insists, "the Perkins...

...There were times, too, when the great perfectionist remained at the mercy of the typesetter...

...And, twisting the knife, he adds, "1 use the word 'masterpiece' without irony, in its original technical sense...

...we seem to be richer in words and phrases for the end of day...

...But," he wrote Hay-ward on October 10, "I am not absolutely confident...

...Of these, Geoffrey Faber (of the publishing house in which Eliot, too, became a partner) headed a list that at times included such notables as Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read...

...One of the most useful services the book performs is making us reconsider our views of this important poem...

...Even as a literary debtor he deteriorates...

...It was during the summer of 1934 that Tom and Emily explored the gardens of Burnt Norton, and although Dame Helen merely hints at this, Emily may have been the muse whose unstated presence accounts for the sweetness of some of the verses in "Burnt Norton...

...Thus "Here and there does not matter" in "East Coker" remained uncorrected until the (posthumous) 1974 edition of the Collected Poems, despite Hermann Paschmann's pointing out the error to the poet, who commented, "How very odd," and added, "What I prefer is Here or there does not matter," magnanimously casting his preference on the side of grammar...

...Take, for instance, his agonizing over the verse in "Little Gidding" where the "dead Master" (Eliot's arch-poet, a conflation of Yeats and several others) says that passage between death and life "now presents no hindrance...

...a piece of work done by a journeyman which satisfies his guild-authorities that he is henceforth entitled to rank as a master, or full member of the Establishment...

...makes better rhythmic, lyrical, and philosophic sense than the same passage with the middle line omitted, as it now appears in all editions of the poem...

...Had it been available to Nancy Duvall Hargrove, her recent Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot would not have insisted repeatedly that the church in "The Dry Salvages" is Our Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester, Massachusetts...

...This strikes me as much nearer the mark than B. Rajan's assessment: "utter and relentless fidelity to the event...

...John of the Cross: "And what you do not know is the only thing you know/And what you own is what you do not own/And where you are is where you are not...

...but even if I could find it [no comma] it probably wouldn't do...

...Surely "Where is the summer, the unimaginable/Summer beyond sense, the unapprehensible/Zero summer...

...and such deliberate delyricization as in Section IV of "East Coker," where the mixing of tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter strangely undercuts the music...

...Rare is the poet, to this day, who does not owe something to Eliot, if only through the mediation of Eliot's quasi-official heirs, Auden, MacNeice, Spender, and the rest...

...for which the ideal is unattainable...

...Another major new contribution is Gardner's discovery of a missing line from "Little Gidding"—a verse that, almost certainly, dropped out of the finished poem by an oversight on everybody's part...

...Hay ward had queried the original word, "barrier," and suggested "hindrance" instead...

...Well, my trouble is that whereas I can see the stillness, I tend to miss the dance...

...Reviewed by John Simon Few 20th-century poets have elicited as much adoration as T. S. Eliot, and none, except for his friend Ezra Pound, has garnered so much hatred...

...some of it Dame Helen herself had set forth in her 1949 book, The Art of T. S. Eliot...

...Such excess of tranquility in the recollection I find faintly dehumanizing...

...When Hayward proposed "faint half-light," Eliot replied that this was too close in sound to a terminal "night" a few lines earlier...

...All the available stages are reproduced by Gardner in footnotes or as part of the text...

...But the attempt to trace Eliot's "ruined millionaire" to the Zeus of Gide's Le Prome'the'e mat enchami is unconvincing...

...To let one have its head at the expense of the other would spoil the 'stillness' of the dance...

...beyond opposites in a language which is based upon opposites...

...There is very likely some dialect word for this degree of dawn...

...Let me call it "creative midwifery," then, with Hayward as the obstetrician, and the others as interns and nurses, officiating at this difficult parturition...

...and from the perusal of the Eliot-Hayward correspondence during the writing of the three later Quartets...

...We get here those "it seems"-es, those "I have said before"-s, that Faber characterized as "lecture-stigmata...

...all too often it tries to be a kind of philosophical epic and hurtles, not infrequently, into prose ?closer sometimes," as Frank Ker-mode reminds us, "to commentary than to the thing itself...

...Gide called most of his fiction soties (not softies, a possible alternative spelling...

...Much of this looks to me like mere indecisiveness, tergiversation rather than equipoise...

...One would not expect the misspellings "rescension" and "moalars" from a Latinist, least of all a Latinist with as much dental trouble as Eliot had...

...Dame Helen quotes the Reverend William T. Levy, who had it from Eliot himself, that it is Notre Dame de la Garde, overlooking Marseilles, regrettably misprinted here as "la Gard...

...are you still assured that it is proper to speak of a hindrance between two termini...

...Similarly, it is interesting to ponder that a bit of flaccid verse from Mrs...

...Grammar in particular bothered Eliot...

...plus such bathos as "you whose bodies/Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,/Or whatever event...

...To R. C. Churchill, "Vie Waste Land...

...Still, as we gather from Gardner's book, this poeta doctus had considerable problems with spelling and syntax—sometimes even with the meanings of words...

...Since there is no eluding the fact, posited by Elizabeth Drew in words borrowed from Eliot, that Four Quartets is an "expression of 'the experience of believing a dogma,"' to which / have a strong aversion—one person's cat is another's dogma—I too am at a disadvantage vis-a-vis this poem...

...Apparently Hayward was able to 'assure' him," Gardner concludes, for in Four Quartets we read "hindrance...

...For Eliot was continually submitting manuscripts of the poem for annotation and commentary to Hay-ward and, to a lesser extent, other friends...

...Originally Eliot had written "dawn...

...And the freedom of movement was not in one direction only, but to and fro...

...Incidentally, it is instructive to note thai psychiatry, contemptuously included in "The Dry Salvages" among such "pastimes and drugs" as astrology and palmistry, should have been rehabilitated in The Cocktail Party, where the Paracletelike hero is a sort of psychiatrist...

...Oddly enough, Eliot, who admired and emulated Mallarme (Gardner duly points out the several quotations or paraphrases from him), nonetheless made some very un-Mallarme-an efforts in Four Quartets toward personalizing his voice—fatal, I think, in a poet whose genius is for the supra-personal...

...By showing that the verse was kept by Eliot in the first and second proof, and merely left out of the "Final Recension" sent to the printer, Gardner establishes an excellent case for its reinstatement...

...Collaboration" is too strong a word, and often there was no "consensus," Eliot accepting, I would guess, only one or two out of every six or seven proposed emendations...

...Here's a quotation dating from 1658: 'Taylors suffer none to set up his trade unless he have first made the masterpiece.'" Among Eliot's admirers, too, there are those who prefer The Waste Land to Four Quartets...

...It is then a case of what Roy Campbell described (in another literary context) as using "the snaffle and the curb all right,/But where's the bloody horse...

...The meetings took place at the summer house of her relatives, the Perkinses, where Eliot, too, was asked to visit...

...It is equally fascinating to learn that the lines in "Little Gidding" that troubled Eliot most, and elicited the lengthiest correspondence, were 89-91, where he describes, among other things, the time of meeting with the ghost as "the waning dusk...

...when a couple of typos do occur in consecutive footnotes on page 202, they come as an astonishing exception rather than, as usual nowadays, the rule...

...it seems to have been dragged in to bolster up Gardner's earlier, and no more convincing, identification of that figure (in The Art of T. S. Eliot) with an aspect of Christ...

...Eliot's confessed antipathy to Milton as a man, compels me to treat Old Possum, as Mr...

...It is nice to be reminded again that among the sources for this most cerebral of poems were Alice in Wonderland and bits of filler material E. Martin Browne had asked for in Murder in the Cathedral to give it livelier movement, then judged unnecessary...

...It was wartime, and communication by mail was often the only possibility...

...Lawrence Durrell tries to defend this as a way of stating "something...

...for her extensive introductory sections and thoughtful running commentaries, she draws on far-flung materials providing literary, historical, biographical, bibliographical, and textual illumination...

...Almost no one would deny that Eliot was one of the most influential "modern" poets in the English language?perhaps even more seminal than Yeats, and certainly more so than Hopkins, his two most conspicuous competitors...