How Pleasant to Know Mr. Eliot
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR. ELIOT By Phoebe Pettingell For several decades, T. S. Eliot was modern poetry. That dying fall in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," all those different...
...told what imagery was influenced by Charles-Louis Philippe's decadent novel, Bubu du Montparnasse...
...It's pretty obvious that the enthusiasms, disgusts and ironies expressed belong to a sensitive, high-strung youth who is trying hard to get his actual state of mind down on paper...
...Lyndall Gordon's biography of Eliot claims that both these youthful love poems, and the rapturous outpourings scattered throughout the later Christian poetry, were inspired by Emily Hale, whom the poet first met and loved in Cambridge while he was at Harvard...
...Sebastian," he confesses to sadomasochistic fantasies...
...However, one doesn't want to be so owlish as to read a lot into bawdy parodies of that day's Music Hall humor...
...Later, when his marriage to Vivien went sour, she again became his muse until shortly before his second marriage...
...Recent biographies have scrutinized Eliot's character under the sort of magnification meant to show up every pore and blemish...
...You didn't associate the poet with hysterical parts of "The Waste Land," because most of those sections were spoken by neurotic women...
...Eliot believed (or wanted to) that this manuscript had been lost...
...With ashes and tins in piles...
...Reading these Inventions of the March Hare, you realize how vulnerable Eliot truly was, and how much he achieved...
...As for the serious poems, biographies have discussed them at length without being able to quote from them...
...Second Caprice in North Cambridge" begins: This charm of vacant lots...
...A Modernist poem wasn't meant to be autobiography...
...Much of the current volume is instead made up of Ricks' annotations to the young man's borrowings and allusions from other writers...
...In the midst of these small pieces, we suddenly come across a giant among pygmies...
...It never really occurred to us to imagine him as a young man...
...A few contemporaries always thought there was something vampire-like about him...
...All that respectful, impersonal adulation now sounds long ago and far away...
...Feeling indebted to the lawyer for many kindnesses, the poet insisted on making a present of the desired papers, but he offered to sell him a notebook with drafts of early work, mostly unpublishable verse...
...Although the canon of his work included a few poems written when he was only 21 and still at Harvard, we saw that even as a student he adopted the stance of a middle-aged, somewhat world-weary man-about-town who had "known [it] all...
...There is a difference: a middle section titled "Prufrock's Pervigilium" (the vigil before the feast of Venus when, according to the original Latin poem, both lover and loverless will make love...
...he is engaged in a profound search for meaning that his society probably can't understand and will judge him ridiculous and unstable for attempting...
...Jessie Weston, the Pervigilium Veneris, Dante, the Upanishads, Elizabethan tragedy and the rest...
...From boyhood on, it becomes clear that he was an acquisitive reader, feeding off books for his own ends...
...Nevertheless, the discarded passages affirm that Prufrock isn't vacillating over silly scruples...
...By themselves, the poems in Inventions of the March Hare would make a very slim book indeed...
...These are phenomena of a disturbance so great that Prufrock fears his own madness...
...The work wasn't really about people, anyway, we were told...
...When Quinn died two years later, the whereabouts of Inventions (alternatively titled by its ironic author, Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot) was unknown...
...Meanwhile, the critical community is currently arguing about just how anti-Semitic he really was, and whether this should affect our valuation of his poetry...
...These had been excised from the manuscript before it was given to Quinn, then sent to Ezra Pound for safekeeping...
...such were the melodies college lit classes taught us to appreciate above all other music...
...In fact, the schools of criticism then in fashion didn't encourage you to think of the writer as a person at all...
...At 21, though, the poet hadn't quite decided how to publicly express the private significance these dismal landscapes had for him...
...Nevertheless, I have reservations about Ricks' decision to give his annotations alongside the verse...
...Pmfrock" almost as it was published...
...True, these jeux d'esprit are everything intended by the word "sophomoric...
...informed which lines echo Tennyson, Swinburne, Hawthorne, Shelley, Edward Lear, etc...
...His verse can be read as slightly veiled autobiography, which, in turn, reflects the psychology of 20th-century anxiety...
...In addition, she has released three comic obscene ballads...
...Furthermore, he was still imitating the slightly dissonant rhyme schemes and loose stanzas popular in that era...
...It may make you like his poetry better than ever...
...Eliot's contemporaries might have been bothered by the sexuality...
...Perhaps because of the prevalence of these unofficial renderings, Eliot's widow has finally decided to let the manuscript go public...
...The problem with the way many of us studied Eliot was that by the time all those references in "The Waste Land...
...In any case, ever since "The Waste Land" appeared, people have been trained to see this poet through a filter of notes...
...I think Ricks overvalues the beauty of this and other tuneful bits throughout Inventions...
...Into this climate of re-evaluation, comes the publication of Eliot's "lost" manuscript of juvenilia, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, edited by Christopher Ricks (Harcourt Brace, 428 pp., $30.00...
...Some critics have seen this poem as nastily misogynist...
...Then in 1968, two years after the poet's death, the New York Public Library announced they had acquired it for the Berg Collection a decade earlier...
...From Ricks' text, you could teach a class in which any one of these little Caprices, Interludes, or Suites (Eliot always did like to take his titles from musical forms) was unpacked till it sounded almost as deep as "Little Gidding...
...Admittedly, though, such pieces offer intriguing prognostications of those sudden bursts into song that enlighten "Four Quartets...
...Eliot never was prolific...
...It doesn't quite come off...
...Occasionally, he broke into the sort of lyric phrase associated with Ernest Dowson or the early W. B. Yeats: Hidden under the heron's wing Or the song before daybreak that the lotos-birds sing Evening whisper of stars together Oh my beloved what do you bring...
...Actually, he had sold it to that prominent Modernist impresario, John Quinn...
...The "stony rubbish" of the "unreal city" with its "heap of broken images" becomes a familiar leitmotif in "The Waste Land...
...Shattered bricks and tiles And the debris of a city...
...In 1922, when "The Waste Land" first appeared in print, Quinn wanted to buy the manuscript...
...To me, it seems to express the longing and terror of a painfully shy, repressed young man who can't imagine how to break through the social barriers placed between him and a nice young woman of the time without some rather operatic emotional cataclysm...
...This is not without interest...
...had been thoroughly scrutinized, students began to think of him less as an individual than a course in Western Civ...
...This early verse seems familiar in many ways, yet it proves that once there really was an immature Eliot, unsure of his tone, and given to a certain amount of adolescent Sturm und Drang...
...Inventions of the March Hare give us an unprecedented opportunity to start over again by confronting the Romantic Eliot...
...it spoke in the voice of a "persona...
...His honesty is remarkable, though, and rather touching, even when, in "The Love Song of St...
...It almost guarantees that the poems won't be interpreted on their own, and future critics will continue to perceive them mostly as a tessellation of references...
...We are pointed to ideas derived from Jules Laforgue...
...Eliot," as he himself once wrote...
...It is true that by 1909 he had already discovered his themes, even some of the phrases and images that show up in the mature work...
...No wonder he worries that the sympathetic listener might reject him...
...Just as the 1971 publication of "The Waste Land" facsimile revealed an Eliot sometimes unsure of himself and his tone, so Inventions of the March Hare (most will recognize the title's allusion to the Mad Tea Party from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) allows us to watch an apprentice try to discover what he wanted to say...
...You can read the same sort of thing in any college literary magazine, only Eliot's poem is less overblown than most...
...By the time my generation came along, he had already become the Nobel prizewinning elder statesman of literature...
...They ended up in Yale's Beinecke collection, which houses Pound's papers...
...Entreat the eye and rack the mind, Demand your pity...
...Nevertheless, bootleg versions have circulating (reputedly memorized in the library by fanatical Eliot buffs, then quickly copied down at home...
...a patron of many figures of the time, including Yeats...
...And all Eliot's personae were oracular and wise...
...The juvenilia doesn't hide behind as many masks...
...From then until the present, it was available to scholars, though they had to promise not to reproduce the text...
...Today, the politically correct are more troubled by their racism...
...It certainly helps to have all these texts so readers may judge the contents for themselves...
...To balance the evening "spread out along the sky like a patient etherized" and yellow fog that curled itself around the houses like a cat, there is a midnight darkness that attacks the sleepless, and a dawn that "realized itself/ And turned with a sense of nausea, to see what it had stirred...
...The helpless fields that lie Sinister, sterile and blind...
...Conrad Aiken was right to tell Eliot to cut this section...
...The poems...
...It was about Big Themes like the disintegration of culture in our century, and man's search for spiritual meaning...
...That dying fall in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," all those different voices populating "The Waste Land," the polyphony of "Four Quartets...
...How unpleasant to know Mr...
...The results aren't very polished, and he hasn't yet tightened up his art enough...
...In it, we finally learn what it was the main character wanted to express to the lady...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
