Fame & Folly (8 page)

The same with the plays. With the exception of the first of the five,
Murder in the Cathedral
—a major devotional poem of orchestral breadth—the plays are all collapsed into curios. From our perspective, they are something worse than period pieces, since that is what they were—Edwardian drawing room dramas—when they were new. They hint at (or proclaim) a failure of Eliot’s public ear. His aim was to write popular verse plays for the English stage—an aim worthy (though Eliot never had the hubris to say this) of Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw had been content with prose—and the majestically cunning prose speeches in
Murder in the Cathedral
are reminiscent of nothing so much as Shaw’s
Saint Joan
, including Shaw’s preface to that play. The dialogue of enjambment that is the style and method of
The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk
, and
The Elder Statesman
, never attains the sound of verse, much less poetry. That was precisely Eliot’s hope: he considered
Murder in the Cathedral
too blatantly poetic, a “dead end.” His goal was to bury the overt effects of poetry while drawing out of ordinary speech and almost ordinary situations a veil of transcendence—even, now and then, of mystical horror, as when (in
The Family Reunion
) the Furies suddenly appear, or when (in
The Cocktail Party
) a character we are meant to imagine as a saint and a martyr goes off to be a missionary among the “natives” and is eaten by ants. (Having first been crucified, it ought to be added. And though there are farcical moments throughout, the devouring anthill is not intended as one of them.) Nevertheless nothing transcendent manages to rise from any printed page of any of the
last four plays—almost nothing suggestive of poetry, in fact, except an occasional “wisdom” patch in the semi-lyrical but largely prosy manner of the philosophical lines in
Four Quartets
. Possibly this is because the printed page is perforce bare of technical stagecraft, with its color and excitement. Yet—similarly unaccoutered—Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Shaw, in their greater and lesser written art, send out language with presence and power enough to equal absent actors, sets, lighting, costumes. Much of Eliot’s dialogue, rather than achieving that simplicity of common speech he aspired to, plummets to the stilted, the pedestrian, the enervated:

Given only the text and nothing else, a reader of
The Cocktail Party
, say, will be perplexed by its extravagant performing history: in London and New York in the Fifties, it filled theaters and stunned audiences. Read now, these later plays are unmistakably dead, embalmed, dated beyond endurance—dated especially in the light of the vigorous Fifties, when the energetic spokesmen of the Angry Young Men were having their first dramatic hearing. As playwright, Eliot inexplicably eschewed or diluted or could not pull off his theory of demarcation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” so the plays are surprisingly confessional—the Furies harbor Vivien, a character is tormented by thinking he has killed his wife, Valerie turns up as a redemptive young woman piously named Monica, etc. Since Eliot’s private life was not only closed but unguessed-at in those years, gossip could not have been the lure for theater-goers. The lure was, in part, skillful production: on the page, the Furies when they pop up seem as silly as the news of the hungry anthill, but their theatrical embodiment was electrifying. Fine performances and ingenious staging, though, were at bottom not what brought overflowing audiences to see Eliot’s plays. They came because of
the supremacy of Eliot’s fame. They came because verse drama by T. S. Eliot was the most potent cultural vitamin of the age.

Inevitably we are returned to the issue (there is no escaping it at any point) of Eliot’s renown. As a young man, he had hammered out the prestige of a critical reputation by means of essay after essay. By the time of the later plays he had become a world celebrity, an international feature story in newspapers and magazines. But neither the essays by themselves, nor (certainly) the plays—always excepting
Murder in the Cathedral
, which ought to count among the most lastingly resonant of the poems—could have won for Eliot his permanent place in English letters. The fame belongs to the poems. The rest, however much there might be of it, was spinoff. Yet the body of poems is amazingly small in the light of Eliot’s towering repute. In 1958, for example, invited to Rome for an honorary degree, he was driven through streets mobbed with students roaring “
Viva
Eliot!” Mass adulation of this sort more often attaches to presidents and monarchs—or, nowadays, to rock stars. What did that roar rest on? Leaving aside the early Bolo ribaldry (which in any case never reached print), the fourteen cat verses, and the contents of a little posthumous collection called
Poems Written in Early Youth
(from ages sixteen to twenty-two), but not omitting two unfinished works—“Sweeney Agonistes” and “Coriolan”—Eliot’s entire poetic oeuvre comes to no more than fifty-four poems. England, at least, is used to more abundant output from the poets it chooses to mark with the seal of permanence. My copy of Wordsworth’s
Poetical Works
adds up to nine hundred and sixty-six pages of minuscule type, or approximately a thousand poems. The changes in the written culture between, say, the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” published in 1807, and Eliot’s
Waste Land
, published one hundred and fifteen years later, speak for themselves. Still, granting the impertinence of measuring by number, there remains something extraordinary—even uncanny—about the torrent of transoceanic adoration that, for Eliot, stemmed from fifty-four poems.

Eliot may have supposed himself a classicist, but really he is in the line of the Romantics: subjective, anguished, nostalgic, mystical, lyrical. The critic Harold Bloom’s mild view is that he “does
not derive from Dante and Donne, as he thought, but from Tennyson and Whitman”—a judgment that might have stung him. For Eliot to have believed himself an offspring of the cosmic Dante and the precision-worker Donne, and to end, if Professor Bloom is correct, as a descendant of the softer, lusher music of Tennyson, is no serious diminishment (Tennyson is permanent too)—though it
is
a diminishment. Lord Tennyson, the British Empire’s laureate, may have seemed a weighty and universal voice to the Victorians. For us he is lighter and more parochial. It is in the nature of fame to undergo revision: Eliot appears now to be similarly receding into the parochial, even the sectarian (unlike the all-embracing Whitman, with whom he shares the gift of bel canto). His reach—once broad enough to incorporate the Upanishads—shrank to extend no farther than the neighborhood sacristy, and to a still smaller space: the closet of the self. His worship was local and exclusionary not simply in the limited sense that it expressed an astringent clerical bias, or that he observed the forms of a narrow segment of the Church of England—itself an island church, after all, though he did his best to link it with what he termed “the Universal Church of the World.” What made Eliot’s religiosity local and exclusive was that he confined it to his personal pain and bitterness: he allowed himself to become estranged from humanity. Feeling corrupt in himself, he saw corruption everywhere: “all times are corrupt,” he wrote; and then again, “the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism.” Demanding that faith—a particular credo—be recognized as the foundation of civilization, he went on to define civilization as extraneous to some of its highest Western manifestations—the principles of democracy, tolerance, and individualism. Despite his youthful study of Eastern religion and his poet’s immersion in Hebrew scripture, he was finally unable to imagine that there might be rival structures of civilization not grounded in the doctrine of original sin, and yet intellectually and metaphysically exemplary. Even within the familial household of Christendom, he was quick to cry heretic. In any event, the style of his orthodoxy was, as Harry Levin put it, “a literary conception.” As a would-be social theorist he had a backward longing for the medieval
hegemony of cathedral spires—i.e., for a closed society. It was a ruefulness so poignant that it preoccupied much of the prose and seeped into the melancholy cadences of the poetry. As a modernist, Eliot was the last of the Romantics.

In the end he could not disengage the mind that created from the man who suffered; they were inseparable. But the mind and the man—the genius and the sufferer—had contributed, in influence and authority, more than any other mind and man (with the exception perhaps of Picasso) to the formation of the most significant aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. It was a movement so formidable that its putative successor cannot shake off its effects and is obliged to carry on its name; helplessly, we speak of the “postmodern.” Whether postmodernism is genuinely a successor, or merely an updated variant of modernism itself, remains unresolved. Yet whichever it turns out to be, we do know for certain that we no longer live in the literary shadow of T. S. Eliot. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead”—the celebrated epigraph Eliot lifted from Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
and affixed to “The Hollow Men”—applies: the heart has gone out of what once ruled. High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is equated with obscurantism. The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached; anything can count as “text.” Knowledge—saturated in historical memory—is displaced by information, or memory without history: data. Allusiveness is crosscultural in an informational and contemporary way (from, say, beekeeping to film-making), not in the sense of connecting the present with the past. The relation of poets to history is that they can take it or leave it, and mostly they leave it, whether in prosody or in the idea of the venerable. If it is true that
The Waste Land
could not be written today because it is too tame for the savagery we have since accumulated, there is also a more compelling truth: because we seem content to live without contemplation of our formal beginnings, a poem like
The Waste Land
, mourning the loss of an integral tradition, is for us inconceivable. For the modernists, the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever
we
are), there is no recollection of a center, and nothing to miss, let alone mourn.

Was it the ever-increasing rush to what Eliot called “Secularism” that knocked him off his pinnacle? Was it the vague nihilism of “modern life” that deposed modernism’s prophet? Was Eliot shrugged off because his pessimistic longings were ultimately judged to be beside the point? The answer may not be as clearcut as any of that. The changes that occurred in the forty years between the Nobel award in 1948 and Eliot’s centennial in 1988 have still not been assimilated or even remotely understood. The Wordsworth of the “Ode to Duty” (composed the same year as “Intimations of Immortality”) has more in common with the Eliot of
Four Quartets
—the differing idioms of the poetry aside—than Eliot has with Allen Ginsberg. And yet Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the single poem most representative of the break with Eliot, may owe as much, thematically, to The
Waste Land
as it does to the bardic Whitman, or to the opening of the era of anything-goes. Ginsberg belongs to the generation that knew Eliot as sanctified, and, despite every irruption into indiscipline, Eliot continues alive in Ginsberg’s ear. For the rest, a look at the condition of most poetry in America today will disclose how far behind we have left Eliot. William Carlos Williams, a rival of Eliot’s engaged in another vein of diction and committed to sharply contrasting aesthetic goals (“no ideas but in things”), said of the publication of
The Waste Land
that he “felt at once it had set me back twenty years,” largely because of its European gravity of erudition. The newest generation in the line of descent from Williams, though hardly aware of its own ancestry, follows Williams in repudiating Eliot: music is not wanted, history is not wanted, idea is not wanted. Even literature is not much wanted. What is wanted is a sort of verbal snapshot: the quick impression, the short flat snippet that sounds cut from a sentence in a letter to a friend, the casual and scanty “revelation.” As Eliot in his time spurned Milton’s exalted epic line as too sublime for his need, so now Eliot’s elegiac fragments appear too arcane, too aristocratic, and too difficult, for contemporary ambition. Ironic allusiveness—Eliot’s inspired borrowing—is out of the question: there is nothing in stock to allude to. Now and then there are signs—critical complaints and boredom—that the school of pedestrian verse-making is nearly exhausted, and more and
more there are poets who are venturing into the longer line, the denser stanza, a more intense if not a heightened diction.

But the chief elements of the Age of Eliot are no longer with us, and may never return: the belief that poetry can be redemptive, the conviction that history underlies poetry. Such notions may still be intrinsic to the work of Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz—Europeans resident in America. Eliot was an American resident in Europe. Even as he was exacting from both poetry and life a perfected impersonation of the European model, he was signing himself, in letters,
Metoikos
, the Greek word for resident alien. He knew he was a contradiction. And it may simply be that it is in the renunciatory grain of America to resist the hierarchical and the traditional. Eliot’s “high culture” and its regnancy in and beyond the American university may have been an unsuccessful transplant that “took” temporarily, but in the end would be rejected by the formation of natural tissue. Or, as Eliot himself predicted in the “Dry Salvages” section of
Four Quartets
,