Picked-Up Pieces (41 page)

As Eliot’s private life moves into the relative light of printed poems and opinion, of worldwide fame and London gossip, Matthews has more material to work with. Yet he handles the
oeuvre
rather brusquely, even dismissively. Of two youthful poems of 1910: “Neither showed the slightest sign of originality or was worth preserving.” Of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”: “If this isn’t showing off with a smirk and a vengeance, what on earth is it?” Of the criticism: “Eliot as critic is also Eliot at his least satisfactory and least likeable—a know-it-all who puts us in our place and keeps us there.” Of
The Waste Land:
“… the scheme, such as it is, is mostly afterthought.” Of the poet’s ear: “Examples of Eliot’s failure of musical ear abound in his later poems.” Matthews elsewhere says generous and shrewd things of Eliot’s works, but he rarely seems to examine them with any focussed concern for the life of the mind behind them. Eliot’s Christianity, for instance, stimulates a long, fulminating, personal, and rather obtuse essay in which Matthews, himself an Anglo-Catholic, worries the cheap paradox that Christians have made war and inflicted cruelties upon one another. The intellectual atmosphere
de l’entre-deux-guerres
, in which Eliot’s profession of faith was a shocking and, to some, an exemplary proclamation, is scanted.
Throughout, the tone of the title—crass, jaunty, faintly bellicose—is sustained; one can feel Eliot’s fastidious ghost wincing.

Yet the book, in part because of its breezy thinness, is easy to read. Mr. Matthews occasionally strikes off a fine phrase: “Eliot’s benign, almost wordless presence seemed to have an encouraging effect on [John Hayward], like the silent flame under a singing tea kettle.” He quotes some illuminating remarks: Stravinsky’s saying of Eliot, “He is not the most exuberant man I have ever known, but he is one of the purest.” And Eliot himself saying, “No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” What a beautiful sadness in this implication that a poet, an artist, “messes up” his life in the hope of producing something immortal. And how startling to know that Eliot composed his poetry standing at a typewriter! “It is a mystery to me how anyone can write poetry except on a typewriter.” And how awful to imagine him, in his little office at Lloyds Bank—“a figure stooping,” I. A. Richards remembered, “very like a dark bird in a feeder, over a big table covered with all sorts and sizes of foreign correspondence”—working directly under the pavement, with heels hammering on the thick green glass squares above his head all day long. And how touching, after the recent revelation that Eliot diffidently accepted almost all of Ezra Pound’s cuts of
The Waste Land
, to read that Pound, shown the manuscript half a century later, was equally diffident about his strokes of editing genius: “He should have ignored me. Why didn’t he restore some of the cancelled passages when Liveright wanted more pages?”

And, though an official biography might bring forth an abundance of the correspondence and specificity rather strikingly sparse in these “Notes,” Mr. Matthews’ silhouette of the life seems unlikely to change: a life disfigured by an unhappy marriage in the middle and distinguished from beginning to end by a proud industry. As a student at Harvard, Eliot compressed four years’ work into three; as a graduate student, he added Sanskrit and Italian to his knowledge of French, German, Latin, and Greek; when he worked a full day in Lloyds, he would rise at five to labor at criticism; in the years he was remapping the English literary tradition, he was nursing an ill wife; he lectured; he edited
Criterion
for seventeen years; at both his banking and, later, publishing jobs he not only put in time but won promotions and praise from his colleagues; after his conversion, he served on many church committees and even
edited an ecclesiastical publication; at an age when many men retire, he undertook to make himself into a commercially successful playwright. Through all this, the meagre, reluctant, pained trickle of poetry, aiming (in his words) at “the maximum emotional effect with the minimum verbal decoration.”

No doubt the time will never return when, as in the early fifties, to those of us in college, Eliot’s reputation was an encompassing gray cloud, the very atmosphere of literature. It was a remarkable looming, a matter of style as well as of content, to a generation that loved the aloof, the cryptic, the ominous, the wry, the weary. Mr. Matthews, who offers a variety of verdicts on the worth to posterity of his elusive subject, suggests that when the “emotional radioactivity” has died away all that will be left of Eliot is “a case of the dry grins.” It is true that Eliot’s poetry is, as was his personality, somehow transuranic, bonded together by a perilous pressure. The contemporary estimates of its worth ranged as wildly as a Geiger counter gone crazy—from R. P. Blackmur’s reverence to Van Wyck Brooks’s abhorrence—and an archaeologist of literature, exhuming its decayed carbon traces in the far future, may have trouble identifying it as poetry at all. It is like no other. Its droning tone underlines a confessed poverty of inspiration and vitality, yet a steady force of seriousness, of caustic austerity, engraves it on our minds. The revelation of
The Waste Land
revisions shocked us, of course, because this of all modern poems had come to seem inevitable; it feels familiar when we read it for the first time, and by the third time it feels memorized. And when we reread it after wading through
Great Tom
, we are exhilarated by its altitude; we are “In the mountains, there you feel free.” Though Eliot’s critical phrases (“objective correlative,” “dissociation of sensibility”) may no longer serve as signposts for the student, and the plays fade, as most plays do, what lines of poetry between Yeats’s late poems and the verse that Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote from within the shadow of death burn deeper, better remember themselves, than Eliot’s? His will asked that no biography of himself be written; we would not be much poorer if his request had been honored.

FRENCH DEATHS

T
HE
F
IRE
W
ITHIN
, by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 183 pp. Knopf, 1965.

S
ELECTED
W
ORKS OF
A
LFRED
J
ARRY
, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, translated by many hands. 280 pp. Grove Press, 1965.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893–1945) and Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) were French men of letters whose reputations, inseparable during their lifetimes from personal notoriety, were eclipsed after their suicides (Drieu shot himself, Jarry no less deliberately drank himself to death) but have been revived in contemporary France. Drieu, a Vichy collaborator whose passionate political inconsistency antagonized all parties, has been rehabilitated from disgrace by, an article in
Le Monde
stated in 1964, “a new generation which has chosen
désengagement
, but which is attracted by his outspokenness, his elegant cynicism, his aristocratic aestheticism, and his desperate lucidity.” Jarry, an undersized super-bohemian whose play
Ubu Roi
marks the birth of the avant-garde theatre, has been honored not only by continuing editions of his writings but by the founding, in 1949, of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, an eccentric and elusive pseudo-science he invented. In the United States, a book by each author has been recently published.

Drieu’s
The Fire Within
is a brief, flickering novel issued in France in 1931 as
Le Feu Follet
—“playful fire,” an idiom for “
ignis fatuus
,” or
“will-o’-the-wisp.” The will-o’-the-wisp presumably is the hero himself, Alain, whose weak hold upon life finally yields to the pull of suicide. As Alain moves through his last few days vainly seeking an excuse to live, the author subjects him to a bewildering alternation of acute sympathy and stern lecturing. The sympathy probes emotional nihilism to its last dead end and self-defeating checkmate; the lecturing seems delivered from a standpoint nearly Christian:

Yet although he scolds him as a “fetishist” and a “naïve dandy,” Drieu cannot in honesty construct a fictional world that at any point substantially resists Alain’s premonitions of futility. So Alain’s suicide, instead of afflicting us with the dizzying impression of waste we feel in, say,
Anna Karenina
or
Appointment in Samarra
, arrives serenely, as something appropriate and slightly overdue. It is a kind of happy ending: “A revolver is solid, it’s made of steel. It’s an object. To touch an object at last.”

Alain is much concerned with objects, and part of Drieu’s appeal to the modern young must be his flat objectivity, a dispassion that reduces people to a species of object opaque in their psychology and mute even in speech. In Drieu, the tendency has not achieved the doctrinal purity of Robbe-Grillet; his flat narrative texture is bubbled by incongruous outbursts of sermonizing. But his sense of actuality rejects mankind’s ancient claims of special importance, the conviction of spiritual destiny that inflames and inflates the living newspapers of Balzac and Dickens.
The Fire Within
ends a moment before death and begins a moment after coitus. The lover and beloved are discovered looking at each other with eyes dreadfully clear of illusions: “All she saw was a hairy chest, no head. It didn’t matter: she had felt nothing very violent either, yet the switch had been tripped, and that was the only sensation she had ever known, not permeating but precise.”
The switch had been tripped
. Drieu’s mordant and entertaining characterizations—and there are many characters; the novel in form is picaresque—work to mechanize humanity, to chisel a series of hard-featured marionettes:

Mademoiselle Farnoux smiled at Alain with meagre lust.… She was a little girl between forty and sixty, bald, with a black wig on her bloodless skull.

Even the beautiful women are rigid dolls:

It is natural that Alain, who has some of the instincts of an artist, mocks this de-animated society with ironic collages and random assemblages of objects:

In his mirror he has arranged two photographs, a foreshortened man and woman, and between them “a news item pasted on the glass with four stamps reduced the human mind to two dimensions and left it no way out.” The third dimension must be the supernatural.

Though
The Fire Within
takes place in Paris, its spiritual locale is the empire of disenchantment whose twin capitals are Paris and New York. The two chief women in Alain’s life, his absent wife and his present mistress, are Americans, and his vices and weaknesses seem peculiarly
American—drug addiction, sexual inadequacy, fear of losing his youth, a greedy awe of money, an enfeebling dependence upon women. He is described as a Puritan: “a man who saw the vices sprouting from his prejudices, but who was incapable, because of his prejudices, of enjoying his vices.” He even has a psychiatrist, who sagely tells him, “A strong, healthy woman like these Americans will make you forget all this.” But Americans, as represented in this book, are clearly also “a race exhausted by civilization.” The only convinced spokesman for life is a scholar immersed in the study of the gods of ancient Egypt; “he would have liked to recite some of those Egyptian prayers distended with the fullness of being, in which the spiritual life, exploding, pours out all the sap of the earth.” Perhaps the reason that the waning of the Christian faith is so peculiarly desolating in France and America is that in these nations the pagan gods, whether Hellenic or Teutonic, were never taken very seriously. The Christian bet was hardly hedged. Pascal and Cotton Mather alike theologize on the basis of a vast gamble, and their heirs feel cheated. “There was, after all, something of the Christian in Alain”—this something, which needs to act righteously and refuses to embrace the mediocre muddle of living, produces, with a purity coolly mathematical, his self-destruction.