How T. S. Eliot Became T. S. Eliot (original) (raw)

The trouble with the marriage was not infidelity. It was the opposite, an asphyxiating mutual dependency. They were both anxious, brittle people. Her medical and psychological issues were serious and ultimately incapacitating (she ended up being committed to an asylum); his were merely chronic. He complained a lot during the marriage, in nearly every letter that is not purely professional and in many that should have been. He is overworked, he is ill and in bed, she is unable to get up or to eat, they don’t have enough money, their flat is too noisy, he can’t go on, she can’t go on, they can’t go on. It’s relentless, the misery. Every bump in the road is a trip through one of the circles in Dante’s Hell. In her diary, Virginia Woolf wished that “poor dear Tom had more spunk in him, less need to let drop by drop of his agonized perplexities fall ever so finely through pure cambric. One waits; one sympathizes, but it is dreary work.”

And all the time he was conquering the world of letters. “There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England,” he wrote to his mother in 1919. “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached.”

The literary scene in England was highly factionalized. Eliot’s strategy was to avoid taking sides by showing up on every side. He wrote for tiny modernist magazines, like The Egoist, which Pound had commandeered and turned into the flagship of free verse, and which had a circulation of a hundred and eighty-five. He reviewed for papers hostile to modernism, like The New Statesman, and for Bloomsbury-dominated journals, like The Athenaeum, edited by the critic John Middleton Murry. And he wrote lead articles for the Times Literary Supplement, where most of the pieces were unsigned—“the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature,” he informed his mother. He did it all at home after a day at the bank, and on weekends.

It’s one of the most remarkable runs in literary journalism. All of Eliot’s intellectual bristles are on display in these pieces. They are smart and showoffy, and seeded with dicta from which tall forests of academic criticism would one day grow:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. On Henry James:

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

A consistent theme is the sorry state of English letters. The English don’t know how to write criticism, and they don’t know how to write poetry. They use literature as a means of expressing ideas and personal feelings, or they confuse it with something else, with social commentary, or mysticism, or philosophy. As he wrote in 1922, “The present situation here has now become a scandal impossible to conceal from foreign nations: that literature is chiefly in the hands of persons who may be interested in almost anything else; that literature presents the appearance of a garden unmulched, untrimmed, unweeded, and choked by vegetation sprung only from the chance germination of the seed of last year’s plants.” This had been Pound’s position. It’s why they were comrades.

In less than three years, from the middle of 1919 to the end of 1921, Eliot wrote all the essays in his first two volumes of criticism, “The Sacred Wood” (1920) and “Homage to John Dryden” (1924); he published “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney Erect,” and “Song for the Opherion” (“The wind sprang up at four o’clock”); and (while having a nervous breakdown) he composed a complete draft of “The Waste Land.”

“Lack of will” is a peculiar diagnosis for a man producing an outburst like that. Reading the letters, we would conclude that Eliot was suffering from major depression, but you don’t write “The Waste Land” while you’re suffering from major depression. Eliot sought treatment in Lausanne, from a doctor, recommended by Morrell, named Roger Vittoz. Vittoz practiced a precursor of cognitive behavioral therapy, teaching his patients to redirect compulsive thoughts. It worked for Eliot. He finished his poem.

On the way home, he stopped in Paris, where Pound was now living, having given up on the English as a hopeless job, and—a canonical moment in modernist legend—Pound made his celebrated editorial intervention. “Complimenti, you bitch,” he wrote to Eliot after reading the near-final draft. “I am wracked by the seven jealousies.” He thought that Eliot had given their movement its monument. It was January 24, 1922. A little more than a week later, on February 2nd, Joyce’s “Ulysses” was published.

What was the revolution all about? Inner and lower were the directions modernist writers took literature, toward what goes on inside the head and below the waist. That is certainly how readers experienced modernism, at least, and why the books attracted the censors. For the writers themselves, it was largely about technique. To modernize is not to make a brand-new thing; it’s to bring an old thing up to date. “Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue, a standard nineteenth-century poetic genre. There is a tension built into the form, a tension between what the speaker “presents” and what we “see”—as in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” to pick a hoary middle-school example. In “Prufrock,” tension is created by shifting tonal registers: the title itself; the unexpected Italian epigraph from the Inferno; the opening simile comparing the evening to someone in a coma; the couplet about the women and Michelangelo, which seems to belong to a different poem and gets played, for no apparent reason, twice, like a refrain, or a jingle.

It’s an exercise in syncopation, like a Cubist portrait. It perpetually wrong-foots you. Eliot thought that Stravinsky, in “The Rite of Spring,” had transformed “the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life.” He had taken something primitive and recast it in a contemporary idiom—the way Picasso used African masks for his portrait of the prostitutes in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” or Joyce put the whole of the Odyssey underneath “Ulysses.” What was important for Pound and Eliot was that the bones of the old are legible (or visible or audible) under the contemporary skin. That’s what produces the modernist dissonance. Behind the wan and squeamish flâneur is the defiant shade of Guido da Montefeltro, burning in the eighth circle of Hell.

“It is a battle cry of freedom,” Eliot said about free verse, in 1917, “and there is no freedom in art.” He meant that when people pick up a poem they expect that it will read like a poem, and this expectation defines the formal field of play. The modernist poem puts pressure on the form, distorts it in places, grows impenetrable in places. But it never abandons it. The form is the electric current that the writer taps into.

Eliot’s word for this current was “the tradition,” and his classic statement about it is the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” published in 1919 in The Egoist, where he was an assistant editor. The term is unfortunate, since it connotes some kind of capital “C” canon. (Eliot used it because he was tacitly responding to a book called “Tradition and Change,” by Arthur Waugh, in which he and Pound were attacked.) There is no doubt that Eliot believed in a capital “C” canon, but that is not the point of his essay.

The point is philosophical. I know that what I am looking at is a house because I am already familiar with things that look more or less like it and are houses. This is what enables me to say that the particular house I am looking at is a big house, an ugly house, a modern house, and so on. The same thing happens when I read a poem: I relate it to all the other poems I have read—in the head of an ideal reader, to all the poems that have ever been written. Past poems condition my response to any new poem. And the really new poem conditions my response to all the poems that preceded it. After “Prufrock,” the Inferno is, ever so slightly, a different poem. After I see a house by Marcel Breuer, my own house looks, ever so slightly, different.

Eliot argued that, since this is the case whether a poet is conscious of the tradition or not, he or she might as well be conscious of it. The more complete the poet’s saturation in the whole of literature, the more genuinely new that poet’s work is likely to be—that is, the more powerfully it is likely to affect the old.

“You keep saying, ‘Whoa, Nellie.’ My name is Todd.”

Still, this doesn’t quite explain Eliot’s own practice. Eliot didn’t just write with the literature of the past “in his bones,” as he put it. He made poems out of the poems of other people. “Burbank,” a poem of thirty-two lines plus epigraph, borrows from or alludes to a dozen other texts. Most of those texts have something to do with Venice, where “Burbank” takes place. But where any poem referring to Venice also “takes place” is within the set of all things that have been written about Venice—“The Merchant of Venice,” “The Aspern Papers,” “The Stones of Venice,” and every other representation of that city. Eliot simply flipped over the tapestry. He put the textual background in the foreground. He wrote a poem about Venice that is also a poem about poems about Venice.

Eliot was regularly accused of plagiarism, and it tickled him. “I should be glad to participate with a few quotations which the critic would perhaps not identify,” he wrote to Monroe after she had reported a complaint. With “The Waste Land,” he approached the scandalous limits of the technique. The poem is a collage of allusion, quotation, echo, appropriation, pastiche, imitation, and ventriloquism. It uses seven languages, including Sanskrit, and ends with several pages of notes, written in a sendup of academic citation: “The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.” Good to know the next time you are in a German library.

It’s astonishing how readily these notes have been taken at face value—as useful annotations, or keys to interpretation. In “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” Eliot’s notes are printed not at the end of the poem, which is where he put them, but at the bottom of the page, as footnotes, interspersed with the Norton editors’ own annotations. On what authority? The notes are not a reader’s guide to the poem. They are part of the poem. They don’t interpret the riddle; they are one more riddle to be interpreted. If Joyce had written them, no one would imagine they were merely what they appear to be.

In fact, the notes, and much else in the poem, were almost certainly inspired by Joyce. Eliot finished “The Waste Land” before “Ulysses” was published, but he had already read nearly the entire novel, first in The Egoist, where some of the early chapters were serialized, and then in a manuscript loaned to him by Joyce himself. (Pound had put them in touch.) In April, 1921, Joyce sent Eliot the late chapters known as “Oxen of the Sun” (the tour-de-force imitative history of the language, from Anglo-Saxon to pidgin), “Circe,” and “Eumaeus.” A month later, Eliot returned the manuscript. “I have nothing but admiration,” he wrote Joyce. “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.” Years later, he told an interviewer that he stopped working on “The Waste Land,” believing that Joyce had already done what he was attempting, but that Pound persuaded him that, even if Joyce had done it in prose, it still needed to be done in verse.