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T. S. ELIOT'S COMIC VISION: "FOUR QUARTETS" AND THE COMIC STRUCTURE OF THE LATE PLAYS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

William Errett Kinnison, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2000

Dissertation committee: Approved by — . Professor Walter Davis, Adviser

Professor Sebastian Knowles Adviser Professor Morris Beja English Graduate Program UMI Number 9962413

UMI*

UMI Microform9962413 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Copyright by Willlam Errett Kinnison 2000 ABSTRACT

T. S. Eliot's prose writings on the theory and practice of drama (both the group of essays written many years in advance of his attempting to write plays of his own and called by Eliot "workshop criticism" and the

"retrospect essays" composed after the intitiation of his dramatic output) have been used to generate indicators of direction in the study of Eliot's three post-war comedies:

The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958). Seven such indicators have been isolated: 1) Eliot's "search for form"; 2) "the mythical method"; 3) "Objective correlative"; 4) "nature of the audience"; 5) "levels of sensibility"; 6) "nature of the actor"; 7) "escape from personality."

These seven commonplaces of Eliot's thinking in the theory of drama have been traced in terms of their influence on his dramatic practice. Key to the application of these seven commonplaces is the "comic vision" Eliot arrived at through the lengthy composition

11 of the poetic work Four Quartets. The comic spirit of this poetic vision is seen to find its dramatic expression in the three post-war comedies. It is postulated that Eliot's personal experience of

witnessing his close friend Emily Hale in a production of

Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit during the summer of 1946 served as the catalyst which induced Eliot to "digest and

transmute" the disparate materials of drama and the comic vision over which he had been puzzling during the years of

World War II into the comic form he would present on the stage over the remainder of his career.

Reading each of the late plays through Eliot's comic vision— the form of which Eliot groped toward in the early criticism and the spirit of which he worked out in Four

Quartets— highlights the contribution Eliot ultimately makes to twentieth-century dramatic stage practice. In his last three plays, Eliot adapts devices, characters, and plot structures provided by the genre of stage comedy and weds them to the drama of layers indicated by his workshop criticism, embodying the comic vision of Four

Quartets on the stage.

iii For Allen Koppenhaver

Iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my adviser. Mac Davis, for his patience and support during the visions and revisions which led to the final form of this dissertation.

Special thanks also to Seb Knowles whose observations and insights about T. S. Eliot and about the process of scholarly writing enriched my experience with this project considerably.

I am grateful to Murray Beja for engaging with a substantial amount of new material in a short period of time. I am grateful also to Tom Cooley for his much appreciated help in the final stages of the project.

Tony Libby and Katherine Burkman read well and responded insightfully to several early drafts of this dissertation and to them I offer my sincere appreciation. Doug Downey and Marsha Dickson also have my thanks.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my children,

Joshua, Abigail, and Emma, the bright angels of my life, who frequently drew me from my writing and always returned me to it with fresh perspective and renewed commitment. Thanks, also, to my wife, Katie, for frequent

sacrifices and for the gifts of books and shared memories of September visits to T. S. Eliot's birthplace, St.

Louis. I am mindful, also, of the many insights, both

scholarly and personal, to which she brought me. My debt

is considerable.

Deepest thanks are due to my parents, William and

Lenore, for many years of support and encouragement, for

cards sent and conversations shared, for questions asked

and questions strategically withheld— I could not have

completed this work without them.

I am grateful to Katherine A. "Kitty" O'Brien,

Graduate Office Associate in the Department of English,

for her information, her expertise, and her kindness.

Thanks to Bobbi Davis-Jones and Tim Watson of the Graduate

School for the care and concern with which they treated my manuscript. I am grateful also to my colleagues at Bishop

Hartley High School for their friendship and support, especially Barb Recchie, Mike Winters, and Jim Silcott.

In addition, I offer a wink of the eye to my Brothers in

Arms: Scott, Tom, Bob, and Michael (aka "Steve").

Vi A word of thanks Is due to my teachers and students, past and present, for continually challenging and broadening my thinking and %*riting.

Finally, I wish to thank Allen Koppenhaver, my teacher, friend, and colleague at Wittenberg University and fellow member of the T. S. Eliot Society. Allen shared with me his love of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and prose and first turned my critical eye to the plays. It is to

Allen that this work is dedicated.

vii VITA

April 25, 1961..... Born - Springfield, Ohio

1979...... Diploma, Springfield North High School

198 3 ...... B.A. English, Wittenberg University

198 4 ...... M.A. English, University of Michigan

1983 - 1984...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of Michigan

1985 - 1969...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English The Ohio State University

1987 - 1988...... Adjunct Instructor, Department of English Wittenberg University

1989 -.. 1993...... Lecturer, Department of English The Ohio State University

1993 - 1996...... English Teacher, Catholic Central High School Springfield, Ohio

1996 -.. 1997...... Visiting Instructor, Department of English Ohio University

1997 - 1998...... Lecturer, Department of English The Ohio State University

viii 1997 - 1998...... Adjunct Instructor, Department of English Wittenberg University 1997 - present...... English Teacher, Bishop Hartley High School Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

Research Publication

1. William E. Kinnison, "'Why Damme, It's Too Bad!': The Structure of Comedy and the Strictures of the Doubting Game in T . S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk." Yeats-Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship. 10.5 (Winter-Spring 1989): 21-24.

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: English

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Abstract...... 11

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita...... Vi 11

Abbreviations...... xl

Chapters :

1. Variations on a Theme: Eliot's Workshop Criticism on the Drama...... 1

2. Eliot's Comic Vision and the Spirit of Comedy in FOUR QUARTETS...... 38

3. Between Two Lives: The Use of Memory and the Conditions of Comedy in THE COCKTAIL PARTY...... 85

4. Between Two Worlds : The Use of Imagination and the Search for Identity in THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK...... 146

5. T. S. Eliot's Divine Comedy of Situation: Dante's PURGATORIO, Sartre's Tragedy of Situation, and THE ELDER STATESMAN...... 178

Bibliography...... 227 ABBREVIATIONS

In the pages that follow, Eliot's major works will be referred to parenthetically by abbreviations. The abbreviations and the editions to which they correspond are as follows:

APD The Aims of Poetic Drama: The Presidential Address to the Poet's Theatre Guild. 1949. London: Norwood Editions, 1978.

CP The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot. 1st American Ed. New York: Harcourt, 1967.

CPP The Complete Poems and Plavs, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, 1971.

FLA For Lancelot Andrewes: Bssavs on Style and Order. 1928. London: Faber, 1970.

GPP On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, 1957.

SE Selected Essays. New Edition. New York: Harcourt, 1950.

SP Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975.

SW The Sacred Wood : Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920. 7th Ed. London: Methuen, 1950. University Paperback Reprint, 1986.

TCC To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber, 1965.

UPUC The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. 1933. London : Faber, 1968.

xi CHAPTER 1

VARIATIONS ON A THEME;

ELIOT'S WORKSHOP CRITICISM ON THE DRAMA

Reviewing my critical output for the last

thirty-odd years, I am surprised to find how

constantly I have returned to the drama, whether

by examining the work of the contemporaries of

Shakespeare, or by reflecting on the

possibilities of the future. It may even be

that people are weary of hearing me on this

subject. But, while I find that I have been

composing variations on this theme all my life,

my views have been continually modified and

renewed by increasing experience; so that I am

impelled to take stock of the situation afresh

at every stage of my own experimentation. (OPP

75) Here, in the opening paragraph to his retrospective essay,

"Poetry and Drama" (1951), T. S. Eliot draws our attention rather deliberately to the nature of his early dramatic criticism as a kind of "experimentation", a kind of thinking on paper in which ideas are "continually modified and renewed". Here, as elsewhere, Eliot takes a keen interest in characterizing what he will later (1956) call his "workshop criticism" (OPP 118) as exercises in

"reflecting on the possibilities" or "composing variations on a theme."

This characterization, despite Eliot's insistence on it, is often overshadowed by what Eliot himself calls "a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world" (OPP 117). Indeed, throughout the early essays on the drama run a number of memorable, forcefully-phrased, quotable statements about plays and playwrights, audiences and actors, which tend to cast

Eliot in the role of a pontificator rather than that of an explorer. It was Delmore Schwartz who first spoke of the

"literary dictatorship of T. S. Eliot" and argued that

Eliot had occupied such a position "since 1922, at least" largely because of the effect of his criticism in tandem with the poetry (119). Austin Warren reiterates this phrase (and the connection between Eliot's criticism and his poetry) some sixteen years later when he cites Eliot's

"place in the roll of English literary dicators which begins with Ben Jonson", also a poet who wrote a great deal of influential criticism (279).

Given this widespread perception of T. S. Eliot as a dictator rather than a postulator, numerous critics of

Eliot's drama and dramatic criticism have latched onto the aforementioned "notorious phrases" and seen fit to use them, like Ronald Peacock, as "a set of chapter headings for a poetics of the form" (100). Rene Wellek, for another, begins his essay by listing an impressive batch of critical concepts derived from Eliot's criticism and, after examining each, concludes that Eliot's ultimate achievement as a critic is that he "found memorable formulas" for these "important critical matters" (262).

Thus, concepts such as the "Objective correlative", the

"dissociation of sensibility", and "impersonality" have taken their place in Eliot's dictatorial criticism as the supposed blue-prints for the dramas Eliot would not begin to bring to the stage until some ten to fifteen years after the essays were first published.

Despite this large gap of time between the writing of the early essays and the staging of the plays, influential reviewers of Eliot's workshop criticism on the drama tend to characterize the young Eliot as establishing precepts and principles which he would later attempt to force onto an intractable stage. Peacock, for instance, describes an

Eliot engaged in "formulating ... a series of judgements" and states that in Eliot's early writings on the drama

"[elvery valuation is a future precept" (89). Peacock sets out to read Eliot's "essays on drama in sequence, watching the pattern of criteria developing" (109) and speaks, as he goes, of Eliot establishing "principles"

(94) and "passing judgement" (96). Though Peacock allows that "(ilt would be too simple to regard Eliot's essays on drama as cumulative fragments of a blue-print for his own drama writing" he nevertheless insists that "in one sense they are so" (97). And his final judgement of Eliot's workshop criticism is a critical view held by many: "Eliot worked out in his drama criticism some valuable central principles of the poetic form he most admired" (110).

But while Eliot's "workshop criticism" is frequently remembered for its series of forcefully formulated pronouncements, it is the perception of its exploratory quality which leads to the more fruitful appreciation of the plays. The body of early critical work reveals a young man with intense interest in, but apparently very little familiarity with, the theatre. Eliot had read many plays^ read them well and thought about them deeply. But he had yet to work in the theatre with actors, directors, musicians, and set designers in this collaborative art. "The earlier essays," cautions Austin Warren, "are those of a young man reading the Elizabethans to learn from them" (291). Eliot in these early essays is educating himself as he goes, thinking aloud. Concepts like

"objective correlative" and "dissociation of sensibility" and his observations about the relationship of the theatre to the Anglican Mass and the Russian Ballet are explorations, starting points, not finished theories.

If Eliot's early critical writings about the drama were indeed blue prints for the actual plays he later wrote for the theatre, we should expect to see plays written for the page rather than the stage, plays that owed much more to the Mass and the Ballet than to Noel

Coward, Euripides, and Shakespeare. If they are to be of any value to readers and viewers of Eliot's plays, these early essays must be seen in the light of an author establishing benchmarks, laying down areas of inquiry, putting out feelers for later development.

It is no mere coincidence that critics who tend to view Eliot's workshop criticism in this way also tend to devalue the plays themselves; "the plays are a weaker branch of the Eliot tree," says Ronald Peacock (97) discerning a flawed theoretical blueprint imperfectly and inconsistently applied in practice. This "Theory and

Practice" approach tends to reinforce all the preconceptions and assumptions that work against Eliot's reputation as a dramatist. Eliot is seen, not as a modern dramatist experimenting with new forms, but as a Christian poet with an agenda who wants to use the stage as a platform for poetry and Christianity. As Michael Goldman has observed ;

Eliot's own practice as a critic and reputation as a

poet have tended to concentrate discussion on either

the versification and language of his plays or their

Christian implications, and this, while leading to

much excellent and valuable criticism, has helped

promote a serious misunderstanding of his achievement

as a dramatist— as a writer, that is, whose texts are

designed to allow a group of actors to shape an

audience's experience in the theatre over a finite

interval of time. (43)

In short, Eliot has come to be seen (in Arnold

Hinchliffe's phrase) as "merely a poet Jjn the theatre," not a poet "of the theatre" (8). A more useful approach to students of Eliot's plays

is taken by critics who, like Eliot himself, foreground the exploratory nature of the workshop criticism. Brian Lee, for instance, characterizes the interpretation of

Eliot's critical utterances as "a study of words in use"

(his emphasis, 1). Eric Thompson, moving away from the

metaphor of Eliot as a literary dictator, characterizes

him as "a somewhat indifferent parent" to his critical

ideas, "leaving them like infants on various doorsteps,

allowing other people to raise them, and acknowledging

only those whose faces make up well" (52). Mario Praz

suggests that Eliot's "real guide is not logic, but

intuition" (263) and describes Eliot as "an empirical

critic ... liable to waverings and recantations" (272)

and insists that, far from being precepts and blueprints,

"the laws [Eliot] tries to discover and apply have no absolute validity in his eyes" (276).

Warren, like Peacock, reread Eliot's prose works chronologically before embarking on his analysis, but was

not looking for chapter headings;

The total effect of consecutively rereading Eliot's

remarkable criticism, written over a considerable time and chiefly 'occasional', is to be surprised far

less by disjunction than by continuity and

development. (288)

Warren, too, notices the quotable "remarks and insights"

but cautions that "the effect [of these] is to advance

critical discrimination and critical sensibility ... not to offer . . . principles which can be taken down in

notebooks and applied without sensibility or

discrimination" (289).

"Eliot," concludes Warren, "is not an easy critic to

summarize" (279). But he is easy to "misuse" as Harold F.

Brooks specifies. First, critics misuse Eliot's prose

essays because, according to Brooks, they fail to realize

that Eliot is not working out a theory of drama so much as

articulating his own preoccupation with a practical problem: "How should the new poet or poetic dramatist be

trying to write now?" (29). Further, Brooks suggests, many readers of Eliot's workshop criticism do not seem to

register the fact that, at times, "Eliot was deliberately provocative" (29); or, to use Eliot's 1961

expression from "To Criticise the Critic," he was often

"not altogether guiltless of trailing my coat" (TCC 19).

One might add to Brooks' list a third way to misuse

Eliot's criticism: that is, to fail to distinguish between the group of essays written before Eliot's actual work as a playwright (that which Eliot calls "the workshop criticism") and the group of essays written during and after Eliot's twenty-five year career in the theatre.

Brooks calls the essays in this latter group "retrospects" and characterizes them as "varying from brief comments to extended surveys, in which he looks back over ... some of his own poetry and drama and the critical thinking that went with it" (21). Warren, too, pinpoints this crucial difference. Eliot in the earlier essays is to be seen as

"a critic preparing himself to write" (296) whereas "the later essays ... are the accounts of a twentieth-century poet writing, at long last, his own verse dramas" (291).

Leaving the retrospects for later consideration, I would identify seven central concepts in Eliot's workshop criticism which ultimately bear fruit for a study of

Eliot's later plays :

1. "search for form"

2. "the mythical method"

3. "Objective correlative"

4. "nature of the audience"

5. "levels of sensibility"

6. "nature of the actor"

7. "escape from personality" In listing these general areas of Inquiry, one must keep

in mind that each is to a significant degree bound up with

one or more category. Eliot’s "search for form", for

example, is the most important thing going in his workshop

criticism and in many ways it subsumes all the others. It

is the theme upon which all of the other items are

variations. The mythical method and the Objective

correlative as well as Eliot’s inquiries into the nature

of the audience, their levels of sensibility, and the

nature of the actor, along with the need to extinguish

personality (the author’s, yes, but the actor's

especially) all have to do with this search for form.

Audience responses and habits of mind are, for Eliot,

components of any dramatic form. He does not discuss

dramatic form without taking into account audience receptiveness to that form.

As Eliot explores twentieth century audiences and

their receptiveness to certain forms of entertainment

(music-hall comedy, the ballet, even the Anglican Mass), he becomes more and more fascinated by the differing

capacities members of audiences exhibit for involvment in the drama. What do their various "levels of sensibility"

imply for the development of a dramatic form? Actors are regarded in the workshop criticism chiefly as a threat to

10 this as yet undiscovered £orm in that their chief purpose,

it seems to Eliot, is to express their own personalities on stage. The word "form" might tend to peg Eliot as a

formalist, merely concerned with describing appropriate

poetic structures to force onto his unsuspecting

audiences. But to serve him justly as a critic of the drama (and, it is clear, an aspiring dramatist), we need

to emphasize that for Eliot, form had largely to do with appropriating and structuring recognizeable devices,

treatments, actions, characters, etc. which twentieth- century audiences would be more or less prepared to

accept. Indeed, "form" for Eliot is the same as

"convention"— and he uses the two terms interchangeably.

It is important again to reiterate the distinction of characterizing Eliot in his workshop criticism as the seeker of a form as opposed to viewing him as already confidently in possession of such a form. All told, Eliot

is seeking the component parts for a form of drama which would serve what he sees as the dramatic needs of twentieth-century audiences.

In terms of looking to put together a dramatic form of which modern audiences could fully partake, Eliot seems most excited by the possibilities raised by Joyce's work

11 in Ulysses. Joyce's approach, which Eliot calls "the mythical method" (SP_178), held for Eliot "the importance of a scientific discovery" (SP_177) and, he said, made

"the modern world possible for art" CSP 178). When Eliot speaks of Joyce's Ulysses and the method of juxtaposing

The Odyssey of Homer with the contemporary actions of

Leopold Bloom, he is speaking largely of a method of bringing form to the formless: "It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (SP_177). We cannot underestimate the value this new method held— and continued to hold— for Eliot. Indeed, each of his last three plays has a Greek myth or a Greek drama functioning underneath it: The Alcestis of Euripides for The Cocktail

Party; Euripides' Ion for The Confidential Clerk; and

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus for The Elder Statesman.

It is important to note that Eliot does not do with the Greek plays precisely what Joyce does with The

Odyssey. Eliot refined and developed the approach as he had stated others must do: "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him" (SP 177). Joyce's "mythical

12 method", like other areas of Inquiry in Eliot's workshop

criticism, is not a finished formula. A writer hoping to exploit the new discovery would have to be like "the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in

pursuing his own, independent, further investigations" (SP

177). Significantly, Eliot foresees hard work ahead in

developing this technique: "And only those who have won

their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world

which offers vey little assistance to that end, can be of

any use in furthering this advance" 178).

As Eliot seeks in his own way to further this advance

and to make the modern world possible for drama again, he

spends a great deal of time in consideration of

Elizabethan playwrights, analysing the successes and

failures of what he saw as the last great period of drama

in English. He feels strongly that his considerations of

Elizabethan drama are not just "an exercise in mental

ingenuity" but "should have a revolutionary influence on

the future of drama" (^E 91).

"Objective correlative" is the famous discovery that

came out of Eliot's investigations into the Elizabethan dramatists. But the articulation of this particular

discovery amounts to one of the most persistently troublesome of Eliot's pronouncements about the drama. It

13 is often misinterpreted and misapplied to Eliot's plays— even those plays composed 30 years (and more) later. It is another of those memorable and controversial concepts which Eliot put across so eloquently when his reputation as a critic was being formed. Appearing in the essay

"Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), the phrase has come to symbolize the ineptness of Eliot as a dramatic critic and is the hallmark of his outlandish dismissal of Hamlet as

"an artistic failure" 47). It is taken as evidence that Eliot's move into the theatre some thirteen years later was a move made as a poet and critic with an agenda to impose on the theatre, rather than as a writer with a genuine interest in writing for the stage.

We should not take "Objective correlative" as a solid and complete precept ready for application to Eliot's later plays. Like Joyce's mythical method, the hypothesis of the Objective correlative would require more refinement and development. Instead, we should focus our attention on Eliot's discussion of this concept as an important example of his growing concern for finding a viable form for modern drama.

Essentially, Eliot sees the "Objective correlative" as the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art.

In other words, emotion is not a free-floating commodity

14 that can simply be blown out over an audience from a wind

machine (or by an actor with personality or a poet with word skills). Emotion must emerge from a shape of some duration on the stage. In short, it must have a form.

That shape or form will embody the emotion for the

audience, build them up to it. This form can be a "set of

objects" or "a situation" or "a chain of events". Emotion

coming out of this form has artistic inevitability (SP

48) .

Indeed, part of Eliot's explanation for Shakespeare's

alleged artistic failure in Hamlet is attributed to

Shakespeare's not having complete control of the shape and

form of his play. The "whole action of the play", Eliot

believes, was not exclusively "due to Shakespeare's design" which had to be "superposed upon much cruder

material" ( ^ 46). Eliot believed, as many scholars of

Shakespeare's plays believe, that Shakespeare was

reworking a complete play by Thomas Kyd which had already

been reworked at least once, probably by Chapman.

Eliot's examples of "Objective correlative" from

Shakespeare's "successful" tragedies (SP_ 48) are both from

Macbeth where, presumably, Shakespeare had complete control of his material (as in Coriolanus and Anthony and

Cleopatra. "Shakespeare's most assured artistic successes"

15 SP 47) and could create situations, chains of events, and sets of objects as needed to express the emotions called for. In Hamlet, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was wrestling with "intractable material" (SP_47). Shakespeare had an emotion in mind, probably deeply rooted in his personal life, "a period of crisis", an emotion which he was trying to express through Hamlet and his situation (SP_47). But the business of revenge and the guilt of the mother simply could not be wrestled into appropriate shape. Eliot asks us to look instead at Shakespeare's successful creation of emotion in Macbeth : Lady Macbeth's state of mind during the walk in her sleep and Macbeth's speech upon hearing the news of his wife's death.

Eliot may indeed be dead wrong in asserting that there is no Objective correlative for Hamlet's emotion in the play Hamlet. I would propose, for example, that the ghost's appearances and the oppressive threat of reappearances implicit in the ghost folklore familiar to

Shakespeare's audience could function as Eliot's Objective correlative for the emotion in the play. Even the play within the play and all the theatrical allusions and metaphors could function as the necessary "Objective correlative".

16 But too many of us are distracted by Eliot's dismissal of Hamlet as an artistic failure. The salient point is that Eliot, as early as 1919, links "artistic success" in playwrighting to finding the proper form with

which and within which to express emotion on stage. The key question for Eliot— and for us— is what form or forms

can be utilized on the contemporary stage to embody and

express the kinds of emotions called for in the twentieth century. The mythical method and Objective correlative are two early possibilities for further inquiry established in Eliot's 1919 workshop criticism.

Four years before his death, in "To Criticise the

Critic" (1961), Eliot looks back on the Hamlet essay and suggests that his definition of the phrase "Objective correlative" may have come from his "bias" towards the

later plays of Shakespeare, plays writtenwhen he was moving through the form of tragedy to the new form of what might be called tragicomedy— from Timon of Athens through

Anthony and Cleopatra toward The Tempest. Eliot makes a similar move in his own plays and the Greek sources he based them on: from the tragedy of The Family Reunion and the Orestes through his mature "comedies" and the tragicomedies of Euripides and Sophocles.

17 Eliot expands on his "search for form" in "The

Possibility of a Poetic Drama" (1920). There, he looks

greedily to the Elizabethans and the great advantages they

had over our age of drama:

The Elizabethan Age in England was able to absorb a

great quantity of new thoughts and new images ...

because it had a great form of its own which imposed

itself on everything that came to it. (SW 62)

Because the Elizabethan playwrights had a great form of

their own to work with, they were able to achieve "a

subtlety and consciousness, even an intellectual power"

that has not been achieved on the stage since.

"Everywhere else this age is crude, pedantic, or loutish";

but because they already had a viable dramatic form

familiar to their audiences, they were able to achieve

great things in the drama (SW 62).

By way of example, Eliot directs our attention to the

nineteenth century which "had a good many fresh

impressions" but "no form in which to confine them" (SW

62). He gave Wordsworth and Browning great credit for

"hammering out forms for themselves" (SW_62). But the

drawback Eliot observes is one he could apply to his own time and career: "These poets were certainly obliged to

consume vast energy in this pursuit of form" (^W 63).

18 Eliot points to Dante as a contrast. Here he sees a poet

who "had the benefit of years of practice in forms employed and altered by numbers of contemporaries and predecessors; he did not waste the years of his youth in metric invention" (SW 63).

In terms of the stage and Eliot's own developing

thirst for a form of drama that could fill the needs of

his generation, Eliot glances jealously at Shakespeare:

To have, given into one's hands, a crude form,

capable of indefinite refinement, and to be the one

to see the possibilities— Shakespeare was very

fortunate. (SW_ 63)

Eliot is careful to specifiy that he is not simply talking

about blank verse. The form of which he is speaking consists also of the five-act play and the Elizabethan

playhouse. It consists also of the plot, "incorporated, remodelled, adapted or invented, as occasion demanded".

And, significantly, this form consisted, in large part, of

"a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public to

respond to particular stimuli" 64).

This is most significant. It indicates that, as early as 1920, Eliot was searching for a form familiar

enough to its audience to provide what Eliot calls

"commonplaces". These commonplaces would involve all the

19 elements o£ the dramatic experience: the page, the stage,

and the audience. Here arises also Eliot's fascination with people of various levels of sensibility when it comes

to their awareness of the significance and intensity of

life. It is significant to me that the very problem which

Shakespeare tackled in Hamlet and which Eliot in 1919 says

he failed to surmount (and went so far as to question the efficacy of attempting at all) is the very problem Eliot

tackles in all three of his last plays: how to give form and expression to emotions which are in excess of the

facts as they appear. Eliot expresses it this way:

The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an

object or exceeding its object, is something which

every person of sensibility has known; it is

doubtless a subject of study for pathologists. It

often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts

these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feelings

to fit the business world; the artist keeps them

alive by his ability to intensify the world to his

emotions. (SP 49)

Eliot, here, is essentially describing the various emotional states of his various characters in the later plays. There are those who have put their feelings to sleep (Edward Chamberlayne in The Cocktail Party; B.

20 Kaghan and Lucasta Angel In The Confidential Clerk;

Charles Hemlngton and Mrs. Carghlll in The Elder Statesman). There are those who have trimmed their feelings dovm to fit the business world (Peter and Lavinia

in The Cocktail Party; Mulhammer in The Confidential

Clerk; Claverton and Gomez in The Elder Statesman). And there are those who are seeking, through artistic and/or religious questioning, to "intensify the world to their emotions" (Celia in The Cocktail Party; Colby in The

Confidential Clerk) and one who is waking up after a life of trimming his emotions down to fit the business world and wondering whether or not it is too late to intensify his emotional life (Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman).

And these are more than mere stratifications of characters in Eliot's plays. The later plays are about these various levels and the characters who are going about the business of understanding one another's various needs and helping one another rise to the level appropriate to his or her sensibility. The comic structure of each of the last plays has to do with characters finding themselves and accepting the consequences.

21 In 1919 Eliot questioned Shakespeare's attempt to

explore "intense feelings, ecstatic or terrible, without

an object or exceeding its object". In 1949, Eliot began

presenting a series of plays featuring lead characters

struggling with the same intense feelings. "We must

simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem that

was too much for him," Eliot said in 1919. "Why he

attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle ..." This begs

the question, what did Eliot learn between 1919 and 1949

that lead him to believe he could successfully tackle a

very similar problem in each of his last three plays?

Part of the answer is to be found in questions Eliot

continued to ask and the answers he began to posit in the

workshop criticism.

In 1919, Eliot clearly favored Macbeth, Coriolanus,

and Anthony and Cleopatra over Hamlet. But Hamlet is the play that continued to fascinate Eliot throughout his career, as evidenced by Eliot's choice to devote much

space to an analysis of Hamlet's dramatic and poetic

success in the retrospect "Poetry and Drama" (1951).

Eliot, after years of actually working in the theatre,

writing actual plays for the actual stage, seemed to develop much more empathy for the creator of this play,

Hamlet, which "is possibly the one on which Shakespeare

22 spent the most pains’* (OPP 47), Eliot certainly found the play "puzzling and disquieting as is none of the others" (OPP 47).

As we have seen, much of Eliot's early criticism focuses on the nature of the audience for modern drama in general and for poetic drama in particular. In "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama" (1920) Eliot asserts that

"Es]urely there is some legitimate craving, not restricted to a few persons, which only the verse play can satisfy"

(S}/ 60). This "legitimate craving" seems to be associated in Eliot’s mind and criticism with that "intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible" discussed in the Hamlet essay.

Notable is Eliot’s insistence, in "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama" (1920), that a vital part of the form for which he is seeking is "a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public to respond to particular stimuli" (SW

63). Eliot takes pains to equate past attempts to restore poetry to the stage in the 20th century with the type of audience written for which they had been written:

The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which

wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand

a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take

a form of entertainment, and subject it to the

process which would leave it a form of art. (SW 70)

23 So, for Eliot, form is tied to audience receptiveness again. The questions which remained for Eliot up into the war years were simple: Which form of entertainment could best be utilized and by what processes may one turn a type of entertainment into a type of art? In this essay, Eliot posits that "Perhaps the music hall comedian is the best material" (Sjf 70).

Strikingly, Eliot published an essay a little over two years later praising the artistry of Marie Lloyd, a music hall comedienne whose death struck Eliot as an

"important event" 172). Eliot confesses to having long admired the genius of Marie Lloyd and finds himself pondering her importance as an artist.

The center of Eliot’s "appreciation" of Marie Lloyd is bound up with the "attitude of audiences" toward her.

Eliot identifies their attitude toward her as "different" from that exhibited toward any other of the day's favorites (he names Little Tich and Nellie Wallace) and specifies that "this difference represents the difference in her art" (SP_172). For Eliot it was an issue of controlling the audience. Others controlled their audiences by strong arming them, responding to hostility with hostility. Marie Lloyd somehow won the sympathy of

24 her audiences "and it was through this sympathy that she controlled them" (^P 172). Her method of winning sympathy? Bringing form to the expression of their o%m lives on stage: "whereas other comedians amuse their audiences as much and sometimes more than Marie Lloydno other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of that audience, in raising it to a kind of art" 172). This is crucial to our undertanding of the method by which Eliot considered raising a form of entertainment to the level of art.

Marie Lloyd, in effect, became an "Objective correlative" for the life of her audiences. The famous phrase from

Eliot's definition of "Objective correlative" ("set of objects") pops up in Eliot's discussion of the "set of objects" one of Miss Lloyd's character's carries in her bag. Eliot praises her for getting that "precise statement of life on stage" and notes that she has the

"capacity for expressing the soul of the people" (SP 172).

He raves about "the perfect expressiveness of her smallest gesture" (SP_ 173) and notes that it is "all a matter of selection and concentration" (SP_173) as opposed to exaggeration.

That which is "comic" for Eliot here is something subtle, a matter of art, not of buffoonery. Of Marie

25 Lloyd's rival comedians. Little Tich, Nellie Wallace,

Eliot complains that "each ... [isI a kind of grotesque

... an orgy of parody of the human race". Eliot continues

in some detail:

To appreciate, for instance, the last turn in which

Marie Lloyd appeared, one ought to know objects a

middle-aged woman of the char-woman class would carry

in her bag; exactly how she would go through her bag

in search of something; and exactly the tone of voice

in which she would enumerate the objects she found in

it (SP, 172) .

The connection to Beckett's Happy Days strikes one

with considerable force here. Also, note Eliot's appreciation for surface realism and the deeper, more

moral, level it indicates:

My own chief point is that I consider her superiority

over other performers to be in a way a moral

superiority: it was her understanding of the people

and sympathy with them, and the people's recognition

of the fact that she embodied the virtues which they

most genuinely respected in private life, that raised

her to the position she occupied at her death (SP

173).

26 This reiterates also a key to which Eliot returns again and again in his workshop criticism on the drama— the degree to which the audience is drawn into and involved with in the theatrical experience:

The working man who went to the music-hall and saw

Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself

performing part of the act; he was engaged in that

collaboration of the audience with the artist which

is necessary in all art and most obviously in

dramatic art (SP 174).

We also get another good look at the difference developing in Eliot's mind between "art" and

"entertainment", tying what is being carefully represented on stage to the needs of the audience. Art is somehow expressing the life, the soul of its audience, satisfying some legitimate craving and involving the participation of that audience— an audience which exhibits a certain

"preparedness" or "habit of mind" to respond to certain stimuli. The set of objects, the structure of actions on stage will be this expression, this statement, this form to which the audience responds.

Entertainment, on the other hand, lulls the mind rather than engaging it. Eliot complains particularly of the cinema and its "continuous senseless music" and the

27 action which is "too rapid for the brain to act upon". He speaks of an audience receiving without giving in a state of "listless apathy" 174). For Eliot, the superiority of art to entertainment is a moral superiority.

In 1924, Eliot’s search for form takes an intriguing turn during a contentious discussion in his essay, "Four Elizabethan Dramatists: A Preface to an Unwritten Book".

Eliot makes another of his memorable pronouncements: "The great vice of English drama ... has been that its aim of realism was unlimited" 93). Eliot complains that since Thomas Kyd, "there has been no form to arrest, so to speak, the flow of spirit at any particular point before

it expands and ends its course in the desert of exact likeness to reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind" 93).

This quotation and this essay has always been taken as a signal that Eliot detests realism on the stage. Not so. Eliot, in his drama and in his workshop criticism, respected the audience’s expectation of and preparedness for a surface realism on the stage. Eliot is not calling for a retreat from realism for the twentieth century drama. Eliot’s call is for a form, a form to arrest the verisimilitudes put on stage before they become mere likenesses.

28 Perhaps Eliot was beginning to make the connection with Joyce's mythical method here. Eliot's intention in the later plays, at any rate, seems to be to allow the aim toward greater and greater surface realism, appealing to

the most commonplace minds in the audience, but

undergirding it, arresting that realism with a new form based on the concept of a mythical plot operating

underneath the realistic one. Eliot points to "lack of convention" (read "lack of form") as the state of affairs

which has allowed realism to run wild. Eliot's response, ultimately, would be to provide a mythical form under a

realistic surface in his plays, just as his dramatic language, on the surface, sounds like the everyday

language really spoken by men, while undulating with powerful poetic rhythms beneath.

Along with what is perceived as his attack on stage realism, another major blow to Eliot's reputation as an aspiring dramatist— and even to his credibility as a critic of the drama— is the lingering effect of his repeated attacks on and dismissal of the role actors play in the collaborative art of the drama. In "The

Possibility of a Poetic Drama" (1920), Eliot first addresses his concerns about "the instability of any art— the drama, music, dancing— which depends upon

29 representation by performers'* (SW 69). It is clear in the early essays that Eliot would like to be rid of actors altogether.

Eliot's discussion in the 1920 essay is the first of many in which he reveals his naivete about the importance of actors. His reputation as a dramatic outsider hoping to impose something foreign upon the theatre has as its root this kind of pronouncement: "The intervention of performers introduces a complication ... which is itself likely to be injurious" 69). Eliot further complains that "a struggle, more or less unconscious, between the creator and the interpreter is almost inevitable" (SW 69).

Indeed, Eliot many times in his discussions of actors, yields to the temptation to fire off a few good one-liners and quotable-quotes— the "notorious phrases" that followed him throughout his career. Here is one such passage :

The conflict [between playwright and actor) is one

which certainly cannot be terminated by the utter

rout of the actor profession. For one thing, the

stage appeals to too many demands besides the demand

for art for that to be possible; and also we need,

unfortunately, something more than refined automatons (SW 69).

30 And another:

Ocassionally attempts have been made to 'get around* the actor, to envelop him in masks, to set up a few 'conventions' for him to stumble over, or even to

develop little breeds of actors for some special Art

drama. This meddling with nature seldom succeeds;

nature usually overcomes these obstacles ISV 69).

The words Eliot uses in 1961 ("To Criticise the Critic")

to lament his famous 1928 statement that he was now

"classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and

anglo-catholic in religion" (FLA ix) could well be applied

to.any of his forcefully phrased early remarks about

actors: "I ought to have foreseen that so quotable a

sentence would follow me through life" (CC 15).

In terms of Eliot's development as a playwright, it

is important to view Eliot's early suspicion of actors in

connection with his deep desire to create a suitable dramatic form. Eliot's fear is that the nature of the

actor is such that he or she cares nothing about the form

of a play. Actors, rather, are interested soley (Eliot

believes) in opportunities for virtuosity. They wish to put across their personalities. Eliot saw this as a

threat to what would be a hard-won dramatic form.

31 Much light can be shed on this position by a perusal of Eliot’s essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

(1919). There Eliot defines the struggle of the poet as

"a continual extinction of the personality" (SW^ 53) in search of form and in commitment to the work. This struggle is painful and all consuming. A person completing such a struggle at such a cost would be most unwilling to hand his work over to an actor who is merely looking for a vehicle through which to express his or her personality. "The interest of the performer is almost certain to be centered in himself: a very slight acquaintance with actors and musicians will testify" (SW

69).

And "a very slight acquaintance" is exactly the kind of relationship Eliot had with actors and musicians as of

November 1920. Eliot has much favorable to say about his actual collaborations with flesh and blood actors and directors and musicians in later years. Rather than letting his comments about performers brand him as a man guilty of failing to comprehend the nature of drama throughout his career, let us take them as a snapshot of the great importance he placed on the form of the play and the desired effect upon the audience. At this point in his career, actors were an unknown commodity, variables

32 that could prove dangerous: "The performer Is Interested not in form but in opportunities for virtuosity or in the communication of his 'personality'" (SW 69). Rehearsing the litany of Eliot's "notorious phrases" brings to mind Eliot's observation about both Goethe and

Coleridge as critics, which might apply equally well to

Eliot's own early utterances. Eliot says that each possesses "unquestionable critical insight" and that each has one of those "minds naturally of creative order" which puts ideas across so authoritatively and memorably so as to "make critical aberrations plausible" (SW 95).

Unquestionably Eliot, long before he ever attempted to write for the stage, said a number of foolish things about the theatre. But he formulated them so forcefully and memorably that his dramatic reputation was unable to ecape them even after he, as a playwright, had moved beyond them. Later in life (after actually writing a number of plays for the stage and seeing them through production), Eliot clearly distanced himself from many of his most memorable early utterances, such as "objective correlative" and "dissociation of sensibility" and

"impersonal theory of poetry", revising them or rejecting them outright. As Eliot stated in the 1958 Paris Review interview with Donald Hall,

33 I am no longer very much Interested in my own

theories about poetic drama, especially those put

forward before 19 34. I have thought less about

theories since I have given more time to writing for

the theatre. (103)

Eliot once dismissed Wordsworth's definition of poetry ("intense feelings recalled in tranquility") as an

"inexact formula" (SP^ 43). And it is in this spirit of inexactness, of groping toward meaning that we must approach Eliot's early critical utterances as well. They indicate directions, rather than provide directives, for the study of Eliot's later plays. When Eliot's early critical observations are applied as precepts to his plays, the critical utterances become finished theories and the plays become failed attempts to push a poetic/philosophical agenda onto the stage. When the early critical utterances are taken as indicators, starting places for Eliot's growth and development as a dramatist, they become more helpful. Eliot's workshop criticism on the drama is of much better use to us in suggesting the areas of inquiry which Eliot the dramatist would continue to pursue over a quarter century's work on the stage.

34 After the last of Eliot’s workshop criticism on the

drama (”A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry") was published in 1928, Eliot engaged in a period of experimentation and brought to the stage four dramatic works (Sweeney

Agonistes, The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral, and The

Famlly Reunion) during the 1930s. Each of these Eliot considered "very experimental" (APD 1) or "a dead end"

(OPP 84) or "defective" (OPP 89) largely because he had

not yet finalized in his own mind the nature of the

dramatic form for which he had been seeking: "I do not

believe," he said in 1949 before the debut of The Cocktail

Party, "that there is one poet in the theatre today, who

can feel assured that he has found the right form" (APD

1 ) . During the war years, when plays could not be staged

in London, Eliot would turn his spiritual and professional energies to working out much of his personal philosophy of life and history in Four Quartets, crafting what could be

called his "comic vision". As the war drew to a close and

Eliot began to turn his thoughts and energies again toward

a return to the stage, he was still in search of a form— this time a form, an "objective correlative", which could

adequately embody his new comic vision on the stage.

Committed to finding a form, a "convention" familiar to a

35 large audience, Eliot turned his interest to the commercial theatre and the conventions of comedy as the long sought for "form of entertainment" which could be rendered into a "form of art".

As Eliot turned to comedy, each of the seven areas of inquiry from the workshop criticism remained central to his efforts. In terms of the mythical method, Eliot would base each of his last plays on, not so much a Greek myth, but a Greek play. The great "Objective correlative" on stage for the comic vision of Eliot's Four Quartets would ultimately be made up of the devices, characters, and turns of plot familiar from the long history of stage comedy. In the rich traditions of stage comedy going all the way back to the Greeks, Eliot was able to draw on the devices and characters and conventions with which actors and audiences would be familiar and responsive. Moving into the genre of comedy as practiced by the likes of

Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward gave Eliot the form of entertainment with built-in audience responses and expectations for which he had been searching and allowed him to explore the various levels of sensibility for his characters and his audience in a form with which the latter were familiar.

36 BIBLIOGRAPHY: CHAPTER 1

Brooks, Harold F. T_^ S_^ Eliot as Literary Critic. London: Woolf, 1987. Eliot, T. S. Interview. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series. With Donald Hall. London: Routledge, 1963. 91-109.

Goldman, Michael. "Fear in the Way: The Design of Eliot's Drama." Modern Critical Views : T. S . Eliot. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1985. 43-57.

Hinchllffe, Arnold, ed. S_z_ Eliot : Plays. A Casebook. London MacMillan, 1985.

Lee, Brian. Theory and Personality: The Significance of T. S . Eliot's Criticism. London: Athlone, 1979.

Peacock, Ronald. "Eliot's Contribution to the Criticism of Drama." The Literary Criticism of T. S . Eliot. Comp, and ed. David Newton-De Molina. London: Athlone, 1977. 89-110. Praz, Mario. "T. S. Eliot as a Critic." T^ S_j, Eliot : The Man and His Work. Ed. Allen Tate. New York: Dell, 1966. 262-277.

Schwartz, Delmore. "The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot." The Partisan Review (Feb 1949): 119-42. Cited in Praz 262.

Thompson, Eric. T_^ Sj_ Eliot: The Metaphysical Perspective. Carbondale, Southern Illinois UP, 1963.

Warren, Austin. "Continuity in T. S. Eliot's Literary Criticism." T_^ S_^ Eliot : The Man and His Work. Ed. Allen Tate. New York: Dell, 1966. 278-298.

37 CHAPTER 2

ELIOT’S COMIC VISION

AND THE SPIRIT OF COMEDY IN FOUR QUARTETS

Two distinct periods of Eliot’s work as a dramatist separate the workshop criticism and the retrospects. The first, a period of experimentation in the 1930s, saw Eliot bring to the stage four dramatic works: Sweeney Aaonistes

(published 1926-27; produced 1933); The Rock (1934);

Murder in the Cathedral (1935); and The Family Reunion

(1939). The second was a period of enforced absence from the stage during the 1940s and World War II. When Eliot returned to playwrighting and play production in 1949, he was at work, in the words of his long-time director, E. Martin Browne, on ’’something very different from what had gone before” (172). Indeed, all three of the post-war plays are comedies, drawing-room comedies of the Noel Coward type, as opposed to the obviously religious and/or mythical tragedies of the

38 experimental thirties. In the mature comedies, the

rhythms and figurative flourishes of the verse are much

closer to natural speech than to poetry. The characters are as carefully and realistically crafted as before, but they are drawn and developed as much from comic stage types and stock characters as from the observable characteristics of real human beings. Anything that would detract from the illusion of verisimilitude being presented on the stage, such as choruses or mythological figures or overtly poetic passages (each a hallmark of one or more of the experimental works), has been eliminated.

Two things would seem to account for this difference

in the kind of dramatic fare Eliot would produce over the last decade of his career. First, an acute awareness of the defects of his previous dramatic experiments coupled with the war hiatus which allowed him to ponder those weaknesses for an extended period of time. Second, the composition of Four Quartets, which occupied almost exclusively Eliot's creative energies during the war and embodied for him a new view of life, a new philosophy which had emerged largely as his response to the war experience. Any plays written after this period would have to be free of these defects (as chronicled in the

39 retrospect essays) and would have to reflect the new philosophy of the author (as developed and expressed in Four Quartets).

Eliot has said in later interviews that the war made it impossible for him to begin work on a new play as he would have no audience and no stage (Ackroyd 254). In the

1958 Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, for instance, Eliot states:

In 1939 if there hadn't been a war I would probably

have tried to write another play. And I think it's a

very good thing I didn't have the opportunity. From

my personal point of view, the one good thing the war

did was to prevent me from writing another play too

soon. I saw some of the things that were wrong with

Family Reunion, but I think it was much better that

any possible play was blocked for five years or so to

get up a head of steam. (101)

It is quite true that the possibility of a big London production was out of the question for Eliot. But opportunities did exist. The Pilgrim Players, for example, under the direction of E. Martin Browne, were touring the British countryside throughout the war performing plays in schools and churches for people, especially evacuees from the big cities, who would

40 otherwise be unable to see dramatic productions (Browne

152). Browne indicated to Eliot as early as 1940 that he

and the Pilgrim Players were hungry for a new T. S. Eliot

play and would begin rehearsals as soon as Eliot could

oblige. The exchange of letters continued throughout the

war and "[allmost every letter in our war correspondence

contains this hope of a new play” (153).

Browne's letters to Eliot reveal him to be a persistent gadfly in the attempts to spur the

"hibernating” playwright on to further dramatic composition. He fed Eliot suggestions, ideas, and even detailed scenarios ranging from a play based on Simeon's reaction at seeing the Christ child to the call for "a

play about Christmas from a completely adult point of view" (156). Ultimately, Browne raises the issue of revising The Family Reunion and, in a lengthy letter of

July 14, 1946, goes so far as to assign Eliot certain revisions which would "bridge the small gap” between artistic success and failure in a play which was "so nearly right" (163).

Eliot's sparse responses and polite refusals tell us much. While Browne was delving again with his troupe into revivals of Murder in the Cathedral and The Family

Reunion. Eliot was moving away from these works.

41 instinctively moving toward something else. Eliot is not

interested in anything overtly religious like Murder in the Cathedral and rejects the Simeon idea outright. And he is clearly not interested in revising The Family

Reunion ; "I feel that it would be healthier for me to

leave it alone" (Browne 164). In fact, he seems to have

conveniently forgotten to take the script with him on his

lengthy trip to America of that summer t "Now, I meant to

bring the Family Reunion with me, but I forgot ..."

(Browne 163). Grover Smith has remarked that "(tlhe defects of The Family Reunion should have warned Eliot away from further writing for the stage" (213). Failing

that, those defects (perceived by no one more clearly than by Eliot himself in the retrospects) surely put Eliot in

the mood to reflect and regroup rather than to re%frite or begin a new dramatic project.

It is clear now that the lion's share of Eliot's reflecting and regrouping during the war years went into

the creation and revision of three poems which would complete the cycle of what would be called Four Quartets.

And it was a matter of interest rather than just a question of opportunity that led him to do so. As Eliot

stated to John Lehmann in 1953, the effect of the war on him creatively was to shift his interest from following up

42 The Family Reunion with another play to following up Burnt

Norton with what would ultimately be a series of three more poems :

I had become very much absorbed in the problems of

writing for the stage and might have gone straight on

from The Family Reunion to another play. The war destroyed that interest for a time . .. East Coker was

the result— and it was only in writing East Coker

that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four.

(5)

As a consequence. Four Quartets forms a significant bridge between Eliot's early dramatic experiments and his late comedies. The first poem of the four. Burnt Norton, had actually been begun with fragments of verse left over from Murder in the Cathedral— bits Eliot considered "too good to waste" CWriters at Work 99) . And the last three poems (East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) reveal Eliot postulating and developing the very themes, settings, character situations, levels of sensibility, and philosophical outlooks which inform his later trio of plays.

Central to both Four Quartets and Eliot's last three plays is what could be called his "comic vision", the spirit of which first finds expression in Four Quartets.

43 Helen Gardner, writing In 1966, was the first to pinpoint this "comic vision" as the substantive difference between Eliot's plays of the 1930s and his mature works of the 40s and 50s:

Eliot's first plays, like the greatest of all his

earlier poems, are informed by the tragic sense of

human solitude ... The earlier plays, like the

earlier poetry, communicate a sense that life is

agonizingly trivial and meaningless, unless some

power from without breaks in to create a gleam of

meaning. (161)

Gardner traces the roots of Eliot's development of a comic vision to the war poetry, arguing that "in the course of

Four Quartets a change of mood is clearly aparent" and she equates this new mood with "the comic writer's concern" and concludes that, in Four Quartets "we pass beyond the tragic sense to a mood that transcends and includes both the tragic and the comic vision of life"

(161).

A key to this new "mood" is that Eliot works out his comic vision almost exclusively in terms of the human perception of time:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.

44 And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction Remaining

a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

CCPP 117)

What Four Quartets boils down to is an exploration of the comic nature of time and the role that the human

perception of time plays in each individual's life-long development. The range of human perceptions of time runs

from the comic to the tragic. The tragic perception of time is to interpret time as being "eternally present", a model in which each moment is consumed even as it is experienced. In this model, the future does not yet exist and the past exists nowhere but in the patterns of protein synthesis in the brain which constitute memory. Time, viewed in this way, is an unfolding process leading to nothing which consumes itself as it goes along. Human beings ride this crest of time, afforded mere glimpses of that unfolding process even as they are churned under by it:

45 If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable. (CPP 117) It is this tragic vision of time which dominates much modern drama. Krapp's Last Tape provides a succinct example. The past exists for Krapp only in his memory

(where it fades ... "viduity? ... viduity?") and on his reels of tape-recorded birthday memoirs (where it persists in a merciless rigidity). All time, for Krapp, is eternally present and he finds his life trailing irrevocably into nothingness like a finished tape flapping on a reel. The play, in keeping with the dominant tone of modern drama, is about regret, waste, and absurdity.

Eliot's comic vision, first in the Quartets and afterward in the plays, acknowledges the possibility of waste and absurdity ("ridiculous the waste sad time stretching before and after") but posits that time future and time past might very well have a palpable reality.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.

And time future contained in time past.

(CPP 117)

That "perhaps" represents, for Eliot, the hope of the comic vision. And hope, in the final analysis, is the essence of comedy. Time and reality might be structured

46 so as to allow meaning and the change o£ meaning to play out over a stretch of time and, if they are, there remains the possibility that even tragic events and consequences might be worked out or "redeemed". Coincidentally, it is a hallmark of each of the varied sub-genres of stage comedy that the characters are afforded by the author (be it Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Sheridan, or Wilde) time to work out difficulties and reach decisions, whereas in tragedy, time (or lack thereof) is the great enemy of the protagonist. This is the substantive difference between

Much Ado About Nothing and Othello, between The Winter * s

Tale and King Lear. Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus.

The proposal of the comic vision in place of the tragic vision is the great "theme" of Eliot's Four

Quartets. Here, the comic nature of time and the human perception of time are explored in a variety of ways. The most significant of these is Eliot's proposal of a "still point", a moment both in the sequence of time and outside the sequence of time the apprehension of which momentarily frees the human mind from sequential reality long enough to afford a glimpse of the whole unfolding pattern of time, of life, and of history.

47 At the still point of the turning world. Neither

flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it

fixity.

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement

from nor towards.

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point,

the still point.

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say

where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it

in time. (CPP 119)

Grover Smith identifies this ("the union of the flux of time with the stillness of eternity") as the central theme of Four Quartets and sees the concept of the "still point" as the culmination of Eliot's philosophical musings about time throughout his poetic career (253). And the concept is, at heart, expressed as a simple metaphor. If one imagines the surface of a disk, spinning, be it a wheel or a pinwheel, there must be a point at the center which is not spinning. Without this still point, the

48 spinning of the circumference would be impossible. Eliot

extends this metaphor to a model of time in which the time

of progression and sequence is the movement and the time

of eternity is the stillness. At the moment of

intersection of movement and stillness, of time and

timelessness, past and future are gathered into the present.

Smith, in the same essay, draws our attention to the

two epigraphs from Heraclitus and suggests, along with

Elizabeth Drew, that Eliot is pushing those epigraphs

toward an Aristotelian interpretation which allows for a

'•center'* at which the flux of sequential time can be

gathered into, in Eliot's phrase, "neither ascent nor decline". Smith paraphrases the two epigraphs this way:

"Although there is but one Center, most men live in centers of their own" and "The way up and the way down are

the same" (255-256). Grover Smith's interpretation is worth quoting at length:

What Eliot did in the Quartets was to invoke the

logos of Heraclitus as if it were ... the center,

round which the wheel of flux revolves forever but

which 'gathers' the movement into stillness. Since

the flux comprehends the changes of matter and the

apparent succession of time as well as the laws

49 controlling them, the first epigraph can be deemed to

relate as much to an empirically psychological point of view as to an ethical one. We each think that time passes, but in the logos it is eternal. We each

think that the past endures in our memory, but in the

logos it endures in immediate actuality. (256)

Northop Frye's statement about "studying poems of great scope, such as the Commedia or Paradise Lost," certainly applies to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets ; "we find that we have to learn a good deal of cosmology" (160). And

Eliot's cosmology here is not far removed from the

Ptolemaic universe Frye exploits as a "framework of symbolism" in making his own distinction between comedy and tragedy: "a heaven above, a hell beneath, and a cyclical cosmos or order of nature in between" (161).

Frye uses this model to posit "four main types of mythical movement: within romance, within experience, down, and up"

(162) . It is with the latter two that we are concerned here :

The downward movement is the tragic movement, the

wheel of fortune falling from innocence toward

hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe. The

upward movement is the comic movement, from

threatening complications to a happy ending and a

50 general assumption of post-dated innocence in which

everyone lives happily ever after. In Dante the

upward movement is through purgatory. (162)

Eliot explores the starting place of either movement, the still point, through a number of metaphors which make it, ultimately, an accessible one. Eliot sees the still point as a point of perception, a perspective which, although it cannot be maintained by flesh and blood humans caught up in the flux of successive time, can be attained upon certain occasions. From this still point we can catch a glimpse of the both the comic and the tragic pattern of movement toward possible things. For Eliot in

Four Quartets. the apprehension of the still point and the perception of the patterns of reality go hand in hand.

As the concept is developed in Four Quartets, the still point is revealed, essentially, to be a moment of perception which frees one from the sequence of time long enough to glimpse the larger patterns. "Reality," as Ole

Bay-Petersen observes in his discussion of Eliot's ideas of time in Four Quartets, "may transcend our notions of time, even if it can be apprehended by the human mind only in time (145). And this apprehension is a difficult one in that "[a]s human beings we are so constituted that we can experience time only as sequence" (146). Strikingly,

51 In Eliot's three mature comedies, characters and groups of characters are forced to engage with the events and actions (even non-events and inactions— the "what might have beens" and abstractions) of their past lives and to

interpret them, not in terms of a present summary, but as a pattern involved with the past and the future as well as

the present. As Bay-Petersen points out about the

Quartets, "even that which we failed to do 'exists* in an abstract sense as a perpetual possibility, never to be

realized in time, but forming a part of the total pattern"

(147). The hope for or possibility of "redemption"

through grappling with the issues of time and the characters' perceptions of time becomes the argument of each comedy. Bay-Petersen's summary comment about Four

Quartets might well be applied to the characters in each of Eliot's last three plays;

We may despair of the apparent futility of life and

come to doubt the existence of a pattern ... Only by

perservering in our spiritual quest may we be granted

hints of the eternal pattern in which we are to

become transfigured. (149)

By enacting this perseverance in front of an audience, the characters of Eliot's mature comedies learn— and teach— a

52 process by which a life may be understood as a whole, as a pattern, rather than as the arbitrary summations of a mere moment.

The chief metaphor for this perseverance toward the still point of perception in Four Quartets is that of the garden to which Eliot's speaker is led for reflection and contemplation. Several metaphors for the comic pattern there perceived are presented as well: music, dancing, poetry, the Chinese jar, the change of seasons.

Throughout it is suggested that the role of each person is to strive for the apprehension of the still point. It is acknowledged that human beings are born with varying levels of capability for this role. But for each, according to his or her best abilities, several aspects of striving are expected: waiting, patience, what Eliot calls the "negative" and "positive" ways, along with a certain kind of "solitude".

Eliot emphasizes that one moment of perception is not enough. The patterns are always changing and each individual must endeavor to live the kind of life which allows for repeated approaches to the meaning: "For the pattern is new in every moment I And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all that we have been" (CPP 125) .

53 Eliot's struggle to explore and explain all this in poetry goes well where he can draw on devices familiar to his readers as he proceeds in evocative, intuitive ways. But how are such perceptions to be presented on stage? On stage, Eliot well knew, he would need to find an

"Objective correlative" for this comic vision, "a form of entertainment" which could be subjected "to the process which would leave it a form of art" (Sif 70). But where was this form of entertainment to be found?

In part, Eliot stumbled upon the form of popular dramatic comedy in his retreat from the failures he perceived in his earlier plays. Eliot's retrospect essays on the drama (The Aims of Poetic Drama. 19 49; "Poetry and

Drama", 1951; and "The Three Voices of Poetry", 19 53) are quite detailed in terms of the problems Eliot discerned in his experimental work and hoped to overcome in subsequent plays. As he confided in "Poetry and Drama", "the desire to write something which will be free of the defects of one's last work is a very powerful and useful incentive"

(SP 144). Each defect Eliot discusses in his retrospect essays is concerned with the failure of the form he had presented on the stage to cohere sufficiently with the expectations and responses of his audience. One gets the impression that Eliot felt he had all the necessary

54 component parts for his ideal of a poetic drama but that he had not yet achieved the necessary synthesis of the parts which would make for successful theatre in the experience of his audience.

In the address to The Poet's Theatre Guild in 1949,

Eliot pinpointed several of the differences between what he had written before and what he expected to write in the future. One was that he wanted, in future, to "get away from the chorus" (APD 4) as a dramtic device, since it is primarily a poetic one and may be too jarring for a modern play-going audience. Speaking of Murder in the Cathedral, he confesses that he had used the device to "bulk the play out" in that "my argument was somewhat thin, and the conflict between personalities was of a rather simple kind" (APD. 4). Further, at that stage of his experimentation, Eliot had been "doubtful of [his] ability to handle dialogue", whereas writing choral verse as he had done for The Rock was something with which he felt comfortable (APD 4). In addition, "[t]he introduction of a chorus of excited and sometimes hysterical women, reflecting in their emotion the significance of the action, helped wonderfully" in that "perhaps the dramatic weaknesses would be somewhat covered up by the cries of the women" (SP 140). Thus, the use of the chorus as a

55 device was deemed a success for that play only:

The use of the chorus strengthened the power, and concealed the weaknesses of my theatrical technique.

For this reason I decided that next time I would try

to integrate the chorus more closely into the play.

(SP_ 140)

Consequently, for The Family Reunion, Eliot "reduced the choral part" (APD 4) but further chronicled his dissatisfaction with the end result in "Poetry and Drama":

"the device of using four of the minor personages, representing the Family, sometimes as individual character parts and sometimes collectively as a chorus, does not seem to me very satisfactory" (SP_142). Eliot’s main concern was that the device placed too many demands on both the actors and the audience and threatended the effectiveness of form with which he was experimenting. As for the actors, "the immediate transition from individual, characterized part to membership of a chorus is asking to much ... it is a very difficult transition to accomplish"

(SP 142). And in terms of a member of the audience, "if he enjoys this sort of thing, [he] is putting up with a suspension of the action in order to enjoy a poetic fantasia" (SP 142).

56 A second aim Eliot articulated in his address to the

Poet's Theatre Guild and elaborated upon in later

retrospects also had to do with bringing the poetic drama

closer to the experience of his audience: "I only want to

write plays of contemporary life" (Eliot's emphasis, APD

5). In this address, Eliot emphasizes the importance of

presenting

... a plot of contemporary people, such as men and

women we know, in the usual clothes that they wear

today, in the same perplexities, conflicts and

misunderstandings that we to our acquaintances get

involved in, and uttering no lines that are not

relevant to the situation, the mood, and the dramatic

action. (APD 5)

In "Poetry and Drama", Eliot elaborates on this theme :

People are prepared to put up with verse from the lips of personages dressed in the fashion of some

distant age; therefore they should be made to hear it

from people dressed like ourselves, living in houses

and apartments like ours, and using telephones and

motor cars and radio sets. (OPP 145)

Eliot reveals as part of his motivation that he wishes for poetic drama to enter into "overt competition"

(SP 141) with the drama in prose, that is, commerically

57 successful dramatic entertainment. This campaign was to be waged "until the verse play is recognized by the larger public as a possible source of entertainment" (OPP 145).

It was vitally important to Eliot that the poetic drama should not seem like something remote and irrelevant to modern audiences:

What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world

in which the audience lives and to which it returns

when it leaves the theatre ... Then we should not be

transported into an artificial world; on the

contrary, our own sordid, dreary daily world would

suddenly be illuminated and transfigured. 141)

This illumination and transfiguration so fully expressed as the atttainment of the comic vision in the poetry of

Four Quartets could only take place on the stage if the audience was truly involved in the dramatic experience being presented to them. Eliot felt audiences for his experimental plays were leaving the theatre in a detached, analytical state of mind when what he wanted from them was the recognition of some deeper, more intuitive experience:

It seems to me that beyond the nameable, classifiable

emotions and motives of our conscious life when

directed towards action— the part of life which prose

drama is wholly adequate to express— there is a

58 fringe of indefinate extent, of feeling which we can

only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the

eye and can never completely focus; of feeling of

which we are only aware in a kind of temporary

detachment from action. This peculiar range of

sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry at its moments of greatest intensity. At such moments,

we touch the border of those feelings which only

music can express. (OPP 145-6)

Eliot, of course, had attempted to reach this experience through the contemporary setting of The Family

Reunion but nevertheless felt that he had failed, principally because of the "failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation" (S2 143). Once again Eliot ties this failure to its effect on his audience; "we are left in a divided frame of mind, not knowing whether to consider the play the tragedy of the mother or the salvation of the son. The two situations are not reconciled" (SP 143).

Carol H. Smith connects Eliot's hope for a more successful synthesis in his next play with his belief that the use of a comic surface might help to smooth over the difficulties he had encountered in his earlier plays:

59 Faced with the failure of The Family Reunion, Ellot

appears to have concluded that If the surface of his dramas were made comic these difficulties might be

resolved ... Audiences of English comedy had had long

training, in tragi-comedy, in romantic comedy, and

even farce, in moving from broad comic effects to the

belief in a situation of romance or pathos. No

damage would be done to the serious intention of the

dramatist by leading the audience from the world of

comedy to a set of serious meanings implicit in that

world. (149-50)

This is certainly the case. But Eliot was not seeking a merely cosmetic solution in turning to popular comic drama. Eliot, as always, was concerned with how all the levels of his drama might be fully experienced by his audience. The comedy and the deeper theme articulated in

Four Quartets must be synthesized. Gary Davenport is emphatic on this point in his discussion of The Cocktail

Party;

What I wish to maintain is that to Eliot these two

implications were simultaneous, and that the comedy

of his play is not merely intended to provide

'relief* from the more serious theme ... it is an

integral part of it. (302)

60 Rather than being a surface concern, the use of familiar comic conventions and characters should allow for this synthesis being picked up on by various members of the audience in their various capacities. Eliot turns to

Shakespeare for his illustration:

In a play of Shakespeare you get several levels of

significance. For the simplest auditors there is a

plot, for the more thoughtful the character and

conflict of character, for the more literary the

words and phrasing, for the musically sensitive the

rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and

understanding a meaning which reveals itself

gradually. (UPUC 146-7)

In "Poetry and Drama", Eliot suggests that this "meaning" is not to be understood merely as the alert reception of an author's message: "There emerges, when we analyse it, a kind of musical design also which reinforces and is one with the dramatic movement" COPP 136). Eliot here speaks of a "double pattern in great poetic drama" which he feels

"may be examined from the point of view of stagecraft or from that of music" (OPP 137). In the John Marston essay,

Eliot is even more specific in describing what he seeks as

"a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once" (SE 3rd ed. 229). Eliot puts this

61 kind o£ doubleness on a plane with both allegory and

symbolism, except that both of these involve primarily the intellect, and he is speaking of something felt or

intuited rather than something simply recognized and

analysed by an audience: "the drama has an underpattern,

less manifest than the theatrical one" (SE, 3rd ed. 229).

This underpattern, whether it be the workings of an

underlying myth or the expression of a philosophic vision

or the pattern of plot and character recognizeable as

comedy or some more personal situation being exorcised by

the author, should be seamlessly woven into dramatic action taking place on stage. As Eliot expressed his goal

in "Poetry and Drama":

I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the

perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of

human action and of words, such as to present at once

two aspects of dramatic and of musical order. (OPP

146)

If Carol Smith is right that Eliot turned to "English

comedy" to resolve the defects of his earlier dramatic works, what influences can be discerned to shed light on

the type of drama Eliot settled upon for his last three plays? Lyndall Gordon reports that during the summer of

1946 Eliot's close American friend, Emily Hale (she is

62 sometime's cited as Eliot's "muse" and is described as

having been shocked and shaken when word reached her of

Eliot's marriage to another close friend, Valerie), "acted

in [Noel Coward's! Blithe Spirit with the Dorset Players,

in Dorset, Vermont, and Eliot was in the audience" (168).

Gordon quotes Dorothy Elsmith as saying that Eliot "used to follow Emily in her summer theatrical appearances"

(168) and notes that Hale had directed another Noel Coward play. Hay Fever, the previous March. Gordon makes a most sagacious connection between Blithe Spirit and The

Cocktail Party;

This comedy about a husband whose dead wife's spirit

returns to trouble his relationship with his new wife

may have provided the germ for Eliot's first comedy.

The Cocktail Party. (168)

I would like to push this a little farther. Eliot may have been moved by this comedy featuring his close friend just as he had been moved by the music hall performances of Marie Lloyd. Beneath the smooth surface of Coward's sophisticated drama, perhaps, Eliot responded to something deeper, something striking a more resonant emotional chord— his personal relationship with this haunting leading lady and the fact of his own wife's incarceration in a sanatorium.

63 It is difficult to ignore the temptation, sung to us

by the bird at the beginning of Burnt Norton, of following Gordon's intuition into the world of speculation where the impact of seeing Emily Hale in a production of Noel

Coward's Blithe Spirit during the summer of 1946 begins to

work on the creative processes of T. S. Eliot. And

inasmuch as Hale was herself, as Gordon and others have

pointed out, very much an inhabitant in that "world of

speculation" for Eliot, it may be of value, for a time, to

follow the deception of the thrush.

The experience of witnessing this production could

very well have been a watershed moment in Eliot's search

for a suitable dramatic form with which to enact the comic

vision of his Four Quartets. It is very likely that Eliot

would have responded to the production on a number of

different levels, perhaps the most intense being an

emotional one at seeing, enacted on stage by his intimate

companion, a romantic situation more than slightly

analogous to their own. In Blithe Spirit, the dead first

wife, Elvira (reminiscent, perhaps, of the

institutionalized Vivien) comes back to haunt and

violently disrupt the relationship of the second wife,

Ruth (played by Emily Hale) and Charles, the middle-aged

writer looking for new inspiration (Eliot).

64 Linked to this supposed emotional reaction would be a

range of intellectual and artistic ones as Eliot spots,

perhaps, a link between the Noel Co%#ard situation and that

of Euripides* Alcestis, suggestive of Eliot's own use of

James Joyce's "mythical method" in choosing Aeschylus*

Orestia as the mythical basis of his previous play. The

Family Reuinion. Indeed, Eliot would choose Alcestsis as

the basis of his next play— and first of the mature

comedies— The Cocktail Party. Though Eliot had long

championed the use of myth as an ordering device in poetry

and modern fiction, the effectiveness of its use in a

popular play may have been intriguing to the playwright

who Ivor Brown had recently predicted "might write an

excellent light comedy" (377).

Eliot may also have been struck by the easy rapport

Coward seems to have with his audience in this play, an

enticing symptom of Coward*s mastery of a genre that

depends so much, as Eliot had phrased it years earlier, on

"a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public to

respond to particular stimuli" (SW_64). This preparedness

had long been a vital part of Eliot*s search for a dramatic form with which to engage. In no other dramatic

genre are audiences so well trained by long and enjoyable experience to play along with the playwright as in

65 drawing-room comedy. In addition, the sparkling

excellence of Coward's dialogue could not have escaped Eliot's ear, trained as it was to detect the slightest elevation of the rhythms of ordinary speech and

conversation toward the realms of verse and poetry.

Finally, if Eliot's dramatic preoccupation at this

point in his career was indeed to find a way to embody on stage the comic vision of Four Quartets, Blithe Spirit may have offered yet another insight. Eliot would be

concerned with presenting on stage characters who are placed in situations where they must re-examine their

perceptions of time past, time present and time future.

These characters would spend their time on stage working,

to the best of their varied abilities, through tragic perceptions of time as an eternally present compilation of

the inescapable consequences of past actions. Ultimately, these characters would achieve a comic perspective in which the past, the present, and the future are all bound up in the perception of a new pattern that allows for a reinterpretation of the present to reveal a past that is redeemable and a future that is not unhopeful.

This is neither the theme nor the action of Blithe

Spirit. But Noel Coward does present in his play a series of conversations in which characters wrangle about their

66 conflicting interpretations of past relationships and events. Indeed, it is conventional for practitioners of stage comedy to entertain their audiences with monologues and duologues in which characters offer up various defenses of past behaviors. As the audience learns more of the facts, the incongruities of these interpretations are exposed resulting in laughter for the audience and growth for the characters.

Strikingly, the ghost of Elvira in Blithe Spirit represents a dramatically successful embodiment of the past, an objective correlative of past choices, a manifestation of the past's inexorable influence on the present. Eliot had already demonstrated his fondness for spectral visitors from the past in Murder in the Cathedral

(The First Tempter) and The Family Reunion (The Furies/Eumenides) but felt strongly that, while these

"ghosts" respresented real psychological and spiritual forces, such intrusions of the supernatural onto the stage could play no part in plays of contemporary life. In reference to his disappointment with the Furies in particular, Eliot is entertaining as well as adamant:

They must, in future, be omitted from the cast ...

We tried every possible manner of presenting them.

We put them on the stage, and they looked like

67 uninvited guests who had strayed in from a fancy

dress ball. We concealed them behind guaze, and they suggested a still out of a Walt Disney film. We made them dimmerf and they looked like shrubbery just

outside the window. I have seen other expedients

tried: I have seen them signalling from across the

garden, or swarming on to the stage like a football

team, and they are never right. They never succeed

in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks.

(OPP 90)

If Eliot was able to share in the audience's delight at the invisible antics of Elvira in the scenes just after her return during the seance, her handling by Coward may have had some influence on Eliot's subsequent pronouncement that the Furies in The Family Reunion "must

... be understood to be visible only to certain of my characters, and not to the audience" COPP 90). Indeed,

Michael Goldman argues that ghosts continue to populate

Eliot's stage even in the last three plays, though they are not overtly presented as ghosts (43).

All in all. Blithe Spirit offers a compelling set of analogous literary and intellectual titillations for the reader interested in Eliot's change of dramatic direction after The Family Reunion and Four Quartets. But the

68 intensity of the emotional experience Eliot may have

undergone while watching the Emily Hale performance of the

play is the element which argues strongly for Eliot's full

emotional and artistic attentions being captured by this

Noel Coward comedy.

Eliot had known Emily Hale since his days at Harvard and she had played a significant role in his personal and

literary life— a role well-explored by two Eliot

biographers, Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon. Drawing

largely upon unpublished papers, letters, interviews, and

reminiscences, both Ackroyd and Gordon paint a detailed

and convincing picture of a long intimacy between Hale and

Eliot; an intimacy, it is suggested, that both Hale and

Eliot believed would have ended in marriage but for the

fact that Eliot was already married to Vivien Haigh-Wood.

Eliot is described as being torn and haunted by this

duality of truths in his life. The possibility of

happiness and fulfillment seems to have been made real for

Eliot in the person of Emily Hale even as its

impossibility was underscored by the disruptive presence

of his troubled, estranged wife, Vivien.

By the time of the Dorset Players production of

Blithe Spirit. Vivien had been committed resident of

Northumberland House, a sanatorium, for eight years.

69 Eliot, in fact, had been legally separated from Vivien since 1933. Ackroyd posits the earlier date, 1933, as the time from which Eliot and Hale "resumed their close and sympathetic relationship, and it seems that Miss Hale offered him the attentive but respectful affection of which he had experienced so little with his wife" (204).

In 1934 Emily Hale makes the first of a series of journeys to England in order to be with Eliot (Ackroyd 212).

Miss Hale came to England each summer between 1934

and 19 38 (except in 19 36), and Eliot stayed with her

and her relatives, the Perkins, on at least three or

four occasions in each year. ... He was certainly

very close to her and in the one year which she did

not travel to England, 1936, he himself returned to

America; when they were apart, he wrote often to her

and would send her draft copies of his work which she

would return with her o%m suggestions (she was lecturer in drama at Smith College). And so for the

six years after his separation from Vivien, they

maintained an intimacy which only the war severed.

Emily's own friends in America have explained that

she felt herself to be unofficially 'engaged' to him.

(Ackroyd 229)

70 Lyndall Gordon reports that Vivien was not unaware of

the presence of Hale in Eliot's life. Indeed, during the

summer of 1936, Vivien reportedly pretended to hire a

confidential clerk, claiming that she had moved to America

on vacation. Vivien was herself the private secretary,

calling herself "Daisy Miller" and giving out as her

forwarding address "83 Brattle Street"— the residence of

Emily Hale (Ackroyd 232). In addition, Vivien took

various disruptive steps toward winning Eliot back.

Ackroyd cites the occasion of a public book signing and

exhibition sponsored by the Sunday Times at which Vivien

appeared along with their little dog Polly:

Vivien went up to him and said "Oh, Tom"; he seized

her hand and said "How do you in a loud voice.

The dog recognized him and jumped up at him, but he seemed not to notice. When he spoke at the

exhibition, Vivien stood the whole time, keeping her

eyes fixed upon his face. After he finished his

address she went up to him again and said, "Will you

come back with me?" He replied, "I cannot talk to you

now." She gave him three of his books: he signed

them and returned them to her. Then he walked away.

(Ackroyd 232)

71 This was just the sort of public haunting which Eliot most feared. Lyndall Gordon provides further insight into Eliot's state of mind: "In fear of her pursuit, he kept his address secret from almost everyone. After a guest house in Courtfield Gardens, his hideout was the clergyhouse at 9 Grenville Place in the Cromwell Road"

(43). Eliot seems to have felt, like Harry in The Family

Reunion, that he was being quite literally pursued by

Furies.

On the other hand, Eliot seemed to enjoy being seen with Hale in public "as a recognizeable couple" (Ackroyd

230). Gordon writes of visits the two made to the offices of Faber and Faber where the very real possibility of a meeting between Emily and Vivien concerned Eliot:

When in London, she [Emily Hale] used to visit Cat

Morgan at Faber, where Eliot's secretary. Miss Swan,

made her welcome. She was known to Faber colleagues,

but clearly there was some agreement to keep her

under wraps, possibly because Vivienne (until she was

institutionalized in July 1938) would not have been

averse to scandal. It could not have been an

unforseen danger that the two women might cross paths

on their visits to Faber. (Gordon 165)

72 Indeed, Eliot's secretaries at Faber were familiar with Vivien's unannounced visits. As Ackroyd recounts,

"Cslhe had a habit of turning up at the offices

unexpectedly and asking for him— but she was always told

that he was out, or at a committee meeting" (217). One of

the secretaries, Bridget O'Donovan, has written that Eliot would sneak down a back staircase and out of the building on such occasions and upon his return "would be on edge,

talking even more slowly and hesitantly than usual"

(Ackroyd 218). Ackroyd points out that the secretary's

name in The Cocktail Party is "Miss Barraway" as in, "Miss

Bar-a-way" and she performs a similar function for Sir

Henry Harcourt-Reilly.

Both Ackroyd and Gordon trace a fifteen year

relationship between Eliot and Hale that may have been at

its deepest during the summer of 1946 at the time of the Blithe Spirit performance. Eliot had achieved some comfort, but not peace, following the commission of Vivien

to a sanatorium. According to both Gordon and Ackroyd, he continued to be wracked by a sense of guilt and

foreboding. It is Lyndall Gordon, however, who traces a compelling view of how the situation in which he found himself impinged upon his writing. Gordon calls Hale "The

Lady of Silences" and suggests that she influences and.

73 indeed, appears in such major works as Ash Wednesday

(1930), "Marina" (1930), "Cape Ann" (1933), and "Burnt Norton" (1935). Indeed, Gordon notes that Emily Hale accompanied Eliot on his first trip to Burnt Norton in the

summer of 1934;

And so it is in the company of a woman he had known

and admired before he met Vivien, and whom he might

conceivably have married if his wife were not alive

that he visited Burnt Norton. (165)

It would seem that Eliot's first philosophical

musings about "time past" and "time present", about "what

has been" and "what might have been", which would form the

basis of his comic vision in Four Quartets as well as in

the last three plays, were not rooted exclusively in the

impersonal, philosophical realm of Eliot's work as a poet

and dramatist. They seem also to have grown very much out

of his personal situation involving Vivien and Emily Hale.

It would not, then, be trespassing too far into the realm of speculation to imagine the impact upon T. S.

Eliot of seeing Emily Hale enacting the role of Ruth in

Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. To witness Charles' character tormented and, for a time, controlled by the

will of the once-dead Elvira before the achievement of the comic resolution may very well have provided for Eliot the

74 kind of cathartic experience he fond so often lacking in

contemporary prose drama. Seeing the flesh and blood

Emily Hale enact Ruth at the center of this drama would

have intensified these effects considerably.

In addition, it must be remembered that the paradigm

for the experience here ascribed to Eliot is Eliot's own description from "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as

to how the poet creates. Eliot offers as his paradigm for poetic creativity the now well-known "suggestive analogy":

"the action which takes place when a bit of finely

filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing

oxygen and sulfur dioxide" (S2 40).

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two

gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence

of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is

present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains

no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is

apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral,

and unchanged. The mind of the poet is this shred of

platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon

the experience of the man himself; but, the more

perfect the artist, the more completely separate in

75 him will be the man who suffers and the mind which

creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. (SP 40-41)

And if all this seems somehow inappropriately

personal for Eliot, that most impersonal of poets, it

should be pointed out that this same artistic process is

characterized by Eliot in the same essay as the formula

for the process of depersonalization. The key for a poet,

according to Eliot, would not be to shut down his emotions as he experienced them, but rather to "surrender ...

himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable" (SP_ 40). That is, to channel the intellect and the emotion into art so that the art is larger than the

experience.

Eliot never argues that poets must not have

personalities or feelings. Rather, personalities and feelings are to be abstracted into art. Eliot the man

may suffer. Eliot the poet must create out of that suffering. Eliot’s own words capture this concept most

evocatively; "The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases,

images, which remain there until all the particles can unite to form a new compound are present together" (SP

76 41}. But one need not go back to the 1919 essay to find

Eliot speaking of how the personal may be transformed into

art. Speaking of his method of playwrighting in the 1953

retrospect, "The Three Voices of Poetry," Eliot speaks in

strikingly similar terms of deeply personal experiences

imposing themselves on the form of the drama being

created :

And if I set out to write a play, I start by an act

of choice: I settle upon a particular emotional

situation, out of which characters and a plot will

emerge ... It is likely, of course, that it is in the

beginning the pressure of some rude unknown psychic

material (Eliot's emphasis) that directs the poet to

tell that particular story, to develop that

particular situation. (OPP 111)

It is my hypothesis that the Dorset Players' production of

Blithe Spirit, featuring Emily Hale, brought all the

feelings, phrases, and images from years of experiences

with Emily and Vivien (now transcendent, now excruciating) together in the presence of the various elements of

Eliot's search for an appropriate dramatic form, channeling this "rude unknown psychic material"

77 successfully and cathartically through a crowd-pleasing drawing-room comedy and suggesting to Eliot the new direction for his poetic drama.

There can be no doubt that Eliot's first comedy. The

Cocktail Party, bears more than a passing resemblance to

Blithe Spirit. The first and most striking similarity is the cast of characters. Each of Eliot's last three plays

features, like Blithe Spirit, a cast of seven major players. And the roles of each are similar. Blithe

Spirit involves two couples (the Condomines, Charles and

Ruth, and the Bradmans, George and Violet) and three ancillary characters (Ruth, Madame Arcati, and Elvira).

The setting is a drawingroom which becomes a seance. The supernatural breaks in upon the natural through the three ancillary characters, a psychically gifted servant, a medium, and a ghost. These influence things sufficiently so as to cause the couples, especially the Condomines, to face and come to terms with their past behaviors and relationships.

Eliot appears to have been intrigued enough by this set up to appropriate and develop it. His three mature comedies likewise involve two couples influenced by three ancillary characters to examine their lives, past, present and future. The Cocktail Party (1949) features the

78 couples Edward and Lavinia, Peter and Celia and their interactions with characters who partake of the supernatural: Harcourt-Reilly, Alex, and Julia. The

Confidential Clerk (1953) depicts the couples Claude and

Elizabeth, Colby and Lucasta and their interactions with characters who are not quite so supernatural, at least at first blush: Eggerson, B. Kaghan, and Mrs. Guzzard. The

Elder Statesman (1958) tinkers with the pattern somewhat, but still presents two couples, Claverton and Mrs.

Carghill, Monica and Charles, as they are confronted by a figurative ghost, a wayward son, and a busybody: Gomez,

Michael, and Mrs. Piggot.

In each of these comedies, Eliot sees to it that the three ancillary characters— sometimes deliberately, sometimes in spite of themselves— push the two couples into exploring their lives and relationships, confronting past actions and behaviors. Generally, the younger couples discover that their love for each other was but a stepping stone to a deeper apprehension, either in religious or artistic terms, of the still point. Celia and Peter fall into this category along with Colby and

Lucasta. Monica and Charles do marry to end The Elder

Statesman but their engagement is much prolonged as they are forced by the other characters to solve more pressing

79 problems first. The older couples, such as Edward and

Lavinia, Claude and Elizabeth, find that their road to the apprehension of the still point and the larger patterns of their lives lies in a recommitment to each other and to the everyday matters which make up their lives: cocktail

parties, business deals, etc.

In the course of watching a two-hour "improbable

farce in three acts" by Noel Coward, Eliot saw the "form of entertainment ... capable of infinite refinement" (SW

70, 63) for which he had long been looking. Here was his mythical method: if the myth of Alcestis could be suggested by the analogous situation of a dead wife brought back to the living after a seance, the play of

Euripides could work as the parallel underpining of an entire piece. Here was his process of depersonalization: a conventional structure capable of limiting and shaping the personal dilemma about which Eliot felt himself compelled to write. Here %/as his objective correlative: this same conventional structure replete with stock characters, stock situations, devices, and commonplaces readily recognizeable to a large segment of the theatre- going public could be expanded to embody the search by various characters for peace and fulfillment as well as for romantic resolution. Here also was the answer to

80 Eliot's concerns about the nature of this theatre-going

public in a form where audience expectations and reactions

could be enumerated and counted on.

"[Olur problem should be," Eliot had written in "The

Possibility of a Poetic Drama", "to take a form of

entertainment, and subject it to the process which would

leave it a form of art" (^W 70). That process, for Eliot,

would essentially involve creating a play that functions

flawlessly on the level of comic verisimiltude as well as

on deeper or more sublime levels of apprehension. Eliot

would take the form of drawing-room comedy and wed it to

Greek myth, connect it to his own personal concerns, enact

the comic vision of Four Quartets. and energize the whole

with the rhythm and music of conversational speech

elevated to verse and, in moments of emotional intensity,

poetry. Indeed, the nature of The Cocktail Party as a drama of levels immediately suggests itself: at bottom,

the play by Euripides rooted in Greek myth; at top,

Eliot's own personal situation, the emblem of which was

his inability to mary Emily Hale because he had already chosen to marry Vivien Haigh-Wood; at the level most

easily apprehended by even the most commonplace of minds, a Noel Cowardesque kind of drawing-room comedy.

81 Some three months after Eliot witnessed the Dorset

Players' production of Blithe Spirit, Eliot's long-time director, E. Martin Bro%me, was producing a revival of The Family Reunion at the Mercury Theatre (Browne 166). This was the revival for which Eliot in a letter dated 27

August 1946— very shortly after witnessing Emily Hale's performance — had rather forcefully declined to provide revisions and reworkings (Browne 164). Eliot, according to Ackroyd "was eager to start work upon another play and was trying to extricate himself from various official duties in order to give himself room for composition"

(283). The end result, the work that would take the stage at the Edinburgh Festival on 22 August 1949, was an entirely new kind of play for T. S. Eliot and the prototype for the kind of drama he would continue to create for the rest of his career. The first notice to the public of this shift in direction was a two-word descriptive phrase affixed to the new work's title: "The

Cocktail Party, a comedy."

82 BIBLIOGRAPHY: CHAPTER 2

Ackroyd, Peter. T_^ Eliot : A Life. New York: Simon, 1984. Bay-Petersen, Ole. "T. S. Eliot and Einstein: The Fourth Dimension in the Four Quartets." English Studies : A Journal of English Language and Literature 66.2 (1985): 143-155. Brown, Ivor. Review. Observer (26 Mar 1939): 15. T. S . Eliot: The Critical Heritage, Volume 2_. 2 vols. Ed. Michael Grant. London: Routledge, 1982. 375-377.

Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T . S . Eliot's Plays. London: Cambridge UP, 1969.

Davenport, Gary T. "Eliot's The Cocktail Party: Comic Perspective as Salvation." Modern Drama 17 (1974): 301-306.

Eliot, T. S. Interview. Writers at Work : The Paris Review Interviews. 2nd Series. With Donald Hall. London: Routledge, 1963. 91-109.

. Interview. New York Times Book Review (29 Nov 1953). With John Lehmann. 4-7. Cited in Knowles. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Gardner, Helen. "The Comedies of T. S. Eliot." T_^ S. Eliot ; The Man and His Work. Ed. Allen Tate. New York: Dell, 1966. 159-181.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot's New Life. New York: Farrar, 1988.

83 Knowles, Sebastian D. G. A Purgatorial Flame ; Seven British Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1990. Smith, Carol H . S_^ Eliot * s Dramatic Theory and Practice from Sweeney Agonistes to. The Elder Statesman. 1963. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Smith, Grover. S_^ Eliot's Poetry and Plays. 9th Impression. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.

84 CHAPTER 3

BETWEEN TWO LIVES: THE USE OP MEMORY AND

THE CONDITIONS OP COMEDY IN THE COCKTAIL PARTY

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons,

detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life.

Being between two lives— unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of

memory:

For liberation— not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

Prom the future as well as the past.

(CPP 142)

85 These first ten lines from the third movement of Little

Giddinq offer the argument of T. S. Eliot's first mature comedy. The Cocktail Party (1949). Eliot develops the appropriated cast relationships from Blithe Spirit to dramatize two sets of characters exercising their varying capacities for using memory to liberate themselves from the consequences of past actions and events. This liberation leads some characters (Celia and perhaps Peter) out of indifference and into a further detachment from self and from things and from persons even as it leads others (Edward and Lavinia) out of indifference and into a deeper attachment to self and to things and to persons.

The key is that each character, with help from several guardian figures, must escape the entanglements of indifference. Eliot has embedded this philosophical escape deeply within the conventional, comic stage actions of two couples engaged (with the help of interested, interfering servants, clowns, and elders) in sorting out their romantic misadventures. As the play progresses and these ancillary characters are revealed to be "guardians" of an essentially supernatural nature, each of the characters is taught to expand love beyond desire. In

86 this way the philosophical concerns, which from beginning to end parallel the romantic ones, are gradually foregrounded.

The danger for each of the four principal characters is precisely that of falling into "indifference" and living "unflowering" lives of bitterness and recrimination. Depending upon the spiritual capacity of the character, one of two %fays out of indifference may be appropriate: the way of attachment or the way of detachment. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly presents the two paths to Celia deep in the second act. The way of attachment would involve becoming reconciled to the "human condition". Such individuals

Maintain themselves by the common routine.

Learn to avoid excessive expectation.

Become tolerant of themselves and others.

Giving and taking, in the usual actions

What there is to give and take. They do not repine;

Are contented with the morning that separates

And with the evening that brings together

For casual talk before the fire

Two people who know they do not understand each

other.

87 Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them.

It is a good life. Though you will not know how good

Till you come to the end. (CPP 363-4)

The second way, the way of detachment, is more difficult for Reilly to describe:

There is_ another way, if you have the courage.

The first I could describe in familiar terms

Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it.

Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about

us.

The second is unknown, and so requires faith—

The kind of faith that issues from despair.

The destination cannot be described;

You will know very little until you get there;

You will journey blind. But the way leads towards

possession

Of what you have sought in the wrong place.

It is a terrifying journey. (CPP 364-5)

Reilly's explanation of the "ways" to Celia derives from

Eliot's interest in St. John of the Cross and his work describing approaches to the attainment of a oneness with

88 God, "the divine union" which Eliot cites as early as his epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes (CPP 74). Eloise Knapp Hay emphasises that St. John describes "a twofold path, one for beginners (whether religious or lay novices) and the other for experienced contemplatives" (153-4). In The

Cocktail Party, one couple (Edward and Lavinia) will be revealed as rank amateurs in such a quest while the other

(Celia and Peter) will demonstrate more advanced capacities.

In applying St. John in his poems and plays, Eliot seems to have been under the influence of Charles Williams

(Knowles 119) who describes the way of detachment (the via negative) as "the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself" and the way of attachment (the via positiva) as "the approach to God through these images" (8-9). "Which way is better?" Celia will ask.

"Neither way is better," Reilly will respond. "But both ways are necessary. It is also necessary! To make a choice between them." The images of "created beings" (CPP

74) and creation as a whole may be embraced or rejected— but they cannot be accepted uncritically by the seeker.

The choice between detachment or a deeper attachment

89 provides the necessary escape from indifference; an indifference which Eliot, through Sir Henry, makes clear is hell:

Both ways avoid the final desolation

Of solitude in the phantasmal world

Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires.

It isn't hell

Till you become incapable of anything else.

(CPP 365)

In a more exact interpretation of St. John, the way of indifference may indeed be seen as a path to enlightenment, as in the "holy indifference" of Christian tradition or the "non-attachment" of the Hindu (Knowles

128). But, in Eliot's (and, perforce, Reilly's) interpretation, indifference does not serve: "Whether

Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, 'holy indifference* can never be, for Eliot, a way to enlightenment" (Knowles

129) .

Indeed, this hell of indifference is described in

Burnt Norton as "a place of disaffection", "a twittering world" of "unhealthy souls", a state of being in which the person is caught between life and death, unflowering:

"neither daylight ... Nor darkness ... Neither plenitude

90 nor vacancy" (CPP 120). In this passage, Eliot speaks of

"strained time-ridden faces I Distracted from distraction by distraction I Filled with fancies and empty of meaning" (CPP 120). The terminology of time in this passage of

Burnt Norton is that of the tragic vision ("Time before and time after" CPP 120) as opposed to that of the comic vision ("Time present and time past" CPP 117). The tragic vision is a perspective which emphasizes the eternally unredeemable nature of the present as caught irrevocably between "time before" and "time after". It is the comic vision, attained either by ascending or "descending

lower", which perceives the nature of time as multifaceted and which renders one capable of escaping from the hell of unredeemable consequence. Edward speaks of this hell in similar terms:

There was a door

And I could not open it. I could not touch the

handle.

Why could I not walk out of my prison?

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from

And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

(CPP 342)

91 In addition to being Eliot's deliberate, direct

response to Sartre's "Hell is other people!" line in Huis

Clos (Browne 233), these lines hint at the way(s) out of

hell. Greater commitment and attachment to others is the

way up into a world of possibility and hope just as a

deeper exploration of solitude (for those who are capable)

is the way down into a world of hope made possible by

stillness and patience and waiting. Despite Northrop

Frye's construct that the way up is comedy and the way

down is tragedy (162), in Eliot's cosmology the only

tragedy is the tragedy of indifference, the failure to

move one way or the other. Thus, the second epigraph to

Burnt Norton, provided by Heraclitus, becomes the

philosophical epicenter of Eliot's first postwar play:

"The way up and the way down are one and the same"

(translation by Grover Smith 256).

Here, in The Cocktail Party, Eliot seeks to wed this

comic vision from Four Quartets, this "theme of serious

spiritual quest" (Smith 214) to the structure of devices

and conventions known as stage comedy. The structure of

stage comedy may be divided into four parts: the basic

problem or comic situation in which audiences find the

characters embroiled to begin the play; the complications and deepening entanglements from which, to the delight of

92 the audience, characters seek to extricate themselves; the resolution or denouement during which characters, usually in the presence of clowning figures, with the help of valued servants, and over the objections of well-meaning elders, find themselves free and in possession of those persons or goods which will bring them joy and fulfillment; and, finally, a celebration performed visibly on stage for the audience to enjoy, such as a wedding (or the promise of one), music, feasting, dancing, etc. Very frequently the characters upon which we focus as an audience for comedy are young lovers, couples who find the road to romantic fulfillment (usually represented by marriage) blocked by the initial problem, moved further out of reach by the complications and obstacles, but at last cunningly achieved and fittingly celebrated.

Northrop Frye traces this accepted formula back to

"the plot structure of New Greek Comedy, as transmitted by

Plautus and Terence" remarking that the form "has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types" (163). E. J. H. Greene, in focusing on the relationship in such comedy between the couples and the servants, identifies a formula, which he calls "F".

In this focus, the ancillary characters are seen to side with the young couple(s), aiding the lovers in overcoming

93 the obstacles placed before them by society in attaining their romantic union (2-3). Greene views his own study as

"a particular application of Frye's theoretical ideas" (5) and his concern is the French drama of the eighteenth century. He does not touch upon the plays of T. S. Eliot, but his application serves to direct our attention to

Eliot's own development of this character interaction in the direction of a spiritual guardianship.

The two couples in The Cocktail Party, for example, while they begin by exploring their various romantic problems (Peter loves Celia who loves Edward who prefers to win back Lavinia who has left him in her bitterness at losing both Peter and Edward to Celia), ultimately find themselves discussing the deeper nuances of their philosophical and spiritual lives. This is the use of memory: they liberate themselves from indifference by expanding love beyond mere desire. These young, romantic characters receive guidance in their romantic/spiritual quest from three ancillary characters late identified as guardians, but intitially presented as the familiar stock characters of stage comedy.

The job of these guardians (Alex, Julia, and

Harcourt-Reilly) is to help the other characters (Celia,

Peter, Edward, and Lavinia) choose the spiritual path more

94 appropriate to his or her capacities. Eliot manipulates the audience's instincts here as he seeks to differentiate between the spiritual quality of the two couples and the different paths the guardians are suggesting for each. It

is conventional that the audience for romantic comedies play favorites, instinctively choosing which man and which woman belong together. Instincts, plus cues from the playwright, give the audience to know, for example, in A

Midsummer Night's Dream that Lysander and Hermia belong together while it is best for all concerned that Demetrius and Helena, almost as a consolation, be married to each other. In discussing this phenomenon in stage comedy,

Ronald F. Miller suggests that the familiarity of audiences with numerous comedies ends up "generating comic expectations" (4). In comedy, audiences know, "spring overcomes winter, the threat to society and good sense is frustrated, chaos and complications miraculously result in those good turns which the audience has willed all along"

(13). Or, in the words of Puck, "Jack shall have Jill,I

Naught shall go ill." Miller speaks of "the awaited tonic chord ... anticipated by every spectator" (13) and "the collective will of the audience" (15).

In The Cocktail Party. Celia and Peter are clearly a match by all conventional standards. But Eliot does not

95 depend solely on the "generic expectations" (Hiller 17) of his audience, however pervasive in the comic theatre they may be. He is at pains to further develop his couples along visibly parallel lines. Both Celia and Peter are artists, Celia a poet and an actress, Peter a novelist and aspiring filmmaker. Edward and Lavinia are clearly not of the same quality. Edward is a middle-aged barrister with a tendency toward selfishness and self-pity that manifests itself rather early in the play. Lavinia is quickly revealed to be controlling and shrewish. Eliot also makes the two couples easy for audiences to categorize in spiritual terms. Celia and Peter speak of artistic things, transcendent moments, compassion for others, and a sense of sin regarding past behaviors. Edward and Lavinia use words to injure others and to isolate themselves, each blaming the other for past indiscretions in which they both are to blame.

Through the detailed characterizations, Eliot confirms his audiences' generic suspicions that Edward and

Lavinia deserve each other and that Celia and Peter would do well to escape the influence of the older couple.

Consequently, these audiences more deeply enjoy the interruptions and interferences of Julia and Alex as they serve to uncouple inappropriate pair bonds, much as Puck

96 does In the enchanted forest outside Athens. Harcourt-

Reilly, Julia and Alex take care to match each character's sensibility with the proper path even as they sort out the true loves turned false and the false loves turned true.

Celia and Peter are encouraged along the road of artistic and, in Celia's case, spiritual endeavor. Edward and

Lavinia are encouraged to get marriage counseling and

"make the best of a bad job" (CPP 356).

The concept of guidance from supernatural figures being available and at times necessary finds its root in

Four Quartets. The figure of the bird, for example, in

Burnt Norton leads the seekers into the garden for fleeting moments of perception warning that "human kind I

Cannot bear very much reality" (CPP 127). In East Coker,

Eliot makes elliptical references to Christ as a wounded surgeon, a dying nurse, and a ruined millionaire who care for the spiritually sick through "[t]he sharp compassion of the healer's art" (CPP 127). The "Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory" in The Dry Salvages is the

Virgin Mary of Catholic and Anglican tradition who intercedes on behalf of sailors on the sea and those who wait for them (CPP 135). In Little Giddinq, the "familiar

97 compound ghost" (CPP 140) and the dead whose speech "is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living" (CPP

139) provide further examples.

Grover Smith traces "the concept of guardianship"

from "the legal use of the term to the Stoic-Christian idea of guardian angels" and suggests that Eliot's

introduction of "the Guardians" in The Cocktail Party is an echo of the Guardians in the Republic of Plato and is in line with Eliot's "outline for the social role of the

Community of Christians in The Idea of a_Christian Society

(19 39)" (220). This may be so, although throughout The

Cocktail Party, Eliot is most assuredly at pains to present matters in non-christian, if at times overtly spiritual terms. But Eliot's dramatic foundation for the concept of "guardians" is Euripides' Alcestis and the concept of supernatural beings, such as Apollo to open the play, masquerading as humans to protect the house of a favoured man or woman:

APOLLO: House of Admetus! Here I have endured to

live

Content with labourers' bread— yes. I, a god, Apollo.

... I came here, herdsman to a stranger.

98 Till today I have been this household's guardian.

For here I found Admetus, a good man, fit to entertain a god. (43) Here, after the god identifies himself as a "guardian" of the house of Admetus, he reveals that he has previously stepped in to prevent Death from taking Admetus. And he predicts that Heracles will soon arrive to take Admetus' wife, Alcestis, back from Death by force.

For the purposes of The Cocktail Party, Eliot seems to have split Apollo and Heracles into three "guardians":

Harcourt-Reilly, Julia, and Alex. Harcourt-Reilly is clearly intended to be a Heracles parallel both in terms of his boorish behavior singing and drinking as well as in terms of his promise to "bring someone back from the dead"

(CPP 329 ) .

Eliot's idea to dramatize these three characters as supernatural "guardians" comes initially from Noel Coward.

In Blithe Spirit, the three ancillary characters all partake of the supernatural: Elvira is the spirit of

Charles Condomine's deceased first wife; Madame Arcati is a medium who conducts seances; Edith is "a Natural" who is in subconscious contact with the spirit world. Eliot gives supernatural qualities to his own ancillary

99 characters enabling them to provide protection and guidance in spiritual matters as well as romantic ones.

To further wed this "guidance" to the genre of stage comedy, Eliot has drawn upon the age-old device of servants, clowns, and/or elders who, through timely and often hilarious interruptions and the throwing down of obstacles to be overcome, ultimately aid the couple's choices. Further, each "guardian" is a recognizeable stock character who, even while performing supernatural duties, behaves well within the bounds of the given stock character throughout the play. Alex, for example, despite functioning as Peter's guardian and ushering him along his appropriate spiritual path, remains "in character" as a bluff and boisterous, widely-travelled, well-connected, past-middle age military man. Julia, acting as Celia's guardian, never leaves her role as the elderly gossip, the inescapable busy-body. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly performs his guardian services for all of the characters while enacting a more recent comic type, that of the insightful and wise psychiatrist— a type which finds its roots, after all, in the doctors and physics and medicine men of past eras of stage comedy.

100 Critics of the play tend to praise Eliot's

achievement in terms first put forward by Grover Smith in 1956:

The Cocktail Party is a clever, tart comedy, readily

intelligible in the theatre and for that reason

better than The Family Reunion. Eliot learned in

this play how to interweave easy sophistication,

irresistible to one sort of audience as the work of

Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward had proved, with gradual

complication of problems. Nothing in the first few

minutes of action prepares for any weighty message,

yet by the time this comes, in the final act, it is

less startling than one might imagine. (216)

I would make two adjustments to this interpretation.

First off, the first few minutes do indeed "prepare" the audience for such a message by firmly rooting the play in

the genre of drawing-room comedy and by beginning almost immediately to develop the genre on several levels. The stock characters which populate the stage and the stock situation which is presented at the opening curtain are systematically deepened and expanded to function on two planes at once.

Secondly, the "message" is not sprung on the audience

in Act Three or even with Reilly's comments about the two

101 ways (quoted above) in Act Two. They evolve naturally and structurally from the comic proceedings of the play.

Stock characters continue to behave as stock characters even as their supernatural qualifications begin to manifest themselves. The audience— partly made up of

Eliot "admirers" engaged in symbol hunting and partly made up of theatre-goers born and bred on Noel Coward— will respond to the dramatized goings on at various levels of understanding, gradually coming together as a single audience witnessing a single, though multifaceted action.

Walter Davis has suggested Grotowski's dictum that the director's first job is to cast the audience applies equally to the playwright (8). Eliot was acutely aware of the difficulty of this primary task, given his already established fame. The audience for a T. S. Eliot comedy

(certainly in 1949 and still quite likely even today) would be made up of two separate strands: Eliot's

"admirers", as he terms them, and those theatre-goers who are more accustomed to West End and Broadway type fare.

After reading and reflecting on such works as "The Love

Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four

Quartets, Eliot's admirers are primed to delve mentally below the surface of an Eliot work, searching for hidden

102 meanings, sources and allusions— "symbol-hunting" if you will. But this is not the component of his audience with which Eliot was primarily concerned; The poet cannot afford to write his play merely for

his admirers, those who know his non-dramatic work

and are prepared to receive favourably anything he

puts his name to. He must write with an audience in

view which knows nothing and cares nothing, about any

previous success he may have had before he ventured

into the theatre. 138)

Eliot felt very strongly that his earlier dramatic successes, particularly Murder in the Cathedral, were "a dead end" from the perspective that they were written for a very different type of audience--"an audience of those serious people who go to 'festivals' and expect to have to put up with poetry" (SP 139).

Having solved the problem of creating the verse form suitable to a drama of contemporary personages and situations in The Family Reunion, Eliot turned his attention to matters of stage craft and dramatic form.

I tried to keep in mind ... in designing The Cocktail

Party ... that in a play, from time to time,

something should happen; that the audience should be

kept in constant expectation that something is going

103 to happen; and that, when it does happen, it should

be different, but not too different, from what the

audience had been led to expect. 144)

Eliot well knew the importance of a quick, energetic beginning to a play and is not so much trying to "parody empty small-talk" (Jones 127) as he is trying to emulate the mastery of Noel Coward in using language to draw audiences into a drama. Eliot is out to capture the broader audience when the curtain rises on The Cocktail

Party and that audience is drawn immediately into a production commencing, not only iji_ médias res, but in médias converse as so many successful Shakespeare and Noel

Coward comedies do (Lloyd Evans 164). Immediately, the well-trained playgoer quiets herself and listens more intently so as to catch up to what is already taking place. ALEX: You've missed the point completely, Julia:

There were no tigers. That was the point.

JULIA: Then what were you doing, up in a tree:

You and the Maharaja?

ALEX: My dear Julia!

It's perfectly hopeless. You haven't been

listening.

PETER: You'll have to tell us all over again, Alex.

104 ALEX: I never tell the same story twice.

JULIA: But I'm still wanting to know what happened. I know it started as a story about tigers. ALEX: I said there were no tigers.

CELIA: Oh do stop

wrangling.

Both of you. It's your turn, Julia.

Do tell us that story you told the other day,

about

Lady Klootz and the wedding cake.

PETER: And how the butler found her in the pantry,

rinsing her mouth out with champagne.

I like that story.

CELIA: I love that story.

ALEX: I'm never tired of hearing

that story. (CPP 297)

Here, the verse takes on the rhythm of animated conversation, familiar enough as what D. E. Jones calls a

"kind of pseudo-wit made popular by Noel Coward" (127) to bring the full attention of both components of Eliot's audience to bear on the proceedings. An avid reader of

Eliot's works is already predisposed to probe into potential symbols and allusions such as the situation of being up in a tree with a "Maharaja". Is the tree a

105 Christian symbol? A crucifix? The play does end with a report of the crucifixion of one of the lead characters.

Does the reference to a Maharaja allude to Eliot's interest in eastern religions and philosophies? Are the tigers meant to be evocative of "Gerontion"'s Christ the tiger? Is the fact that there were, after all, no tigers an allusion to James' Beast in the Jungle? And the champagne? The wedding cake?

With the larger component of his audience in mind,

Eliot takes care to keep the opening lines within the realm of familiar party banter. In addition, Eliot populates the stage with recognizable types, stock figures the behavior of which will to a large degree be determined by the expectations of the audience. The young couple,

Celia and Peter, are quickly identified as they speak sequentially to one another, even finishing each other's sentences. Alex, the bluff, straightforward military man filled with worldly advice and well-versed in the name- dropping of contacts and acquaintances gleaned from his many adventures traveling all over the world is larger than life and central to the initial goings on as he tells one of his adventure stories. Julia, the slightly senile old gossip who lives for cocktail parties and her chance to poke her nose into everyone's business, betrays a

106 decided fondness for champagne as she drinks and probes.

Edward, the logical, self-controlled barrister, embodies the character understood and expected to represent the role of reason and logic against the slings and arrows of outrageous comedy.

In addition, Eliot has provided for his audience, in

Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly (the Unidentified Guest) a character to act on their behalf as the recipient of background information and explanations which both he and the audience lack. A series of negative responses from this character ("No, I've never heard it" ... "No, I never met her" ... "No, I don’t know her" ... "No, I don't know the Vincewells") aid in the distribution of expository material from the characters who possess it to the Unidentified Guest and the eavesdropping audience.

Indeed, both components of Eliot's audience are rewarded early on. Eliot's own "admirers" are rewarded with titbits like the tigers, the Maharaja, and the wedding cake. The theme of the play, indeed, will be of weddings and marriages and religious commitments, beasts in the jungle which do not attack and those which do.

Even Julia's humorous story of the boy who could hear the cry of bats establishes the theme that different people

107 have different sensibilities and capacities for apprehension as well as for suffering.

Audiences of the Noel Coward type are more likely drawn into the stock characters and stock situations, propelled by their own expectations of couple shifting and comeuppances into the deepening themes of the play.

Indeed, as David E. Jones notes, ” [f]or some time after the curtain goes up on the burst of laughter which marks

Julia's failure to see the joke, we might be watching an ordinary West End comedy" (127).

With the help of the busy-body Julia and the seemingly uninformed as well as Unidentified Guest, the audience soon zeroes in on the fact that Edward is attempting to squirm free of an embarrassing social situation even as he faces a stressful personal one. His wife, Lavinia, has left him, we will learn— and left him just hours before a cocktail party she has arranged is scheduled to begin. Discovering this, Edward has managed to call and cancel with all but a few of the guests, those few now seated around him at the opening curtain; Julia and Alex, Peter and Celia, and an unidentified guest whom

Edward does not know. The interactions of the characters and Edward's increasingly apparent predicament provide the laughter we associate with comedy.

108 A series of duologues follows the opening party scene

to develop this comic situation. First, Edward confides to the Unidentified Guest his desire to see his departed wife again. Second, Peter returns to confide in Edward his puzzlement at a failing and perhaps failed relationship with Celia. Third, Celia returns to confront

Edward about his reaction to the news about Lavinia— his desire to have Lavinia back and his apparent willingness to allow their own relationship to end. Fourth and

finally, with the aid of the Unidentified Guest, Lavinia and Edward are reunited in what ends up being a miserably failed attempt at a rapprochement.

Through these duologues and the incessant

interruptions to these conversations by the stock characters, Alex and Julia, Eliot shifts the focus from the couples' romantic exploits to their spiritual lives and the impact that their past and present relationships will have on their future life journeys. Eliot uses these duologues and the attendant interruptions to illustrate the hell of indifference that each character potentially faces. In addition, these duologues serve to establish that these characters are not of the same cloth when it

109 comes to capacity for sensitivity to philosophical and spiritual considerations and will need to be guided along different paths.

Eliot seems, again, to be indebted to Noel Coward and

Blithe Spirit for the basic approach he appropriates and develops. The substance of many Noel Coward plays is a series of witty, emotional, sometimes passionate exchanges between individuals, usually a man and a woman. These exchanges are punctuated by hilarious, interrupting antics of ancillary characters whose function, dramatically, is to break up the intense exchanges and give the audience some comic relief.

In Blithe Spirit, for instance. Coward very early on establishes the character of Edith, the Condomines’ recently hired maid, as highly strung. Ruth has been helping her practice patience and deliberation by making her empty ice-cube trays and fill them up again with water. Though she is praised for making "giant strides"

(12), she still bolts comically in and out of the room in response to various bells and commands. This established, she functions very nicely as a frantic form of comic relief throughout the play, especially at well-timed moments during the "duologues". At the end of the play, it must be noted. Coward springs upon his audience the

110 revelation that Edith is "a Natural" (105) who has somehow caused the materialization of Elvira's ghost. Nothing in Edith's behavior up to the point of revelation has prepared us for this.

By the time of The Cocktail Party, Eliot has taken this approach to heart and uses his ancillary characters in a similar fashion, breaking up long conversations between characters and providing comic relief. Many critics, such as Grover Smith, are inclined to interpret these characters at the comic level only: "The clowning by

Sir Henry and the idiocies of Alex and Julia, being largely devoid of satiric motive, should probably be considered Eliot's antidote to the gravity and problem- comedy tone of his play" (219). But Eliot had a deeper function in mind for these characters who, while behaving as interrupting busy-bodies and know-it-alls, are also performing the more important function of guardianship for the primary characters.

It was Eliot's director E. Martin Brown who encouraged Eliot in the direction of these interruptions by Alex and Julia who in earlier drafts, he feared, were not being sufficiently developed by the time of their more spiritual behaviors in the later scenes: "These additions not only served to break up long duologues, and sharpen

ill their effect by doing so, but also make clear the role of the three guardians" (183). The final version of Eliot's play develops the comic situation into a philosophical exploration through this series of duologues punctuated by the simultaneously comic and guardian-like interruptions of Alexander MacColgie Gibbs and Julia Shuttlethwaite.

The first of these characters, known to the others and to the audience simply as "Alex," is from the start represented as an aging, slightly over-weight, widely- traveled miltary man, full of stories of journeys to strange places, the interesting customs and significant personages he has met there. He exhibits all the conventional traits. Frye identifies this stock character as miles gloriosus, the braggart soldier, and traces it back to Aristophanes' The Acharnians (163). In naming this particular stock character "Alex", Eliot emphasizes the his connection to the Greek myth of Alcestis and the phrase "alexikakos" by which the "averter of evil"

Heracles is so often evoked (Vellacort 20). Alex's role in the play is that of an averter, interrupting proceedings at crucial moments to prevent Peter from learning certain facts or admitting others.

It is Alex the averter's story that is in progress when the curtain rises: "You've missed the point

112 completely, Julia:I There were no tigers. That was the point.” The playgoer never gets to hear the story of how Alex and the Maharaja came to be up a tree hiding from non-existent tigers, but the persona of Alex is

immediately powerful and recognizable as the stock character who claims to "never tell the same story twice” but frequently does. It is Alex who knows the family history of Lady Klootz. It is Alex who knows the family secret of Delia Verinder. Alex is, on the surface, a bumbling busybody who pops in when he is least wanted. He tends to interrupt proceedings based opn his supreme confidence that he knows just what needs to be done at just that moment. The audience recognizes and enjoys these interruptions which provide a great deal of levity throughout the play. Initially, the levity is caused because, as audience members, we seem to know the situation better than Alex. Later, we come to know that

Alex in fact knows a great deal more than we about the proceedings.

In Julia, we have a similar character. She is recognizably a stock-figure who behaves completely in accordance with her role as a dizzy, perhaps tipsy, old gossip, poking her nose into everything— prying into

Alex's stories, prodding into the identify of the

113 Unidentified Guest, questioning Ed%#ard about the

disappearance of his wife despite his earlier explanation

that she has gone to care for a sick aunt. She caps it

all with a dry, "well, we won't probe into it" (CPP 302)

It is Julia who is pressing Alex for a clarification

to his story about tigers when the curtain goes up. It is almost as if she resents having to make her gossip stories

share the stage with Alex's world travel stories. It is

Julia who is repeatedly trying to draw out the

Unidentified Guest in the early dialogue, thereby

fulfilling the dramatic function of drawing the audience's

attention to what will be an increasingly important

character: "Do you know Delia Verinder?" "No, I don't know

her." "Well, one can't be too careful I Before one tells a

story." "Did you know the Vincewells?" "No, I don't know

the Vincewells." "Oh, they're both dead now. But I wanted

to know.I If they'd been friends of yours, I couldn't tell

the story" (CPP 298, 300).

Julia's stories (even those she doesn't tell) are

evocative of the stock character she represents. And they

are funny. She has the story about Lady Klootz and the

wedding cake in which the butler finds the aforementioned

Lady Klootz in the pantry rinsing her mouth out with

champagne (CPP 297). She has the story about the

114 Vincewell's whose son Tony "was the product, but not the

solution" (CPP 300) of their troubled marriage. Most striking, however, is her story about the "harmless" third

brother of Delia Verinder.

Julia: He was very clever at repairing clocks;

And he had a remarkable sense of hearing—

The only man I ever met who could hear the cry of

bats.

Peter: Hear the cry of bats?

Julia: He could hear the cry

of bats. Celia: But how do you know he could hear

the cry of bats? Julia: Because he said so. And I

believed him. Celia: But if he was so ... harmless,

how could you believe him?

He might have imagined it.

Julia: My darling Celia,

You needn't be so skeptical. I stayed there once At their castle in the North. How he suffered!

They had to find an island for him

Where there were no bats. (CPP 299)

Without departing one iota from her stock-comic role as a scatter-brained gossip, Julia has managed to introduce the main theme of the play: levels of sensibility and the suffering which accompanies the lives of the most

115 sensitive. Different members of the cast will be revealed to have varying capacities for responding to life emotionally and spiritually. The fact that this unfortunate fellow was clever at repairing clocks may be taken to indicate that he was clever at adjusting faulty human perceptions of time, just as the guardians are.

Ultimately, it will be Celia who, in re-examining her sense of reality, her sense of past, present, and future, will suffer so intensely from her heightened perceptions that she, like the boy, will go away to an island. It is

Julia who will be principally responsible for guiding

Celia toward this path.

But in these early moments of The Cocktail Party,

Julia Shuttlethwaite primarily engaged in probing into

Edward's unfortunate situation. It is increasingly obvious to everyone that Edward's wife has left him or that some similarly sordid secret is being kept. "Edward without Lavinia!" she announces when Edward has left the room. "He's quite impossible!! Leaving it to me to keep things going. What a host! And nothing fit to eat!I The only reason for a cocktail party! For a gluttonous old woman like me ! Is a really nice tit-bit. I can drink at home" (CPP 299). Edward has tossed off the lame excuse that she is visiting a sick aunt. And as Julia presses on

116 with questions for which Edward has prepared no answers it becomes obvious that, lo, Edward has married without knowing Bunbury: Is she visiting her aunt Laura? No? Her favourite aunt?

EDWARD: Her aunt's favourite neice. And she's rather

difficult.

When she's ill she insists on having Lavinia.

JULIA: I've never heard of her being ill before.

EDWARD : No, she's always very strong. That's why

when she's ill

She gets into a panic.

JULIA: And sends for Lavinia.

I quite understand.

I understand these tough old women—

I'm one myself: I feel as if I knew

All about this aunt in Hampshire.

EDWARD : Hampshire?

JULIA: Didn't you say Hamphire?

EDWARD : No, I didn't say

Hampshire. JULIA: Did you say Hampstead?

EDWARD : No, I didn't say

Hampstead.

JULIA: But she must live somewhere.

117 EDWARD: She lives in

Essex.

JULIA: Anywhere near Colchester? Lavinia loves

oysters.

EDWARD: No. In the depths of Essex.

JULIA: Well, we won't probe into it. (CPP 301-2)

Edward survives Julia's probing and is about to enjoy the solitude he so desires when he begins the series of duologues by, on a whim, asking the last of the departing characters, the mysterious Unidentified Guest, to stay a little while longer. A close examination of the ensuing dialogues in sequence will reveal the double functioning of these stock characters as they gradually reveal themselves to be "guardians" of a higher order, seeking to guide the four romantically challenged characters along their appropriate spiritual paths.

Edward, finding himself in the confessional mode in the company of this stranger, the Unidentified Guest, gives the audience the exposition for which we have been waiting, for which our curiosity has been piqued by the persistent gadfly Julia.

EDWARD : I want to apologise for this evening.

The fact is, I tried to put off this party:

These were the only people I couldn't put off

118 Because I couldn't get at them in time;

And I didn't know that you were coming. I thought that Lavinia had told me all the names Of all the people she said she'd invited.

But it's only that dreadful old woman who

mattered—

I shouldn't have minded anyone else,

[The bell rings. EDWARD goes to the door,

saying :]

She always turns up when she's least wanted.

[Opens the door]

Julia !

[Enter JULIA] (CPP 303-4)

She has forgotten her umbrella and so returns to initiate

the pattern of interruptions to the duologues which she and Alex will perpetuate throughout. Whereas Alex's

interruptions appear designed to protect Peter, Julia's will be centered upon Celia. D. E. Jones suggests a

different stratification of guardians to characters: "it becomes clear from the machinations of Act II that Julia

is indeed [Celia's] guardian and that Alex is Edward's"

(149). It is true that Alex will lavish attention on

Edward, the making of the toothsome meal and so forth.

But the truth is that Alex's interest is in Peter and.

119 more precisely, in protecting Peter from the Influence of Edvrard, just as Julia will later be intent upon protecting

Celia from both Edward and Lavinia. The duologues will reveal that only the spiritually inclined, Celia and

Peter, are in need of supernatural guardians because of their delicate condition as initiates to the way of detachment. Edward and Lavinia are revealed to be more mundane. They must not be allowed to damage the others as they find their way to a deeper attachment. This is established almost immediately in the first conversation, that of Edward and the Unidentified Guest.

This first duologue has been criticized for being unrealistic in its motivation- Edward, at pains to keep his marital situation secret from his friends, feels suddenly compelled to tell all to a complete stranger.

But Eliot is here inverting a similarly bizarre circumstance from the source play, Euripides' Alcestis.

There, all the community of Pherae know the situation of

Admetus : his wife is dead, having agreed to die in his place. When Heracles arrives as a visitor in the house of mourning, Admetus chooses to keep the death of Alcestis secret from his good friend. Admetus plays the role of good host to the extreme to prevent his friend Heracles from traveling to another man's home, as he would surely

120 do if he knew the truth. Edward's hiding the truth publicly and confiding it to a total stranger is an inversion of Admetus* hiding the truth the whole world knows from his close friend, Heracles.

In both instances, the choice brings the influence of the supernatural to bear on the case of the missing wife.

In Alcestis, Heracles is so moved by the hospitality of his friend, Admetus, when he learns the truth about his wife’s death, that he confronts Death and wrestles him to win Alcestis back. In The Cocktail Party, the

Unidentified Guest, using a twisted form of reverse psychology, manipulates Edward into requesting that his departed wife be brought back to him. When Edward has second thoughts, the Uninvited Guest rebukes him:

... all you wanted was the luxury

Of an intimate disclosure to a stranger.

Let me, therefore, remain the stranger.

But let me tell you, that to approach the stranger Is

to invite the unexpected, release a new force.

Or let the genie out of the bottle.

It is to start a train of events

Beyond your control. (CPP 306)

Despite a developing air of mystery and the supernatural about him, the Unidentified Guest stays within his

121 announced role of psychiatrist, making diagnoses and prescribing cures. The central action is that Edward and the Unidentified Guest arrange to have Edward's missing wife, Lavinia, returned to him. This, Edward feels, will be the end of his ordeal. But as the duologues continue,

Edward and the audience learn that the ordeal is just beginning. The train of events has only just been set in motion.

Once Edward has arranged with the Unidentified Guest to have his wife returned to him, Julia pops in again ("So it's you again, Julia!" CPP 309). This time she has forgotten her glasses and has brought Peter back with her.

She's been "dragging Peter all over town I Looking for them everywhere" (CPP 309). Later, we may realize that Julia's control of Peter serves, conveniently, to keep Peter away from Celia who has by now realized that Edward is free of

Lavinia. To the audience at this stage, however, she is merely providing comic relief within her stock-character role of the nosy gossip zeroing in on a new scandal at the

Chamberlayne residence.

We are not surprised to learn, after all, that the glasses have been in her handbag the entire time. But we are perhaps taken aback at the hint that there may be something deeper to this character as well when she

122 identifies the spectacles by saying that "one lens is

missing" (CPP 309) which sparks the Unidentified Guest to burst into raucous song about drinking gin and water

(which he has been) and "bein’ the One Eyed Riley" and

making songful reference to Julia as "the landlord’s

daughter" (CPP 309-10) No one is more offended by this

than Julia, who produces her glasses, sans lens, and

departs leaving Edward and Peter alone to commence the

second of the duologues.

The conversation between Peter and Edward ensues,

this time with the appropriate interruptions provided by

Alex. Julia, as Celia’s guardian, does not return to

Edward's flat until Celia does so. Peter has returned to

seek Edward's fatherly advice about a romantic matter

regarding Celia. Alex's first interruption occurs here during this potentially delicate conversation between

Peter and Edward. In the context of what the audience currently knows (only that Lavinia has left Edward and

that the Uninvited Guest will be bringing her back to him), Alex's series of interruptions can only be taken as

bumbling interference. Alex, in wanting to help Edward is

intruding where he is not wanted or needed. But given

what we will later learn, that Edward and Celia have been having an affair and that Edward sees Peter, bitterly, as

123 a younger rival, Alex's interruptions take on a protective quality. Alex is here, not as Edward's guardian, but as

Peter's averter of possible damage. Peter is the sensitive soul beginning a journey that could easily be derailed in its early stages. Edward is merely the drowning man capable of harming those who come within his grasp. It is Alex's job, along with providing comic relief from intense discussions, to protect Peter.

Edward asks Peter a pointed question about his relationship with Celia; "How did you come to know her?"

The answer is averted by the unannounced arrival of Alex:

"Ah, there you are Edward! Do you know why I *ve looked in?" (CPP 312). Alex is perfectly in character as the take-charge, military man, bounding in to do what must be done for Edward whose wife, as Edward has claimed, has gone to take care of a sick aunt. His plan, since he knows all the best restaurants, is to take Edward out for dinner. "I thought, Edward may be all alone this evening,1 And I know that he hates to spend an evening alone ..." (CPP 313). The audience well knows that Edward has been pining and protesting all along to be left alone so that he can sort matters out. This is a familiar comic situation often performed by the type of character Alex represents: forcefully doing just the wrong thing for a

124 character who cannot give a suitably forceful refusal

without revealing a secret he is unwilling to reveal. ... I know what I'll do.

I'm going to give you a little surprise:

You know. I'm a rather famous cook.

I'm going straight to your kitchen now

And I shall prepare you a nice little dinner

Which you can have alone. And. then we'll leave you.

Meanwhile, you and Peter can go on talking

And I shan't disturb you. (CPP 313)

But disturbances rather than cooking are Alex's specialty, and all he does for the duration of the Peter-Edward conversation

is disturb and interrupt— all in accordance with his expected behavior as a stock character -

Edward protests: "There'll be nothing in the larder worthy of your cooking.I I couldn't think of it." But such characters are not so easily put off:

Ah, but that's my special gift—

Concocting a toothsome meal out of nothing.

Any scraps will do. I learned that in the East.

With a handful of rice and a little dried fish

I can make half a dozen dishes.

Don't say a word. I shall begin at once. (CPP 313)

125 Alex's interruptions are not merely hilarious, they are also exquisitely timed to prevent Peter from suffering damage at the hands of the distraught and vitriolic Edward who is, through Peter's innocent explanations, learning that his Celia has been involved with a younger man. "Did you see her often?" (CPP 314) Edward snaps. And, as if on cue, Alex's voice rings from the kitchen:

Edward, have you a double boiler?

EDWARD: I suppose there must be a double boiler:

Isn't there one in every kitchen?

ALEX'S VOICE: I can't find it.

There goes that surprise. I must think of another. (CPP 314).

Throughout the scene, Edward parrots the Unidentified Guest's advice to Peter in very agressive ways. "But what am I to do?" Peter asks about Celia's recent lack of interest in him. "Nothing. Wait. Go back to California" answers Edward, adding, "I don't know why I should be taking all this trouble I To protect you from the fool you are" (CPP 316). These responses reveal that Edward lacks a great deal in the way of compassion as well as in the way of insight as to the Unidentified Guest's advice.

Peter, on the other hand, reveals himself to be a

126 sensitive and thoughtful artist, a novelist and filmmaker

whose experience with Celia gives him a spiritual capacity that Edward cannot understand. He speaks of moments of

shared perception with Celia and describes a kind of love beyond desire of which Edward is incapable. Once again

the words of a character in The Cocktail Party echo the

words of Four Quartets when Peter says:

And I was so happy when we were together—

So ... contented, so ... at peace: I can't express

it;

r had never imagined such quiet happiness.

I had only experienced excitement, delirium.

Desire for possession. It was not like that at all.

It was something very strange. There was such

tranquility ... (CPP 315)

Peter has learned, as Edward never will, about the use of memory for the "expansion of love beyond desire" (CPP 142). Edward can respond only with bitterness and sarcasm: "There's no memory you can wrap in camphor I But the moths will get in" (CPP 316-17). Edward's view of the pastness of the past is the tragic vision, and he uses the deterministic language of indifference. The past is dead and gone except as it has reduced present choices. Peter views the past as something significant which still

127 breathes life into the present. Peter feels he must

somehow understand the past, what has happened with Celia, in order to preserve his future: "I have been telling you

of something real— I My first experience with reality . . .

(CPP 315)

Peter is in a precarious state as he tries to ferret out his new perceptions. And Edward is in a position to impose his own negative interpretations and ridicule upon the young man. But Alex is within earshot and averts the damage that may be done with another timely interruption.

When Edward asks Peter, "And what interrupted this interesting affair?" The answer comes in the form of a stage direction: "Enter Alex with shirtsleeves and an apron" (CPP 315). Alex is in a state of agitation, ostensibly because he can't find any curry powder, and the conversation is effectively derailed. "There goes another surprise then. I must think.| I didn't expect to find any mangoes,I But I did count on curry powder" (CPP 315).

No sooner has Edward agreed to speak to Celia for

Peter than Alex enters with his jacket on and ushers Peter out the door to safety.

Oh, Edward! I've prepared you such a treat!

I really think that of all my triumphs

This is the greatest. To make something out of

128 nothing! Never, even when traveling in Albania,

Have I made such a supper out of so few materials As I found in your refridgerator. (CPP 317)

The greatest triumph, in actuality, is that Alex has averted a potentially disastrous situation by monitoring the conversation between Peter and Edward and interrupting at just the right moments.

The third duologue begins when Celia returns to

Edward's flat, revealing to the audience that she and

Edward have been having an affair. Alex continues to interrupt by phone, ostensibly to check on the dinner he has left simmering for Edward. But it is Julia who returns in body finding Celia, at Alex's cue, in Edward's kitchen. Julia claims to have had the same "inspiration" as Celia, that of feeding Edward. She appropriates the apron from Celia and tells her to talk to Edward while she works in the kitchen. This is precisely the same dramatic situation that we witnessed with Alex, interrupting from the kitchen as Peter and Edward talked. And Julia's interruptions will also be of the same two levels: that of the busybody interrupting at just the wrong moments for comic relief of an intense conversation and that of a guardian protecting the delicate Celia from Edward's self- centered anguished thrashings.

129 Edward is, perhaps, beginning to take Harcourt-

Reilly's advice to wait and be patient in humiliation—

Eliot's stage direction before this scene, for example, has Edward "alone, playing Patience" (CPP 318), a British form of solitaire with a name evocative of Sir Henry's prescription for Edward. But it is again clear that Celia is a character with much deeper apprehensions of life and love than Edward. The conversation, at first, is the very familiar one of the married man telling his young mistress that he is not willing to divorce his wife even though her departure has given him grounds and left the way clear for marriage to another. Celia is incredulous that Edward could prefer Lavinia: "So you want Lavinia back ! I

Lavinia! So the one thing you care abouti Is to avoid a break— anything unpleasant!" (CPP 322). Edward again speaks in familiar terms:

It's been very wonderful, and I am very grateful.

And I think you are a very rare person.

But it was too late. And I should have known

That it wasn't fair to you. (CPP 323)

Celia is outraged at Edward. And their contrasting perceptions of what the nature of their relationship has been elevate the matter into the realm of spiritual capacity. They speak of time in different terms : "What

130 future had you ever thought there could be?" (CPP 323),

Edward asks. Celia's answer seems taken nearly directly from Four Quartets : CELIA: What had I thought that the future could be?

I abandoned the future before we began.

And after that I lived in a present Where time was meaningless, a private world of

ours.

Where the word happiness had a different meaning

Or so it seemed.

EDWARD: I have heard of that experience.

(CPP 324)

Indeed, these are very nearly the same terms with which Peter spoke of his relationship with Celia.

This "dream" has also been Celia's first experience of reality. But finding that Edward took it as a "passing diversion" (CPP 324) leaves Celia feeling humiliated— not for what Edward has done, but because her apprehension of reality is now seemingly false. This humiliating realization is the beginning, as described by Harcourt-

Reilly, for these characters' spiritual journeys. They must now make a perilous leap: that of keeping ahold of the apprehension, which is true, and shifting it away from the context of the romance, which was false, into that of

131 the spiritual realm. Edward, as he was with Peter, is now

in a position to do damage to Celia. "It never could have been a permanent thing" he tells her. "You should have a man ... nearer your own age" (CPP 325). Celia's rebuke

is sharp:

I don't think I care for advice from you, Edward.

You are not entitled to take any interest

Now, in my future. I only hope you're competent

To manage your own. (CPP 325)

And this is, after all, the action of the play.

Characters will use memory according to their differing capacities to manipulate their perceptions of the past to achieve liberation from the future. It is the job of the guardians to separate the characters from each other so that they may proceed unchecked along their chosen paths.

Celia has made the right choice. Edward and Celia are now moving along separate paths. Interestingly, just as Celia learns that Edward intends to salvage his marriage to Lavinia rather than to divorce and deepen his relationship with Celia, a popping noise is heard in the kitchen. Julia enters in celebratory fashion with a bottle of champagne and three glasses. By now, the audience shares Julia's perception that Edward and Celia do not belong together. Celia's perceptions of love and

132 life, encouraged and punctuated by Julia's interruptions, show her to be rather more like Peter than Edward.

Once Julia deems Celia is safe from Edward's influence, Julia departs. Later, however, Celia is about to wander back into danger when she attempts to specify two things for which she would like Edward *s forgiveness.

She is never able to specify just what these items are because Julia's very well-timed telephone interruption derails the conversation and leaves Edward speculating that the forgiveness involves Celia's relationship with

Peter. This is not true, but the misconception empowers

Edward to let Celia make a clean break of it.

Even though it is not until this duologue of Celia and Edward that the term "guardian" and the concept of

"guardians" in the plural is first named, it has been simmering beneath the surface of the comic action all through the play. Edward's insight is that his guardian is "the dull, the implacable,1 The indomitable spirit of mediocrity" (CPP 326) which prevents him from overreaching, from chosing paths for which he is not qualified. It is, in Edward's conception, more of an internal guidance system than an external guidance counselor. Celia is captivated by this concept, but develops it along external, corporeal lines. Perhaps

133 picking up on the fact that Julia's last interruption, the phone call, has saved her from trusting a delicate confession about the state of her soul to an indelicate, mediocre man, Celia focuses on Julia for her corollary to

Edward's concept. Celia proposes a toast:

EDWARD: Whom shall we drink to?

CELIA: To the Guardians.

EDWARD: To the Guardians?

CELIA: To the Guardians. It was you who spoke of

guardians.

[They drink. 1

It may be that Julia is a guardian.

Perhaps she is iny_ guardian. (CPP 328)

This toast and Celia's subsequent departure mark the moment that Eliot's audience comes to be completely in tune with the multi-level structure of the play. Nothing now remains to be revealed at any level: the comic situation present at the opening curtain has been exposed, along with the characters' pasts. Now, only the managing of their futures remains to be played out. We begin to perceive that Alex, Julia, and Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly have been operating all along and will continue to operate at the level of spiritually gifted guardians as well as that of irritants. And we understand that Celia's and

134 Peter's futures are to be categorically different than those of Edward and Lavinia. While Celia and Peter will have the advantage of external counselors as they move along their chosen paths, Edward and Lavinia will simply be encouraged to listen to their internal guardians, their spirits of mediocrity.

Because of the slow but steady deepening and expanding of the comic-level goings-on into recognizably philosophical and spiritual ones, the revelations of the end of the play meet Eliot's own criteria for being

"different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect" (^P 144). We know that twoways out of indifference are offered and that Edward and

Lavinia are not fit for the way of detachment.

Edward and Lavinia have long ago become specialists in what Walter Davis calls "blame's metonymy" (150). In a discussion of O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night,

Davis sketches the dynamic:

Once couples have achieved a certain history in their

relationship, 'idle talk' constantly shimmers with

its subtext. It's not important who starts any

particular round of blame, because the shared reality

is an intersubjectivity that must issue in drama.

Such is the nature of marriage. Tyrone and Mary are

135 not separate individuals but a single psychological

complex defined by a conflict which each tries to discharge by placing it onto the other. (150-1) This is the hell into which the marriage of Edward and

Lavinia has devolved. The scenes bewteen them in their

home and in Reilly’s office are replete with the detritus

of past arguments— the filling out of tax forms, the

failure to put the cap back on a tube of toothpaste, the

miscommunication over where to spend the honeymoon:

LAVINIA: I said: "I suppose you’d as soon go to

Peacehaven”—

And you said ”I don’t mind.”

EDWARD: Of course I didn't

mind.

I meant it as a compliment.

LAVINIA: You meant it as a

compliment!

EDWARD: It’s just that way of taking things that

makes you so exasperating. (CPP 338)

Eliot has subsequently been defensive about his being perceived as having made a statement in this play about

the nature of marriage in general: ’’Some people want to get a general statement on marriage out of Edward and

Lavinia. You can’t depict all your views about life. You

136 are limited by time" (Jones 137). But this is undeniably

the nature of the marriage of Edward and Lavinia. They

are in fact a "single psychological complex" in which each

can blame the inadequacies of himself upon the other:

It is said that married couples come to resemble each

other. What really happens is that all differences

that aren't functional to the shared disorder

evaporate with time as the interaction comes to

express nothing but the frustrations of the

relationship; which is, of course, the knowledge both

parties resist. (Davis 150)

Edward and Lavinia are diagnosed together by Reilly along

these very lines lines. Edward is a man "incapable of

loving." Lavinia is a woman incapable of being loved.

Reilly elaborates on Edward's condition that "To men of a certain type I The suspicion that they are incapable of

lovingl Is as disturbing to their self-esteemi As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence" (CPP 355). Edward

provides the elaboration on Lavinia's state: "Lavinia,I

You know, you really are exceptionally unlovable" (CPP

355) .

REILLY: And now you begin to see, I hope.

How much you have in common. The same isolation.

137 A man who finds himself incapable of loving

And a woman who finds that no man can love her. LAVINIA: It seems to me that what we have in common Might be just enough to make us loathe one another.

REILLY: See it rather as the bond which holds you

together.

While still in a state of unenlightenment.

You could always say: 'He could not love any

woman•;

You could always say: 'No man could love her.'

You could accuse each other of your own faults.

And so could avoid understanding each other.

Now you have only to reverse the propositions

And put them together.

LAVINIA: Is that possible?

(CPP 355-6)

Reilly does not know the answer and speaks later of

having "taken a great risk" (CPP 367). In fact, the play

itself does not contain the answer. Julia promises to

"keep an eye on them" (CPP 367) but the very real possibility of a descent back into hellish indifference

weighs heavily upon Reilly:

To send them back: what have they to go back to?

To the stale food mouldering in the larder.

138 The stale thoughts mouldering in their minds.

Each unable to disguise his own meanness

From himself, because it is known to the other. It's

not the knowledge of the mutual treachery

But the knowledge that the other understands the

motive— Mirror to mirror, reflecting vanity. I have taken a great risk. (CPP 367)

After the several scenes between Edward and Lavinia in all three acts, this fear of Reilly's has palpable reality for the audience. Eliot has been at work throughout the play exposing the bleak interworkings of the Chamberlayne's marriage. He does not attempt at the end of a play to resolve the flaws, only to establish that the characters are now aware of them. Davis' analysis of

O'Neill's method in A Long Day's Journey into Night is of interest to us here;

It takes a long time to get the structure in place,

but once it clicks, the family has become a pure

psychodrama ready for its repressed conflicts to be

activated. This is where O'Neill begins ... (150)

But this is where Eliot ends, the structure in place, the outcome uncertain. Even Reilly and Julia have their doubts.

139 As audience members, we expect Edward and Lavinia to attempt to "make the best of a bad job" (CPP 356) and to attempt to treat each other with new respect and dignity as they live their lives of barristers' meetings and cocktail parties. But Eliot provides meager evidences of success when we find them in the last scene of the play.

Two years have passed and Edward has learned to compliment

Lavinia's dress before a party. Edward is also quite fussy about Lavinia getting enough rest. This, Eliot seemed to have believed, was enough to communicate his intention that Lavinia is pregnant. A child is about to be "inserted into the interaction" (Davis 150). Will this child be used by the parents "to further their conflicts"?

Or will the child and their new understanding of each other bring a blessing to the union? What remains is for the Chamberlayne's to "work out [their] salvation with diligence" (CPP 366). The last we see of Edward and

Lavinia is the moment just after the doorbell rings signalling the arrival of guests for their cocktail party.

Lavinia betrays a touch of East Coker's "In my end is my beginning" (CPP 129) when she utters, to end the play,

"It's begun" (CPP 387).

Our expectations regarding Peter, Alex, Julia, and

Reilly are more hopeful. We expect Peter to travel to

140 California and pursue his career as an artist making

films, and this he does under the tutelage of one of

Alex's contacts. We expect Alex and Julia and Harcourt-

Reilly to go on being guardians and this they do, heading

to the Gunnings for a party instead of attending the one

Edward and Lavinia are having.

We expect Celia to become a missionary of some sort,

join an austere order and help others. And this she most

certainly does do. But the news that she is dead, that

she has been "crucifiedi Very near an ant hill" (CPP 381)

is rather more than Eliot's audience has been prepared to

take. Grover Smith states that Eliot himself called this

moment a dramatic "kick in the teeth" for the audience

(217). The shock is significant. But it is sufficiently

in line with the supernatural elements now accepted by the audience. The blow is, perhaps, softened by the fact that

the well-trained theatre goer is not unaccustomed to comic

figures that, because of some deeper or more troubling

apprehension, are excluded from the comic festival which ends the play. Jaques in Shakespeare's As You Like It

springs immediately to mind. Further, the shock exhibited by the other characters is sufficient to channel and absorb the shock of the audience.

141 A similar sense greets the playgoer at the end of

Euripides' play when the passionate Alcestis, who had spoken so eloquently about life and death and the future of her children early in the play, is returned to Admetus as a silent figure because she is "still consecrated to the gods below" (79). We long to hear her speak, but she must remain silent for three days, long after the final curtain. In Alcestis, the eponymous character partakes of two worlds at once as she is both mystically silent and corporeally returned to the daily life of marriage and raising a family.

Eliot in splitting Alcestis into two characters for

The Cocktail Party is able to weave an ending which involves both the mystery of Alcestis in the death of

Celia and the promise of Alcestis* return to earthly life in the pregnancy of Lavinia. It has earlier been said of

Lavinia that she "always had the ambition 1 To establish herself in two worlds at once— I But she herself had to be the link between them" (CPP 314). Lavinia, as she eulogizes Celia, is our link to both aspects of Alcestis here in the final scene.

This phrase descriptive of Lavinia could also be applied to Eliot, the playwright, seeking to find success in two worlds at once as he tries to bring the comic

142 vision of perhaps his greatest poem. Four Quartets, to the stage in the form of a commercially successful drawing­ room comedy. And success he did find. After seeing The

Cocktail Party through a gratifying British run and an even more successful American run, Eliot saw the play reach an audience of nearly three and one half million viewers when it was broadcast on television in 1952

(Akroyd 308) . Eliot had found his form of entertainment and developed it successfully. The following year, 1953,

Eliot was prepard to present the second of his three mature comedies. The Confidential Clerk.

143 BIBLIOGRAPHY: CHAPTER 3

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon, 1984 .

Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays. London: Cambridge UP, 1969.

Coward, Noel. Blithe Spirit. 1941. Three Plays by Noel Coward. New York: Grove, 1965. Rpt. 1981.

Davenport, Gary T. "Eliot's The Cocktail Party: Comic Perspective as Salvation." Modern Drama 17 (1974): 301-306.

Davis, Walter A. Get the Guests : Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994.

Euripides. Alcestsis. 438 BCE. Euripides: Three Plays. 1953. Trans. Philip Vellacott. New York: Penguin, 1986. 41-80.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Gordon, Lynda11. Eliot's New Life. New York: Farrar, 1988.

Greene, E. J. H. Menander to Marivaux ; The History of a_ Comic Structure. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1977.

Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot's Negative Way. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 1977.

Jones, David E. The Plays of T. S . Eliot. London: Routledge, 1960.

144 Knowles, Sebastian D. G. A Purgatorial Flame ; Seven British Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1990. Lloyd Evans, Gareth. Upstart Crow: An Introduction to Shakespeare's Plavs. Ed. and rev. Barbara Lloyd Evans. London: Dent, 1982.

Miller, Ronald F . "King Lear and the Comic Form." Genre 8 (1975): 1-25.

Smith, Carol H. T_^ S_^ Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice from Sweeney Agonistes to The Elder Statesman. 1963. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Smith, Grover. S_^ Eliot's Poetry and Plays. 9th Impression. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.

Vellacott, Philip. Introduction. Euripides: Three Plays. 1953. New York: Penguin, 1986. 9-39.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 3rd Ed. E d . Carl E. Bain, et al. New York: Norton, 1981. 1342- 1390.

Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice. London: Faber, 1943. Cited in Knowles 117-8.

145 CHAPTER 4

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: THE USE OF IMAGINATION AND

THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

In The Confidential Clerk (1953), Eliot makes his second attempt to dramatize the comic vision he had worked

out in Four Quartets. Once again he exploits the long history of the genre of stage comedy to find devices, characters, and plot structures to act as "Objective correlative" on the stage for that comic vision. This time, however, Eliot steps away somewhat from the sophisticated surface of Noel Coward's drawingroom comedies and reaches further back to the deeper, though more farcical, fare of works like Oscar Wilde's The

Importance of Being Earnest or Gilbert and Sullivan's ^

M. S . Pinafore. The plot of The Confidential Clerk is essentially built, like the aforementioned Wilde and

Gilbert works, upon the old device of a foundling whose attempts to discover the truth about his past create

146 complications which challenge the social order of the play

and unravel in humorous and surprising ways which establish a new, more stable order among the characters. In Eliot's hands, however, the farcical search for

biological parentage and its attendant social themes is

quickly elevated into the religious-philosophical realm where the search is for spiritual as well as actual

fathers and the play-ending discoveries have far-reaching

psychological and religious implications for the

characters involved.

As the play begins. Sir Claude Mulhammer is meeting

with his out-going confidential clerk, Eggerson, to

arrange the delicate matter of introducing his new

confidential clerk, Colby, to his wife. Lady Elizabeth.

The matter is delicate for two reasons. One is that Lady

Elizabeth detests change unless she herself suggests it.

More pressing is that Mulhammer believes Colby to be his

own illegitimate son.

As proof of their relation, Mulhammer cites the fact

that both he and Colby share the experience of artistic disappointment in life. Claude had hoped to be a fine

potter, but lacks the skill. He continues working with clay as a hobby and focuses most of his energies on

business. Colby had hopes of being a fine organist, but

147 feels he has reached the point in his career where he must acknowledge failure. Mulhammer expects to teach Colby how to channel his energies into business, playing piano only in his spare time.

Mulhammer hopes that Lady Elizabeth will take a liking to Colby and, perhaps, suggest adopting him and, thus, "regularize his position in the household" (CP 220).

Mulhammer has not, as yet, decided whether or not he will tell Lady Elizabeth of his relationship to Colby. The matter is further complicated in that Sir Claude also has an illegitimate daughter, Lucasta. This fact is already known to Lady Elizabeth and Sir Claude does not wish to shock her with another such revelation. It must also be noted that Lady Elizabeth herself once had a son— about

Colby's age— who was lost as an infant upon the death of her fiance, Tony, who was run over by a rhinoceros in

Tanganyika. In addition, Eggerson and his wife long ago

"lost" a child in the war, "his grave unknown" (CP 220).

If all these lost children and their parents do not call to mind Gilbert and Sullivan's "Little Buttercup" who in jii M_^ S_^ Pinafore "practised baby farming I A many years ago" (179) and got her children mixed up, then surely the words of Lady Bracknell (in Oscar Wilde's The

Importance of Being Earnest) must echo in the playgoer's

148 memory; "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded

as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness" (1354). D. E. Jones, in highlighting the Wildean

connection, categorizes the play as "high farce" and

traces the development of the genre from the Greeks

forward :

It is a play in the central tradition of European

comedy, which first flowered in Greek New Comedy, was

transplanted to the Rome of Plautus and Terence and

thence shed its seeds in all the countries of Europe,

springing up early and late, in Shakespeare's

nursery. The strain grew sickly until Oscar Wilde

cross-fertilized it with the comedy of manners and

developed a brilliant new species in his hothouse.

Yet the characteristics of lost children, searching

parents, and mistaken identity, persisted all the

while. (155-6)

In developing his own new species of farce in The

Confidential Clerk, Eliot is again working at developing his comedy on two levels: the conventional comic surface

of mistaken identity and the deeper parallel theme of the search for spiritual identity articulated in Four

Quartets. "The Confidential Clerk is serious farce,"

remarks Denis Donoghue; "the basic situation of foundlings

149 and castaways is the surface of the play. But the farce in that play has another dimension" (148). Donoghue refers to a spiritual portion of the play consisting of

"the parts which Noel Coward could not have written"

(149). Eloise Knapp Hay is more specific: "Onto this comic plot ... Eliot grafted the serious plot of a young man's quest for God, a plot closer to The Pilgrim's

Progress" (140). Some reviewers, such as Harold Hobson, failed or refused to see the deeper aspects of the play, calling it merely "a tower of absurdity which will strike as funny anyone whose sense of humour is developed even far enough to be diverted by the spectacle of Mr.

Robertson Hare losing his trousers" (Donoghue 148). But

D. E. Jones unwittingly answers such interpretations as

Hobson's by emphasizing the play as "a kind of spiritual farce":

it is just that [the characters] are suddenly caught

with their defenses down, having doffed some of the

armour of sophistication or removed their social

masks, instead of being caught in their underwear

like characters in the more usual type of farce.

(158-9)

To bring his two levels of farce into balance, Eliot works within the same seven-character set-up established

150 for The Cocktail Party. Like its predecessor. The

Confidential Clerk features two couples, one young and one older. Colby and Lucasta have replaced the youngsters Celia and Peter. Likewise, Sir Claude Mulhammer and his wife Lady Elizabeth have replaced the middle-aged Edward and Lavinia. The "guardian" characters of The Cocktail

Party (Harcourt-Reilly, Julia, and Alex) have been toned down considerably in terms of their supernatural qualities; but hints remain in Eggerson, Mrs. Guzzard, and

B. Kaghan as they fulfill the same dramatic function as their predecessors in terms of providing timely interruptions and advancing, subtly, the developing relationships of both couples. The two relationships

(that of Colby and Lucasta along with that of Claude and

Elizabeth) are teased and tested through the interventions and revelations of the three ancillary characters,

Eggerson, B. Kaghan, and Mrs. Guzzard. And it does not take long before the philosophical considerations of the failed musician are transfigured from the realm of foundlings and farce.

Though the guardian "characters" are greatly

"regularized" in The Confidential Clerk hints of their earlier and other creative powers in The Cocktail Party remain. The need for guidance is still clearly present in

151 the characters. And the term "guidance" is introduced quite early in the play during the opening conversation as

Mulhammer and Eggerson discuss the misguided Lady

Elizabeth: "she believe's she has what she calls

'guidance'" (CP 219). Mulhammer's wife has, over the course of their marriage, immersed herself in bizarre searches for insight that have taken her all over Europe.

She believes she can read peoples' auras (CP_231). She continues to conduct "investigations into ... the life of the spirit" (CP, 238). She makes distinctions between mystics who practice "mind control" and those who merely practice "thought control" (CP 232). She is interested in

"Light from the East", "The Book of Revelation", and "The

Wisdom of Atlantis" (CP_ 220), not to mention dervish rituals, health cures and modern art (CP_ 268). She is, in short, a dramatic embodiment for the hopeless searches for guidance which Eliot catalogues in section V of The Dry

Salvages :

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits.

To report the behaviour of the sea monster.

Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry.

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biography from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers; release omens

152 By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into preconscious terrors—

To explore the womb, tomb, or dreams; all these are

usual Pastimes and drugs ... (CPP 136)

Lady Elizabeth is the character whose need for "guidance" is exploited comically. But all the characters are in search of greater fulfillment, a more secure sense of identity.

Even the term "guardian", so richly developed in supernatural fashion throughout The Cocktail Party, is bandied about in Act II of The Confidential Clerk. B.

Kaghan, with delighted enegergy, engages in those timely interruprtions perfected by Alex and Julia in the earlier play. "Enter B. Kaghan!" he says, each time he bursts into a scene. At the first interruption, he claims the title and role of "guardian" for himself: "Trust Kaghan's intuitions!" he announces; "I'm your guardian angel,|

Colby ..." (ÇP 250). If Eliot intends his audience to think of Julia in The Cocktail Party and her deliberately timed interruptions to the tete-a-tete between Edward and

Celia, Kaghan's next line cements it: "I told Colby, never learn to mix cocktails,I If you don't want women always

153 dropping in on you" (CP, 251). Kaghan even mentions

"tigers" as Julia did to open the earlier play.

Mrs. Guzzard, too, shares some vestiges of the

supernatural guardians from The Cocktail Party. Indeed,

she utters the same kinds of mysterious phrases to end The

Confidential Clerk that Harcourt-Reilly does to begin The

Cocktail Party. "But let me tell you," Reilly had warned

Edward in the earlier play, "that to approach the

stranger I Is to invite the unexpected, release a new

force,I Or let the genie out of the bottle" (CPP 306).

Mrs. Guzzard is made to speak in similar terms in the very

last scene of her play: "I have been asked here to answer

strange questions— I And now it is my turn to ask them.1 I

should like to gratify everyone's wishes"; "We all of us

have to adapt ourselves 1 To the wish that is granted";

"Wishes, when realised, sometimes turnl Against those who

have made them" (CP 284).

Even Eggerson, who throughout the play appears, on

the surface, to be merely the polite, eager-to-oblige,

retiring private secretary to Sir Claude Mulhammer, is

revealed at the end to have been engaged in Harcourt-

Reilly-like behaviors. He does not step in, as his

surface, role as Mulhammer's outgoing confidential clerk

requires, when Mrs. Guzzard turns the official inquiry

154 into a bizarre session of wish-granting. And when Lady

Elizabeth asks him to persuade Colby to stay, Eggerson refuses a request for the first time in the play, and probably for the first time in his thirty-one years of service. "I wouldn't venture" (CP^ 289), he responds. One begins to suspect that his "service" all these years has been to look after the boy, Colby, as he grew, rather than after the interests of his employer, Mulhammer.

Just as the guardians of The Cocktail Party found their roots in the source for that play, Euripides'

Alcestis. the characters of The Confidential Clerk trace their supernatural elements to Euripides' Ion. The eponymous figure of Euripides' later play is the source for Colby. Ion will learn that his father is not in fact

Xuthus but the god, Apollo; Colby will learn that Sir

Claude Mulhammer is not his real father, leaving Colby free to devote his life to God, his heavenly father. The bearer of this news in the Ion is Pallas Athena. In The

Confidential Clerk the revelation at the end of the play is made by the baby farmer, Mrs. Guzzard, who partakes both of Gilbert's Buttercup and Euripides' deus ex machina.

Eliot's treatment of the source echoes Shakespeare's development of the Menaechmi of Plautus. Shakespeare

155 doubled the characters provided by Plautus and arrived at

a pleasing multiplicity of complications based on two sets

of identical twins, the Antipholuses and the Dromios.

Eliot likewise splits his source characters into more than

one contemporary character: Ion, for example, is split

into Colby, B. Kaghan, and, one might argue, Lucasta

Angel. The end result is three young people searching for

their true identities, rather than one, allowing Eliot to

show, as he did in The Cocktail Party, that each character

has a different capacity or sensibility for the search.

By juxtaposing the two couples and the outcomes that

are possible for each individual, Eliot illustrates,

dramatically, the various ways of achieving the

apprehension of the still point. For the person of

religious sensibility (such as Celia or Colby), it

involves or will involve "prayer, observance, discipline,

thought and action" (CPP 136). For the artistic characters (such as Peter and, to begin the play, Colby

and, to end the play, perhaps, Lucasta) it involves

immersion in art. For normal, everyday characters (like

Edward and Lavinia, Mulhammer and Lady Elizabeth) apprehension of the still point involves renewed

commitment to more everyday matters such as marriage, cocktail parties, and the finance business.

156 For all persons and characters, it means aspiring to

the next level, and this is the primary source of dramatic tension: the characters are dissatisfied with their roles

in life and, as they each learn more about their parentage, look for more fulfilling identities. In this

way, both The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk

reflect the necessity for movement implicit in Dante’s

’’climb, terrace by terrace" (Knowles 118) in The Divine

Comedy or St. John’s ladder of ten rungs inAscent of

Mount Carmel. Thus, artists like Celia andColby find themselves urged on to a more religious course; characters

like Peter and Lucasta push on to better understand and enjoy filmmaking or poetry or music.

T. S. Eliot was clearly comfortable with the dramatic ensemble of characters he had created for The Cocktail

Party and he seeks to exploit it again in The Confidential

Clerk, even as he de-emphasized the supernatural auras around the dramatic functionaries. This set-up of two couples and three attendant "guardian" characters allowed a great deal of comic and dramatic flexibility in the trading off of romantic partners that is so common in stage comedy. In The Cocktail Party, Peterthinks he has been romantically involved with Celia who regards him only as a good friend while having an affair with Edward who is

157 surprised to find he is actually upset that his own wife,

Lavinia, has taken an interest in said Peter, and so on.

In The Confidential Clerk, Lucasta, engaged to B. Kaghan, finds herself in a deepening relationship with Colby, which he reciprocates until he discovers the strong probability that Lucasta is his half-sister.

Eliot uses this comic square dance in both plays as the dramatic equivalent of what Four Quartets presents as the principal human endeavor: that of growing mentally and spiritually toward truth and self-knowledge. As we watch the square dance in each play we become aware that different characters have varying capacities for apprehending the truth, achieving the still point. Sir

Claude breaks things down rather nicely into "truly religious people", "men of genius", and "others" (CP 238).

Some movement from level to level is expected, as it was in The Cocktail Party. In that play, Celia intitially moved in the wrong direction from seeking fulfillment in poetry to finding answers in a romantic relationship before her course is righted and she moves along her path to a religious fulfillment. Colby also moves the wrong way initially, dropping out of his commitment to music to find satisfaction in the business world as a confidential

158 clerk and financier before being urged by Eggerson in the direction of the church, first as an organist and later, perhaps, as a holy man. Eliot's characters in each play, as they move through their relationships and the various turns of plot, are continually moving toward, not so much that moment of apprehension itself, but the way of life, the attitude, the philosophy, the process by which such moments of apprehension may become more possible and more frequent in their lives. In The Confidential Clerk, Eliot (more deliberately than in The Cocktail Party) utilizes two of the major metaphors for such apprehension in Four

Quartets ; the garden and music. Colby through his music,

Mulhammer through his pottery, and Eggerson through his garden try to reach the still point, that moment of perception when the pattern of life is clear. Eliot had used all of these metaphors in Burnt Norton to approach the new comic vision he was trying to express. It is fitting that Eliot dramatize these metaphors in the context of a farcical search of a foundling for his true identify.

The garden is one of the first striking images to be encountered in Four Quartets, following hard upon Eliot's expose about "Time present and time past" in Burnt Norton

159 (CPP 117). No sooner has Eliot finished stating his thesis (or, to stick with the music metaphor, established his theme) that both are "perhaps present in time future,I

And time future contained in time past" does he leads us

"(dlown the passage we did not take" and through "the door we never opened I Into the rose garden" (CPP 117). Now, the rose-garden is clearly a metaphor, not only for the past in its actuality, but also for past choices not made, past actions not completed. What might have been coexists in this garden with what was. This seems to be a garden where all aspects of time meet. "Echoes", we are told,

"inhabit the garden" (CPP 117). And if we are to follow after them, we must head the advice of a bird: "Quick, said the bird, find them, find them" (CPP 117). The bird appears a few lines later: "And the bird called, in response to I The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery"

(CPP 118).

The bird in Burnt Norton seems to symbolize some fleeting perception, some difficult to decipher guide, and is connected in this garden to unheard music. How striking it is, then, in the early moments of The

Confidential Clerk to be told by the gardener (Eggerson) that the musician (Colby) is not only "very fond of bird watching" (CP 218) but uniquely qualified to detect these

160 birds in unlikely places. The conversation takes place in the opening scene as the employer. Sir Claude, discusses housing arrangements for his new confidential clerk, Colby, with the outgoing confidential clerk, Eggerson.

The exchange is worth quoting at length.

EGGERSON: And the flat in the mews?

How soon will that be ready for him?

SIR CLAUDE: They still have to do the walls. And

then it must be furnished.

I ’m trying to find him a really good piano.

EGGERSON: A piano? Yes, I'm sure he'll feel at home

When he has a piano. You think of everything.

But if I might make a suggestion: window boxes!

He's expressed such an interest in my garden

That I think he ought to have window boxes.

Some day, he'll want a garden of his own. And

yes, a bird bath!

SIR CLAUDE: A bird bath? In the mews? What's the

point of that?

EGGERSON: He told me he's very fond of bird

watching.

SIR CLAUDE : But there won't be any birds— none worth

watching.

161 EGGERSON: I don’t know. Sir Claude. Only the other

day I read a letter in The Times about wild birds seen

in London:

And I'm sure Mr. Simpkins will find them if

anybody. SIR CLAUDE: Well, we’ll leave that for the present.

As we have a little time

Before you start for Northolt ... (CP 218-19)

The Times . . . why The Times? Time past, time present and time future? Sir Claude mentions both "the present" and "time I Before" in almost the next breath as they plan

for the immediate future. But even if this reference is too much to hang on this exchange, surely the interweaving of the garden, the music, and the birds is too much to ignore from a poet so conscious of his own body of work and so fond of self-reference. Colby is immediately revealed to us as someone who possesses the rare, inate ability to "follow the deception of the thrush" (CPP 118)

into the garden where insights about the true, redeeming nature of time, may be had.

In Act II, Colby and Lucasta find themselves in a conversation about Eggerson’s garden, touching deeply upon and interweaving these metaphors from Four Quartets. It

162 is Lucasta who raises the issue, describing Colby's music as "a secret garden" (CP 245) to which Colby can "retire" locking the gate behind him to protect him from the abrasiveness of reality. Colby picks up on this metaphor asserting that Lucasta, too, must have a secret garden, if only she can find it. "And your garden", says Lucasta, as if reading from the unheard music in the garden section of

Burnt Norton, "is a garden 1 Where you hear a music that no one else could hear" (CP 245).

Colby extends the metaphor, complaining of the unreality of his garden. It is too unconnected to the real world:

I turn the key, and walk through the gate.

And there I am ... alone, in my 'garden'.

Alone, that's the thing. That's why it's not

real.

You know, I think that Eggerson's garden Is more real than mine.

LUCASTA: Eggerson's garden?

What makes you think of Eggerson— of all people?

COLBY: Well, he retires to his garden— literally.

And also in the same sense that I retire to mine.

But he doesn't feel alone there. And when he

comes out

163 He has marrows, or beetroots, or peas ... for Mrs.

Eggerson.

LUCASTA: Are you laughing at me?

COLBY; I'm being very

serious.

(ÇP 245)

And Eliot is being very serious in elaborating on this theme that the two worlds, the two lives, must somehow be unified if any sense of reality is to be achieved. The problem with Colby's garden, Colby's music, is that it is only "make-believe", or might as well be since he no longer believes he has the skill to share it with anyone. "If you have two lives", posits Colby,

"Which have nothing whatever to do with each other— I

Well, they're both unreal" (CP_ 246).

If the metaphor were to be taken to religious terms, says Colby, God would walk in the garden and make it real.

He imagines this is so for Eggerson. This is the

Incarnation Eliot ultimately reveals in Four Quartets :

"The hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood" (CPP

136). Celia in The Cocktail Party had this religious sensibility and it took her into missionary work and death by crucifixion. Colby, like Peter in The Cocktail Party, understands himself— and is understood by the audience at

164 this point— as an artist. Peter, the filmmaker, it is

hinted, may find religious significance to his artistic feelings later. Colby, the organist, it is hinted at the

end of the play, might soon "be thinking of reading for

orders'* (CP 290). But for most of the play, Colby is on

the artist level of Eliot's scale of perceptive

sensibility. Colby's music, like Peter's filmmaking and

Mulhammer's pottery, "takes the place of religion" (CP

238) .

Central to the garden metaphor in Burnt Norton is the

"unheard music" (CPP 118) to which the bird responds.

This unheard music is merely mentioned in the middle of

the first movement and is not developed until the fifth

and final section. In between, Eliot is at pains to

express the means by which an individual my strive to

apprehend the comic nature of time and reality. It is a

dangerous occupation as "human kind! Cannot bear very much

reality" (CPP 118) and thus the need for make-believe

("one cannot look at it steadily") and the central role of

the imagination are clearly part of this endeavor. The method by which one apprehends the still point and the

method by which one apprehends music are unified in he

fifth and final movement of Burnt Norton:

165 Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern. Can

words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note

lasts. Not that only, but the co-existence.

Or say that the end precedes the beginning.

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. (CPP 121-122)

A person's life moves across time, from moment to moment, just as a melody moves only in time, from note to note. But just as a melody can not be understood a note at a time, a life cannot be understood a moment at a time.

It is the form, the pattern of the music that the mind must apprehend in order to appreciate the piece. The end, as it were, must precede the beginning in the listener's mind. A melody cannot be comprehended merely in the present, listening to the pitch of the current note. The human mind must "remember" the preceding note, indeed, all

166 of the previous notes, in order to know how to interpret

the presently sounding note. Similarly, the listener must have some expectation of where the melody will go, what the subsequent notes might

be, in order to fully appreciate where the melody actually

does go. What might have been and what has been play in

the experienced listener’s mind along with what is

currently sounding. The melody exists as a whole, a

complete pattern, a complete progression. But it can only

be heard by the ear ("that murmuring shell of time" CPP

134) one note at a time. It is the mind which appreciates

the melody, not the ear. The ear holds but one note at a

time; the mind holds all the notes and feels the pattern,

apprehends the movement. It must also be noted that music

is much more complex than mere melody: there are

harmonies, arrangements of instruments, patterns within patterns and so on. Listeners who have learned to listen hear more deeply than beginners.

This is one of Eliot’s chief metaphors for explaining

how human beings must perceive time and life. One must continually "listen" for the pattern. And just as some

listeners to music are more gifted and/or more trained at listening, so some livers and apprehenders of life are more trained and more gifted. The Confidential Clerk is

167 about a character who is both. Eliot has chosen a musician, an organist, a composer (Colby Simpkins) as his hero. This allows Eliot to dramatically explore the music metaphor he first posed in Four Quartets.

The dramatic interest lies in the fact thatColby

Simpkins is a failed musician, a failed organist. After devoting most of his young life to musical training, he has come to accept his own mediocrity: I know

I should never have become a great organist.

As I aspired to be. I'm not an executant;

I'm only a shadow of the great composers.

Always, when I play to myself,

I hear the music I should like to have written.

As the composer heard it when it came to him;

But when I played before other people

I was always conscious that what they heard

Was not what I hear when I play to myself.

What I hear is a great musician's music.

What they hear is an inferior rendering. (CPP 237-8)

So Colby has given up trying to hear "the unheard music" and will "trim down his feelings to fit the business world" (SP 49).

168 Colby's dramatic situation is developed (in both its existential and farcical aspects) by the fact that Eliot sets Mu1hammer up, not only as a would-be father figure, but also as a dramatic foil. Just as Colby must, in

Mulhammer's terms, "forgetI That his great ambition was to be an organist" (CP. 218), Sir Claude cannot forget that his own great ambition was to be a potter. It is

Mulhammer who proposes that Colby must find a "substitute activity" (ÇP. 218), that of being his confidential clerk and immersing himself in business.

In a conversation to end Act I, Sir Claude and Colby engage in a discussion of their thwarted ambitions. Sir

Claude reveals that he did not always desire to be a financier. Originally, he confides, "I wanted to be a potter" (CP 235). He speaks of his childhood joy at shaping things, working with forms and colours. And he makes an important distinction:

Most people think of china or porcelain

As merely for use, or for decoration—

In either case, an inferior art.

For me, they are neither "use" nor "decoration"—

That is, decoration as a background for living;

For me, they are life itself (CP 236).

169 This is a vital distinction, not only for Mulhammer,

but for Eliot as well, as concerns the artistic endeavor,

the uses of the imagination. Decoration is a background

for living; art is life itself. The artist must strive to

create a deeper reality "where the form is the reality,I

Of which the substantial is only a shadow" (CP 236).

Eliot has touched on this before, in that same fifth

movement of Burnt Norton. There, as he develops his music

metaphor, he brings in the metaphor of the Chinese jar.

Just as music can reach the still point or the stillness

through its form or pattern, so "a Chinese jar still I

Moves perpetually in its stillness" (CPP 121). So, as

early as Burnt Norton. Eliot, in seeking poetic metaphors

for his philosophical conception of "the still point" and

how human minds perceive it, has already hit upon both music and pottery. He returns to those metaphors here in

The Confidential Clerk and develops them dramatically.

As foils, Colby and Mulhammer react to their artistic

failures differently. In failing to become a "first-rate potter"(CP_ 237), Mulhammer has turned his imagination to

"make-believe" (CP 236). But this is a kind of lie that

Colby is unwilling to accept. The two compare notes about

being caught up in their art, about those transcendant

170 moments which are the focus of Four Quartets. And Sir

Claude's words sound very much like Colby's in discussing his music and his sense of failure: There are occasions

When I am transported— a different person.

Transfigured in the vision of some marvelous

creation.

And I feel what the man must have felt when he made

it.

But nothing L ever made gave me that contentment—

That state of utter exhaustion and peace

Which comes in dying to give something life ...

I intend that you shall have a good piano. The best.

(CP 237)

Mulhammer suggests that when Colby is alone, playing the piano in the evening, he will "go through that private door I Into the real world, as I do, sometimes" (CP 237).

Sir Claude, in fact, keeps his pieces in a private room.

He goes into the room, alone, to contemplate one piece or another in his collection:

... when I am alone, and look at one thing long

enough,

I sometimes have that sense of identification

171 With the maker, of which I spoke— an agonising

ecstacy

Which makes life bearable. It's all I have.

I suppose it takes the place of religion ... (CP 238)

A sense of identification with the maker. The Maker?

The Divine Union of St. John? Not for Mulhammer. But, possibly, for Colby. As Colby begins to unravel the religious implications of his artistic sensibility, his search becomes most clearly united with the comic one, the foundling's search for his true identity. We are given a clear sense that Colby may choose to reject Mulhammer as his father figure and rebel against the past, as well as the future, that Mulhammer has assigned to him:

SIR CLAUDE: Do you understand now what I meant when I

spoke

Of accepting the terms life imposes upon you

Even to the point of accepting ... make-believe?

COLBY: ... something in me

Rebels against accepting such conditions.

It would be so much simpler if you weren't my

father! (CP 238)

Dramatically, this is the dilemma of self-discovery which Colby must enact. He has concluded that he is not one of the artistic people. But must he be lumped in with

172 his "father", Mulhammer, and follow his legacy? Mulhammer has listed for him the three types of people he has encountered in life and his categories are part and parcel of his attempt to hoop Colby into his own sphere of dealing with failure to unite his two worlds: "I dare say truly religious people ... can find some unity," he observes. "Then there are also the men of genius," he adds. "There are others, it seems to me, who have at best to live I In two worlds— each a kind of make-believe.I

That's you and me" (CP 238).

When Eliot's deus ex machina, the baby farmer Mrs.

Guzzard, appears on the scene to reveal once and for all to whom each of the children belong, that which has been and that which might have been both point to one end ... which is Act III. And in this last act, the philosophical questioning and the devices of farce interweave very well indeed. Mrs. Guzzard, of Teddington (the birthplace of

Noel Coward, incidentally), begins granting wishes left and right, linking sons and daughters to the parents she believes can best guide them. In Mrs. Guzzard's schema,

Lucasta remains Sir Claude's daughter, but B. Kaghan is revealed to be Lady Elizabeth's long lost son. Colby is

173 taken away from the broken-hearted Mulhammer and assigned to none of the characters we know— a failed musician who died young.

Colby accepts this possibly fallacious assignation and adopts Eggerson as his spiritual father, forsaking

Mulhammer: ”I must follow my father— so that I may come to know him" (CP 288). Eggerson is quick to pick up on

Colby's new sense of identity and to develop it out of the artistic realm (where Colby can at best expect to be another failed organist like his father was before him) into the spiritual realm, where Colby's Father would be

God. "Is it true," he asks Colby, "that what you desire I

Is to become the organist of some parish church?" he begins (CP_ 289).

When this is confirmed, Eggerson reveals that he happens "to know of a vacancyl In my own parish, in Joshua

Park" (CP_ 289). Eggerson points out that he is himself the Vicar's Warden and will have influence with the

Parochial Church Council. Further, Eggerson presumes to have intimate knowledge of Colby's spiritual state:

I hope you won't take this as impertinence—

I don't see you spending a lifetime as an organist.

I think you'll come to find you've another vocation.

174 Mr. Simpkins! You'll be thinking of reading for

orders. Joshua Park may be only a stepping-stone

To a precentorshlp! And a canonry! (CP 290)

At this point, other statements characters have made about

Colby in the course of the drama come into play. B. Kaghan, for example, had remarked that "as for Colby,1

He's the sort of fellow who might chuck it all I And go to live on a desert island" (CP 252).

This puts the failed artist on the same plane of sensibility with Harry in The Family Reunion or Celia from

The Cocktail Party. Eggerson's observations about Colby's ability to find birds advances this notion in a way reminiscenct of Julia's comment about Delila Verinder's brother (the harmless one) who could hear the cry of bats in that play.

D. E. Jones calls this a "fine tactical move" (149) on Eliot's part in that he has shifted the ground of discussion for The Confidential Clerk from that of The

Cocktail Party. The "two worlds" of each play are thematically the same: the secular and the spiritual, but in The Cocktail Party, as Jones points out, there is a wide "gulf" between the spiritual world inhabited by the guardians and Celia and the secular world left to the

175 Chamberlaynes. Here, in The Confidential Clerk, there is

no gulf. Eliot successfully uses the foundling plot to present the competing demands of art and commerce as

metaphors for the spiritual and secular concerns of the characters. Indeed, as Eloise Knapp Hay reports, "[mlany

in Eliot's audiences ... felt that Eliot successfully fused his deepest message with the social mores portrayed

on stage" (139). In his third and final comedy. The Elder

Statesman, Eliot would again seek this successful fusion of two worlds, this time by utilizing as his metaphors for

secular and spiritual concerns the public and private worlds of a powerful politician facing a forced retirement

where the long-neglected contemplation of a personal life in tatters will occupy his last days.

176 BIBLIOGRAPHY; CHAPTER 4

Donoghue, Denis. The Third Voice : Modern British and American Verse Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959 Gilbert, W. S. and Arthur Sullivan, M^ S_^ Pinafore. 1878. The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. Intro, and Ed. Ian Bradley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 113-185.

Euripides. Ion. 420-410 BCE. The Complete Greek Tragedies : Euripides. Ill. Trans. Ronald F. Willetts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. 177-255.

Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way. Cambridge : Harvard UP, 1977.

Jones, David E. The Plays of T . S . Eliot. London: Routledge, 1960.

Knowles, Sebastian D. G. A Purgatorial Flame; Seven British Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1990.

Lloyd Evans, Gareth. Upstart Crow; An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. and rev. Barbara Lloyd Evans. London; Dent, 1982. Smith, Carol H. T^ S^ Eliot * s Dramatic Theory and Practice from Sweeney Agonistes to. The Elder Statesman. 1963. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Stephenson, Robert C. "Farce as Method." Tulane Drama Review 5.2 (1961); 85-93. Rpt in Corrigan.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 3rd Ed. E d . Carl E. Bain, et al. New York; Norton, 1981. 1342- 1390.

177 CHAPTER 5

T. S. ELIOT'S DIVINE COMEDY OP SITUATION:

DANTE'S PURGATORIO, SARTRE'S TRAGEDY OF SITUATION,

AND THE ELDER STATESMAN

On August 25, 1958 at the Edinburgh Festival, T. S.

Eliot brought to the stage the last of his mature comedies. The Elder Statesman. As in The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk. the central action of the play involves characters who find themselves in dramatic situations which force them to choose a response to life analogous to the "three conditions" of "Little Gidding": attachment, detachment, and indifference. This choice involves the use of memory in an examination and valuation of the past as it impinges on the present lives and future hopes of the central characters. As in the earlier plays, structural elements and historical commonplaces of stage comedy are exploited to provide a surface parallel to the

178 underlying spiritual drama, a drama which in turn finds parallels in Eliot's personal life and in Greek myth.

The elder statesman here is Lord Claverton. Once known simply as Dick Ferry, Claverton has, by degrees, adopted his late wife's surname and the title that accompanies it. Thus, Dick Ferry became Richard Claverton-Ferry and, ultimately. Lord Claverton, a successful politician who was once considered a serious candidate for Prime Minister. Claverton's career, however, has been abruptly ended by a nearly fatal stroke.

We learn in the opening scene that his doctors doubt he will survive even a few months before a second stroke ends his life. He has been ordered to quit his career at once and avoid all stress. The plan being implemented by

Claverton’s devoted daughter, Monica, and her fiance,

Charles, is to send Claverton to Badgley Court, a rather expensive convalescent home, for what she optimistically calls a "rest cure".

Claverton's last days at Badgley Court, however, are anything but restful. Two persons from his days at

Oxford, sparked by newspaper stories of his early retirement at age sixty, have returned to confront

Claverton about the misdeeds of his youth, actions which

179 have paradoxically resulted In both the initial ruin o£ their lives and the ultimate wealth and success that each now enjoys. The first, Claverton*s college buddy, Fred

Culverwell, was encouraged by young Dick Ferry in wild and scandalous behaviors until being abandoned by him to face a forgery charge alone. Culverwell was convicted and sentenced to jail. Upon release, Claverton gave him money to leave the country. Culverwell fled to San Marco, changed his name to Federico Gomez, and became incredibly successful and wealthy as a figure involved inorganized crime. Now he has returned to exact a bizarre kind of revenge, demanding not money but constant companionship from the ailing Claverton who wishes instead to focus his remaining energies on repairing relationships with his children, Monica and Michael. But Gomez knows the secret of the night Claverton, conjuring images of murderous

Oedipus at the place "where three highways meet" (51), ran over an old man in the road and did not stop. Even as he strikes up an unwelcome relationship with Claverton's impressionable son, Michael, Gomez insinuates that he will reveal to Claverton's beloved daughter Monica the awful truth about her father.

180 The second antagonist. Maisle Batterson, was

Claverton's lover just after his Oxford days. Apparently,

Claverton*s father objected to the match and Claverton dumped the girl unceremoniously. A breach of promise suit was narrowly avoided by a considerable payoff which allowed her to launch a successful career as the music hall singer, Maisie Mountjoy. Later, she married Mr. John

Carghill, the wealthy proprieter of bathing machines and is now his very wealthy widow, known simply as Mrs. John

Carghill. She too has sought out Claverton, armed with photostats of his love letters, demanding not money but a kind of intimacy he would not otherwise give. She too strikes up an unwelcome relationship with the son,

Michael, while suggesting that she will reveal the past relationship to Monica.

In both cases, Claverton as a young man held a kind of power over an impressionable admirer and wielded it callously and carelessly, resulting in life-changing pain and suffering for each even as his own life and career proceeded unscathed. Now, motivated by a mixture of sorrow and bitterness, each victim has returned to enjoy the exercise of power over the weakened Claverton.

Claverton at first rises to the stressful occasion by putting on his brave public face and responding cooly and

181 logically to these "ghosts" from his past. But both Gomez and Carghill instinctively turn their intentions to Claverton's son. They wield the kind of influence over Michael that Claverton once wielded over them. Their revenge, it is clear, will be to ruin Michael as Claverton once ruined them.

At Badgley Court, instead of receiving his rest cure,

Claverton finds himself hounded by Gomez and Carghill to his death. After witnessing the departure of his son to join the vindictive Gomez as a business partner in San

Marco, Claverton confesses his sordid past to his daughter. Monica responds with forgiveness and understanding: but Claverton nevertheless dies shortly thereafter of the feared second stroke.

In its conception, the play seeks to juxtapose this haunting and hounding of Claverton by these spectres from his past with the love story of Monica and her fiance and their blessings of compassion and forgiveness which they pour out upon the troubled, dying man. Each set of actions and emotions must be fully present upon the stage in order for Claverton's suffering to give way powerfully and satisfyingly to his final acceptance of forgiveness, rest, and peace.

182 Toward this end, Eliot has fashioned adjustments to

the cast setup borrowed from popular drawing-room

comedies, most notably Blithe Spirit, which he first

exploited in The Cocktail Party and subsequently in The

Confidential Clerk. As in the earlier plays, two couples

work out their romantic, artistic, professional, and/or

spiritual affairs guided either deliberately or accidentally by three ancillary characters whose

interruptions and interferences complicate situations,

leading to the growth and development of the principal

characters. As in the earlier plays, the outcomes for each couple will be different: the story of one couple

will end in marriage and that of the other will end in the separation that accompanies the commitment to separate

spiritual paths.

But in The Elder Statesman, the relationships have reached their climax by the end of the opening scene and

the drama of the play comes about as the blessings derived from the one balance against the bitterness resulting from

the other. The younger couple in this play, Monica and

Charles, become engaged in the very first moments of the

play and their growth and development as a couple commence in terms of the distractions and delays they must face as

Lord Claverton either dies or surprises his doctors by

183 recovering during the "rest cure" at Badgley Court. The

older couple is Lord Claverton himself and the recently widowed Mrs. John Carghill. Their relationship in fact

ended bitterly nearly forty years before they find

themselves together again at Badgley Court, sorting out

the consequences of their behavior toward each other. The

ancillary characters here, Mrs. Piggott, Federico Gomez,

and Claverton's son, Michael, are cast either as unaware

of the vital situations of the major characters (Mrs.

Piggott and Michael) or as deliberately intent upon

causing them real harm (Gomez and Mrs. Carghill).

This significant shift in the casting of the

ancillary or guardian roles characterizes Eliot's intent

in structuring the dramatic action of his last play: the

protective characters (Monica, Charles, and the

ineffectual Mrs. Piggott) are counter-balanced with the

antagonistic or blocking characters (Mrs. Carghill, Gomez,

and Michael). Rather more like The Family Reunion than

either The Cocktail Party or The Confidential Clerk, two

of the characters in this play, Gomez and Mrs. Carghill, are actively working to ruin the health and reputation of

another. Lord Claverton. Eliot intended this to charge

The Elder Statesman with something of the haunted quality he had achieved in The Family Reunion.

184 Eliot very much visualized Gomez and Carghill as

counterparts to the Furies of The Family Reunion which

hounded Harry and darkened that play with his torment.

Indeed, Eliot had first suggested the use of Oedipus at

Colonus as an underpining story when he was drafting a way

of resolving the torment that Harry was facing: "Harry's career needs to be completed by an Orestes or an Oedipus

at Colonus" CBrowne 107). The significance of the peace

and rest Oedipus finds in the sacred grove at Athens is

elevated by the extreme suffering and torment he has

experienced in his life and relived on stage at the hands

of Creon and Polyneices. Only if the suffering of

Claverton on stage is real can his confession to Monica

and her forgiveness of him in the last scene have any dramatic significance or impact.

Mrs. Piggott is the self-professed guardian of

Claverton as he takes his rest and seeks to avoid the

importunities of Gomez and Carghill. But hers is a diminished role from the guardians of the earlier plays.

It is true that she supplies most of the humor with her

interruptions, which is reminiscient both of Julia in The

Cocktail Party and of B. Khagan in The Confidential Clerk.

But she is devoid of any supernatural or even preternatural discretion. She merely interrupts, angling

185 for Claverton in romantic competition with Mrs. John

Carghlll as she all but declares herself an available widow. Her interruptions provide comic relief from the attacks of Gomez and Mrs. Carghill, but they perform no protective function— nor do they advance the quest of self-knowledge for Calverton. This latter function is given over to the antagonists themselves who succeed in forcing Claverton to confront his past, accept responsibility for it, and to repent.

This suggests another significant difference debuted by Eliot in his last play. In The Elder Statesman, there are no characters with the exceptional spiritual or artistic sensibilities we have encountered in the earlier plays. Lord Claverton is not of the same cloth as Celia or Peter in The Cocktail Party or of Colby in The

Confidential Clerk. Indeed, no character in Eliot's final play can make the claim of spiritual insight which propells Celia to her crucifixion and Colby to his calling as a church organist and candidate for orders. Perhaps

Monica, with her redeeming love and deep sense of intuition comes closest. But the action of the play involves the last days of the spiritually ordinary character, Claverton— heir to that "dull ... implacable

186 ... indomitable spirit of mediocrity" CCP 153) which embodies Edward Chamberlayne and Sir Claude Mulhammer.

A third substantive difference in how Eliot sets up his last play also involves the nature of the leading character. The Elder Statesman does not feature a young or middle aged or even elderly man whose spiritual awakening and subsequent life choices will enrich his future by reinterpreting and redeeming his past. Lord

Claverton is terminally ill. In Claverton, unlike any in

Eliot's previous work, we have a character who has made it nearly to the end of his life without ever finding it necessary to face the things other of Eliot's characters have had to face: life-changing events which demand that a choice be made. Sir Harcourt Reilly in The Cocktail

Party, in describing the choices to Celia (the way of attachment and the way of detachment) cautioned that "It is ... necessaryI To make a choice between them" (CP

117). The consequence of failing to choose is

"indifference" which leads to a kind of hell, "perpetual solitude" (CP 117).

At first brush, Claverton would seem to have accepted the first choice offered by Little Gidding and by

Harcourt-Reilly— that of attachment to things and to life and to people. He has involved himself in political and

187 social matters while entering into a marriage and rearing

two children. Claverton would seem to be like other of Eliot’s characters who have learned to:

Maintain themselves by the common routine

Giving and taking, in the usual actions

What there is to give and take. ...

Are contented with the evening that brings together

For casual talk before the fire

Two people who know they do not understand each

other.

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them. (CP 189)

Claverton, however, has not made this choice. He has, in fact, demonstrated himself to be expert in escaping crises and avoiding the choices of becoming more attached to the other people in his life— to say nothing of becoming detached from them in pursuit of some spiritual or artistic ideal. He has never had occasion to contemplate the past because he has always embarked on a very particular reading of the present and the futurein terms of building a political career. Toward this end he has crafted a brilliant public persona. We see that he is a charming man, a witty and intelligent man. He has

188 inspired the loyal support of his party, the devoted love

of his daughter, and the admiring respect of his future

son-in-law. We see his personal qualities come through

even as he faces down Gomez and Carghill, deftly handling

their attacks with patience and humor. He is not petty.

He has a delightful and at times self-deprecating sense of

humor. He is an eloquent speaker and charming conversationalist. But just as he has used these skills

to forge success in public life, he has used them to escape rather than to face defining situations in his

personal life. And now that his ruined health has taken his public life away from him, he finds his personal self

bankrupt. Claverton*s approach resembles attachment as death resembles life. By default, he has chosen

"indifference”. He has fallen into the hell which is the consequence of failing to choose either attachment or detachment.

In terms of the playwright’s craft, the character

Claverton has never been placed— free of compelling possibilities for escape— in a dramatic situation which demands that he choose. Or, to intensify that statement via Sartre, Claverton’s character has never been defined

by a dramatic situation which calls inexorably for a choice. Sartre, in "Pour un theatre de situations" (1947)

189 had deplored the state of modern theatre as too dependent on character and the psychology of character, calling for a return to a type of drama "no longer ... sustained primarily by character ... but by situation" (4). Sartre is very specific in his prescription: "what we have to show in the theatre are simple and human situations and free individuals in these situations choosing what they will be" (4). His thesis is worth quoting at length:

The most moving thing a theatre can show is a

character creating himself, the moment of choice, of

the free decision which commits him to a moral code

and a whole way of life. The situation is an appeal:

it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it's up

to us to choose. And in order for it to bring the

whole man into play, we have to stage limit

situations, that is situations which present

alternatives one of which leads to death ... Immerse

men in these universal and extreme situations which

leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things

so that in choosing the way out they choose

themselves, and you've won— the play is good. (4-5)

These "limit situations" of Sartre's are precisely what Eliot crafts for his characters in the mature comedies. But Claverton, unlike characters in Eliot's

190 earlier plays, has up to this point found easy escapes from situations that these other characters have been forced to respond to. Colby Simpkins, as a young man in

The Confidential Clerk, escapes his father's influence and chooses his own path. Edward Chamberlayne, at middle age in The Cocktail Party, re-commits with his wife to "make the best of a bad job" and to raise children and host social events with her. Claverton has circumvented making the difficult choice in very similar circumstances.

Unlike Colby, he did not find the strength of character to escape the narrow path his father laid out for him.

Specifically, Claverton's father used his vast fiancial resources to enable Claverton to abandon his friend Gomez to a conviction for forgery and to help buy Gomez' way out of the country after his sentence had been served. In addition, his father disallowed a marriage to Maisie

Mountjoy and enabled Claverton to escape a career- threatening breach of promise suit through buying her silence.

In terms of his marriage and family life, Claverton was unable to find a way of making his marriage work, as

Edward Chamberlayne did, finding it easier to delve into a life of politics and power. Claverton has only come to realize this in the face of persecutions by Gomez and Mrs.

191 Carghill. He confides as much to Monica as he ponders the indifference which engulfed his late wife before her death. She never knew about Gomez or Maisie: Your mother knew nothing about them. And I know

That I never knew your mother, as she never knew me.

I thought that she would never understand

Or that she would be jealous of the ghosts who

haunted me.

And I*m still of that opinion. How open one's heart

When one is sure of the wrong response?

How make a confession with no hope of absolution?

It was not her fault. We never understood each

other.

And so we lived, with a deep silence between us.

And she died silently. She had nothing to say to me.

I think of your mother, when she lay dying:

Completely without interest in the life that lay

behind her

And completely indifferent to whatever lay ahead of

her. (CP 342)

This is similar to Reilly's description of the way of attachment to Celia, but for the essential fact that husband and wife did not acknowledge at the time the fact that they were distinct from each other, did not know each

192 other. Reilly has called such a life enriched by self- knowledge "a good life". "It is a good life," says

Reilly. "Though you will not know how good I Till you come to the end" (CP 189).

Claverton has come to the end. And what he must face is that his life has not been one of attachment but, like his wife's, indifference. He must confront the warnings of Little Gidding that the conditions of life "look aliket

Yet differ completely" and that indifference "resembles the others as death resembles life". Claverton has passed his days "between two lives— unflowering" (CPP 142). He has advanced to retirement having become an expert, not at detachment from things and from life and from people, but of indifference to them. What redemption, what liberation, what peace is possible at the end of such a life, one wasted by indifference? As it did for the other two comedies. Four

Quartets provides the answer:

This is the use of memory:

For liberation— not less of love, but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past.

(CPP 142)

193 But memory in Claverton's case can only be aroused by persecution. In a psychological sense, he has always been surrounded, not by guardians, but by enablers: his father, through his wealth and power and ambition for his son;

Monica, through her devoted protection of her beloved father; even the power of Claverton's own personality, his considerable talents, and his powerful position in the political world have neabled him time after time to escape the essential contemplation and examination of his life.

Now Claverton must face all of these situations again as the "ghosts” of Freddy Culverwell (now Gomez) and

Maisie Batterson (now Mrs. John Carghill) come back to persecute him. The hauntings are made real in that flesh and blood humans arrive on the scene in the roles of ghosts and, as Charles advises, "human beings ... can be dealt with" (CP_ 342). What forces Claverton to deal with them now is that his son has been caught up in the same sorts of youthful indiscretions involving women and cars, allowing Gomez and Carghill to latch on to Michael as the surrogate for their revenge. As Mrs. John Carghill says to Michael:

... you're so like your father

When he was your age. He's the picture of you,

Richard, As you were once.

194 ... your father has changed a good deal

Since I knew him ever so many years ago.

Yet you're the image of what he was then.

You've his voice! and his way of moving! It's marvellous. And the charm! He's inherited all of

your charm, Richard. There's no denying it.

Claverton who has always successfully run away from difficult situations is not willing to do so now with the health and happiness of his son hanging in the balance.

His advice and his attempts at intervention with his son will ultimately fail, a fact which weighs heavily upon him as he dies. But his strenuous attempt is the source of self-knowledge which emerges in his speech just before the second act curtain:

What I want to escape from

Is myself, is the past. But what a coward I am.

To talk of escaping! And what a hypocrite!

A few minutes ago I was pleading with Michael

Not to try to escape from his own past failures:

I said I knew from experience. Do I understand the

meaning

195 Of the lesson I would teach? Come, I'll start to

learn again. Michael and I shall go to school together.

We'll sit side by side, at little desks

And suffer the same humiliations

At the hands of the same master. But have I still

time?

There is time for Michael. Is it too late for me,

Monica? (CP 337-8)

Eliot has designed a play, a "limit situation," to

illustrate the convergence of forces which must opperate if such a man as Claverton is to be redeemed. He must go the route of humiliation and discomfort specified in Four

Quartets: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire I Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless" (CPP 126).

Guardians will not serve his turn. Gomez and Carghill must function to disquiet him.

In this context of wisdom, humility, and persecution, the parallels to the source play, Sophocles' Oedipus at

Colonus, are fairly clear. Oedipus arrives to die in the sacred grove outside of Athens just as Claverton arrives to die at Badgley Court. Oedipus draws comfort and strength from his devoted daughter Antigone and her younger sister Ismene, just as Claverton leans on Monica

196 and her fiance Charles in his last days. Both sons,

Polyneices and Michael, arrive on the scene to make a request which is disquieting and a source of bitter distress to their fathers. In each case the old man is forced to relive his humiliations in a distasteful question and answer game: Oedipus at the hands of a curious chorus and a mocking Creon, Claverton at the hands of a bitter lost love and an envious old friend.

Redemption comes for each as he stands his ground and confronts his past honestly, refusing to run or be hounded any longer. And for each, the redemption is bittersweet as the son is lost.

In the initial performance of The Elder Statesman, however, the emphasis of the director, E. Martin Browne, was not on this purgatory which gives way to paradise.

Instead, the love story of Monica and Charles was favored as an echo of the much publicized personal life of the newly married playwright. At Edinburgh, the juxtaposition insisted upon by the script was softened, the love of the daughter for her father emphasized, and the antagonists presented not as Furies but as lonely and harmless irritants, seeking merely closure to the shabby treatment they had received at Claverton's hands.

197 Perhaps Browne was caught up in the new public image

of T. S. Eliot, the mellowed elder statesman, as he states: "The atmosphere of the rehearsal period was different from any that had gone before. We were haunted by gossip writers: somehow, Eliot had become cosy news"

(338). Indeed, Eliot's advancing age and his recent marriage to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, were of more

interest to the public and, hence, to the writers than the play itself. Headlines spoke of "'The Happy Eliots'"

(Browne 338) and "T.S. Eliot at Seventy" (Grant 702).

"The advance information suggested that this would be

'Eliot's most human play'", Browne recalls (339) and that is just what Browne delivered to the stage at Edinburgh.

This misconception by the director, coupled with a young and inexperienced cast, lead to disastrous opening night reviews in which scriptwriter Eliot bore the brunt of the blame for creating a lifeless, passionless "It's- alright-daddy,-I-love-you-more-than-ever" (Grant 721) drama that disappointed at Edinburgh and barely eked out a two-month run in London (Browne 341). For the first time in Eliot's career as a dramatist, an American production was not mounted. And the play has languished for the most part unperformed for the last four decades.

198 In explaining his conception of the play, E. Martin

Browne reports that he envisioned Gomez, not as the vindictive ghost prescribed by Eliot, but as a "flashily successful rogue on the surface, a lonely and lost soul underneath". The emphasis of rehearsals with actor

William Squire was on getting "the two sides of the character in proper balance..." (338) rather than on the character's essential role as an antagonist. In terms of the other antagonist, Mrs. John Carghill, Browne complains that "Eileen Peel was really too young and too well-bred for Maisie Carghill" and concedes that "there may have been depths left unplumbed" (338). These are the two most important characters in the play in terms of raising the temperature for Claverton and putting him through a real purgatory both in his library and on the terrace of

Badgley Court. The play is indeed a comedy and there are some truly funny moments among the three characters; but the threat to Claverton must be conceived as real by the audience as must his suffering and the fear that he will now, having lost his career and his health, lose his children as well because of the misdeeds of his past.

The redemptive structure of Sophocles' play is that the daughter protectively leads the old man to the grove.

There he is forced by the curious Athenian chorus and then

199 by two less-sympathetic antagonists, Creon and Polyneices, to relive the shame and anguish of his past misdeeds: murdering his father, conceiving children with his mother.

Oedipus, like Claverton, maintains his moral innocence, but nevertheless suffers intensely for the pain and loss his actions have caused. Claverton has not killed his

father: but he did fail to stop after running over an old man in the roadway with Gomez (then Fred Culverwell) in the passenger seat. And he has not committed incest: but he did abandon a woman with whom he had been intimate to pursue his political career. Just as Creon and

Polyneices, and to some degree the Athenian chorus, successfully force Oedipus to suffer what Eliot, in Little

Gidding. calls "the rending pain of re-enactment" (CPP

142), so too must Gomez and Carghill succeed in their roles as Furies.

It is striking that Eliot's own director criticizes the eponymous character for being unexciting, saying that

"... in certain respects the part is not attractive.

After his opening scene, he has very little to say in the first two Acts; in all the big scenes he is on the defensive against one of the Intruders or against his son, each of whom pours out a stream of words to which he makes scant reply" (337). Browne seems to see the scenes in

200 which Claverton is made to suffer by the "intruders" as an impediment to the development of the character rather than as the crucial scenes in which Claverton's reactions to the tormentors define and delineate him. Character, for

Browne is defined by speeches, by what the character says, rather than by actions and reactions. "This means that he reaches the last Act, where his change of heart and his death dominate the play, without having had the opportunity to establish himself as a fully known and fully convincing person. The actor must therefore to a large extent create Claverton's personality from within himself" (338).

Claverton's character, however, is created in the script by a sequence of juxtaposed expositions. Little by little, Claverton's past is revealed, first by Monica in her explanations to Charles, then by Gomez in his accusations against Claverton in the library. Later, Mrs.

John Carghill reveals her version of events on the Terrace at Badgley Court. The audience is exposed to Claverton's past behaviors, and makes judgements about them, only to have those judgements mitigated or even reversed when

Claverton's own memory of past events is offered. We see the way he interacts with his children, particularly t^e troubled Michael. The audience becomes intrigued, even

201 emotionally involved with Claverton, but suspends

judgement as the facts emerge, one by one. As A. V. Cookman puts it, "Mr. Eliot plays his hand of guilty

secrets very expertly, tabling them one by one with such

an effect that they assume the importance for us that they

have for the man whom they imprison" (Browne 339).

In this way, the character is not created "within the

actor". It is defined and redefined over the course of

the play within the minds of the audience. Even as the

accusatory stories of Gomez and Carghill and Michael ring

in our memories, the cool manner with which Claverton

handles his vindictive accusers arouses our sympathies.

The reasonable rebuttals put forward by Claverton along

with our knowledge of his illness, and the devotion

revealed early on by Monica all work together to suspend

our judgement, to arrange and adjust our conception of

Claverton. The story of the hit and run accident, for example, undergoes several changes over the course of the

play. Gomez* original accusation is that Claverton ran

over an old man in the road and kept going because he

didn't want to face the consequences. This is tantamount

to vehicular homicide and a cover up. Later, we learn

that the old man had been lying down in the road and that

Claverton was not at all sure what he had just hit. Still

202 later, we learn that, although the thud had indeed been

that of an old man beneath Claverton's wheels, the fellow had actually died some hours earlier. Claverton’s offense

is still significant, but it is no longer a crime. He didn’t stop when he should have. And he stood silently by while a second driver who hit the same body stood trial before being acquitted.

All the stories about Claverton maintain their tinge of cowardice and escapism as the play progresses. But the initial charges of high crimes and misdemeanors fade with each retelling. Indeed, the degree of regret that

Claverton demonstrates for his past actions comes to seem excessive in light of what we finally know them to be.

But as Claverton explains to Monica:

There are many things not crimes, Monica,

Beyond anything of which the law takes cognisance:

Temporary failures, irreflective aberrations.

Reckless surrenders, unexplainable impulses.

Moments we regret in the very next moment.

Episodes we try to conceal from the world.

It's hard to make people realise

The magnitude of things that appear to them petty;

203 It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes

in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law

And the sin is in relation to the sinner. (CP 344-5)

Nevertheless, Browne complains that Monica is "so generously understanding of [Claverton] from the first

that his confession can make little difference" (338).

But the confession, in juxtaposition to the antagonism,

must make a difference, in fact, it must make the

difference. The success of the play depends upon it.

Monica's devotion is known to the audience, but it can

hardly be known to Claverton whose greatest fear is that he should be revealed as cowardly and selfish to the daughter for whom he has created his greatest role, that of a good man.

Once again, when Browne speaks of a character, he is really speaking of his own interpretation, and that of the initial production, that of the actor who originated the part :

We asked Anna Massey to play [Monica] and she did it

very pleasantly, but since this was only her third

part she had not the experience to add much of

herself to the role. A few years afterwards, on

204 television, Vanessa Redgrave was able to add a great

deal, and show what Anna, who is the same age, could

have done if the clock had been turned forward for

her. (338)

This is apologetics. As Browne discusses his direction of

The Elder Statesman, he speaks of key roles played by weak

actors. He reveals himself as a director who did not

believe in the dramatic quality of the script he was

directing. Two misconceptions in particular should have

disqualified him from the director’s role: one, that he

felt the lead character remained undefined by the torments

devised for him by the author and, two, that the climax

was anticlimactic. Browne apparently perceived himself to

be ’’making the best of a bad job” in casting and producing

this play. And that is just how the first night reviewers

saw it. Browne describes these critics as "feeling the

lack of theatrical vitality in the whole" (341).

Indeed, John Barber in the Daily Express (26

September 1958) reviewed the play as "never exactly

exciting" and concluded: "This is minor Eliot" (Browne

341). Henry Hewes called the play "disappointingly simple and much too full of the milk of human kindness" (Grant

702); but he singles out the director for censure: "Under

E. Martin Browne's direction ... the performance generally

205 lacks sufficient fire and dimension ... it perhaps needs passion more than do Mr. Eliot's other plays" (Grant 704). J. G. Weightman reviewing the play for Twentieth Century. highlights the potential of the two deemphasized characters, Gomez and Carghill, but blames Eliot the scriptwriter rather than Browne the director for failing to bring them out: "They are, as it happens, the two most interesting characters and, had Shakespeare been holding the pen, they would have run away with the action" (Grant

708) .

Nona Balakian is emblematic of many reviewers of the

Edinburgh production when she reviews Eliot's play "in the light of his recent, happy marriage" (Grant 723) and dismisses the work as "the inevitable coda to the evolving

Divine Comedy of modern life which Eliot's work as a whole suggests" (723). Browne's low-key production seemingly fits with her paradigm of Eliot as now too old to write dramatically significant fare but at least happy as he writes what will probably be the last play of his career.

Comparatively, she says that what enlivens Eliot's previous plays is "the willingness and capacity" on the part of the heroes "to suffer in the hope of finding the elusive meaning of their existence" (723).

206 But is this not the substantive definition of

Claverton revealed in the script? From the moment we first meet him, emerging slowly from his library where he has been thumbing through the pages of his appointment book, he contemplates the significance of his life, his past and his present, in the face of an uncertain future.

When confronted with two flesh and blood embodiments of his past, he is forced to relive past behaviors which trouble him deeply. On stage he suffers. He suffers self-doubt, regret, and fear: fear that his son will come to harm by following in his own cowardly footsteps; despair that his daughter will be disillusioned when and if she learns the truth about him.

In pinpointing the catalysts for such redemptive and dramatic suffering in the earlier plays, Balakian cites the Tempters of Murder in the Cathedral, the "ghosts" and

"confessors" of The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party and

The Confidential Clerk. But, she says, "The Elder

Statesman is bare of such devices" (723) and dismisses

Claverton’s suffering and self-appraisal as "only a brief stop to make in his ‘purgatory’ before he is released from the burden of his guilt" (724), It is significant that, after a viewing of the initial production, Balakian does not accept Gomez and Carghill as the "devices" Eliot

207 intended them to be. These characters are, in fact,

"ghosts", and Claverton refers to them as such. They are of the same dramatic ilk as the Furies which hound Harry.

They have been conceived by Eliot to be both "ghosts, who can be exorcised" and "human beings, who can be dealt with" (CP 342). But the cost of exorcising these ghosts, of dealing with these human beings, will be great in terms of Claverton's suffering:

... Freddy Culverwell and Maisie Batterson,

And Dick Ferry too, and Richard Ferry—

These are my ghosts. They were people with good in

them.

People who might all have been very different

From Gomez, Mrs. Carghill and Lord Claverton.

Freddy admired me, when we were at Oxford;

What did I make of his admiration?

And Maisie loved me, with whatever capacity

For loving she had— self-centered and foolish—

But we should respect love always when we meet it;

Even when it's vain and foolish, we must not abuse

it.

That is where I failed. And the memory frets me.

208 Claverton, in The Elder Statesman, dramatizes the third of "the gifts reserved for age" that the familiar compound ghost reveals in Little Gidding:

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

(CPP 142)

Rather than the spectacle of an exasperated spirit proceeding from wrong to wrong toward his final forgiveness and peace, opening night reviewers apparently witnessed a quiet-voiced elder (CPP 125) moving "without strife or suffering ... in the presence of a loving, forgiving person" (Grant 725). The script is intended to emphasize suffering, even unto death, in juxtaposition with this forgiveness, not the omnipresence of Monica, the forgiver. But in Browne’s production, the love story has been allowed to overshadow the strife and the suffering

209 almost entirely. "It is perhaps in the nature of a

Paradiso," concludes Balakian, "to lack drama" (Grant 725) . Oedipus at Colonus, too, lacks drama if Oedipus is not hounded, one last time, by his past in the persons of

Creon and Polyneices, and the very real threat that he may be forcibly taken back to Thebes. Shakespeare's The

Tempest, too, lacks drama if Prospero's temptation toward revenge is not permitted to roil the waters of the enchanted island, raising spectres of the innocent victims

Ophelia and Desdemona and Cordelia as the naive Miranda and her fiance, Ferdinand, wonder at her father's strange moods. And the Paradiso lacks drama only if separated from the other essential parts of the Divine Comedy,

Inferno and Purgatorio. Eliot, in The Elder Statesman does not intend to separate the Paradiso from the

Purqatorio which sets it up. In designing the character of Claverton, Eliot does not pick up the story of Harry after the Furies have become the Eumenides. Claverton returns home, as Harry does, to find the Furies waiting for him. In both cases, the Purqatorio ensues. The hell of Claverton's life, as defined in Four Quartets has been

210 his indifference to others. He can emerge from this state

into a state of peace only through the persecutions of

Gomez and Carghill.

Enoch Brater reports that Samuel Beckett, in Malone

Dies, suggests "'The end of life is always vivifying’-- particularly when it is given the high definition ... of an unsentimental theatre image” (10). In The Elder

Statesman, Eliot clearly risks sentimentality by having the old man consistently bolstered and unconditionally forgiven by the daughter. But Eliot seeks to avoid falling into that sentimentality by making the purgation and the suffering real— and never quite vanquished by the forgiveness received at the end of the play. A performance which emphasises the forgiveness at the expense of the purgation will fail whereas a performance which faithfully reproduces Eliot's complex theatre image will succeed.

For Eliot, such an image involves a complete action occuring on many levels. The Greek myth as dramatized by

Sophocles, the comic surface intelligible to the twentieth-century audience, the personal situation of the once-haunted but now happily-married playwright, the comic vision of Four Quartets ; all these are juxtaposed to create a balanced theatrical image, that of a terminally

211 ill man hounded unto death, losing his son in the process,

but finding a measure of peace through the devotion and forgiveness of his daughter. The key to all of these

elements in The Elder Statesman is the action of moving

from a kind of hell through a kind of purgatory into a

kind of paradise.

Eliot's theatre image is more elaborate than those of

a playwright like Samuel Beckett. In Krapp's Last Tape,

for example, the theatrical image is much simpler: it is

the naturalistic image of an old man on stage listening to

tapes of his past self. In this play, Beckett avoids the

sentimental by making the on-stage Krapp appear

ridiculous, even clown-like in his big shoes, purple nose and slapstick antics. Further, Beckett avoids the

sentimental by limiting the dramatic action to the conflict between the actual Krapp that we see and the

recorded Krapp that we hear. We see and hear the reactions of the actual Krapp to the tape and the

sentimental response is avoided simply by having one Krapp comment deflatingly upon the other.

Krapp's Last Tape opened at the Royal Court Theatre

in London on October 28, 1958, just a little over two

months after the Edinburgh opening of The Elder Statesman.

It is striking that each play explores the same theme and

212 presents the same dramatic spectacle: on stage, a man who has passed middle age and entered into his "twilight years" confronts the ghosts of his past and the spectre of fewer and fewer days left in the future. Eliot's publishing house, Faber and Faber, published Beckett's play some months before it was first produced. It is likely that Eliot's duties at the firm would have allowed him a look at this latest Beckett work. We know that certain lines in Eliot's The Cocktail Party were intended,

"contra Sartre" (Phelan 13), as a rebuttal to that playwright's Huis Clos. Eliot's treatment of the theme and situation of Lord Claverton resonates, "contra

Beckett", with that playwright's treament of the theme and situation of Krapp. Perhaps Eliot wished to dramatize something of the torment of Beckett's character while completing Krapp's career, like Harry's, with a redemptive final outcome.

Krapp's Last Tape is vintage Beckett in that we find a character alone on a minimalist stage reacting to an inescapable situation. There are no "ways out" which, according to Sartre, allow for choice. Eliot's plays, especially the comedies, present characters in the presence of other characters, interacting within a changing situation which merely seems inescapable to them.

213 Beckett is essentially presenting a tragic view of time:

the past is gone, unreachable, unredeemable; but it lingers in the form of inescapable consequences.

Eliot, in presenting his comic vision of time, keeps

the past accessible to Lord Claverton in the persons of

flesh and blood ghosts who inhabit the stage with him and

provide the purgatorial pestering which can lead to a more

hopeful resolution. Krapp, like Eliot's Gerontion, has no

ghosts; or, more precisely, has no living ghosts who open

the past up to him again in a present that allows for

confrontation and alteration. Krapp holds out no real (or

reel) hope for redemption. His past exists only as reels

of tape. Real ghosts are more effective than reel to reel

ghosts in terms of bringing the old man out of his paradigm into a new situation. Eliot's insistence on

remaining within the traditional structure of a commercial comedy allows for complications and obstacles to be worked out over a period of time during which an audience perceives a character open to the possibilities of change

and growth.

Beckett, working very deliberately outside this

tradition, sets the action of his play as "A late evening

in the future", immediately establishing a kind of determinism that is in keeping with his tragic vision of

214 time. This is what will be for Krapp. It is not a "limit situation" but a determined one. Just as the past is untouchable, unchangeable, irredeemable, so the future is already decided. Further, Beckett dresses his character like a clown, making him the subject of farce, the comic equivalent of determinism. Krapp is a stage object, at the mercy of the forces which will engulf him: he has been given "Rusty black narrow trousers too short for him"; he has "four capacious pockets" like those of a clown; he wears a "surprising pair of dirty white boots, size ten at least"; and is given, in addition, a "white face" and a

"purple nose" to go with "Disordered gray hair". He comically eats a banana, slips and nearly falls on the peel, reveals himself to be near-sighted and hard of hearing through a series of comic pantomimes which open the show (918).

This is reminiscent of Herbert Blau's citation of

"the conventional object" of farce: "a person becoming a thing":

the spitting image of everything anal, puppetlike,

uptight, automatic, and genitally fixed which, in a

quick release of contradictions, contradicted,

produces a belly laugh ... (14-15)

215 Blau is speaking o£ a passage from Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, but his remarks apply seamlessly to Beckett's opening stage directions for Krapp:

The sequence contains glimpses, as if through the

swinging door of staccato words, of various things we

tend to find comic in whatever period, from the

animation of the words to slapstick to body humor to

mixed signals to parody to the implication at the

intimidated end of the laughing matter, of

hyperactive self-abuse. (15)

It is important to point out, here, that Blau is using the word "comic" in this case as a synonym for "the ridiculous" or "that which inspires laughter". Blau states as one of his goals for his essay that he intends to be "parsing out the comedy from the laughter" (14), but does not do so here. Similarly, the "comic" in Krapp's

Last Tape consists, not of a Dantean or even a Noel Coward structure like that employed by Eliot, but in bits and pieces of comedy routines from vaudeville and other farcical sources.

Both Krapp and Claverton spend their opening moments on stage consulting a ledger. Krapp's ledger is a list of tapes in boxes, at least nine boxes--"nine! good God!"

(919)— arranged by year. Beckett, in preparation for

216 directing the 1969 production with Martin Held in the lead

role calculated that Krapp has been recording birthday

tapes for 45 years and has amassed 9 boxes of tapes each

containing 5 spools (Gontarski 302). Titles on Krapp's

ledger reveal the contents of the box and spool which

Krapp seeks: "Mother at rest at last", "The black ball",

"The dark nurse", "Slight improvement in bowel condition";

Memorable Equinox". These are the subjects which will

haunt Krapp during this particular taping session: the

lover given over for the literary and philosophical "fire"

engendered in him by the "Memorable Equinox" at the light

house; the mother expiring in a lonely room as Krapp sits

in the park flirting with a dark nurse and playing fetch

with a scruffy white dog and a slobbery black ball.

Claverton's ledger is a calendar of business

appointments. He has ledgers for all his years in

politics and business, but none for his personal life.

When we first encounter Claverton, he is dressed in the

dignified garb of his station in life. Has been

"contemplating nothingness" instead of "thinking about

nothing" as his doctors have ordered.

Every day, year after year, over my breakfast,

I have looked at this book— or one just like it—

You know I keep the old ones on a shelf together;

217 I could look in the right book, and find out what I

was doing Twenty years ago, to-day, at this hour of the afternoon.

It's the empty pages I've been fingering—

The first empty pages since I entered Parliament.

(CP. 301-2)

Like Krapp's tape reel which will wind on in silence,

Claverton is confronted with a ledger book which will admit no more appointments: "I've been wondering ... how many more empty pages?" (302). But Claverton will receive more appointments: meetings with Gomez and Carghill will, figuratively, fill his empty pages. Krapp's drama will admit no futher sound as he sits "motionless staring before him" (925) .

Krapp has his birthday routine just as Claverton has his breakfast routine. But Krapp's routine always has been and always will be free from the interruption of other characters. He visits his club to drink alone by the fire and collect his thoughts. Then he returns to his dark den, lit by a single bulb, to listen to past birthday tapes. His younger self calls the "old P.M.s gruesome" (920) but indicates they help him collect his

218 thoughts for the latest tape. Finally, Krapp begins his

new tape, always by criticizing his earlier self.

The past self that the present Krapp listens to this

evening in the future had wanted to get "the vision" on

tape. The older self, listening, wants to hear more about

"the girl". He keeps fast forwarding through the former to get to the latter and we overhear fragments of the

vision: a "howling wind", a "miracle", a "lighthouse" and

the perception that the "dark is not to be kept under but

is my most ....' (920). We are cut off at the crucial

point. We perceive that no interest in this vision

remains for this old man. Both Krapp and Claverton are to

a point in life where they need to, in the younger Krapp's

phrase, "separate the grain from the husks ... those

things worth having after the dust has settled, my dust"

(Bain 920). For the younger Krapp, these were captured in

the notes jotted on the back of an envelope and never

committed to audio tape which the older Krapp periodically

takes from a desk drawer, examines, and replaces.

Ultimately, the older Krapp crumbles the envelope up and

throws it away.

Claverton has no such envelope to crumple and throw

away. He is forced, instead, to deal with his children and his intruders from his past. Krapp remains alone on

219 stage, haunted by his memories and his words on the tape

which evoke them. Krappe's skills as a writer come across in his powerful prose: the ball in the hand at his mother's death; the punt. As Enoch Brater describes the words of the younger Krapp, they are "so moving a

testament to the past that he will wind it back and forth to listen again and again" (8).

Krapp's past sins are resonant with those of

Claverton. Each must face a rejected love and a relative he allowed to die alone. Krapp, the younger, has been involved with a woman whom he threw over for what he deemed an artistic quest. But the taped portions of his past to which he keeps forwarding and rewinding are the descriptions of the "girl in a shabby green coat" and the punt :

upper lake, with punt, bathed off the bank, then

pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay

stretched out on the floor boards with her hands

under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing

down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I

noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she

came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said

again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on,

and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.]

220 I asked her to look at me and after a few moments— [Pause.]— after a few moments she did, but the eyes

just slits, because of the glare. I bent over them

to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause.

Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the

flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing,

before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with

my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay

there without moving. But under us all moved, and

moved us, gently, up and down, from side to side.

(922-3)

Claverton too is forced to recall an afternoon with

Maisie and "a punt 1 On a river" (CP 321). But Claverton is forced to recall it in the presence of the real Maisie

Batterson, grown older, and to hear in her voice and in her words the story of the afternoon and "the tea basket I

With some lovely little cakes" (321). Krapp is left only with the overwhelming poetry of his own description of years before.

Similarly, Krapp must listen to his own poignant description of his mother's death. He is frozen in time on the tape describing the dark nurse with whom he was flirting in the park and the black ball in his hand which the little dog was barking for:

221 — the blind went down, one of those dirty brown

roller affairs, throwing a ball for a little white dog, as chance would have it. I happened to look up

and there it was. All over and done with, at last.

I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand

and the dog yelping and pawing at me. [Pause.]

Moments. Her moments, my moments. [Pause.] The

dog's moments. (921-2)

These moments, dramatically speaking, are frozen in

time, inaccessible. The playwright, in designing his

play, has framed them that way. Krapp can only listen,

remember, and react. The drama comes as the audience

watches Krapp's agitated fumbling with the tape switch in

juxtaposition with the confident, younger voice.

In The Elder Statesman, Claverton revisits his memory

of his wife's death. It is a similar story: no love or

communication between the man and the dying woman. But

Claverton recounts the story in the presence of another.

The retelling of the story in the form of a confession to another character on stage makes the past, again

dramatically speaking, accessible and redeemable to

Eliot's character. The drama comes as Claverton's

daughter reacts to the story and Claverton reacts to her reaction.

222 Eliot gives Claverton real ghosts as opposed to reel

to reel ghosts. Claverton can choose to avoid them or

choose to confront them. This is key to Eliot's drama : he

is using the conventions of the well-made play, the

drawing-room comedy to unravel his character through

confrontation. Beckett's characters stand alone or with useless partners confronting nothingness, the fragments of

comic routines utilized merely to highlight their status

as objects.

Enoch Brater has said that a Beckett play is genre

unto itself (177). Hugh Kenner has said as much for

Eliot: "The Eliot play," he observed in 19 59 ... "seems on

the way to becoming a distinct dramatic genre, like the

Shaw play or the Wilde play, in which a special language,

a corresponding moral climate, and a whimsically

melodramatic kind of plot irradiate one another’s

possibilities" (331). But whereas in "Eliotic drama"

(337) for Kenner "[eIverything depends on the language"

(331), Eliot's focus on the problem of developing a dramatic form suitable to the modern stage goes beyond

mere concerns of language and has resulted in a much more complex dramatic image as presented in the postwar plays.

At the base of every postwar comedy is, not only a

Greek myth, but a Greek myth as rendered in a tragi-comic

223 form by a Greek playwright. At the level of surface

verisimilitude, each play presents contemporary characters

in a contemporary setting operating within the conventions

of postwar British stage comedy. As a kind of elusive

descant in each of the mature comedies, Eliot's own

personal situation functions— from the situation with Emily Hale and Vivienne through the redeeming new marriage

to Valerie Fletcher. And coursing throughout the whole,

the comic vision of Four Quartets, informing the dramatic

situations, enriching the dramatic discourse, and

impelling the characters to their denouement. At the

dramatic core of this complex theatrical image in each of

the postwar plays is a simple drama of limit situations

where a character or a group of characters is placed in a circumstance where a choice must be made between attachment, detachment, and indifference.

The progression to the choice, ultimately, is Eliot's

take on Dante's Divine Comedy. Characters suffer the hell

of solitude in a seemingly irredeemable present, endure

the purgatory of torment by ghosts and images of the past, and emerge into the paradisio of a hopeful future attained

only by making the appropriate choice in T. S. Eliot's

Divine Comedy of Situation.

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