LIDIA VIANU T.S. ELIOT AN AUTHOR FOR ALL SEASONS EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS 2010 2 Lidia Vianu: T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons Editor: Cristina Ioana Vianu Technical editing and proofreading: Carmen Dumitru, Georgiana Mîndru Cover: VIC (CRISTINA IOANA VIANU) Text: © Revised LIDIA VIANU, 2010 EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS http://mttlc.ro/editura/ Volume published by Editura Paideia, 1997; Editura Universitǎţii din Bucureşti, 2002. ISBN: 978-606-92167-5-0 EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS 3 Lidia Vianu: T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons Contents I. T.S. ELIOT AND THE DIGNITY OF CULTURE ......................................................................... 4 II. AN AGE OF IMPRECISION (ORDER DENIED) .............................................................................. 6 III. ‘MY DAYS AND WAYS’ (ELIOT AND HIS TIME, ELIOT ON HIS TIME) ............................... 13 1. COHERENCE IN FRAGMENTARINESS .................................................................................... 31 2. MISREADINGS OF ELIOT’S OVER- AND UNDER-STATEMENTS (Faltering between Believing and Wishful Thinking) ............................................................................................................. 55 3. THE HOLLOW POEMS: ELIOT EXPLICIT ................................................................................... 78 4. HUMOUR DESCENDING ............................................................................................................... 87 5. ELIOT IN HIDING (Prying into What Was Not Meant to Be Published) ...................................... 103 V. LITERARY CRITICISM ................................................................................................................. 113 VI. BEHIND THE SCENES (THE QUEST AND QUESTION PLAYS) ........................................... 169 VII. ELIOT MIS à NU (THE SOOTHING QUARTETS) ................................................................... 187 EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS 4 Lidia Vianu: T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons I. T.S. ELIOT AND THE DIGNITY OF CULTURE A long line of innovating poets, playwrights and literary critics seem to have followed in T.S. Eliot’s footsteps. Had he thought of his posterity, he may have shrunk away from it as he did in the end with himself, his own statements and earlier moods. Eliot undoubtedly did innovate some things in poetry and literary criticism. Yet, essentially, his way of thinking was not exactly of the innovating type. It bore the deep imprint of Eliot’s early partly German rigid philosophical training. It also bore the imprint of the sceptical mobility of Bradley, on whose philosophical work Eliot wrote his never defended dissertation. In Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948), for instance, Eliot’s ideas proceed tamely and cautiously. Even the aggressivity of his earlier volumes of literary criticism hides a stern wish to preserve, to conform, to worship the existing culture. His cultured poetry, his poetic Esperanto of echoes coming from all ages did no less, as a matter of fact. He had a life-long obsession with the unity of European culture. He admitted that his work, in its ‘sources’ and ‘emotional springs’ came ‘from America’ (Paris Review, 1959). But he also wrote the following: Younger generations can hardly realise the intellectual desert of England and America during the first decade and more of this century. In the English desert, to be sure, flourished a few tall and handsome cactuses, as well as James and Conrad (for whom the climate, in contrast to their own, was relatively favourable); in America the desert extended à perte de vue, without the least prospect of even desert vegetables. The predominance of Paris was incontestable. He mentioned the names of Anatole France, Rémy de Gourmont, Lévy-Bruhl, Bergson. He concluded by saying: ... an atmosphere of diverse opinions seems to me on the whole favourable to the maturing of the individual. (A Commentary, ‘Criterion’, 1934) In the light of the previous statement it is easy to understand Eliot’s veneration for European culture. In 1918 (Henry James:The Hawthorne Aspect) he plainly wrote: It is the final perfection, the perfection, the consummation of the American to become, not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality can become. Eliot touched upon this topic time and again. The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1948 confirmed him as a citizen of world literature. Authors like George Steiner have accused Eliot of not taking direct and active part in contemporary history. While the horrors of the second World War were taking place, Eliot was investigating the meanings of the word culture, or at least so his essay began: EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS 5 Lidia Vianu: T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons I have observed with great anxiety the career of this word culture during the past six or seven years ... (1948) From the despair of the war to the despair of words. From the face of a broken Europe to the dispersing meanings of its once common culture, now forcibly smashed to pieces. Eliot’s political unrest wears the robe of language. The verbal insecurity he so often complains of is an indirect expression of his sadness at seeing the culture of Europe deteriorating. The literary review Eliot edited between the two world wars (The Criterion) made his concern with European cultural solidarity and dignity very obvious: The Criterion aims at the examination of first principles in criticism, at the valuation of new, and the re-valuation of old works of literature according to principles, and the illustration of these principles in creative writing. It aims at the affirmation and development of tradition. It aims at the determination of the value of literature to other humane pursuits. It aims at the assertion of order and discipline in literary taste. (Quoted by H. Howarth, Figures behind T.S. Eliot) Eliot was adept at a free circulation of ideas inside a common European culture. His poems tried to illustrate the need for a free exchange of ideas, of images. Much of world literature survives in Eliot’s innovation: cultured poetry. He loved to quote from all possible authors and various languages. He actually managed to melt them together. He was by no means insensible to the disasters of the war. The literary review he himself edited had to disappear when World War II broke out because, Eliot said, in Europe intellectual frontiers had begun to appear. He was dreaming of an international intellectual brotherhood. He hated exacerbated nationalistic opinions and provincialism in literature. He did not ignore the fact that any work of art must by all means be particular and national first of all. But it must also have an eye wide open to the horizon of the whole of world literature. In his poetry and essays, Eliot constantly fought narrow- mindedness and provincial aggressivity. He worshipped spiritual peace among countries. He hated intellectual wars, barriers set for the imagination. His veneration for the freedom and dignity of culture, his firm belief in the power of the mind to bring together the beings on this earth make him our very close contemporary. The dignity of culture, Eliot felt, must be preserved at all costs, at all times, for all seasons. EDITURA PENTRU LITERATURĂ CONTEMPORANĂ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PRESS 6 Lidia Vianu: T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons II. AN AGE OF IMPRECISION (ORDER DENIED) The early years of our century were a restless age. They were haunted by the urge to innovate, yet also afflicted with bitter dissatisfaction with the consequences of each innovation in turn. A mistrustfully innovating age, we may call it. Its mood was innovating. Its brain was however realistic enough to keep radical reversals at arm’s length. When our century was only beginning, Virginia Woolf remarked that the ever more complicated machinery which the age was (and is) producing would not necessarily imply an improvement of the literary mind as well. The author of The Waves would be turning in her grave if she heard any of the more technically minded literary critics intimate that the better we build, the better we write. On the contrary, she keenly sensed that, in such a fickle age, literature could not be spared the anxiety, the dread of possible failure. A failure caused by the very restlessness of the age; an age whose literature, at the peril of its own life, would not stay still. Whose words, as Eliot so memorably put it in one of his Quartets, ‘strain/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still’ (Burnt Norton). From a literary point of view, the first decade of this century of ours, which is now drawing to an end, opened an era of imprecision both in fiction and poetry. It would be risky to point at the exact writer who set up this gunpowder plot which was meant to blow up that beautiful (though apparent) precision, that obvious clarity which had been queen of most previous literary works. Fact is that sometime around 1922, when both Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, accompanied by Virginia Woolf’s novels (this is to name only very few of the literary rejuvenators), a distaste for previous ways of writing