T. S. Eliot MASTERS OF WORLD LITERATURE PUBLISHED: GEORGE ELIOT by Walter Allen COLERIDGE by Walter Jackson Bate T. S. ELIOT by Bernard Bergonzi GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by Bernard Bergonzi MATTHEW ARNOLD by Douglas Bush JANE AUSTEN by Douglas Bush JOHN KEATS by Douglas Bush JOHN MILTON by Douglas Bush IBSEN by Harold Clunnan JONATHAN SWIFT by Nigel Dennis DANTE by Francis-Fergusson STENDHAL by Wallace Fowlie THOMAS HARDY by Irving Howe HONORE BALZAC by E. J. Oliver GOLDSMITH by Ricardo Quintana TENNYSON by Christopher Ricks THE BRONTES by Tom Winnifrith IN PREPARATION: PROUST by William Barrett FLAUBERT by Jacques Barzun SAMUEL JOHNSON by James L. Clifford EUGENE O'NEILL by Harold Clunnan EMILY DICKINSON by J. V. Cunningham YEATS by Douglas N. Archibald JOYCE by Leon Edel CONRAD by Elizabeth Hardwick EMERSON by Alfred Kazin SHAKESPEARE by Frank Kennode POE by Dwight Macdonald CHEKHOV by Howard Moss FIELDING by Midge Podhoretz HENRY JAMES by Richard Poirier MELVILLE by Harold Rosenberg WHITMAN by Theodore Weiss MASTERS OF WORLD LITERATURE SERIES LOUIS KRONENBERGER, GENERAL EDITOR T. S. Eliot ++++++4++• •••+ ••+ +++• •+ ••+ ••••+ +• ••••••••••••••• Bernard Bergonzi Second Edition 1M[ The quotations from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot are reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. © The Macmillan Company, New York, 1972, 1978 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published in the United States 1972 First published in the United Kingdom 1972 Second edition 1978 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bergonzi, Bernard T. ·S. Eliot - 2nd ed. - (Masters of world literature series) 1. Eliot, Thomas Stearns - Criticism and interpretation I. Title II. Series 821'.9'12 PS509.L43Z ISBN 978-0-333-24259-9 ISBN 978-1-349-15945-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15945-1 The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser This book is sold sub;ect to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement FOR Benet, Clarissa, and Lucy Contents PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xiii I St. Louis, Harvard, Paris, 1888-1914 1 II London Reputation, 1915-1920 28 III Poet and Editor, 1921-1927 70 IV Religion, Politics, and Drama, 1928-1939 110 V Wartime and the Nobel Prize, 1940--1948 150 VI Comedies and Second Marriage, 1949-1965 174 Appendix: The Waste Land Manuscripts 193 A SELECf BIBUOGRAPHY 199 INDEX 205 Preface to the Second Edition T HIS BOOK was written at a time when Eliot's reputation ap peared to be in decline. Since his death in 1965 he had been condemned as a snob and a reactionary; some English critics were inclined to reopen early battles concerning The Waste Land, alleging that it was not a unified poem, perhaps not a poem at all; while American critics were increasingly convinced that the modern poets who mattered were Pound and Williams and Stevens rather than Eliot. This climate of opinion gave my book a slightly defensive tone that now seems unnecessary. For since 1972, when the first edition appeared, interest in Eliot has revived remarkably; disagreements about his poetry continue to be felt and expressed, but there now seems to be a general conviction that Eliot is important and is likely to remain so. Some of this new interest is biographical. Eliot forbade any life of himself to be written; such injunctions are always provocative and likely to be ignored, and there is an inevitable desire to bring together what Eliot wanted to keep apart, the man who suffers and the mind which creates. Several biographical studies have already appeared notwithstanding the lack of official support and such ludicrous inci dental obstacles as the fact that Eliot's correspondence with a life long woman friend, Emily Hale, is deposited in Princeton University Library but according to the terms of her bequest may not be read by anyone until 2020. "Impersonality", which so long looked like a central Eliotian doctrine, has been quietly abandoned by many x T. S. ELIOT critics; Eliot's dismissive assertion-reported at several removes, and without documentary backing-that The Waste Land was "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling", has been seized on eagerly. When I wrote this book the idea that The Waste Land had a deeply personal dimension and was not only an "impersonal" meditation on history and culture, still seemed a little novel. By now it has become taken for granted. One of the editors of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature compares The Waste Land to In Memoriam, remarking that both are "poems of re pressed passions, presumably of a man for a man ... Both poems are violently personal, eccentric, High Romantic at the core ..." Recently a whole book has been written on the assumption that The Waste Land is a homosexual elegy or lament. The belief that Eliot was a homosexual has gained some currency, though with little basis in fact, apart from speculations about the dedication and Dantean epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations, for Jean Verdenal, "Mort aux Dardanelles." Sexual anxiety and dis gust and longing recur in Eliot's poetry, but it is evident that they are provoked by women rather than by men. Of the recent books with a biographical emphasis the best is certainly Lyndall Gordon's Eliot's Early Years, which is balanced and sensitive and scholarly, even though limited in its critical insights. There have been quite other reasons for new and generally favourable appraisals of Eliot. The last few years have seen a widening of vision in English criticism, a growing interest in comparative literature and a European perspective, in contrast to the insularity and limited aims of the fifties and early sixties. The vogue of Structuralism has led back to Symbolism, which was Eliot's own starting-point, and he is now more clearly seen as a master of European modernism, a deeply challenging and inno vating writer whose implications are still not fully absorbed. This is the position of Gabriel Josipovici, who in a recent essay, "'But Time Will Not Relent': Modem Literature and the Experience of Time," associates Eliot with Proust and Kafka and Beckett. Josipovici writes, "the power of Eliot's early poetry stems from its embodiment of a sense of awakening, and that awakening is always frightening, since humankind cannot bear very much reality." For this critic The Waste Land is still radically modem, PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xi the embodiment of a new consciousness and a non-linear appre hension of time, even though it offers a standing temptation to critics to reduce it to familiar terms, to assimilate it to a literary mainstream ("High Romantic at the core"); or else to see it "as a mirror or symptom of apocalypse, thus proving the continuing validity of Nietzsche's dictum that man would rather take the void for his purpose than be devoid of purpose." Josipovici's read ing is one that I incline to myself, and I think it provides fruitful ways of understanding Eliot. There is a somewhat similar ap proach in Michael Edwards's Eliot/Language, a small book from a small press, the Aquila Publishing Co. (situated on the Isle of Skye), which contains some original and acute criticism of Eliot, set out in aphorisms and brief pensees. Edwards reads Eliot as a Symbolist poet, who had to wrestle with the peculiarly intractable problem of writing a Christian-Symbolist poetry, of redeeming language in a fallen world. In the first edition I was unable to say very much about the manuscripts of The Waste Land, which had been discovered in 1968 in the New York Public Library; such references as I made were on the basis of articles by Donald Gallup. Mrs. Valerie Eliot's edition was in preparation, but I was not able to see it before it was published late in 1971, when my book had gone to press. I wrote an extended review in Encounter in 1972, which was later included in my book The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature. It now appears as the Appendix to this edition, in what looks like its natural resting place. Apart from this making good of an obvious lack, I have not felt impelled to make changes in the text, even though there are things I would now phrase differently. I have, however, deleted a line from "Gerontion" at the end of the last chapter, as I have come to feel that its contextual implications were inappropriate. If I have changed my thinking about Eliot since 1972 it is more in emphasis than in taking new directions. I still find the Quartets difficult to come to terms with-more difficult than The Waste Land, despite the greater limpidity of language-but now I admire more of it than I did a few years ago, though I still be lieve that the poem works as a series of fragments rather than a wholly achieved unity.