It was a very windy
night here in McHenry County. Which brought to mind an effort by that apostate
Unitarian, T.S. Eliot, who was long considered the most important American—or Anglo-American—poet of the 20th
Century mostly because his poems were so dense and hard to understand.
Thomas Sterns Eliot was
born into the western branch of Unitarianism’s most distinguished family. The Eliot family contributed two presidents
of the American Unitarian Association,
a noted President of Harvard and
innumerable important ministers. They
were related to such other prominent families as the Mays, and the Wares.
Thomas’s father was a
successful St. Louis, Missouri businessman and prominent
local Unitarian layman. His mother was a former teacher and a volunteer social
worker. The youngest of 7 children, he
was sickly and drew special attention from his parents. As a boy he was taken to Gloucester, Massachusetts every summer
to keep up his connections with the rest of the Eliot clan.
Of course Eliot was
sent to Harvard, where his cousin Charles William Eliot had just
concluded his famous Presidency. He
excelled as a student but was openly critical of the curriculum, which he did
not consider sufficiently rigorous. He
quickly gained notice for his writing, which appeared in student publications
and literary journals.
Upon graduation he did
graduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris, back in Harvard and at Merton College, Oxford. His wide ranging
studies exposed him to Parisian bohemianism and to neo-catholic
monarchism. He was drawn to and repelled
by both. The experimental possibilities
offered by bohemia thrilled him but a yearning for order drew him to philosophic
conservatism. Out of the war of these
ideas, and his struggle with his liberal Unitarian background came the poems
that would cement his reputation.
He wrote The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and other seminal
poems in 1910 and 1911. The same year he
was pursuing his doctoral degree at Harvard working in a group that included George Santana, William James and the visiting Bertrand
Russell. Heady company indeed.
In 1914 Eliot was
studying at Marburg, Germany. The impending onset of war sent him fleeing
to London where Conrad Aiken showed
his poetry to Ezra Pound. Sensing a possible disciple, Pound forwarded
Eliot's work to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry
magazine where it created a sensation.
In 1915 Eliot was
introduced to vivacious, strong headed and patrician Vivien Haigh-Wood. They
impulsively married that June. The
former dancer had a long history of mental and physical breakdowns that alarmed
and alienated Eliot’s parents. Her
refusal to cross the Atlantic in wartime meant that Eliot was forced to take up
permanent residence in England. At first
they shared a London flat with Bertand Russell, but a brief affair between
Russell and Vivian put a natural strain on the relationship.
Eliot struggled to
support the family by teaching, lecturing and reviewing. He became assistant editor the avant-garde
magazine The Egoist, and was finally able to obtain real employment in
1917 when he took a position in the foreign section of Lloyd’s Bank. Financially
secure for the first time in years, Eliot was able to concentrate on his
writing in his spare time. Prufrock
and Other Observations was published that year with quiet financial
support of Ezra Pound.
Through Russell and
others Eliot gained admission to the moneyed world of the English country-house
set. With his growing reputation and
Pound’s tutelage he mixed with the likes of William Butler Yeats and continental intellectuals. With far greater polish than his abrasive
mentor, Eliot's drawing room manners and smooth conversation gained him
admittance to the highest levels of British society.
In 1920 he published a
second slim volume of poetry in which he openly spoke of his struggles with his
father’s faith. Mister Eliot’s Sunday Morning
Service was part of that collection.
The same year he was editing James Joyce’s Ulysses for the
Egoist and becoming publicly identified with Pound’s Imagist movement.
Eliot’s father had died
in 1919 and Vivien’s emotional and physical health was also poor. An extended three-month visit from his mother
and sister in the summer of 1921 in an attempt at reconciliation drove Eliot to
a break down himself. After three
month’s rest in a Swiss asylum Eliot broke through a writer’s block and was
able to finish his epic The Wasteland, first begun in 1919. The poem was published in the influential
magazine The Dial with an introduction and commentary by Edmund Wilson in
1922. Eliot now stood at the undisputed
head of the avant-garde, far overshadowing Pound.
The same year Eliot
assumed the editorship of a new publication, The Criterion which aimed
to review the whole of European culture.
Vivien's near death in 1923 nearly precipitated a second break
down. Again beset with money worries he
over extended himself with his work at the bank and his continuing editorial
and literary endeavors. He was saved in
1925 when he was hired as literary editor of a new publishing firm headed by Geoffrey Farber.
The Hollow Men,
published in Eliot’s next collection in 1925, represented a final break from
his father’s Unitarianism. In 1927 he
was baptized into the Church of England
and took out British citizenship the same year.
He joined a group of political conservatives and declared himself “a
classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-catholic in
religion.” Thereafter more and more of
his work was religious. Farber published
a series of his religious poems including Journey of the Magi and Ash
Wednesday in pamphlet form.
Some of these works,
like Journey
took the form of dramatic dialog and presaged Eliot’s interest in drama. Religion and drama intersected in 1935 with a
commission from Bishop Bell for a church pageant for Canterbury Cathedral which
became the widely admired Murder in the Cathedral, the story
of the martyrdom of Thomas á Becket.
Elliot’s marriage to
the increasingly unstable Vivian continued to deteriorate through the late
twenties. By the thirties they were
estranged and living apart, though Eliot refused to consider divorce for
religious reasons. In 1939 Vivian was
finally committed to a mental hospital.
Eliot continued to
publish increasingly neo-classicist poetry rejecting his earlier bold
experimentation. He dabbled in drama,
mostly unsuccessfully. He served as an
air raid warden in London during the Blitz and published his last major poetry Four
Quartets in 1943.
Vivian finally died in
1947 as Eliot dedicated himself more and more to drama. He finally had a hit
with a Noel Coward-like play The
Cocktail Party in 1949. The year
before Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature and stood at the pinnacle of his career.
The fifties brought
more dramas, and the cloak of a literary and political elder statesman, ever
more Tory and ever more Orthodox. Eliot’s 1957 marriage to Valerie Fletcher brought him something like happiness in his final
years. He died in 1965 and had his ashes
buried in his home church.
Through most of the
century, Eliot was regarded as the greatest English language poet of his
age. The discovery of virulent antisemitism in his private correspondence
tarnished his reputation and literary fashion shifted from the obscurism of his
most famous early poems. Yet his star is
dimmed only slightly and there is still much to learn from the man who rejected
his Unitarian roots.
Rhapsody
on a Windy Night
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the
quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
—T.S. Eliot
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