Something to be said

Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered too much”. Given how little of the poet’s time was spent actually producing poetry, and how much of it was expended on criticism (“to obtain” the tradition), it may be assumed that it was this prolonged and determined labour which caused suffering at least as acute, perhaps, as his not being able to produce poetry. It constituted, in fact, a progress through a “Thibet of broken stones”, as he once characterized the landscape of his life. The fruits of this effort we now have laid before us, in the four capacious volumes of his Collected Prose, which make the Faber Selected Essays (1932, revised and enlarged 1951) look like a pocket edition.

It is now a commonplace to say that Eliot’s reputation is “conflicted”, or in purgatory. The conflict has, if anything, intensified since the release in January 2020 of Eliot’s letters of more than three decades to Emily Hale, and their publication in a free digital edition three years later (TLS, March 3, 2023). Now we possess so much material concerning this poet, much of it intimate, we may as well go on until we have every document in the case. These volumes arrive then at a useful moment, for they may constitute something of a “pushback” – and a chance, for the fair-minded at least, to pause from passing judgement on the Life and return to the not unflawed, no, but still, to the deep and forensically brilliant critical Work.

That possibility is somewhat complicated, however, by the fact that if Eliot is so compelling, this is in part because we sense that the passionate conviction in the work is intimately related to the trajectory of the life. “What every poet starts from is his own emotions”, he wrote famously in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”. The extraordinary letters he wrote to Middleton Murry in 1925, concerning the agony of his life with Vivien, and of Vivien’s life with him, are couched in the theological terms he was beginning to use in his essays. “Is it true that sometimes one can only live by another’s dying?” he asks in anguish. And so, in 1929 he writes about Dante’s Vita Nuova: “There is also a practical sense of realities behind it, which is anti-romantic: not to expect more from life than it can give or more from human beings than they can give; to look to death for what life cannot give”. And again, it is impossible not to feel the impress of the personal when he writes, on the same topic, “There is almost a definite moment of acceptance at which the New Life begins”. After his formal conversion in 1927, the handing down of moral judgements sometimes takes on a pontifical edge (“literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint”) that will reach a low point in After Strange Gods (1934). But the personal remains here, too: one might cite his allergy to D. H. Lawrence and his works, a personal animus that reveals nothing so clearly as Eliot’s own profound anxieties about sex, and intimate human relations in general.

But this is to anticipate. The Faber press release presents the volumes’ contents thus: “The definitive edition of the published prose of T. S. Eliot, published across four volumes and edited by Archie Burnett”. Further, the four volumes “aim to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot’s approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was still at high school, and concluding with his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death”. So, clear enough apparently. By “published prose”, the editor Archie Burnett means all the pieces that Eliot saw into print, whether in periodicals or, in the case of a minority of these essays, into a collected volume. By a “clean-text” or “text-only” edition, he means there is little to nothing in the way of footnotes or context, beyond an accurate bibliographical listing. It is a remarkable thing to have Eliot’s prose writings, in a single chronological sweep, without the usual accretion of scholarly annotation.

Every term here (“published prose”, “single chronological sequence”, “clean-text”), however, needs to be used with care. As far as the first is concerned, what we have here is the collected prose, approved into print, sometimes with revisions, by Eliot. Along with the published collections of essays, this includes printed texts of Eliot’s public lectures, addresses and interviews; his “Commentaries” for the Criterion, and the pseudonymous items in the Letters page composed by TSE; three issues of the Christian News-Letter, when guest-edited (and entirely written) by Eliot; texts originally delivered in a foreign language (now translated). Excluded from this rubric are the Clark Lectures (1926) and the Turnbull Lectures (1933). These have already been published in book form by Faber as The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, in Ronald Schuchard’s indispensable edition (1994). One can regret their exclusion here: to my mind these writings are critical to understanding the crucible of Eliot’s thought, especially the Clark Lectures, at a time when he is working painfully towards the “ethical and theological standpoint” mentioned above. They contain superb insights into French nineteenth-century poets, notably Jules Laforgue, in which the drama of Eliot’s self-projection is at its clearest. Ideally, they would have their place in the great sweep covered by these volumes. But the lectures were never published in Eliot’s lifetime, nor approved for publication, so they do not appear here. Having determined his editorial principles, Archie Burnett remains consistent.

These principles also impact the “single chronological sequence”. Texts that the poet chose to reprint, and eventually to collect in volume form, frequently underwent revisions, and Burnett chooses to publish these in their final form. At the same time, he has chosen to preserve the critical collections, The Sacred Wood (1920), Selected Essays, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), On Poetry and Poets (1957), etc, in their entirety and in their original running order, with pieces he published more than once appearing only in their latest iteration. This means that the seminal early essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, first published in two instalments in The Egoist (September and November 1919) and then collected in The Sacred Wood, is only to be found here when it finally comes to rest in Eliot’s first Selected Essays – nearly halfway through the second volume of the set, separated from the essays contemporaneous with it by some 872 pages. This seems odd. That said, the place where the essay would have fitted in a strictly faithful chronology is marked and clearly cross-referenced, so finding it within the volumes is straightforward. In rare cases, where Eliot revised heavily, for example the essay entitled in Selected Essays “‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama”, which began as “Whether Rostand Had Something About Him” when it was published in 1919 in The Atheneaum, is published in its finalized version, with the essay in its original form printed immediately after.

If this editorial disposition is off-putting to readers, then a solution is at hand: the eight volumes collected online as part of Project MUSE, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The critical edition (Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber; TLS, January 31, 2020), “which gathers for the first time in one place the collected, uncollected and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth-century”, to quote the official description of this monumental ingathering. It would in fact be irrational, as well as unjust, to review the “clean-text” print edition without referencing the astonishing online achievement of the general editor, Ronald Schuchard, and his team of eminent scholars, in what is in fact a much larger project, which runs into thousands of pages and counting, as any hidden fragment of Eliot, however fleetingly minor, will find its place there. This edition is or will be comprehensive: it includes hundreds of items not mentioned in Donald Gallup’s bibliography of 1969, which until now has been the main source for scholars. In terms of chronology, the editors here take the opposite decision to Burnett’s, and the collections in book form have been “disassembled and their contents returned to chronological order alongside the uncollected and unpublished prose”. This includes the Clark and Turnbull lectures, which now take their place, re-edited for the purpose, within the great sweep of Eliot’s critical prose.

There would be no sense or benefit in arguing in favour of one method or the other: both sets of principles are legitimate, and both are coherently defended. It needs also to be borne in mind that whereas the MUSE online edition can expend pages on explanatory textual notes, Burnett’s “clean-text” endeavours to be just that. Instead, the Eliot scholar can now rejoice in both resources: the fully cross-referenced, contextually annotated online edition, the “digital Eliot”, and the pleasures afforded by the physical Faber reading volumes, superbly produced and printed on bible paper. Taken together, the Faber volumes comprise 3,536 pages. Of these, 938 are previously published in volume form. That leaves an eye-watering 2,625 pages of Eliot criticism now collected for the first time in one place in book-form. One can legitimately say, however, that the MUSE Complete Prose effectively complements and completes the printed Collected Prose. Perhaps the most notable inclusion in MUSE is the postgraduate essays on idealist philosophy, written when he was at Harvard, and later at Merton College, Oxford. Even if their author came to despair of such intellectual mazes, in their close argumentation and rigour they do much to reveal the origin of his dialectical method, deployed under the watchwords “comparison and analysis”.

Predictably, much of this activity is at its most astute in the first volume of the Collected Prose, in the years up to 1928, present in materials contemporaneous with famous essays such as “Tradition and the Individual talent”, “The Function of Criticism” and “Dante”, or the series on the Elizabethan drama. A rewarding example is the uncollected essay “Modern Tendencies in Poetry”, which according to MUSE was originally delivered as a lecture series (for which Wyndham Lewis was to speak on art) for the Arts League of Service on October 28, 1919, and later printed in an Indian periodical, Shama’a. The fact that Eliot chose not to collect it gives some measure of his scrupling selectiveness. In this essay he deploys his characteristic dialectical, or pincer method, exploring two representative “types” of modern poetry which he defines “by two kinds of vice: the Emotional, and the Unemotional”, in this case some lines by the Georgian poet James Stephens and a fragment of Dadaist verse by Tristan Tzara. He does so the better to define the space between them, which may well come to be occupied by serious poets (like himself and his friends). The Stephens verses, of the “emotional” school, he dismisses by complaining that the poet tells rather than shows, already using terms that are now the commonplace of creative writing classes. The Tzara is altogether more “formidable”. As so often with Eliot, it is ideas coming from across the Channel that exercise his mind and sharpen his wits. Tzara here is a purveyor of the “unemotional”:

It is the tendency of people of intelligence who have thought about art to the point of having become cynical about it […] The end of this kind of aesthetic interest is to find in art not pleasure, but amusement. The adjectives to be applied to any work of art are “amusing”, or “tiresome”; it must amuse you, or it will bore you: if it amuses you, it is charming. […] It is unscientific, because the interest in mere data is not a scientific interest at all, and in the end, if we pursue only sensation, we shall cease to have even sensation.

That last remark is vintage Eliot. It puts one in mind of a later judgement, but arrived at by much the same method, in “Leçon de Valéry” (1947): “There is only one higher stage possible for civilized man, and that is to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith. But Valéry was not Pascal, and we have no right to ask that of him”. But might he not ask it of himself?

Much in the second and third volumes, we must admit, is heavy going. Once the settled belief is in, the existential tension goes out and this is reflected in the prose, which often turns into long-winded polemic and attempts at defining “What Precisely / And If and Perhaps and But” – Eliot’s “desiccated urbanity”, in Hugh Kenner’s phrase, weaving webs for its own entertainment. One no longer feels the urgency of the personal; the stakes are no longer so high. The best of Eliot is when he is silently placing his own drama, and genuinely seeking his own position, within the heart of the poetic, intellectual, political, philosophical or spiritual argument. Here, morphing seamlessly into the Establishment Man of Letters and a prominent member of the Laity, he starts speaking out with increasing confidence in his almost single-handed attempt to revivify institutional Christianity, surrounded on all sides by the younger, left-leaning Men of the Thirties, steeped in Marx and tempted by the Party. Robert Lowell’s memorable portrayal of the poet-preacher at this time, as a fanatical Calvinist scourging his pagan English public, might seem apt, reading these dry tracts. (Even they, however, can be made compelling when he determines to think a matter through, aided by his elegant style. His prose at times can feel like a boa constrictor, compressing its prey.)

In actual fact, much of Eliot’s defence of Christianity is attractively unemphatic and undogmatic: “No, the world I have in mind would merely be Christian as far as it was anything […] The last thing I want […] is to revert to any medieval or early Christian society”. In a text like “Building Up the Christian World” (1932) there is no doubting that Eliot believes he is talking about something “real”, even a realizable vision, and to insist that the individual soul remain “the unit of value” is a perfectly decent vision; but in the face of the alluringly radical utopias of the Thirties one senses it fading spectrally away even as he writes. Nevertheless, there is no denying his percipience concerning totalitarian systems. From the perspective of the present, his social commentaries on an array of miscellaneous matters, worrying about the motor car, the ribbon developments of suburbia, the deleterious effects of the machine, too much idleness, not enough leisure, popular taste for the “fourth-rate”, the potentials of the wireless, etc, seem merely quaint in the age of AI, when we are so fearfully further down roads he never imagined, and a machine can compose a plausible poem in the style of T. S. Eliot.

Up quite what mountain of purgation he felt he needed to toil when, as guest editor, he composes three entire issues of the Christian News-Letter (see volume three), or when he writes endless papers, addresses, letters in support of Christian schools and charities, remains obscure. On the evidence of the Hale archive, he would slam a church door in Emily’s face when he needed to, during Lent or Holy Week. A chill whiff of churchiness comes off some of these pages, the eminent poet adopting the kind of persona Wyndham Lewis was thinking of when he exclaimed: “He doesn’t come in here disguised as Westminster Abbey”. (A comment which, when reported to him, made the depressed, reclusive Pound, silent in Venice in 1965, throw back his head and laugh.)

Eliot could be cuttingly dogmatic, at times displaying the spritual snobbery characteristic of recent converts, when he felt embattled or threatened. In 1927, burdened with who knows what guilt to expiate or lurid imaginings to neutralize, and seeking some penitential task, Eliot turns to the French once more to take his bearings, and translates a punishing essay by the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, “Poetry and Religion”. Here he lights upon a phrase that he will use with a minatory flourish before his Harvard audience in 1933: “It is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the super-substantial nourishment of man”, adding that Maritain was in “deadly earnest”, and, by implication, their lecturer was too. And yet, this subtle, dialectical, ironical mind could never remain in dogma for long. One needs always to factor in the roleplay and the self-dramatization, as in Eliot’s apparently favourable but actually vicious review of of Middleton Murry’s biography of D. H. Lawrence, Son of Woman (1931). This is part of the skirmish set up between the two friends to provide copy for literary journals. It was the same with the long-running debate between his so-called classicism and Murry’s romanticism. The whole debate was artificial (Lawrence called it “bunkum”) and by 1962, in an interview, Eliot seemed to agree: “To tell the truth, the discussion rather bores me now”.

Taking the critical prose as a whole, if we seek for constants in his thought, or for things of permanent value, to use a favourite phrase, what might we find? Brilliant insights, to be sure; a genius for the apt quotation; forensic analysis of particular examples. In short, Eliot demonstrates literary discrimination of the first order, carried out over an immense range. But there is another vital and engaging constant: unlike other minds, Eliot never in fact lays down exclusive prescriptions about what poetry is or ought to be. What he does, mostly, is apophatic, so when speaking generally he tends to define the art by what is it not. Beyond the celebrated formulations of the early essays (“objective correlative”, “to form a new compound”, “a continual extinction of personality”, “the historical sense”), he insists until the end on poetry’s rarity, its mysteriousness, on its beginnings as rhythm, or as an inchoate mass, containing a “great number and variety of elements which can be combined into new and important compounds” and of which, taken together, “there is something to be said”. Vitally, he foregrounds, when discussing the genesis of a poem, the difficulty of expressing, combined with the absolute necessity of doing so, and the pressure brought to bear upon language thereby.

In the fourth and final volume of the Collected Prose, which among much else contains the miscellaneous interviews Eliot gave, we find this, from 1962, in answer to a question about the moral duty of the poet:

When one is writing a poem, one may not be thinking about one’s moral duties. One just has something inside that one wants to get out, and the only way to get it out and at the same time find out what it is one wants to get out, is to find the words for it. If you are a poet you will come to know when you have found the words, and when you haven’t.

Amen to that.

Stephen Romer is Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford. A collection of his essays, Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism was published last year

The post Something to be said appeared first on TLS.