Craig Raine has narrated this article for you to listen to.
This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein:
I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician].
Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.
Towards the end of his life, in 1963, T.S. Eliot expressed his reservations about three early essays on which his reputation was founded – ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’; ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, which introduced the objective correlative; and ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’. He ruefully noted ‘their callowness’, their ‘facility of unqualified assertion which verges, here and there, on impudence’. His criticism, as these four volumes of almost 4,000 pages demonstrate, is strewn with unprovable, magisterial solipsism.
For example: ‘When Henry VII came to the throne, the English mind, and the civilisation that expressed it, was cruder by a century than the French mind, and still further behind the Italian [my italics].’ How can he know? ‘But for Dryden’s verse, we might not have had the perfection of Congreve’s prose, though this is not demonstrable.’ Again: ‘At certain moments… a word can be made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilisation.’ Is that all? We are frequently told by Eliot how much depends on poetry:
We need constantly new poets, men who combine an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over words: otherwise our own ability, the ability of a whole people, not merely to express but even to feel civilised emotions, will degenerate.
This is a drum Eliot insistently beats. That the ‘first duty qua poet is to the language of his country. First, he has the duty to preserve that language: his use of it must not weaken, coarsen or degrade it. Second, he has the duty to develop that language…’
This quasi-National Service, I submit, is the last thing on a poet’s mind when he starts to compose a poem, in the immediate press of its imperious local demands and decisions. Moreover, so few people read poetry that it is hard to exaggerate its cultural unimportance. A great art, certainly, but a manifestly minority interest. If anything, having displaced poetry as notional cultural arbiter, pop songs are overwhelmingly influential – weakening and coarsening, the Miley Cyrus effect, the wrecking ball of simplified sexuality. (No wonder we prize the Beatles: ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’.)
Take Eliot’s auditory imagination, an impossible super power, invented in 1933:
The feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.
Far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling. Unprovable, in other words. But a potent, seductive assertion, a poetic truth, and one which feeds Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bone Dreams’: ‘I push back/ through dictions,/ Elizabethan canopies,/ Norman devices,// the erotic mayflowers/ of Provence/ and the ivied latins/ of churchmen// to the scop’s/ twang, the iron/ flash of consonants / cleaving the line.// In the coffered/ riches of grammar/ and declensions/ I found bān-hūs…’ The skeleton in the word-hoard.
Eliot’s explanatory gloss is so vague and all-encompassing it has come to mean that sound is also the carrier of sense – an area of fraught subjectivity. Eliot in 1951: ‘It is a common experience that a poem found difficult when read to oneself is suddenly elucidated when read aloud by someone who has understood it.’ Soon enough Helen Gardner recommended reading Eliot’s poems aloud as a way of unlocking their meaning. It doesn’t work.
How did Eliot impose his views so effectively, so hypnotically? It is partly the disarming self-deprecation – ‘the highly intelligent ignoramus’ – in tandem with the critical aggrandisement. A little anthology: ‘I have no capacity for abstract thought’; the notes to The Waste Land dismissed as a ‘display of bogus scholarship’; ‘I wish I had taken Hegel more seriously in my youth, but like many people I was caught napping.’
Eliot’s injunctions to thoroughness contribute to his authority: ‘To understand [Dryden’s] view of Shakespeare we must read all of his critical writing.’ Compare Eliot’s essay on John Ford: ‘We must know all of Shakespeare’s work in order to know any of it.’ The implication is that Eliot has done the homework – all of it.
Then there is his obsessive-compulsive resort to definition, the parade of precision. Take a single, representative essay, ‘Shakespeare Criticism’ (1934). It begins with a complaint that the categories of ‘comedies, histories and tragedies’ are undefined: ‘We have first to grasp what criticism is, and second to grasp the relation between literary and philosophical criticism on the one hand and literary and textual criticism on the other.’ This is a typical pre-ramble.
Eliot then springs on his reader the hypothesis that comedy and tragedy are subliminally identical:
For those who have experienced the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate… In the end, horror and laughter may be one – only when horror and laughter have become as horrible and laughable as they can be… then only do you perceive that the aim of the comic and tragic dramatist is the same.
From this volte-face, Eliot proceeds to the ineffable Shakespeare: ‘In the greatest poetry there is always a hint of something behind, something impersonal, something in relation to which the author has been no more than a passive (if not always pure) medium.’ Literary spiritualism.
So, winning self-irony, a display of rigorous definition, followed by an incoherently impressive but passionate, semi-confessional disclosure. Mystery. Mystification. In 1932, writing about Dryden, Eliot says:
We often feel with Shakespeare, and now and then with his lesser contemporaries, that the dramatic action on stage is the symbol and shadow of some serious action in a world of feeling more real than ours.
It is a central plank of Eliot’s programme, that the poet is not the final authority on the meaning of his poems. The meaning lies somewhere between the poet and the reader. Further, the poem should contain material outside the poet’s conscious control. No surprise, then, that Eliot in his essay on vers libre should invoke ‘the inexplicable line with the music which can never be captured in other words [my italics]’.
In ‘Shakespeare Criticism’, Eliot refers to Thomas Rymer, a 17th-century critic he describes as ‘destitute of taste’. However, earlier, in his volume of essays The Sacred Wood, there is a footnote to the famous Hamlet essay: ‘I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s objections to Othello.’ In another footnote to ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’ (1932), Eliot says that ‘Rymer makes out a very good case’ against Othello. Rymer’s objections are in ‘A Short View of Tragedy’ (1693), where he attacks the inconsistent chronology and the psychological implausibility of the handkerchief as evidence of infidelity. He proposes Desdemona’s garter as a more plausible trigger of jealousy. (He is also shocked that a ‘black-amoor’ should be given such prominence.)
A central plank of Eliot’s programme is that the poet is not the final authority on the meaning of his poems
You would know nothing of these facts from this text-only, strictly chronological edition of Eliot’s prose. It seems to be offered as a cheaper alternative to The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition published by Johns Hopkins University Press at £565 for eight volumes, annotated by several Eliot scholars under the supervision of Ronald Schuchard. Project Muse will provide a searchable electronic format at $300 for a single year’s renewable subscription. Archie Burnett’s mere four-volume version is understandably silent about the competitive Johns Hopkins version, which also includes Eliot’s Clark and Turnbull lectures – absent here on the grounds that they were not printed in his lifetime.
The idea of a chronological edition is, on the face of it, a useful way to read Eliot’s prose. However, another perverse editorial rule sabotages this arrangement. Burnett follows W.W. Greg’s principle of copy text as the last corrected text. So, for example, on23 November 1928, Eliot published his seminal introduction to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems. However, Eliot added a postscript in 1948, so in the actual chronological place (Volume I, p. 812) we are referred to Volume III, p. 749. Eliot’s 1933 lectures at the University of Virginia, After Strange Gods, are presented here in accordance with the last recension. So, not a continuous text but disjecta membra. Chapters 2 and 3 precede the opening chapter, interrupted by a chronologically prior piece about Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Untranslated French, Latin, Greek, German, Italian and Spanish quotations will test your proficiency.
Still, I enjoyed the comparison of Pound’s criticism to someone telling a deaf man that the house is on fire. I was intrigued, too, to learn what Eliot thought of Peter Sellers: ‘I admired very much his work in I’m All Right Jack. And I have a gramophone record in which he does a surprising variety of turns.’ Eliot’s meticulous account of the wreaths at Marie Lloyd’s funeral is not to be missed either. But to understand his take on the Abdication crisis you’ll need the Johns Hopkins edition to explain the references, which remain unrelievedly inspissated in Burnett’s fatally purist edition.
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