by John Updike
A Messed-Up Life
GREAT TOM: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot, by T. S. Matthews. 219 pp. Harper & Row, 1974.
T. S. Matthews, in Great Tom, gives an impressively suave and sprightly demonstration of how to write a book when the book isn’t there. You begin by including in your Acknowledgments a gracious mention of “those who did not answer my letters, or who denied me access to various unpublished papers, or who refused to see me.” You go on to discuss, with unabashed candor, the New York publisher who approached you to write upon a subject in which you have neither scholarly interest nor personal involvement: Mr. Matthews met Eliot on a few “widely spaced occasions,” and, like Eliot, emigrated from America to England, but the publisher seemed bewitched chiefly by the congruence of their first two initials, and his excitement was further whetted by a letter from Eliot’s widow and executrix flatly declining to assist in any way; “for reasons which I still fail to understand,” Matthews confides, “the publisher found this letter encouraging. I did not; but by this time the idea of writing Eliot’s biography had begun to appeal to me strongly. I signed a contract for the book. Was this a mistake? Some people have said so; and if they read this book perhaps they may see no reason to change their minds.”
By now, the reader has been roused to a great pitch of suspense as to how the bulk of pages still unread in his hand will be filled. The suspense becomes well-nigh unbearable under a hail of goose-flesh-raising questions:
Who was T. S. Eliot? Why did he want to keep his private life a secret? … Is there less, or more, in his poetry than meets the eye? To what extent does his poetry depend on plagiarism and parody? Did he have a “tin ear”? Was he a phony scholar? A phony saint? … Was he a homosexual? Did Bertrand Russell seduce Vivienne Eliot?
The Lord only knows; with the same long breath Mr. Matthews admits that, “in the pages that follow,” these “awkward questions” have to be asked, “whether or not they can be satisfactorily answered.” This is indeed, as he names the genre, “a biography, of sorts.”
Well, forewarned is disarmed, and only the most impatient seeker of truth could fail to be beguiled by the succeeding parade of types of padding. There is the irrelevant catalogue:
The home remedies, the lotions and standard antiseptics, tonics, and germicides of the day were familiar to the Eliot household and particularly to little Tom: peroxide, antiphlogistene, baume analgésique, Listerine, camphor ice, malt extract, Castoria.
The vacuous speculation:
Of his interior life we have no record, but we know it existed and suspect that it was his home address. Also he was an adolescent, and we know, or can partly remember, what that was like.
The impudent assertion:
Did he masturbate? Of course. And was he ashamed of it? Unspeakably.
The water-treading rumination:
Who can tell what is going on in a small boy’s head? The only witness, the child himself, is less witness than observer, most of the time enthralled, some of the time in flight (either from fear or from what he will later call boredom), and never capable of reporting his observations in any form that his elders can understand.
The mystery of Eliot’s early sexual attitudes and experience evokes from Matthews the tone of a hectoring bully:
But why, surrounded by women as he was, should his feelings about them have been so faint-hearted? Because his mother and his sisters were ladylike women, terrified of sex and disgusted by it, and ashamed of their female bodies. By precept and example, they encouraged his own shame.
Out of wholly thin air he constructs an imaginary “facts of life” interview between Henry Eliot and his thirteen-year-old son:
Too soon might shock the tender young mind; too late would find its petals browned and withering in corruption. (They really thought in such terms.) Henry Eliot was a man who knew his duty and did it.… The boy would have listened with half an ear to his father’s cautious roundabouts, the customary euphemisms, about birds and bees.… His father’s voice overwhelmed him with the weight of Sinai, and he crept from the presence knowing in his heart that all was lost.
The primly liberated biographer unconscionably equates the Eliots’ Unitarianism with Calvinism (against which it was a liberal revolt), treats St. Louis as a suburb of a cliché-Puritan Boston, and takes poetic evidence of Eliot’s sensuality (“so rank a feline smell”) to mean unqualified repugnance. He assures us on no given evidence that the young Eliot was chaste both at Harvard and in Paris, and, more fascinatingly but with little more substantiation, portrays his first marriage as one long sexual rejection by the clever and neurotic Vivienne. Matthews’ discussion of this marriage includes the enchanting disclaimer “Here again some significant facts are available, even if we cannot always be quite certain of their significance.”
As Eliot’s private life moves into the relative light of printed poems and opinion, of worldwide fame and London gossip, Matthews has more material to work with. Yet he handles the oeuvre rather brusquely, even dismissively. Of two youthful poems of 1910: “Neither showed the slightest sign of originality or was worth preserving.” Of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”: “If this isn’t showing off with a smirk and a vengeance, what on earth is it?” Of the criticism: “Eliot as critic is also Eliot at his least satisfactory and least likeable—a know-it-all who puts us in our place and keeps us there.” Of The Waste Land: “… the scheme, such as it is, is mostly afterthought.” Of the poet’s ear: “Examples of Eliot’s failure of musical ear abound in his later poems.” Matthews elsewhere says generous and shrewd things of Eliot’s works, but he rarely seems to examine them with any focussed concern for the life of the mind behind them. Eliot’s Christianity, for instance, stimulates a long, fulminating, personal, and rather obtuse essay in which Matthews, himself an Anglo-Catholic, worries the cheap paradox that Christians have made war and inflicted cruelties upon one another. The intellectual atmosphere de l’entre-deux-guerres, in which Eliot’s profession of faith was a shocking and, to some, an exemplary proclamation, is scanted. Throughout, the tone of the title—crass, jaunty, faintly bellicose—is sustained; one can feel Eliot’s fastidious ghost wincing.
Yet the book, in part because of its breezy thinness, is easy to read. Mr. Matthews occasionally strikes off a fine phrase: “Eliot’s benign, almost wordless presence seemed to have an encouraging effect on [John Hayward], like the silent flame under a singing tea kettle.” He quotes some illuminating remarks: Stravinsky’s saying of Eliot, “He is not the most exuberant man I have ever known, but he is one of the purest.” And Eliot himself saying, “No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” What a beautiful sadness in this implication that a poet, an artist, “messes up” his life in the hope of producing something immortal. And how startling to know that Eliot composed his poetry standing at a typewriter! “It is a mystery to me how anyone can write poetry except on a typewriter.” And how awful to imagine him, in his little office at Lloyds Bank—“a figure stooping,” I. A. Richards remembered, “very like a dark bird in a feeder, over a big table covered with all sorts and sizes of foreign correspondence”—working directly under the pavement, with heels hammering on the thick green glass squares above his head all day long. And how touching, after the recent revelation that Eliot diffidently accepted almost all of Ezra Pound’s cuts of The Waste Land, to read that Pound, shown the manuscript half a century later, was equally diffident about his strokes of editing genius: “He should have ignored me. Why didn’t he restore some of the cancelled passages when Liveright wanted more pages?”
And, though an official biography might bring forth an abundance of the correspondence and specificity rather strikingly sparse in these “Notes,” Mr. Matthews’ silhouette of the life seems unlikely to change: a life disfigured by an unhappy marriage in the middle and distinguished from beginning to end by a proud industry. As a student at Harva
rd, Eliot compressed four years’ work into three; as a graduate student, he added Sanskrit and Italian to his knowledge of French, German, Latin, and Greek; when he worked a full day in Lloyds, he would rise at five to labor at criticism; in the years he was remapping the English literary tradition, he was nursing an ill wife; he lectured; he edited Criterion for seventeen years; at both his banking and, later, publishing jobs he not only put in time but won promotions and praise from his colleagues; after his conversion, he served on many church committees and even edited an ecclesiastical publication; at an age when many men retire, he undertook to make himself into a commercially successful playwright. Through all this, the meagre, reluctant, pained trickle of poetry, aiming (in his words) at “the maximum emotional effect with the minimum verbal decoration.”
No doubt the time will never return when, as in the early fifties, to those of us in college, Eliot’s reputation was an encompassing gray cloud, the very atmosphere of literature. It was a remarkable looming, a matter of style as well as of content, to a generation that loved the aloof, the cryptic, the ominous, the wry, the weary. Mr. Matthews, who offers a variety of verdicts on the worth to posterity of his elusive subject, suggests that when the “emotional radioactivity” has died away all that will be left of Eliot is “a case of the dry grins.” It is true that Eliot’s poetry is, as was his personality, somehow transuranic, bonded together by a perilous pressure. The contemporary estimates of its worth ranged as wildly as a Geiger counter gone crazy—from R. P. Blackmur’s reverence to Van Wyck Brooks’s abhorrence—and an archaeologist of literature, exhuming its decayed carbon traces in the far future, may have trouble identifying it as poetry at all. It is like no other. Its droning tone underlines a confessed poverty of inspiration and vitality, yet a steady force of seriousness, of caustic austerity, engraves it on our minds. The revelation of The Waste Land revisions shocked us, of course, because this of all modern poems had come to seem inevitable; it feels familiar when we read it for the first time, and by the third time it feels memorized. And when we reread it after wading through Great Tom, we are exhilarated by its altitude; we are “In the mountains, there you feel free.” Though Eliot’s critical phrases (“objective correlative,” “dissociation of sensibility”) may no longer serve as signposts for the student, and the plays fade, as most plays do, what lines of poetry between Yeats’s late poems and the verse that Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote from within the shadow of death burn deeper, better remember themselves, than Eliot’s? His will asked that no biography of himself be written; we would not be much poorer if his request had been honored.
FRENCH DEATHS
Death’s Heads
THE FIRE WITHIN, by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 183 pp. Knopf, 1965.
SELECTED WORKS OF ALFRED JARRY, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, translated by many hands. 280 pp. Grove Press, 1965.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893–1945) and Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) were French men of letters whose reputations, inseparable during their lifetimes from personal notoriety, were eclipsed after their suicides (Drieu shot himself, Jarry no less deliberately drank himself to death) but have been revived in contemporary France. Drieu, a Vichy collaborator whose passionate political inconsistency antagonized all parties, has been rehabilitated from disgrace by, an article in Le Monde stated in 1964, “a new generation which has chosen désengagement, but which is attracted by his outspokenness, his elegant cynicism, his aristocratic aestheticism, and his desperate lucidity.” Jarry, an undersized super-bohemian whose play Ubu Roi marks the birth of the avant-garde theatre, has been honored not only by continuing editions of his writings but by the founding, in 1949, of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, an eccentric and elusive pseudo-science he invented. In the United States, a book by each author has been recently published.
Drieu’s The Fire Within is a brief, flickering novel issued in France in 1931 as Le Feu Follet—“playful fire,” an idiom for “ignis fatuus,” or “will-o’-the-wisp.” The will-o’-the-wisp presumably is the hero himself, Alain, whose weak hold upon life finally yields to the pull of suicide. As Alain moves through his last few days vainly seeking an excuse to live, the author subjects him to a bewildering alternation of acute sympathy and stern lecturing. The sympathy probes emotional nihilism to its last dead end and self-defeating checkmate; the lecturing seems delivered from a standpoint nearly Christian:
Alain had never looked at the sky or the housefronts or the pavements—palpitating things; he had never looked at a river or a forest; he lived in the empty rooms of this morality: “The world is imperfect, the world is bad. I disapprove, I condemn, I annihilate the world.”
Yet although he scolds him as a “fetishist” and a “naïve dandy,” Drieu cannot in honesty construct a fictional world that at any point substantially resists Alain’s premonitions of futility. So Alain’s suicide, instead of afflicting us with the dizzying impression of waste we feel in, say, Anna Karenina or Appointment in Samarra, arrives serenely, as something appropriate and slightly overdue. It is a kind of happy ending: “A revolver is solid, it’s made of steel. It’s an object. To touch an object at last.”
Alain is much concerned with objects, and part of Drieu’s appeal to the modern young must be his flat objectivity, a dispassion that reduces people to a species of object opaque in their psychology and mute even in speech. In Drieu, the tendency has not achieved the doctrinal purity of Robbe-Grillet; his flat narrative texture is bubbled by incongruous outbursts of sermonizing. But his sense of actuality rejects mankind’s ancient claims of special importance, the conviction of spiritual destiny that inflames and inflates the living newspapers of Balzac and Dickens. The Fire Within ends a moment before death and begins a moment after coitus. The lover and beloved are discovered looking at each other with eyes dreadfully clear of illusions: “All she saw was a hairy chest, no head. It didn’t matter: she had felt nothing very violent either, yet the switch had been tripped, and that was the only sensation she had ever known, not permeating but precise.” The switch had been tripped. Drieu’s mordant and entertaining characterizations—and there are many characters; the novel in form is picaresque—work to mechanize humanity, to chisel a series of hard-featured marionettes:
Mademoiselle Farnoux smiled at Alain with meagre lust.… She was a little girl between forty and sixty, bald, with a black wig on her bloodless skull.
The doctor was a nervous jailer. His huge round eyes swivelled above cheeks scored by the terror of losing his boarders, and the little beard that substituted for a chin trembled incessantly.
Brancion smiled. He wore his dentures with ostentation; women were not put off by them.
Even the beautiful women are rigid dolls:
[Eva] got up and slid her dress over her head. Then she pulled off her slip, her garter belt, her stockings. She was completely naked, a magnificent, bloodless plaster body.
Maria was Russian. A Russian peasant with a face and a body carved out of wood.
It is natural that Alain, who has some of the instincts of an artist, mocks this de-animated society with ironic collages and random assemblages of objects:
On the mantel, two objects: one a delicate piece of machinery, a perfectly flat platinum chronometer, the other a hideously vulgar painted plaster statuette of a naked woman that he had bought at a fair and took with him everywhere.
In his mirror he has arranged two photographs, a foreshortened man and woman, and between them “a news item pasted on the glass with four stamps reduced the human mind to two dimensions and left it no way out.” The third dimension must be the supernatural.
Though The Fire Within takes place in Paris, its spiritual locale is the empire of disenchantment whose twin capitals are Paris and New York. The two chief women in Alain’s life, his absent wife and his present mistress, are Americans, and his vices and weaknesses seem peculiarly American—drug addiction, sexual inadequacy, fear of losing his youth, a greedy awe of
money, an enfeebling dependence upon women. He is described as a Puritan: “a man who saw the vices sprouting from his prejudices, but who was incapable, because of his prejudices, of enjoying his vices.” He even has a psychiatrist, who sagely tells him, “A strong, healthy woman like these Americans will make you forget all this.” But Americans, as represented in this book, are clearly also “a race exhausted by civilization.” The only convinced spokesman for life is a scholar immersed in the study of the gods of ancient Egypt; “he would have liked to recite some of those Egyptian prayers distended with the fullness of being, in which the spiritual life, exploding, pours out all the sap of the earth.” Perhaps the reason that the waning of the Christian faith is so peculiarly desolating in France and America is that in these nations the pagan gods, whether Hellenic or Teutonic, were never taken very seriously. The Christian bet was hardly hedged. Pascal and Cotton Mather alike theologize on the basis of a vast gamble, and their heirs feel cheated. “There was, after all, something of the Christian in Alain”—this something, which needs to act righteously and refuses to embrace the mediocre muddle of living, produces, with a purity coolly mathematical, his self-destruction.
The New World to the Old is a hemisphere as disappointingly empty as the heavens. Alain, seeking to save himself, flees to New York and only deepens his plight. Of course, there are differences: Paris is a “lingering, low fever,” whereas “New York, at least, was an open atrocity.” But the two cities, as spiritual ciphers, are interchangeable. The faddish artistic scene of post-Surrealist Paris strikingly resembles the Camp of contemporary Manhattan:
