Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  I am forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence.

  Again and again, in the chronological plod of Mr. Ackroyd’s assertions, one longs for the confirming quotation, the enlivening snatch of poem or letter, that would prove his point. Instead, we get a number, which tantalizingly refers us, in over fifty columns of endnotes, to some library where Eliot’s own words are still locked up safe from all but a few prying eyes. “Should he adapt an academic career and raise a family? Or should he plan eventually to live in Paris? What was he to do? These were some of the worries which he poured out in his correspondence.”20 Fumbling our way to the proper back page, we find “20 Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 25 February 1915. Huntington.” Again: “Their relationship was further impaired when in 1954 Pound criticized Eliot’s Christianity as ‘lousy’; Eliot wrote a caustic letter back.79” The reader who would like to see Eliot being caustic in defense of his religion must travel, “79” informs him, to New Haven, and presumably beg access from the stern guardians of the Beinecke Library. Even when the source is not the great man’s correspondence but his first wife’s diary, a superscripted number pinch-hits for specifics: “Certainly he was himself capable of violent emotions, and in her diary Vivien remembered an instance of his sudden and violent ferocity.62” “Vivien’s diaries for this period21 give an extraordinary picture of a woman who is tearing herself to pieces, and scattering those pieces in the sight of all those she had known.” Even when the source has been placed by others into print, the habit of paraphrase rules Mr. Ackroyd’s style: “Virginia Woolf had denounced The Rock and in April 1934 was arguing violently with him about his religious convictions;32 three months later she told Stephen Spender that Eliot seemed to be turning into a priest.33” The first number refers us to the fourth volume of the published diaries of Virginia Woolf, and the second to the fifth volume of the published letters. Seek, and ye shall find. Mr. Ackroyd considers Eliot to have been an elusive, all-too-mimetic man, with something peculiar hidden at his core; the words “curious,” “peculiar,” “unreal,” and “bizarre” recur. Yet some of the strangeness of Eliot as portrayed here lies in the unnatural silence imposed upon him by the restrictions of his estate; but for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.*

  As early as 1925, Eliot had announced he did not want a biography of him written; this has not totally discouraged Mr. Ackroyd, nor T. S. Matthews, whose impudent Great Tom (1974) skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance, or Lyndall Gordon, whose Eliot’s Early Years (1977) quotes its subject with relative abandon and nevertheless received a helpful reading from Valerie Eliot, nor those several friends—Robert Sencourt, Joseph Chiari, William Turner Levy, Victor Scherle—who have added their personal memoirs of Eliot to the swelling bibliography, nor the armies of literary critics who must draw upon what facts are known about the tortuous and reluctant production of the Eliot oeuvre. Although Mr. Ackroyd is certainly superior to Mr. Matthews in the number of archives and informants he has visited, he is English and born in 1949, so an air of book learning hovers over areas where his American senior was effortlessly at home. Mr. Ackroyd oversolicitously tells his English readers, apropos of Ezra Pound’s nickname for Eliot, “Old Possum,” that “the opossum [is] an animal which shams death in order to escape predators,” and he informs his younger readers, apropos of the Twenties, that “this was the age of ‘flappers’ and ‘bright young people,’ that irruption of the pleasure principle between the Great War and the Depression.” New Englanders will be somewhat disoriented by his opening pages, in which “Beverly” is spelled “Beverley,” Eastern Point is spoken of as the Eliot family’s own summer house rather than as an extensive section of Gloucester, the Harvard Lampoon (or the Lampoon Building) becomes “the Lampoon Club,” and young salts ungeographically “would sail in Eliot’s catboat along the coast of Massachussetts [sic] up to the Canadian border.” Though Mr. Ackroyd has been a Mellon Fellow at Yale, he tends to see us as little Puritan dears far across the sea: America is “marked by a vague spirituality and an inchoate civilization,” Eliot’s father “represented the American aspiration toward success, thrift and practicality,” and his do-gooding mother “was, to use a convenient analogy, a Fabian of American life.” And the biographer’s grasp of Eliot’s religious life seems gingerly, though he musters what sympathy he can: “If it were necessary to locate those elements of the Christian faith which impressed Eliot most deeply, they would surely be those of prayer and confession, balm and absolution for a soul deeply conscious of sin.… That self-imposed martyrdom which Eliot had dramatised many years before in his Harvard poetry … is the particular fate of those who associate the senses with sin and guilt; such an association is formed early in life, and its origins are not susceptible to investigation.”

  Within its limitations—another of which is a slightly unctuous stiffness of tone, as if Mr. Ackroyd were trying to make adequately stuffy conversation with an odd old type with whom he has been condemned to spend a fiendishly prolonged sherry hour—the biography has the virtues of solidity and fairness. In orderly fashion it arrays the stages of Eliot’s pilgrimage: the comfortable upbringing in the St. Louis family of Unitarian Brahmins, the brilliant but not quite comfortable academic career at Harvard, the escape to England in 1914, the escape into marriage in 1915, the few unsatisfactory years of schoolteaching, the harried and overworked but artistically valuable years at Lloyds Bank, the pleasant and lasting change to a publishing job at Faber and Faber in 1925, his reception into the Anglican Church and British citizenship in 1927, his agonized decision to leave his first wife in 1932, his increasingly public and hyperactive bachelor career as editor, lecturer, churchman, playwright, and international personage, and, finally, when it would seem that Old Possum should be playing dead, his happy marriage, in 1957, to a woman thirty-eight years younger than he. Eliot died in 1965, at the age of seventy-six. He was never entirely healthy, having been born with a double hernia, an overwrought nervous system, and a constitutional fragility. A doctor once told him, “Mr. Eliot, you have the thinnest blood I’ve ever tested.” The English winters regularly laid him low with bronchitis and high fevers and his teeth gave him much pain and trouble. In late middle age he developed tachycardia (like “harbouring some runaway machine,” he said) and emphysema. He smoked cigarettes most of his life and was a surprisingly heavy, though rarely demonstrative, drinker.

  His marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood was a wedding of maladies, since she, even when young, was something of a nervous wreck, given to headaches, depression, and excessive self-medication. Even her skin looked unhealthy, as Virginia Woolf more than once observed in her journals. A large amount of Eliot’s energy was deflected into humoring and nursing his neurotic wife, in the very years when he was working full-time at Lloyds Bank and writing those poems and critical essays that renovated English poetry. After he left her, she would remember in her diaries, according to Mr. Ackroyd, “how gentle he was with her during her illnesses … how ‘handy’ he was around the house.” Whatever neuroses and inabilities the virginal twenty-six-year-old groom brought to the precipitate wedding, “Viv” was certainly sicker than “Tom,” and for seventeen years he endured her demands and collapses and abuse with a fortitude and patience that, if not absolutely saintly, were about all that could be humanly expected. Mr. Ackroyd states flatly, “The decision to leave his wife was justified—and it is significant that no one, not even the members of Vivien’s own family, criticized him for it at the time.” Eliot’s feelings of guilt, however, gave even his lectures at the time of the separation an undercurrent of despair and self-disgust; poetry is a “mug’s game,” he told the Harvard audience for the Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1932–33, and a poet “may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” His sore conscience can only have
been aggravated by Vivien’s pathetic attempts, on his return to London, to confront him and win him back, or by her permanent commitment to a mental institution in 1938, or by her death there in 1947, at the relatively young age of fifty-eight. “Any man might do a girl in,” he had written in “Sweeney Agonistes,” “Any man has to, needs to, wants to / Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.” By one account, he was “shattered by grief and almost despair” by Vivien’s death, and by another he cancelled a lunch on the day of her funeral with a cable saying he had to “bury a woman” and was subsequently “unusually relaxed … almost gay at times.” Mr. Ackroyd says, “These accounts are contradictory but not incompatible.”

  The same even-handedness characterizes Mr. Ackroyd’s treatment of two other sensitive points in Eliot’s story: his anti-Semitism, and his political conservatism. Concerning the former, the best-known literary evidence, besides a few veiled phrases in the early poems, is the observation in After Strange Gods that in “the society that we desire … reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” After Strange Gods comprised three lectures given at the University of Virginia in 1933, and was published by prior agreement with the university; Eliot never permitted them to be reprinted in any form. The poems, including the lines from “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” that run “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot,” stood unchanged, though he capitalized “jew” in later editions. These lines from the Waste Land manuscripts—

  Full fathom five your Bleistein lies

  Under the flatfish and the squids.

  Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes!

  —did not see print in Eliot’s lifetime. Mr. Ackroyd found some slighting references to Jews in the unpublished correspondence, but none of them of later date than 1929. Eliot had, of course, a number of Jewish friends, and one of them, Leonard Woolf, said, “I think T. S. Eliot was slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely.” Mr. Ackroyd proposes a connection with the misogynistic traces in Eliot’s utterances of the Twenties: “it seems likely that his distrust of Jews and women was the sign of an uneasy and vulnerable temperament in which aggression and insecurity were compounded. This is an explanation, however, and not a justification.”

  Of Eliot’s politics, and especially on his often-chastised refusal to take an anti-Franco position on the Spanish Civil War, the young biographer, removed from the heat of these ardent old issues, ventures, “His scepticism about his own motives as well as those of others, and his general belief that one should not comment on any situation until one understood it thoroughly, made him refrain from making the kind of easy judgment or fashionable ‘stand’ in which others indulged.” In contrast to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and in spite of a “peculiar” letter to the Daily Mail in 1923 praising a series of pro-Mussolini articles, “Eliot recognized very well that the reliance upon order and ‘the state’ alone was a form of escapism, a cover for unprincipled militarism and nationalism.” Not that Eliot was an outstanding democrat or populist; in those aggressive Virginia lectures he asserted with stark elitism, “The number of people in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil is very small.” But not even the haziest undergraduate should be allowed to confuse Eliot’s circumspect, if paternalistic, ideas of a Christian society† with the irrational and vicious fascism that Pound wound up espousing.

  Eliot was, as his employers and co-workers all recognized, a reasonable and practical man: an effective and conscientious banker, and an even more able editor in a publishing house. Pound himself, in 1915, had written reassuringly to Henry Ware Eliot predicting to him that his son’s progress in London would be smoother and swifter than Pound’s own; and so it proved. Pound went to Paris, then Italy, and drove his great talent onto the shoals of fanaticism, disgrace, and despair. Eliot stayed in England, and in the postwar period reaped honors, popular success as a playwright, and virtually sacred cultural status. “Eliot had always been the subtler and more complicated man, shrewd enough to make his peace with an age to which he did not truly belong.” As editor at Faber and Faber and of The Criterion, Eliot usefully encouraged younger poets from Auden and Spender down to Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. “Eliot’s contemporaries, like Lewis or Pound, were generally quite unable to see the solid or objective merit in the work of the generation then emerging, but Eliot was able to get outside his own preconceptions and assumptions so that he could spot the real thing, even in work very different from his own.” He was even, Mr. Ackroyd claims, something of a postmodernist: “it was Eliot who in the end loosened the hold of the ‘modernists’ on English culture—not only did he assert the public role and ‘social usefulness’ of the writer in an almost nineteenth-century manner, but he also announced that the principles he derived from his religious belief were more enduring than literary or critical ones.” Where the typical modernist religion was private and revolutionary, like the arcana of Yeats or D. H. Lawrence’s bombastic eroticism, Eliot found his own answer in a long-established institution, the Anglican Church, whose committees he did not spurn and whose ongoing existence in society instilled, as did the councils of publishing, the human lessons of compromise and adjustment. In temper Eliot was close to the eclectic Joyce: both men warmed their genius on old loyalties and demotic language, their heads a mix of music-hall tunes and medieval exemplars. Eliot, so long queasy at the feast of life, ended as a celebrant of domestic pleasures, his voyage like Bloom’s come home to (as his last published poem, “A Dedication to My Wife,” pungently puts it) “The breathing in unison / Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other.”

  Along with a freshly detailed impression of Eliot’s hard-working worldliness—how many lectures he gave! how many cultural excursions across the Channel and the Atlantic he undertook, in ill health and good!—Mr. Ackroyd’s biography affords a renewed appreciation of the immense difficulty with which Eliot pulled his few poems out of himself. The fitful and pained assembly of fragments into The Waste Land, and Eliot’s diffidence in accepting Pound’s editorial slashing and in affixing to the published text, at the last minute, the suavely owlish “Notes,” have been well documented by the publication in facsimile of the manuscripts in 1971. One turns those facsimile pages reverently, noticing with what furious speed Eliot wrote when inspiration was upon him, as it was in the “Elizabeth and Leicester” and “water-dripping” sections. He was, for all his professed “classicism,” a most unsystematic bard, given to long fallow periods and much advice-seeking from interested friends; not only Pound but Vivien annotated the Waste Land manuscripts, and John Hayward was to serve as consultant on Four Quartets. Between these two major poems, in nearly twenty years of what should have been his prime, there was precious little, notably “The Hollow Men” of 1925 and “Ash-Wednesday” five years later—poems of a suppliant thinness, affecting chiefly in their near approach to total silence, in their sense of utterance achieved out of a desert dryness. And Four Quartets, which renewed his reputation and gives ballast to his poetic oeuvre, was carried to completion, we are assured by Burton Raffel in his T. S. Eliot (1982), because of “the coming of World War II and the fact that it made further theater work for the moment impossible.” From the unfinished music-hallish “Sweeney Agonistes” on, Eliot’s heart belonged to the theatre; he had always been a poet of voices, of shifting impersonations. Mr. Ackroyd finds even in Eliot’s Ph.D. thesis on F. H. Bradley proof of his “extraordinary ability to create a synthetic discourse; he is able to employ over an extended space a certain form of language while simultaneously remaining quite detached from it.” Having read Eliot’s letters to Pound, he marvels at “Eliot’s extraordinary ability to mimic Pound’s verbal mannerisms, as if he were willingly immersing himself in his personality. He even goes so far as to fabricate his signature in a way similar to Pound’s, so that it forms a kind of hieroglyph.” This propensity for mimicry Ackr
oyd relates to an inner vacuum, a central incoherence. Edmund Wilson found Eliot’s personality “really rather incoherent.” Wilson had heard Eliot read in New York in 1933 and wrote to John Dos Passos, “He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw.… He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or, rather, self-invented character.” V. S. Pritchett described him as “a company of actors inside one suit, each twitting the others.” Wyndham Lewis saw him as “an inveterate moqueur.” Siegfried Sassoon referred to his “coldstoraged humanity” and once heard him claim that “all great art is based on a condition of fundamental boredom.” Lady Ottoline Morrell wrote of her first encounter with Eliot, “I found him dull, dull, dull. He never moves his lips but speaks in an even, mandarin voice.… I think he has lost all spontaneity and can only break through his conventionality by stimulants or violent emotion.” Before he perfected his impersonations of a banker and a clergyman, there was a latent extravagance in his dandified torpor; several acquaintances of the Twenties detected “green powder on his face”—“pale but distinctly green,” the Sitwells thought, “the colour of forced lily-of-the-valley.” Some of the japes and poses affected by the young Eliot sound quite mad. As he and Vivien thrashed through their maladie à deux, nervous collapse was held off by a grim will.

  The private springs he drew upon for his poetry were exceptionally deep and difficult of access. A poet of Auden’s preening fluency must have seemed to him a creature from another planet. He believed, as firmly as the Surrealists, in the crucial collaboration of the subconscious, of buried forces he hoped to call to the surface with a drumbeat of verbal rhythm. When he wrote the final sections of The Waste Land, he told an interviewer, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.” His imagination was thoroughly auditory, a matter of voices and repetitions; sharp visual images become ever more rare in his poetry as the cadence of utterance, increasingly pontifical and ruminative, takes over. After the example of Dante, he strove for simplicity and directness, to the point of baldness; in an unpublished address given in New Haven in 1933 he spoke of hoping to write poetry “with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry.” However lame and flat the thing being said (and his tranced way of composing admits much that seems flat and semi-conscious), the music is real, and seeks those ancient centers of awareness where incantation and lullaby merge.