A cat must have three different names: Eliot as a young critic

 

Cynthia Ozick wrote a famous reckoning with  T.S. Eliot – and his problem with the Jews – for the New Yorker in  1989. The beginning of the essay is marred by the “impression journalism”that identifies Ozick with the proto-cultural warriors, always on the lookout, then, for the decline in Western Civ. Ozick claims, without any references whatsoever, that Eliot is no longer taught in the colleges and the universities, and that he is only remembered for Prufrock. This, at the end of a decade in which the longest running musical on Broadway was called Cats. Ozick, like her soulmates on  the conservative cultural magazine of that decade, the New Criterion, dispenses with providing evidence as though that, itself, were some persnickety politically correct trick. Thus,  there is no grubby looking through actual college catalogues to prove her point, or looking at Anthologies to see if Eliot has so palpably dwindled. In this kind of journalism,  impression quickly reduces to fact and one can move on to nostalgic evocations of better times. While Ozick did not  debase herself by going to actual anthologies, I did.  The 2003 Norton Anthology includes The Wasteland, Prufrock, and one of the Four Quartets. I am almost positive the edition in the 80s included the same material.

Cultural warrior stuff always turns out to be a dinner table impression among emeritus professors viewing the youth with the usual bitter eye.

However, Ozick, while ticking off the cultural warrior boxes – the decline of high art, the substitution of “equal opportunity for minorities” rather than canonical reading lists that include Shakespeare and Jane Austin, etc. – does see two things about Eliot: the anti-semitism and the Prufrock-ery of the “impersonality” urged on the poet – the latter a canonical motif among the New Critics. For coming out foursquare against Christian nationalism, Ozick probably earned some demerits from her rightwing comrades.

Good for her.

It is true, though, that English departments in the fifties and the sixties were crammed with people who thought “real” literary criticism began with Eliot’s collection, The Sacred Wood, 1920. However, the young bucks in the English departments in the seventies had access to and enthusiasm for a whole buncha translated material – and here I don’t just mean the French theory tribe. Bakhtin and Benjamin opened people’s eyes to the 20s. Bold spirits, who went on to found October Magazine, also discovered the Russian formalists and futurists. In the light of, say, Skhlovsky’s Art as Technique from 1917, T.S. Eliot’s once admired The Perfect Critic from 1920  looks positively provincial.

Partly, this is a matter of style. The great essayists of the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, all brought a voice to the essay. From Montaigne’s essays on down, the voice has made its uneasy truce with history (personal and suprapersonal) in the essay. Musil, at the time Eliot was writing, was brooding on how the essay was working its way into the novel.

Eliot brought into the essay his prestige as a great poet and his vocational uncertainty – or rather, the uncertainty of where, outside of poetry, he fit. He was not a teacher, but he adopted the teacher’s tics in the essay. Thus, there is a rumble of great names, often for effect; there are adages that would make good witticisms, but are poor proofs; there is Eliot’s conflicted sense of the modern, and his resolve to close down all those uncertainties with doctrine.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot. Indeed.

The Perfect Critic begins with a quotation from one of Eliot and Pound’s enthusiasms of the time: Remy de Gourmont.  de Gourmont’s heavy fan, Pound, made large claims for him that have no corresponding echo in France, or elsewhere. Eliot, like Pound, seems entirely oblivious of Mallarme. Gourmont was a member of the Mercure clique, until he fell out with Rachilde, the wife of the editor. Still, he was a considerable figure in the symbolist circle around the Mercure. The Mercure, In October, 1935, devoted most of an issue to Gourmont, while acknowledging that after World War I, he was not a much quoted man. “Remy de Gourmont, who had enchanted the friends of letters by the openness of his mind and because he joined boldness to clairvoyance and the sense of ideas to that of language, was soon cast aside. His name is not forgotten, but when young litterateurs cite him, they distance themselves from him with a summary judgment that shows that they know neither his work nor him.”

If I had world and time, perhaps I would know Remy de Gourmont and his work – but I know enough of it to know that Eliot’s yoking of Aristotle and Gourmont in his essay was, to say the least, ill-judged. Although since Eliot takes Aristotle on such general terms, perhaps it was the best he could do for Gourmont. Nothing, to me, is more embarrassing in Eliot’s essays of this time than his presentation of major “Western” figures in a sort of powerpoint way, evoking their greatness but forgetting to explain their pertinence. The pertinence of Aristotle to Eliot’s own sense of criticism seems to consist of the fact that Aristotle analysed tragedy. And you can too!

Such is the spirit.

Eliot was very concerned to exhibit his disaffection with the modern era, that age of disintegration, but his essays in the twenties bear the mark of the twenties. For instance, the decade’s appetite for record making: most homeruns hit, fastest Transatlantic plane time, etc. In that spirit, Eliot likes to begin by giving you the recordholders.

“Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the

last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold – I think it will

be conceded – was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer

rather than a creator of ideas.”

The paltering “perhaps”, the “I think it will be conceded” – no wonder Eliot “overlooks” Hazlitt, or Ruskin, or the romantic critics – de Quincey, the Keats of the letters, Shelley – who would put down ‘Coleridge was the greatest” if they felt it was, and would dare to be damned assertively. “I think it will be conceded” is the kind of pleading one leaves to the family soliciter, fudging the will.

What Eliot is pleading for, in this essay, is a criticism that takes its objects “objectively” and without “emotion.” Now, it is true that the emotion of a geologist finding an unusual rock compound must be separated from the compound itself, though it may be a clue to its rarity or the surprise of its being where it is. But there is little reason to think cultural products are best viewed in that same light – or even that they can be viewed in that same light. The argument that even texts with which one violently disagrees can be understood formally is true. But we distinguish criticism from a lesson in grammar by something other – which is what I would call voice. Eliot knew his voices – the Wasteland is full of them – but he didn’t know what voice to do literary criticism in. Woolf inherited her right to literature, and Lawrence fought for his. Eliot, on the other hand, writes as though he were turning it in for a grade.

Which is unkind. Eliot, like any other freelancer, had to make his way around a literary scene in England that was either avant-garde and run on the trust funds of some rich heirs – and made by Wyndham Lewis types who were cadging drinks and dwelling places and counting their pence, without any retirement plan. Eliot, one feels (oh, I am doing it!) always had a retirement plan.

Eventually, of course, Eliot gave up the notion that criticism must, done right, be done without any passion and plumped for the “sensibility”, a word that can encompass instinct and intellection without too much question.

Whenever I think I am being too harsh on the T.S.E I love as a poet, I return to his essays and find things like the following, the first paragraph in an essay on Hamlet:

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem,

and Hamlet the character only secondary.  And Hamlet the character

has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the

critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which

through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism

instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their

own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a

Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and

probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that

his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that

Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading

kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical

insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the

substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative

gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention

on this play.”

That last line sticks its thumb in the whole massive buttocks of this opening. Poor Coleridge and Goethe, to be condescended to by such a prick! However, perhaps this made them laugh at the high table – and Eliot so thirsted and hungered for the high table. Later, in the high Cold War, when Eliot men were nestled in their English departments, probably somebody who also wanted his seat at the high table made heavy weather of this Hamlet, Coleridge and Goethe business.

Eliot himself, to give him a bit of credit, latter cut his Hamlet article for an American edition of his essays, pronouncing it callow.

Callow, the fidgety flitigy filtering cat.

 

 

  

 

 

 

TSE and me

 Everybody has his or her year of genius, a yar in which neurons configure into revelations. For some it is at age five, for others, at age 65. Everything becomes a portal. You see your life globally. You see your life in a grain of sand or a raindrop. And you see, in a brilliant flash, the alien, strange, other-than-you life of the grain of sand or the raindrop.

For me, that age was approximately fourteen. 1972, 1973 – ninth grade. In the summer between the eighth and ninth grade, I made a fair amount of pocket change, for a kid, bagging ice for my Dad. Dad owned an ice company, due to, well, the absurdity that ruled like a broken mirror’s curse over my Dad. The company went belly up in, I believe, 1975.

For me, this money meant I could buy three things that helped nudge along my revelatory neuronal path: a television set, which I took into my room, a couple of Dylan albums, my first – Bringing it all back Home and Highway 61 – and a subscription to William Buckley’s National Review, then at the height of its intellectual powers. The tv made me independent of my family’s preference for Network programs. I, on the other hand, tuned into public tv, and was thus initiated, via a series of Bergman films and a series on World Cinema hosted by Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin, into the higher civilization of film, where despair was common and an occasional naked woman was to be seen – which was a big plus for a 14 year old.

The Dylan albums are self-explanatory, love em or hate em.

And the National Review was perfect for my self-fashioning as a little conservative. But they were even more than fantastic for my self-fashioning in general, since the standard of the writers in the general section was high, although tending towards the ultra-right – let’s hear it for Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, folks! – and the arts and manners and books section had writers like Guy Davenport and the crazy and now obscure novelist, D. Keith Mano.

Davenport’s review of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era is an oddly important document for me – it was published in May 1972, and I still remember the names, the strange names in it: Apollinaire, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound. I had my nose against the shop window of the higher civilization that I knew existed outside of Clarkston Georgia. I have recently been looking through the correspondence between Davenport and Kenner, and enjoying a nostalgic thrill from the names of that time. Frank Meyer, who remembers Frank Meyer? Only old old movement people – the conservative movement, not the SDS.

I remember some of my eighth and ninth grade teachers, lovely people. But this is not, alas, the story of a stripling being taken under the wing of some wise English teacher. That would have been nice and Hollywoodish, but instead, I was taken under the wings of the Clarkston High School Library and the Decatur Library. It was at this time that the library stepped up for me, not as a place to find a picture book for a book report, but as this fantastic paradise where I could pick the fruit for free.

I discovered Dostoevsky, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein. I discovered Joyce – the Dubliners and the Portrait of an Artist. I discovered “modern” art, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp, etc. If I went back to the art books today, I’d probably smile at how bad the photographic reproductions were, but for me at the time, this was all amazing.

As well, I discovered poetry. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, those were my ticket beyond the shop window, aforementioned.

Eliot, I swallowed whole. He’s been my symbiot since. Knock Prufrock and the Wasteland out of me and you might as well kick me to the curb, because much of what makes me the me that is typing this would be lost.

Eliot of course went along with my young conservative styling, the nostalgia I imbibed from all those National Reviews. As I got over my genius year, I drifted far, far away from young conservativism, but I still liked Eliot’s elegant, elegiac sense of our modern decay – desolation row.

When I went to college, Eliot’s grip on the humanities, ie the literature departments, was loosening. It was becoming clearer that subjecting all poetry to critical techniques that work for a few metaphysical poets might be a mistake. The canon of the right ones – Herbert, Donne – and the wrong uns – Shelley, Tennyson – was breaking down.

What if “the existing monuments: did not “form an ideal order among themselves?” What if the monuments were more like kaleidoscopes? What if romanticism wasn’t some horrid blotch? Maybe trading a sour Christian order in which the vast majority was kept in ignorance and fear for the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” was not a bad deal?

Eliot’s is an odd fate. Here was a man who refused to tread the path he could easily have tread. He could have ended up teaching at Columbia, like Lionel Trilling, instead of being a bank employee on the verge of a nervous breakdown. From which he went not into academia, but into publishing, become a Faber and Faber man. Yet, especially after WWII, and especially in certain American universities, Eliot’s critical stance was embedded in the orthodoxy of literature as a discipline.

That was never going to last. The explosive growth of higher education was moving the great unwashed – such as me – into the classroom. That unwashed was, at first, eager for the washing – and then began to consider that perhaps the washing should go the other way around.

For me, my genius age had some dire and dreadful consequences. It put me on the course of imitating my heroes and never adapting to the discipline of classroom specialization. My reading, even in college, was done under the precepts of idiosyncratic programs I made up for myself, in my head. This made me, in essence, an amateur. An autodidact. A crank. Modernism, as a literary phenomenon, is gloriously, incorrigibly crankish. It embraces Poe in Baudelaire or Mallarme’s translation. It veers with Pound towards Frobenius. It pretends with Wittgenstein to have never read the canonical philsophers.

The crank in me is always making up its own paradigms, which fail, because paradigms, by definition, are common and not idiosyncratic things. Idiosyncratic things are tics. Thus, my genius year and my life as a loser – or, more generously, as a crank – are tied together. This became evident to me when I was in grad school. All the dreaming about garrets when I was fourteen was not good for me.

I think the crankish side of TSE – the man who liked to put on purple lipstick when he went out, from time to time – was taken out of him by his disciples, who were succeeded by people who identified Eliot with his disciples and said: no thanks. I no longer pay much attention to Eliot’s idea of the canon - William Carlos Williams is now in the captain’s tower in my head. But I’m infinitely grateful to him. I’m faithful to the crank I met at fourteen.

The poetry. The poetry. That is the main thing.