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T.S. Eliot: An |
One of the earliest and most durable responses to T. S. Eliot is that there are in fact two Eliots and that they are polar opposites. In one of the first reviews of Eliot's poetry, Arthur Waugh found "Prufrock" so strange that he wondered if it had been written by a rebel whose motto was "I knew my father well and he was a fool" or perhaps by a "drunken slave." But the drunken slave was soon seen to have a sober side. Prufrock and Other Observations was followed by The Sacred Wood, The Waste Land by Homage to John Dryden, and the poet who had been introduced to the world as a drunken rebel announced that he was a royalist in politics, a classicist in literature, and an anglo-catholic in religion.
Accounts of the two Eliots came in spatial and temporal versions. In the spatial, the two coexisted as layers in the same personality; in the temporal, the two succeeded each other in time, with Eliot number two displacing Eliot one at the baptismal font in Finstock Church on June 29, 1927. The persistence of the myth can be explained by the fact that it is strikingly corroborated in his writing, including his verse from "Prufrock" through The Elder Statesman—spatially, in a complex doubling of the self; temporally, in a sharp change in style after The Waste Land. Eliot, of course, was painfully aware of conflicting tendencies within himself. One page in his early notebooks contains this "prayer":
"O lord, have patience / ... / I shall convince these romantic irritations / By my classical convictions" (Inventions of the March Hare).
Almost every book on Eliot gives some account of the two Eliots. The version articulated in Lyndall Gordon's T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life is one of the most compelling. She argues that Eliot should be seen in terms of a self split psychologically between surface and depth, polished shell and burning core, and split morally between perfection and imperfection, saint and sinner. Eliot, she maintains, "had the mind to conceive a perfect life, and he also had the honesty to admit that he could not meet it," and she describes her book as a "spiritual biography" which "explores the divide between saint and sinner in the greatest poet of the twentieth century."
It is the sinner, as her title indicates, that fascinates Gordon, but unlike some who have chronicled Eliot's imperfections, she never loses sight of his virtues as a person and his greatness as a poet. Gordon carefully positions herself between older reverential critics and newer iconoclastic ones. In Oxford in 1996, she was present at a lecture by James Fenton in which Eliot was characterized as anti-Semitic and hypocritical and which ended with the line "Eliot was a scoundrel!" Gordon reports that after a stunned pause, some in the audience ap plauded, but that she did not. Fenton's abusive view is just as false as its opposite, for both deny Eliot's psychological and spiritual complexity. She proposes to
look his flaws in the face without seeing flaws alone ... flaws in lesser works can coexist with moral urgency and poetic greatness in other works. Eliot's greatness ... shows itself in a struggle with certain flaws in his nature, a long struggle that gave birth to the spiritual journeys of his maturity.
Gordon's new book is a revised and updated version of two earlier books, Eliot's Early Years (1977) and Eliot's New Life (1988). The revision was needed because of the recent publication of important materials: the poet's early letters, his 1926 lectures at Cambridge, and his early poetic notebooks.
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