EDITED BY VALERIE ELIOT AND HUGH HAUGHTON.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 944 pages. $45.

THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT. VOLUME 2: 1923-1925

EDITED BY VALERIE ELIOT AND HUGH HAUGHTON

New Haven: Yale University Press, 920 pages. $45.

Published in Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2012).

Volume 1 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, which takes us from the poet’s childhood in St. Louis through The Waste Land, appeared in 1988, the year of Eliot’s centenary; the revised edition, meticulously edited by the poet’s widow Valerie Eliot, this time with the help of Hugh Haughton, adds some two-hundred additional letters, many of them negligible but some containing real revelations, as do the amended notes. Volume 2, more than twenty years in the making, covers only the three years 1923-25. Given that Eliot was to live for another forty years, and that these first two volumes run to more than 1800 pages, one wonders when and even whether this multi-volume edition will reach conclusion.

Never mind: the story these volumes tell is so fascinating that I could not put them down. The young Tom Eliot who graduated from Harvard in 1910 and set out for a year of study in Paris, is a figure straight out of a Henry James novel—a self-conscious, aesthetically inclined innocent abroad in an age when Puritan norms still ruled the American scene. “I do not approve of public instruction in Sexual relations,” the poet’s father Henry Ware Eliot (the president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis) wrote his brother Bob in 1914. “When I teach my children to avoid the Devil I don’t begin by giving them a letter of introduction to him and his crowd. I hope that a cure for Syphilis will never be discovered. It is God’s punishment for nastiness. Take it away and there will be more nastiness, and it will be necessary to emasculate our children to keep them clean.” (I, 41) Eliot’s mother (herself an intellectual and poet) was not at all happy about her son’s plan to spend a year in France. “I cannot bear to think of your being alone in Paris,” she wrote him, “the very words give me a chill. English speaking countries seem so different from foreign. I do not admire the French nation, and have less confidence in individuals of that race than in English” (I, 12).

But it was precisely “that race” to which young Tom was drawn. In Left Bank Paris he came into his own: at his pensione, for one thing, he befriended a medical student named Jean Verdenal, from whom six chatty and warm letters in French are included (the letters to Verdenal were evidently lost). Back at Cambridge, Eliot began work on a doctorate in philosophy, but Europe—and especially Paris—kept beckoning. In 1914, preparing for a fellowship year at Oxford, he chose to spend the summer in Marburg so as to improve his German. Less than a month after he had settled in this “charming . . . wonderfully civilized little place,” (I, 45) war was declared, and Eliot was evacuated to London. Here he soon made friends with another young American poet, Ezra Pound, who promised to publish “Prufrock” in Poetry magazine. “The devil of it is,” Eliot complained to his old Harvard friend Conrad Aiken in September 1914, shortly before taking up residence at Merton College, “that I have done nothing good since J. A[lfred] P[rufrock] and writhe in impotence. . . . Sometimes I think—if I could only get back to Paris. But I know I never will, for long. I must learn to talk English. . . . I think now that all my good stuff was done before I had begun to worry—three years ago.”(I, 63).

Worry about what? By December, Eliot confides to Aiken, “In Oxford I have the feeling that I am not quite alive—that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing else. As you know, I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the walls” (I, 81). It wasn’t just university towns that were oppressive. In London, “One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. . . . I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago.” (I, 82).

Paris had somehow been different. In a revealing letter newly included (12 December 1921), the poet’s brother Henry writes to their mother, “The strain of going out among people who after all are foreigners to him, and, I believe, always must be to an American . . . has, I think, been to him pretty heavy. I remember a year or more ago, in a letter to me, he spoke of always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people. To me he seemed like a man playing a part.” (I, 613) What makes the letters so distinctive is that here Eliot– the poet Pound would later christen The Possum–sometimes lets down his guard. And when he does, we can see that despite Eliot’s famous claim that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1919), the poems from “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” to The Waste Land are nothing if not autobiographical.

On May 2 1915, Eliot received the terrible news that Jean Verdenal had been killed in action in the Dardanelles. Prufrock and Other Observations, published in 1917, was dedicated to Verdenal; many years later, in an editorial for the Criterion (April 1934), Eliot was to recall, “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later . . . to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.” We can only speculate what Eliot must have felt at the time, especially since he couldn’t really talk about his feelings to anyone. Less than two months later, at any rate, the twenty-six-year-old poet finally “disposed of [his] virginity” by suddenly marrying a young Englishwoman exactly his age named Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he had met at a party in Scofield Thayer’s rooms at Oxford. “I am much less suppressed, and more confident than I have ever been,” Eliot wrote his brother Henry soon after the wedding (I, 113) and to his father, “She has everything to give that I want, and she gives it” (119). But within a month, with Eliot briefly back in the US, to consult on his future with his Harvard professors and family, Vivien was writing flirtatiously, in a newly included letter, to Thayer (2 August 1915):

Tom has gone to America without me. . . . Rather unwise perhaps to leave so attractive a wife alone and to her own devices! However—I did not want at all to go—I am frightened of the voyage and submarines—and preferred to remain and play my own little games alone. . . . It is very nice being Mrs. Stearns-Eliot (notice the hyphen). I am very popular with Tom’s friends—and who do you think in particular? No less a person than Bertrand Russell!!! He is all over me, is Bertie, and I simply love him. I am dining with him next week.  (I, 120).

Russell (see I, 831) turned out to be the evil genius of the Eliot household: while offering young Eliot his flat, his country house, and various opportunities for employment, he was, on the side, “entertaining” Vivien. “She says she married [TSE] to stimulate him, but finds she can’t do it,” he wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell (I, 124).  In later years, Eliot refused to have anything to do with him.

Had war not broken out in 1914, Eliot might have lived a very different life and—more important—become a very different poet. As it was, he was now forced to recognize that his future was in England. Vivien’s endless neurasthenic illnesses, his now dimmed prospects for a university position in the US, and the difficulty earning any sort of living made his life nearly unbearable, although, with the publication ofPrufrock and other Poems (1917), he was beginning to make his name. The letters of the war years, in any case, make for painful reading, with Eliot trying hard to convince his family that he had not “made a mess of [his] life as they are inclined to believe” (I, 315).

Then suddenly, on 6 January 1919, the poet’s father died of a heart attack. A few days earlier Henry Ware Eliot had written to his brother, “My Tom is getting along now and has been advanced at the bank [Lloyds of London] so that he is independent of me. Wish I liked his wife, but I don’t” (I, 314). Now the father was never to know of his son’s literary success. It was a devastating blow. Eliot compensated by planning for his mother and sister Marion to visit him. The correspondence detailing the descent on London of these well-meaning but overbearing ladies again has a Jamesian cast, the adoring son counting the days till they left. For by this time, Eliot was fiendishly busy, his Poems 1920 and critical essays in The Sacred Wood having generating dozens of commissions for reviews and articles. He was working hard at Lloyds and beginning an active London social life, all the while caring for an increasingly ill and demanding Vivien. By the end of 1921, Eliot had a complete nervous breakdown and was sent to Lausanne to recover. On the way back via Paris, he shows Pound his drafts for The Waste Land. The story of Pound’s cuts, transpositions, and omissions (see I, 625-31), almost all of them accepted graciously and even submissively by Eliot, is well known (see Valerie Eliot’s edition of The Waste Land Facsimile), but read in the context of the letters, Eliot’s decision to do just about everything Pound suggested is even more remarkable. The later, more confident Eliot would not be so deferential. 

Volume 2 picks up the story after Eliot has become famous as the author of The Waste Land and has become editor of a new quarterly called the Criterion. The new Eliot—and we can register the change toward the end of Volume 1, even before The Waste Land is published and wins the Dial award—has deliberately become a different person. Gone is the sensitive and sympathetic young poet, confiding his doubts and fears to his brother Henry. In his place we have the brisk and efficient Man of Letters who has learned all too well “to prepare a face to meet the faces that one meets.” This new self-consciously English TSE is busy courting the Establishment, from the Grand Old Men like George Saintsbury (Eliot addresses him as “the most eminent English critic of our time,” II 55), to French luminaries from Paul Valéry to Jean Cocteau and German ones from Hugo von Hoffmansthal to Herman Hesse and the scholar Ernst Curtius. He is eager to publish Proust because of the latter’s renown but tells a friend that “I am . . . of the opinion that he is not a ‘classical’ writer.” There is even an unctuous letter to “His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Sweden (30 January 1924), asking for a short story or other piece of writing, only to have a secretary respond that Eliot must mean HRH Prince Wilhelm of Sweden since the Crown Prince “has never written anything that has been published” (II 305).

Eliot’s attitude toward his fellow Americans is very different. Even as he flatters—not always sincerely—Virginia Woolf (about whom he can also be very catty), he ignores American poets like Hart Crane, and when William Carlos Williams submits an essay on Marianne Moore, whom he has professed to admire, Eliot responds politely that “we are absolutely full for the next six months” (II, 316). The treatment of Moore (and indeed women poets in general) is especially harsh. When, in her capacity as editor of The Dial, Moore politely rejects one of Vivien Eliot’s short stories, Eliot is livid:

I have hitherto praised your work both in America and here, without reserve, especially here: where the literary public sees in it no merit whatever. I have championed you in the face of derision and indifference, and I had the right to expect better treatment from you.. . . I do not intend to endure this manoeuvre, and I propose to put all the readers of the Dial whom I know—and I know a good many—in possession of the facts. (682-83).

In later years, Eliot and Moore made up but this and many similarly cruel and sarcastic letters leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Increasingly, in his capacity as editor, Eliot oscillates between deferentiality and condescension, with the result that the Criterion soon becomes a staid and unexciting journal.  

One writer who regularly rebuked Eliot on his choices was his old friend Ezra Pound. “But for yr. connection with the review,” Pound complained of the fourth issue, “I couldn’t go on appearing with this bunch of dead mushrooms” (II, 207). And again, “I can stand your conservatism, and scholarship, but not the Bloomsbury mush that seems to get between yr. chinks. . . .You CANT possibly think 3/4^th of the stuff in this years Crit. has been in se worth printing” (II, 208). Eliot defensively responds, “I ask you to cite one writer of the first merit whom I have not tried to get?” But by “first merit” he increasingly means the tried and true, the established, the eminent. No avant-garde wanted here and no risk taking.

Surprisingly, it is Pound who emerges as the good guy in this volume—the authentic poet who won’t sell out and is always ready to assist Eliot when he is down or help Vivien when she is having one of her crises—even as Eliot is caught making the anti-Semitic remarks one instinctively associates with Pound, as when, annoyed at not receiving the promised Waste Land royalties from his New York publisher Horace Liveright, Eliot grumbles to his patron John Quinn, “I am sick of doing business with jew publishers . . . I wish I could find a decent Christian publisher in New York who could be trusted not to slip and slide at every opportunity” (II, 71). 

Irritating as this later Eliot is, I found myself sympathizing with the busy correspondent who never has enough money, who has to jump through endless hoops so as to secure, finally, a position on the board of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) that makes it possible for him to resign at last from Lloyds Bank. And throughout, Eliot is undergoing his day-to-day nightmare with Vivien (they did not separate until 1932). “In the last ten years,” he tells John Middleton Murry in April 1925, “gradually, but deliberately. . . .I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately—in order to endure, in order not to feel—but it has killed V[ivien]. I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915.” (II, 627).

Was the “killing of the senses” equivalent to the killing of the poetic instinct? In 1925 it seemed that way, both to Eliot and to his readers. But the story is hardly over: Eliot’s next incarnation, that of British citizen, self-declared “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” and the author of Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets, is yet to come. In the meantime, Volume 2 gives a beautifully detailed and painful picture of Eliot’s difficult conquest of a London still shadowed by the cataclysm of the most meaningless and devastating of wars, a London in which all of Eliot’s London correspondents, even the very affluent or aristocratic ones, seem to suffer from repeated bouts of influenza, upset stomach, bad nutrition, and inadequate central heating. Everyone is always leaving town for warmer climates or at least for the English countryside. Vivien is often ill for weeks at a time, and both Eliots are constantly consulting different medical specialists. Servants, de rigueur before the War, are harder and harder to come by.  In this climate, Eliot, has temporarily put poetry aside.  “As for verse,” he writes the editor Harold Monro, “I swear to you that I have not produced the slightest scrap for a year” (II, 32). This comment is made on 2 February 1923, the same day Eliot writes letters soliciting manuscripts from the following: Herbert Read, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, Charles Whibley, Charles Caffrey, and in French, from Julien Benda and Jacques Rivière. Presumably, these letters were written in the evening: the poet is still working full-time for Lloyds Bank. 

Eliot’s self-discipline is remarkable, his adaptation to London complete. “As to Paris,” he advises his friend Wyndham Lewis in April 1921, “I can’t feel that there is a great deal of hope in your going there permanently. Painting being so much more important in Paris, there are a great many more clever second-rate men there . . . to distinguish oneself from. Then you know what ruthless and indefatigable sharpers Frenchmen are” (I, 552).  The Eliot who, seven years earlier, was daydreaming about getting back to Paris—“the awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” as The Waste Land refers to it—has attained the “age of prudence.”

The Detours of Tradition and the Persistence of Individual Talent

By Marjorie Perloff

Published in T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding, Cambridge University Press (2007).

Please note that I didn’t want to make a work of art out of it. The word “readymade” did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a ‘readymade,’ or anything else. It was just a distraction. [1]

Given this familiar Duchamp discourse, it is not surprising that when, at a 1987 Duchamp symposium held in Canada, the artist Eric Cameron linked Duchamp to Eliot, the prominent art critic/theorist Rosalind Krauss was indignant. “Eliot’s conception of tradition,” she insists, “his idea of high culture, his notion that art is redemptive, seems to me to be so far from my understanding of Duchamp. I just don’t know where to look in Duchamp to find anything that would connect to this.” And a little later in the discussion, when Cameron suggests that Jules Laforgue may have been the “connecting point between Eliot and Duchamp—as a way out of Symbolism,” Krauss declares herself “enormously hostile to such a move. I think it is a betrayal of Duchamp,” for whom all “belief systems” were anathema. Indeed, Krauss concludes, ‘Duchamp is one of the few artists in the twentieth century who really did think through the problem of negative dependency, who recognized that the traditional “art system,” of which a poet like Eliot was such a faithful proponent, had to be exploded. [2]

This view of Duchamp’s iconoclasm can be traced back to Peter Bürger who famously insisted, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde:

When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects . . . and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual production. . . . Duchamp’s provocation not only unmasks the art market . . . it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. [3]

As such, Duchamp’s “provocation” could be construed as an attack on the very aesthetic principles of Eliot, Pound, and their Modernist confreres. And further: there is no evidence that Eliot and Duchamp ever so much as met, and Eliot never mentioned Duchamp in print.

Why then would Duchamp cite Eliot (Cameron points out that Eliot is the only critic whom Duchamp ever cited word for word) in his talk “The Creative Act”? The citation is to “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. [4]

The occasion was a roundtable discussion held at the meeting of the American Federation of the Arts in Houston in April 1957. Duchamp’s fellow symposiasts were three famous academics: the art historians William C. Seitz and Rudolf Arnheim, and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Self-deprecatingly referring to himself as a “mere artist,” Duchamp slyly turned the tables on his illustrious colleagues by taking, of all things, the position that there is such a thing as “great art,” and that only history can provide the “verdict” as to which of the countless productive artists working at a given moment has “genius.” And he cites, of all texts, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

Critics have tended to surmise that Duchamp’s invocation of Eliot must be tongue-in-cheek. “The little essay is wickedly subversive,” writes Duchamp’s biographer Calvin Tomkins, explaining that “The Creative Act” is poking fun at the inflated claims of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the fifties, [5] artists whose elaborate statements of intent implied that each brushstroke had been calculated to express the artist’s inner consciousness. From Courbet to the Abstractionists, Duchamp complained, the optical had won out (Cabanne, 43), as had the emphasis on the artist’s direct “touch.” Indeed, such readymades as Bicycle Wheel and Bottle Dryer were prized precisely because they led what seemed to be an independent life, bearing no touch, no direct imprint of their creator.

And here the Eliot connection comes in. In 1919, when Eliot wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the normative poem was still the Romantic lyric, in which an impassioned autobiographical self ruminated on its relation to the external world. In the visual arts, the situation was quite similar: the normative painting was the Impressionist or Post-Impressionist landscape, portrait, or still life, expressive of the painter’s own mood and ethos. Even Duchamp’s rivals Picasso and Matisse remained, however distorted their representations, squarely in this tradition. Thus, we can think of Eliot’s famous sentence, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” as a kind of call to arms, not, as is usually thought, only for such conservative New Critical poets as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, but for the avant-garde as well.

Let us see how this works. Part II of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” begins with the sentence, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (T. & I.T. 17). Note that, as Duchamp was to do in “The Creative Act,” Eliot has shifted ground from the artist to the work and especially to the reception of that work by its audience. In the final paragraph of Part I, after all, the “continual self-sacrifice” and “depersonalization” had been the poet’s. But now, without warning, it is the reader/spectator who is warned that it is the poetry, not the poet, whose role, Eliot and Duchamp agree, is that of a medium. In Eliot’s words, “The mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one . . . by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (T.& I.T. 18, my emphasis). In Duchamp’s:

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out. (SS 138, my emphasis)

Here Duchamp gently tweaks Eliot’s meaning: for the latter, the mind as medium evidently produces those “new combinations” quite consciously, whereas Duchamp regards the mediumistic process as wholly intuitive. But the two artists agree on the central separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” and, accordingly Eliot’s grand pronouncement that “the difference between art and the event is always absolute” is endorsed by Duchamp, who speaks of the “phenomenon of transmutation,” and concludes that “through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place” (SS 140).

The difference between art and the event is always absolute. For the past half century or so, it is this declaration and its corollaries that has given Eliot a bad name. From Williams and the Black Mountain poets, whose mantra was that “Form is never more than the extension of content”— content being the poet’s intentional ideational base—to the confessionals, the Beats and the New York poets, Eliot became the bête noire. In “Personism: A Manifesto,” Frank O’Hara declared that, while he was writing a poem for a particular friend, he realized “that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. . . . the poem is at last between two persons instead of two readers.” [6] And John Cage spoke eloquently of “purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play”:

This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. [7]

Such sixties movements as Fluxus carried Cage’s program to its extreme, their performances and artworks purporting to present to their audiences slices of actual life: someone putting cold cream on her hands and rubbing them, someone else balancing a full wine glass on his head until it spills, and so on. Yet the life =art equation was always something of a ruse. At a performance of Cage’s James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, which I first saw performed in the mid-eighties, I noticed that a woman who came down the aisle of the orchestra in spike heels, was asked to take off her shoes because the clicking sound distracted the audience from the performance itself. The same rule applied when an infant began to cry. “Permission granted,” as Cage quipped in A Year from Monday, “But not to do whatever you want.” [8] As for such O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that poems” as “A Step Away from Them” or “Rhapsody,” the seemingly casual “high and dry” surface is in fact highly structured, every word, sound, and visual phrase contributing to a carefully planned effect.

Duchamp seems to have understood this seeming contradiction. Poets and artists, himself included, could protest all they wanted that there was no distinction between art and life, or between high and low art, but, in the end, “the difference between art and the event was always absolute.” Consider Cage’s praise for Duchamp’s Large Glass [The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even] :

The thing that I like so much is that I can focus my attention wherever I wish. It helps me to blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence in the work itself. There is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another or, in fact, requires me to look at all. I can look through it to the world beyond.” [9]

But Cage acknowledges that when he looks at Etant Donnés, the Philadelphia peep-hole piece, with its spread-eagled nude female body, he has no such freedom: here vision is “all prescribed.” “So,” Cage concludes, “]Duchamp] is telling us something that we perhaps haven’t yet learned, when we speak as we do so glibly of the blurring of the distinction between art and life” (Kostelanetz 180).

And there we have it. Cage acknowledges that the blurring of art and life doesn’t take place as readily as we think. Indeed, even in the case of the Large Glass, we now know, thanks to the publication of Duchamp’s notes and to a host of critical studies, especially Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s monumental Duchamp in Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), nothing in the Large Glass was left to chance. On the contrary, the placement on the glass surface of the various figures like the “Malic Moulds” and the “Oculist’s Witnesses,” the bifurcation of the surface into two halves—the upper “bride” panel and the lower “bachelors” one, the symbolic function of individual images, and the meaning of the cracked glass itself—all these have been shown to have subtle and complex implications designed by its maker. Whatever the passions and erotic notions that motivated the composition of Duchamp’s Large Glass, whatever his mathematical theories and notes on the Fourth Dimension, it is not, to cite Eliot, “the intensity of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts” (T.& I.T. 19).

For Duchamp, the gap between “what [the artist] intended to realize and did realize is the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work.” What makes the “actual transubstantiation” into a work of art happen? Duchamp makes no claim to know, but then even Eliot asserts that Keats’s “Ode on a Nightingale” “contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together” (T.& I.T. 19).

“Never trust the artist,” D. H. Lawrence declared, “Trust the tale.” [10] For Duchamp, as for Eliot, biographical criticism was anathema. Eliot’s fear of self-revelation is, of course, legendary, and he had every reason to mask his private self, to long for the “escape from emotion,” the “escape from personality,” he speaks of in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Duchamp may have had less to hide, but he too was plagued by gossip about his possibly incestuous feelings for his sister Susanne, his rivalry with his painter brothers, and the mercenary motive for his six-month marriage to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor in1927. Duchamp, moreover, was extremely secretive about his work: in the years when he was working on Etant Donnés, his friends assumed he had given up art for chess.

The art object, in this context, must be considered autonomous; the upside-down urinal called Fountain, the snow shovel called In Defense of the Broken Arm, the french window called Fresh Widow: none of these seem directly connected to Duchamp, although of course, as in the case of Eliot, one can read the artist’s biography into all these readymades. For Duchamp, as for Eliot, masking was central: Rrose Sélavy, even though “she” is obviously Marcel in drag, is the counterpart to J. Alfred Prufrock or Gerontion. And Duchamp’s puns match Eliot’s conceits as elaborate distancing distancing devices: “Ovaire toute la nuit,” for example, with its play on “Ouvert” and hence “Ovary/Open all night” could refer to those Eliotic “sawdust restaurants with oyster shells.”

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Yet—and here is the final irony—even though Duchamp, like Eliot, separates the creative act itself from its creator, he manages, with typical slyness, to turn the attention on the artist after all. “Millions of artists create;” he declares, “only a few thousands [sic] are discussed by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity” (SS 138). Clearly, this seemingly insouciant artist considers himself one of the above. Indeed, if “the difference between art and the event is always absolute,” the artist, unable to explain what it is he is doing, becomes all the more mysterious and interesting. The Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is more modest: when he tells us that “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (T.& I.T. 15), he makes no overt brief for his own work. And yet, near the essay’s end, Eliot cannot resist a little one-upmanship in the form of sarcasm:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (T. & I. T. 21).

There it is: the self-importance that often gives Eliot a bad press. Duchamp is more circumspect; he ends his essay by putting the burden on the spectator: it is the spectator who “gives the final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists” (SS 140).

Was Duchamp one of the forgotten? Yes and no. In 1957, when he wrote these words, the avant-garde of the early century was in eclipse, especially in France, although Duchamp remained very much at the center of the New York art world, now dominated by the Surrealist exiles from Europe. Thus Marcel was, in true Duchampian style, able to have it both ways. Yet it is perhaps Eliot who has the last laugh. For even as the poet concludes “Tradition and the Individual Talent” with the insistence that poetry is the “expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet” (T.& I.T. 22), he is carefully making a place for himself—no longer Tom now but the newly created British T. S. Eliot– as the author of “really new” work of art that modifies the “ideal order” of the “existing monuments.” “And should I have the right to smile?” asks the young man in the final line of “Portrait of a Lady.” In the scheme of things, the answer is surely yes.

Footnotes

A reply to Schurchard’s “Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a cigar: American intellectuals, anti-semitism, and the idea of culture,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 1-26.

Marjorie Perloff

Published in Modernism/Modernity, 10, no. 1 (2003): 51-56.

Here, I shall not take up Schuchard’s first argument since I have myself recently countered Julius along somewhat similar lines. In my T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture (September 2002), [1] I suggest that the notorious passage in “Gerontion” (“the jew squats on the window sill, the owner. . .”), obviously anti-Semitic as it appears when taken out of context, must be understood within the frame of the entire poem, which expresses, in the most moving and terrifying terms possible, the crisis (“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”) Eliot underwent in the years following the death of his beloved Jean Verdenal, mort aux Dardanelles in 1915, his miserable marriage to Vivienne, coupled with his knowledge of and complicity in her sordid affair with Bertrand Russell, and the sudden death in 1919 of his father, with whom he had not had a chance to reconcile and who was never to know that his son was to become a distinguished poet. Schuchard establishes a careful factual context for “Burbank with a Baedeker,” and although I disagree with some of his particulars—I think, for example, that Eliot’s alleged concern for post-war Vienna was hardly, as Schuchard thinks (p. 9), a case of empathy for the displaced Eastern Jews pouring into that city but, on the contrary, a concern that the great imperial capital would be mongrelized and its vibrant culture destroyed—I am sympathetic to the argument for context that Schuchard makes.

But the second half of the essay is more troubling. Here the focus is on Eliot’s relationship with the Jewish social philosopher, Zionist, and New School of Social Research professor Horace N. Kallen, an intellectual whom Eliot first met at Harvard in 1906, and whose (hitherto unknown) correspondence with the poet has now surfaced at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. This cache of letters—they extend from 1927 to 1960 and, as Schuchard points out, more and earlier letters may well surface since the two men had been close friends at Harvard from 1906 to 1911—does indeed, in Schuchard’s words “restore a missing chapter of American cultural history.” The question is what that missing chapter tells us.

From 1927 on, when his “friendly correspondence” with Eliot resumed, Kallen was evidently making “repeated efforts to bring [the poet] to the [New School] to lecture and read, an arrangement that finally materialized in the spring of 1933 when Eliot was Norton Professor at Harvard” (p. 24). Kallen was a fervent admirer of the Great Poet and was hence honored to entertain him. At the dinner party he hosted for Eliot at a New York restaurant, one of the guests was the Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Eliot was apparently much impressed with Cardozo, writing to his producer Henry Sherek that the Justice was “singularly distinguished amongst all the guests,” and that “I have always been attracted by Sephardim” (p. 26).

Schuchard takes such anecdotes –and he gives a number of them–as evidence of Eliot’s cordial feeling toward Jews. But why shouldn’t Eliot have been pleased to meet someone as distinguished and famous as Cardozo? And even then, he cannot seem to take Cardozo’s accomplishments at face value: they must be related to the Chief Justice’s Sephardic origins. As for Horace Kallen himself, why wouldn’t Eliot be pleased and flattered by the fuss Kallen, obviously a man of independent means, made about him whenever he visited New York? Kallen, after all, was not just any Jew but a well-situated Harvard Jew who had demonstrated his intellectual distinction. A Jew, moreover, who despite friendly debates with Eliot on issues of religion and culture, seems never to have voiced the slightest objection to the poet’s words or actions.

The delightful visit with Kallen, in any case, coincided with the preparation and delivery of the Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in April-May 1933 and published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods. It is here, of course, that Eliot made his notorious statement that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” “This unfortunate statement,” writes Schuchard, “one of the most quoted and disdained in modern literary and cultural studies, has pained many readers of Eliot, including myself, and my purpose in bringing it forward again is not to excuse it but to reconstruct a context that shows that it is not, regardless of its appearance, an anti-Semitic statement; it is an anti free-thinking statement” (p. 27). Here Schuchard follows Cleanth Brooks, who declared in 1985 that “free-thinking [not Jews] is the key phrase. Thus, even the ultra-conservative Old South got along with its God-fearing Jews very well. There was perhaps less anti-Jewish feeling in the Old South than anywhere else in the United States” (p. 27, note xliv).

As a “free-thinking” Jew married to a free-thinking Jew brought up the Old South (New Orleans) I have always found Brooks’s statement offensive. Who is Eliot, who is Brooks, to tell Jews that they should or should not be “free-thinking”? That as long as they were “God-fearing” they were acceptable in the Old South? For one thing, it isn’t true: Jews in New Orleans, for example, whether secular or religious, were (and still are) excluded from all Mardi Gras activities which were, in Brooks’s day, at the very heart of the social and commercial life of the city. But even if this were not the case, Brooks’s remark, which Schuchard endorses, is irritatingly patronizing, as if to say, we really like those darkies down here as long as they know their place. Who, after all, was telling the Christian majority in the Old South what they should or should not believe?

Eliot’s statement evidently cost him a number of friendships, including that of the (Jewish) philosopher Franz Boas, who, Eliot told Kallen, had been his closest friend in graduate school (p. 25), and it produced a rift between the poet and his later friend Isaiah Berlin. In response to Eliot’s remark about not wanting free-thinking Jews about, Boas evidently wrote him, “I can at least rid you of the company of one.” (p. 28, n.xlvii). There is no record of a reply, but to Berlin, Eliot wrote in 1951 that “the sentence of which you complain (with justice) would of course never have appeared at all at that time if I had been aware of what was going to happen, indeed had already begun, in Germany” [p. 27, my emphasis].

Schuchard takes this disclaimer at face value, noting that Eliot may well have had in mind the ‘free-thinking humanism” of his friend Kallen (whom he admired despite the aberration of his secularism), and he adds, “Though Kallen and Eliot never discuss the episode in their letters, Kallen would certainly have understood Eliot’s intention in relation to their own dialogue on the relation of culture, humanism, and religion; it certainly had no effect on their friendship” (p. 28). But the fact is that Kallen should have objected. For Eliot’s claim that he had been unaware “of what was going to happen, indeed had already begun, in Germany,” strikes me as quite disingenuous. Here a few dates and facts may help clarify the situation.

Hitler came to power in January 1933, at the very time Eliot was beginning work on his Page-Barbour Lectures, which were delivered in April of that year. Within weeks, all Jewish civil servants were dismissed as were all Jewish university professors and school teachers. The number of Jewish students at German schools and universities was rigidly curtailed. Jews were quickly dismissed from the press, the broadcasting industry, and the arts. By April 1, a large-scale state boycott of Jewish stores and businesses was introduced; armed SS guards made an example of particular Jewish shops to insure compliance with the ban. On May 10, 1933, a public burning of Jewish and anti-Nazi books took place throughout Germany, anticipating Kristallnacht of 1938. By July ‘33, Germany had passed a law for forced sterilization of those with “genetic” defects and all East European Jewish immigrants were stripped of their German citizenship. By August, Jewish lawyers were forbidden to practice law and Jewish doctors were allowed to treat only Jewish patients.

All this was done quite openly and was reported by the newspapers throughout Europe and the U.S. In Mein Kampf (1927), for that matter, Hitler had made no bones about his intentions so far as the Jews were concerned, and the minute he came to power, he began to carry them out—in the form of public edicts and laws. Indeed, in the United States, protest on the part of American Jews was quick to come: in the spring of 1933, anti-Nazi rallies took place at MadisonSquareGarden, demanding a boycott of trade with Germany.

What then does Eliot mean when he says he didn’t know what was happening in Germany? If he read the newspapers at all, he did “know.” And even if he didn’t “know” in the spring of ’33, what about the interval between delivery of the lectures and their publication by Faber & Faber in 1934? Eliot could easily have expunged the offending sentence from After Strange Gods. Or could he? Here is the whole paragraph in which it is embedded:

You are hardly likely to develop tradition except where the bulk of the population is relatively so well off where it is that it has no incentive or pressure to move about. The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.[2]

In the context of what was already happening in Germany, the demand for cultural and religious homogeneity and the caution against tolerance put the notorious sentence about “free-thinking Jews” in an especially negative light. Eliot, who later confided to various friends that the word he especially regretted in the passage was race, never reprinted After Strange Gods. In the years that followed, no doubt feeling somewhat guilty, he worked with Kallen to help Jewish refugee professors –for example Karl Mannheim and Adolph Löwe–obtain jobs in the U.S. and he participated in a group called Moot, organized in 1938 to discuss social and political issues and, later, to plan for national reconstruction (p. 30). But are such activities different in kind from the help Ezra Pound offered to Louis Zukofsky over the years? Indeed, in many ways Pound was more generous than Eliot: strapped for funds himself, he paid Zukofsky’s way when the latter came to visit him in Rapallo in the mid-twenties. Pound could forgive Jewishness in poets whose work he admired just as Eliot could forgive it in highly cultured educated men. Both cases are no more than variants on “Some of my best friends are Jews.”

There is no indication that the basic views formulated in After Strange Gods ever changed. Schuchard cites a commentary Eliot wrote for the Christian News-Letter in 1941, protesting the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic policies, as evidence of the poet’s firm objection to anti-Semitism. But this protest is at best equivocal. “Anti-Semitism,” writes Eliot, “there has always been among the parties of the extreme Right: but it was a very different thing, as a symptom of the disorder of French society and politics for the last hundred and fifty years, from what it is when it takes it place as a principle of reconstruction.” (p. 31). The implication of this statement is that anti-Semitism is natural, perhaps even inevitable, when government is not sufficiently in control, as was the case in France throughout the twenties and thirties, but that when it is codified as law, it goes too far. Eliot does not seem to understand that the second step follows logically from the first.

However warmly Eliot may have felt about this or that Jewish friend or acquaintance, Schuchard’s researches reveal that for the poet, Jews remain Jews first, individuals later. In 1947, for example, Eliot protested to the poet Edward Field, who had accused him of being anti-Semitic, “I am no more anti-semitic [sic] than I am anti-Welsh or anti-Eskimo” (p. 31). This is, of course, the ultimate put-down since Eliot hardly numbered many Eskimos among his acquaintance or among those cultivated Western Christians he admired. Like the wild Welsh and the exotic Eskimos, Jews remain outsiders for Eliot—people one tolerates (and sometimes even befriends) but whom one can’t quite accommodate into The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). And there the matter stood even if Eliot admired the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg or the social philosophy of his friend Horace Kallen.

Indeed, Eliot’s later cultural pronouncements provide an interesting gloss on his earlier poetry. I would myself argue that the overtly nasty slurs on Jews in Poems 1920 are much less offensive than the “humane” position adopted by Eliot the sixty-year old smiling public man. For that younger poet was much less given to holding “views” than to putting his feelings into his poetry. From “Prufrock” to The Waste Land, Eliot’s poetry is nasty, cruel, painful—and utterly charismatic, no doubt because the poet is just as hard on himself as he is on those hated others, “Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.” It is the poet as Gerontion, after all, who “was neither at the hot gates / Nor fought in the warm rain / Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, /Bitten by flies, fought.” The verb “fought” in that last line is almost spit out in a moment of self-disgust.

“Gerontion” and The Waste Land will always attract readers because of their sheer verbal and conceptual brilliance. The poetic fabric, in these cases, has absorbed the ideological residue. Ironically, it is not the fiery, nasty younger Eliot but the genteel and understanding Public Poet of the later years that is the problem–the poet who writes those self-deprecating lines in “East Coker” about “Twenty years largely wasted,” since his every poetic attempt has been “a different kind of failure,” even as he declares that an “ideal Christian culture “can“ accommodate Jewish religion and culture” — provided, of course, that, as Eliot wrote the Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz, Jews be “devout and practicing” (p. 36).

“At the end of the culture war,” Schuchard concludes, “Eliot, tired of conducting conflicts with secular humanists in no man’s land, warmly welcomed followers of the Jewish religion into his idea of a Christian society” (p. 36). Provided, of course, they followed the religion. For many of us, there is nothing “warm” about this exclusionary gesture.

ISBN 0817314210, 9780817314217

Citation:

Contents:

Introduction: Differential Reading
1. Crisis in the humanities?: reconfiguring literary study for the twenty-first century    1
2. Cunning passages and contrived corridors: rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion”    20
3. The search for “prime words”: Pound, Duchamp, and the nominalist ethos    39
4. “But isn’t the same at least the same?”: Wittgenstein on translation    60
5. “Logocinema of the frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s multilingual poetics and its legacies    82
6. “The silence that is not silence”: acoustic art in Samuel Beckett’s radio plays    102
7. Language poetry and the lyric subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo    129
8. After language poetry: innovation and its theoretical discontents    155
9. The invention of “concrete prose”: Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias and after    175
10. Songs of the earth Ronald Johnson’s verbivocovisuals    194
11. The Oulipo factor : the procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall    205
12. Filling the space with trace: Tom Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo”    227
13. Teaching the “new” poetries: the case of Rae Armantrout    243
14. Writing poetry/writing about poetry: some problems of affiliation    258

Reviews:

• Barbour, Douglas. “Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning.” EBR. <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/notable>
• Becker, C.A. “Marjorie Perloff. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.[Review]” RMMLA 59.2. <http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/59.2/reviews/becker.asp>
• Corey, Joshua. “Poetry Microreviews.” Boston Review 30.3. <http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/micros.html>

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