Fame & Folly (2 page)

Internal folly—of the kind that involves itself with fame—is stronger and stranger than
fatwa
or heritable malice or the lighting of what Saul Bellow calls “the ideological fuse.” Think of Henry James’s nervous breakdown (to use our own lingo for it) in the face of a raucous humiliation he had never before experienced: the exalted man of letters, the very Master, getting hooted off a stage. Indignity was a wound too horrible to bear—and why was that, given James’s self-recognition and the clear interior resplendence of his powers? This amazing Jamesian plot (recounted in this volume) is mainly hidden in a corner of biography, a secret
folly scarcely able to breathe its little fog on the great bright mirror, and armor, of James’s renown.

Trollope’s folly, the story goes, lay in his confessing in his
Autobiography
that he wrote for productivity, like a businessman, with his timepiece on his table. Though Trollope belongs with the permanent enchanting few (he educates domestically in the manner of Jane Austen, and in a worldly sense in the manner of Balzac), he has been a diminished figure ever since—except in the unbiased regions of literary truth. But didn’t he bring it on himself, according to the legend at least, through needless arithmetical public bragging, so many words per hour?

By contrast, and to arrive at the proportionally lesser: my friend Chester’s folly, all of his own making, succeeded in submerging altogether the upward flight of his reputation; it’s likely you wouldn’t have suspected his existence if not for my own mournful memoir (it looms ahead), and the mournful memoirs of a handful of others. But who, and what,
isn’t
transitory, fleeting, perishable?

—An explosion. Ah, I hear you! “Don’t,” you’re exploding, “
please
don’t start on all that, the decay of civilizations, the vanishing of empires, where now are the scribes of Sumer and the snows of yesteryear—all that stuff. Besides,” you’re saying, “God knows fame isn’t by any measure a literary subject, so why does it matter? Listen,” you’re saying, “it’s folly that’s
really
interesting. Forget the fame part. Concentrate on the folly.”

I’ve done that, I think. With an exception here and there: a bit of homage when needed.

September 1995

T. S. ELIOT AT 101
 

T
HOMAS
S
TEARNS
E
LIOT
, poet and preëminent modernist, was born one hundred and one years ago.
^*
His centennial in 1988 was suitably marked by commemorative reporting, literary celebrations in New York and London, and the publication of a couple of lavishly reviewed volumes: a new biography and a collection of the poet’s youthful letters. Probably not much more could have been done to distinguish the occasion; still, there was something subdued and bloodless, even superannuated, about these memorial stirrings. They had the quality of a slightly tedious reunion of aging alumni, mostly spiritless by now, spurred to animation by old exultation recollected in tranquility. The only really fresh excitement took place in London, where representatives of the usually docile community of British Jews, including at least one prominent publisher, condemned Eliot for antisemitism and protested the public fuss. Elsewhere, the moment passed modestly, hardly noticed at all by the bookish young—who, whether
absorbed by recondite theorizing in the academy, or scampering after newfangled writing careers, have long had their wagons hitched to other stars.

In the early Seventies it was still possible to uncover, here and there, a tenacious English department offering a vestigial graduate seminar given over to the study of Eliot. But by the close of the Eighties, only “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appears to have survived the indifference of the schools—two or three pages in the anthologies, a fleeting assignment for high school seniors and college freshmen. “Prufrock,” and “Prufrock” alone, is what the latest generations know—barely know: not “The Hollow Men,” not “La Figlia che Piange,” not “Ash-Wednesday,” not even
The Waste Land
. Never
Four Quartets
. And the mammoth prophetic presence of T. S. Eliot himself—that immortal sovereign rock—the latest generations do not know at all.

To anyone who was an undergraduate in the Forties and Fifties (and possibly even into the first years of the Sixties), all that is inconceivable—as if a part of the horizon had crumbled away. When, four decades ago, in a literary period that resembled eternity, T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature, he seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon—or like the New Criticism itself, the vanished movement Eliot once magisterially dominated. It was a time that, for the literary young, mixed authority with innovation: authority
was
innovation, an idea that reads now, in the wake of the anti-establishment Sixties, like the simplest contradiction. But modernism then was an absolute ruler—it had no effective intellectual competition and had routed all its predecessors; and it was modernism that famously carried the “new.”

The new—as embodied in Eliot—was difficult, preoccupied by parody and pastiche, exactingly allusive and complex, saturated in manifold ironies and inflections, composed of “layers,” and pointedly inaccessible to anybody expecting run-of-the-mill coherence. The doors to Eliot’s poetry were not easily opened. His lines and themes were not readily understood. But the young who
flung themselves through those portals were lured by unfamiliar enchantments and bound by pleasurable ribbons of ennui. “April is the cruel-lest month,” Eliot’s voice, with its sepulchral cadences, came spiralling out of 78 r.p.m. phonographs, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire …” That toney British accent—flat, precise, steady, unemotive, surprisingly high-pitched, bleakly passive—coiled through awed English departments and worshipful dormitories, rooms where the walls had pin-up Picassos, and Pound and Eliot and
Ulysses
and Proust shouldered one another higgledy-piggledy in the rapt late-adolescent breast. The voice was, like the poet himself, nearly sacerdotal, impersonal, winding and winding across the country’s campuses like a spool of blank robotic woe. “Shantih shantih shantih,” “not with a bang but a whimper,” “an old man in a dry month,” “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”—these were the devout chants of the literarily passionate in the Forties and Fifties, who in their own first verses piously copied Eliot’s tone: its restraint, gravity, mystery; its invasive remoteness and immobilized disjointed despair.

There was rapture in that despair. Wordsworth’s nostalgic cry over the start of the French Revolution—“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”—belongs no doubt to every new generation; youth’s heaven lies in its quitting, or sometimes spiting, the past, with or without a historical crisis. And though Eliot’s impress—the bliss he evoked—had little to do with political rupture, it was revolutionary enough in its own way. The young who gave homage to Eliot were engaged in a self-contradictory double maneuver: they were willingly authoritarian even as they jubilantly rebelled. On the one hand, taking on the puzzlements of modernism, they were out to tear down the Wordsworthian tradition itself, and on the other they were ready to fall on their knees to a god. A god, moreover, who despised free-thinking, democracy, and secularism: the very conditions of anti-authoritarianism.

How T. S. Eliot became that god—or, to put it less extravagantly, how he became a commanding literary figure who had no
successful rivals and whose formulations were in fact revered—is almost as mysterious a proposition as how, in the flash of half a lifetime, an immutable majesty was dismantled, an immutable glory dissipated. It is almost impossible nowadays to imagine such authority accruing to a poet. No writer today—Nobel winner or no—holds it or can hold it. The four
^*
most recent American Nobel laureates in literature—Czeslaw Milosz, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Brodsky (three of whom, though citizens of long standing, do not write primarily in English)—are much honored, but they are not looked to for manifestos or pronouncements, and their comments are not studied as if by a haruspex. They are as far from being cultural dictators as they are from filling football stadiums.

Eliot
did
once fill a football stadium. On April 30, 1956, fourteen thousand people came to hear him lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism” at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. By then he was solidly confirmed as “the Pope of Russell Square,” as his London admirer Mary Trevelyan began to call him in 1949. It was a far-reaching papacy, effective even among students in the American Midwest; but if the young flocked to genuflect before the papal throne, it was not they who had enthroned Eliot, nor their teachers. In the Age of Criticism (as the donnish “little” magazines of the time dubbed the Forties and Fifties), Eliot was ceded power, and accorded veneration, by critics who were themselves minor luminaries. “He has a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike an east wind,” wrote William Empson, one of whose titles,
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, became an academic catchphrase alongside Eliot’s famous “objective correlative.” R. P. Blackmur said of “Prufrock” that its “obscurity is like that of the womb”; Eliot’s critical essays, he claimed, bear a “vital relation” to Aristotle’s
Poetics
. Hugh Kenner’s comparison is with still another monument: “Eliot’s work, as he once noted of Shakespeare, is in important respects one continuous poem,” and for Kenner the shape of Eliot’s own monument turns out to be “the Arch which stands when the last marcher has left, and endures when the last centurion or sergeant-major is dust.” F. R. Leavis, declaring Eliot “among the
greatest poets of the English language,” remarked that “to have gone seriously into the poetry is to have had a quickening insight into the nature of thought and language.” And in Eliot’s hands, F. O. Matthiessen explained, the use of the symbol can “create the illusion that it is giving expression to the very mystery of life.”

These evocations of wind, womb, thought and language, the dust of the ages, the very mystery of life, not to mention the ghosts of Aristotle and Shakespeare: not since Dr. Johnson has a man of letters writing in English been received with so much adulation, or seemed so formidable—almost a marvel of nature itself—within his own society.

Nevertheless there was an occasional dissenter. As early as 1929, Edmund Wilson was complaining that he couldn’t stomach Eliot’s celebrated conversion to “classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism.” While granting that Eliot’s essays “will be read by everybody interested in literature,” that Eliot “has now become the most important literary critic in the English-speaking world,” and finally that “one can find no figure of comparable authority,” it was exactly the force of this influence that made Wilson “fear that we must give up hope.” For Wilson, the argument of Eliot’s followers “that, because our society at the present time is badly off without religion, we should make an heroic effort to swallow medieval theology, seems … utterly futile as well as fundamentally dishonest.” Twenty-five years later, when the American intellectual center had completed its shift from freelance literary work like Wilson’s—and Eliot’s—to the near-uniformity of university English departments, almost no one in those departments would dare to think such unfastidious thoughts about Eliot out loud. A glaze of orthodoxy (not too different from the preoccupation with deconstructive theory currently orthodox in English departments) settled over academe. Given the normal eagerness of succeeding literary generations to examine new sets of entrails, it was inevitable that so unbroken a dedication would in time falter and decline. But until that happened, decades on, Eliot studies were an unopposable ocean; an unstoppable torrent; a lava of libraries.

It may be embarrassing for us now to look back at that nearly universal obeisance to an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather
narrow-minded and considerably bigoted fake Englishman—especially if we are old enough (as I surely am) to have been part of the wave of adoration. In his person, if not in his poetry, Eliot was, after all, false coinage. Born in St. Louis, he became indistinguishable (though not to shrewd native English eyes), in his dress, his manners, his loyalties, from a proper British Tory. Scion of undoctrinaire rationalist New England Unitarianism (his grandfather had moved from Boston to Missouri to found Washington University), he was possessed by guilty notions of sinfulness and martyrdom and by the monkish disciplines of asceticism, which he pursued in the unlikely embrace of the established English church. No doubt Eliot’s extreme self-alterations should not be dismissed as ordinary humbug, particularly not on the religious side; there is a difference between impersonation and conversion. Still, self-alteration so unalloyed suggests a hatred of the original design. And certainly Eliot condemned the optimism of democratic American meliorism; certainly he despised Unitarianism, centered less on personal salvation than on the social good; certainly he had contempt for Jews as marginal if not inimical to his notions of Christian community. But most of all, he came to loathe himself, a hollow man in a twilight kingdom.