Authors: Cynthia Ozick
The typist paused in her labors. “Help you?”
“I am here,” Eliot self-consciously announced, “to offer something for publication.”
“F.B. stepped out a minute.”
“May I wait?”
“Suit yourself. Take a chair.”
The only chair on the horizon, however, was Firkin Barmuenster’s own, stationed forbiddingly on the other side of the awe-inspiring desk. Eliot stood erect as a sentry, anticipating the footsteps that at last resounded from the distant terminus of the corridor. Firkin Barmuenster, Eliot thought, must be returning from the door marked
MEN
. Inside the manila envelope in Eliot’s fevered grasp, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” glowed with its incontrovertible promise. One day, Eliot felt sure, it would be one of the most famous poems on earth, studied by college freshmen and corporate executives on their way up. Only
now there were these seemingly insurmountable obstacles: he, Tom Eliot, was painfully young, and even more painfully obscure; and Firkin Barmuenster was known to be ruthless in his impatience with bad writing. Eliot believed in his bones that “Prufrock” was not bad writing. He hoped that Firkin Barmuenster would be true to his distinction as a great editor, and would be willing to bring out Eliot’s proud effort in the pages of
The New Shoelace
. The very ink-fumes that rose up out of the magazine excited Eliot and made his heart fan more quickly than ever. Print!
“Well, well, what have we here?” Firkin Barmuenster inquired, settling himself behind the mounds that towered upward from the plateau of his desk, and reaching into one of the paper bags to extract a banana.
“I’ve written a poem,” Eliot said.
“We don’t mess with any of those,” Firkin Barmuenster growled. “We are a magazine of opinion.”
“I realize that,” Eliot said, “but I’ve noticed those spaces you sometimes leave at the bottom of your articles of opinion, and I thought that might be a good place to stick in a poem, since you’re not using that space for anything else anyhow. Besides,” Eliot argued in conciliatory fashion, “my poem also expresses an opinion.”
“Really? What on?”
“If you wouldn’t mind taking half a second to look at it—”
“Young man,” Firkin Barmuenster barked rapidly, “let me tell you the kind of operation we run here. In the first place, these are modern times. We’re talking 1911, not 1896. What we care about here are up-to-date issues. Politics. Human behavior. Who rules the world, and how. No wan and sickly verses, you follow?”
“I believe, sir,” Eliot responded with grave courtesy, “that I own an entirely new Voice.”
“Voice?”
“Experimental, you might call it. Nobody else has yet written this way. My work represents a revolt from the optimism and cheerfulness of the last century. Dub it wan and sickly if you will—it is, if you don’t mind my blowing my own horn”—but here he lowered his eyes, to prove to Firkin Barmuenster that he was
aware of how painfully young, and painfully obscure, he was—“an implicit declaration that poetry must not only be found
through
suffering, but can find its own material only
in
suffering. I insist,” he added even more shyly, “that the poem should be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness. To see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”
“I like what you say about the waste of all that white space,” Firkin Barmuenster replied, growing all at once thoughtful. “All right, let’s have a look. What do you call your jingle?”
“ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ”
“Well, that won’t do. Sit down, will you? I can’t stand people standing, didn’t my girl tell you that?”
Eliot looked about once again for a chair. To his relief, he spied a high stool just under the single grimy window, which gave out onto a bleak airshaft. A stack of back issues of
The New Shoelace
was piled on it. As he gingerly removed them, placing them with distaste on the sooty sill, the cover of the topmost magazine greeted Eliot’s eye with its tedious headline:
MONARCHY VS. ANARCHY—EUROPE’S POLITICAL DILEMMA
. This gave poor Tom Eliot a pang. Perhaps, he reflected fleetingly, he had brought his beloved “Prufrock” to the wrong crossroads of human aspiration? How painfully young and obscure he felt! Still, a novice must begin somewhere. Print! He was certain that a great man like Firkin Barmuenster (who had by then finished his banana) would sense unusual new talent.
“Now, Prudecock, show me your emanation,” Firkin Barmuenster demanded, when Eliot had dragged the stool over to the appropriate spot in front of the editor’s redoubtable desk.
“Prufrock, sir. But I’m Eliot.” Eliot’s hands continued to shake as he drew the sheets of “Prufrock” from the mottled manila envelope.
“Any relation to that female George?” Firkin Barmuenster free-associated companionably, so loudly that the fringed typist turned from her clatter to stare at her employer for a single guarded moment.
“It’s
Tom
,” Eliot said; inwardly he burned with the ignominy of being so painfully obscure.
“I like that. I appreciate a plain name. We’re in favor of clarity here. We’re straightforward. Our credo is that every sentence is either right or wrong, exactly the same as a sum. You follow me on this, George?”
“Well,” Eliot began, not daring to correct this last slip of the tongue (Freud was not yet in his heyday, and it was too soon for the dark significance of such an error to have become public knowledge), “actually it is my belief that a sentence is, if I may take the liberty of repeating myself, a kind of Voice, with its own suspense, its secret inner queries, its chancy idiosyncrasies and soliloquies. Without such a necessary view, one might eunuchize, one might render neuter—”
But Firkin Barmuenster was already buried in the sheets of “Prufrock.” Eliot watched the steady rise and fall of his smirk as he read on and on. For the first time, young Tom Eliot noticed Barmuenster’s style of dress. A small trim man lacking a mustache but favored with oversized buff teeth and grizzled hair the color of ash, Barmuenster wore a checkered suit of beige and brown, its thin red pinstripe running horizontally across the beige boxes only; his socks were a romantic shade of robin’s egg blue, and his shoes, newly and flawlessly heeled, were maroon with white wing-tips. He looked more like a professional golfer down on his luck than a literary man of acknowledged stature. Which, Eliot mused, was more representative of Barmuenster’s intellectual configuration—his sartorial preferences or the greasy paper bags under his elbows? It was impossible to decide.
Firkin Barmuenster kept reading. The typist went on smacking imaginary flies. Eliot waited.
“I confess,” Firkin Barmuenster said slowly, raising his lids to confront the pallid face of the poet, “that I didn’t expect anything this good. I like it, my boy, I like it!” He hesitated, gurgling slightly, like a man who has given up pipe-smoking once and for all. And indeed, Eliot spied two or three well-chewed abandoned pipes in the tumbler that served as pencil-holder; the pencils, too, were much-bitten. “You know our policy on fee, of course. After we get finished paying Clara and the rent and the sweeping up and the price of an occasional banana, there’s not much left for the writer,
George—only the glory. I know that’s all right with you, I know you’ll understand that what we’re chiefly interested in is preserving the sanctity of the writer’s text. The text is holy, it’s holy writ, that’s what it is. We’ll set aside the title for a while, and put our minds to it later. What’s the matter, George? You look speechless with gratitude.”
“I never hoped, sir—I mean, I
did
hope, but I didn’t think—”
“Let’s get down to business, then. The idea is excellent, first-rate, but there’s just a drop too much repetition. You owned up to that yourself a minute ago. For instance, I notice that you say, over here,
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
,
and then, over
here
, on the next page, you say it again.”
“That’s meant to be a kind of
refrain
,” Eliot offered modestly.
“Yes,
I
see that, but our subscribers don’t have
time
to read things twice. We’ve got a new breed of reader nowadays. Maybe back, say, in 1896 they had the leisure to read the same thing twice, but our modern folks are on the run. I see you’re quite a bit addicted to the sin of redundancy. Look over here, where you’ve got
‘
I am Lazarus, come back from the dead
,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’
—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.’
Very nice, but that reference to the dead coming back is just too iffy. I’d drop that whole part. The pillow, too. You don’t need that pillow; it doesn’t do a thing
for
you. And anyhow you’ve said ‘all’ four times in a single place. That won’t do. It’s sloppy. And who uses the same word to make a rhyme? Sloppy!” Barmuenster iterated harshly, bringing his fist down heavily on the next banana, peeled and naked, ready for the eating. “Now this line down here, where you put in
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be
,
well, the thing to do about that is let it go. It’s no use dragging in the Bard every time you turn around. You can’t get away with that sort of free ride.”
“I thought,” Eliot murmured, wondering (ahead of his time) whether banana-craving could somehow be linked to pipe-deprivation, “it would help show how Prufrock feels about himself—”
“Since you’re saying he
doesn’t
feel like Hamlet, why put Hamlet
in
? We can’t waste words, not in 1911 anyhow. Now up here, top of the page, you speak of
a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floor of silent seas
.
Exactly what kind of claws are they? Lobster claws? Crab? Precision, my boy, precision!”
“I just meant to keep it kind of general, for the atmosphere—”
“If you
mean
a crustacean,
say
a crustacean. At
The New Shoelace
we don’t deal in mere metonymy.”
“Feeling is a kind of meaning, too. Metaphor, image, allusion, lyric form, melody, rhythm, tension, irony, above all the objective correlative—” But poor Tom Eliot broke off lamely as he saw the older man begin to redden.
“Tricks! Wool-pullers! Don’t try to tell Firkin Barmuenster about the English language. I’ve been editing
The New Shoelace
since before you were born, and I think by now I can be trusted to know how to clean up a page of words. I like a clean page, I’ve explained that. I notice you have a whole lot of question marks all over, and they go up and down the same ground again and again. You’ve got
So how should I presume?
and then you’ve got
And how should I presume?
and after that you’ve got
And should I presume?
You’ll just have to decide on how you want that and then keep to it. People aren’t going to make allowances for you forever, you know, just because you’re painfully young. And you shouldn’t put in so many question marks anyhow. You should use nice clean declarative sentences. Look at this, for instance, just look at what a mess you’ve got here—
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach
.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each
.
That won’t
do
in a discussion of the aging process. There you go repeating yourself again, and then that question business cropping up, and ‘beach’ and ‘each’ stuck in just for the rhyme. Anybody can see it’s just for the rhyme. All that jingling gets the reader impatient. Too much baggage. Too many
words
. Our new breed of reader wants something else. Clarity. Straightforwardness. Getting to the point without a whole lot of nervous distraction. Tell me, George, are you serious about writing? You really want to become a writer some day?”
The poet swallowed hard, the blood beginning to pound in his head. “It’s my life,” Eliot answered simply.
“And you’re serious about getting into print?”
“I’d give my eyeteeth,” admitted Tom.
“All right. Then you leave it to me. What you need is a good clean job of editing. Clara!” he called.
The fringed typist glanced up, as sharply as before.
“Do we have some white space under any of next issue’s articles?”
“Plenty, F.B. There’s a whole slew of white at the bottom of that piece on Alice Roosevelt’s new blue gown.”
“Good. George,” the editor pronounced, holding out his viscid hand in kindness to the obscure young poet, “leave your name and address with Clara and in a couple of weeks we’ll send you a copy of yourself in print. If you weren’t an out-of-towner I’d ask you to come pick it up, to save on the postage. But I know what a thrill real publication in a bona fide magazine is for an aspiring novice like yourself. I recollect the days of my own youth, if you’ll excuse the cliché. Careful on the elevator—sometimes the rope gets stuck on that big nail down near the fifth floor, and you get a bounce right up those eyeteeth of yours. Oh, by the way—any suggestions for the title?”
The blood continued to course poundingly in young Tom Eliot’s temples. He was overwhelmed by a bliss such as he had never before known. Print! “I really think I still like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ ” his joy gave him the courage to declare.
“Too long. Too oblique. Not apropos. Succinctness! You’ve heard of that old maxim, ‘So that he who runs may read?’ Well, my personal credo is:
So that he who shuns may heed
. That’s what
The New Shoelace
is about. George, I’m about to put you on the map with all those busy folks who shun versifying. Leave the title to me. And don’t you worry about that precious Voice of yours, George—the text is holy writ, I promise you.”