No End To Smoky Days

NINE YEARS HAVE gone by since the death of T.S. Eliot, yet the fascination so widespread during his lifetime has hardly subsided. While few men have been the object of so much respectful scrutiny, so much speculation about the meaning of every word they have written, equally few have been so bitterly resented. Even now, incompatible reactions continue to thrive. With them swells the horde of over one thousand books (and counting) on Eliot--biographies, criticism, memoirs, recollections, analyses. T.S. Matthews's Great Tom is one more goose from this gaggle, peddling no easy answers to the Eliot enigma. Its value lies in its subject: As Ezra Pound said, "The more we know of Eliot, the better."

A "biography, of sorts," it calls itself. The subtitle is not merely a corny echo of Eliot's own Notes Towards the Definition of Culture but "an acknowledgement, like his, that this will not be the last word on the subject." It's just as well. Along with every other student of Eliot, the author asks sadly unanswerable questions; no writer can even hope to solve the haunting mysteries of Eliot's life until all existing information has been studied. At the moment, the Emily Hale papers (the bulk of a life-long correspondence) are doomed to dusty confinement at Princeton until January 1, 2020; and Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow and sole executrix, has so far felt bound to carry out her husband's expressed wish that no authorized biography of him be written. Even when the unpublished material is finally released, the character which Eliot himself made every effort to hide will remain deeply perplexing. It was "not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality" that Eliot demanded of himself as a poet in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. And with the Impersonal Theory of Poetry Eliot sought to divert his readers' interest from the poet to the poetry through self-sacrifice, the extinction of personality. The "heap of broken images" which is The Waste Land possesses no single central consciousness, only a conglomeration of very different speaking voices.

T.S. Matthews, former managing editor of Time, has explored the few available sources of information on T.S. Eliot, including Professor John H. Finely '25 and the extensive Eliot-Pound correspondence. Matthews examines certain major themes in Eliot's life: his overly strict, God-fearing, asexual upbringing, a disastrous first marriage which drove him for years into a devastating personal waste land, the gnawing sense of guilt which pervades his post-1922 poetry and plays, his conversion from Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism, and the emotional rejuvenation of his second marriage.

"I always felt that I was in the presence of a remorseful man, of one who had some secret sorrow or guilt" said Eliot's friend, Herbert Read. Matthews claims that this guilt, apart from being deeply ingrained (for Eliot had adopted, early in his life, his Calvinist ancestors' need for a constant sense of sin), was "centered on two peculiar obsessions which he stated as general truths: that every man wants to murder a girl; that sex is sin is death."

Any man has to, needs to, wants to

Once in a lifetime, do a girl in. [from Sweeney Agonistes]

Falsely equating Sweeney, in the poem, with the poet, Matthews supplies no further evidence of this "general truth."

It is unfortunate that Matthews fails to discriminate between the significant and the soporific. Do we honestly care about the contents of food hampers carried on trains from St. Louis to Boston? The entire book is plagued by a frustrating discrepancy between minute detail and lack of any detail at all. While Matthews describes at length the life of Eliot's friend (and possibly fiancee) Emily Hale with a series of frequently fatuous anecdotes, we learn almost nothing about the influence of Pound upon Eliot's work. Any reasons for this are unclear, since the author was refused access to any really significant information on Emily Hale (the Emily Hale papers) while he was free to study all the Pound documents. It's just too speculative--so many questions are left unanswered that Matthews only succeeds in casting shadows on the already shadowy personality he had hoped to illuminate.

Stylistically, the book gets off to a gaudy and disappointing start: "Like all the rest of us, T.S. Eliot was born in blood, sweat and tears; unlike most of us, he was born in St. Louis." Where the author is at the mercy of incomplete material he resorts to catchy phrases at the expense of coherence, and metaphors for the sake of metaphors. (On the subject of Pound, he gushes: "His critical tone is quite unself-conscious, at times even incautiously blurty; this tone buoys him up and carries him along swimmingly--until, late in his career, he founders in the shallow rapids of his baby talk.") As the book progresses, the style improves in direct proportion to the content. There are even flickers of ingenuity where Matthews weaves Eliotisms directly yet unobtrusively into the narrative--"Eliot's return to Harvard was (you may say) satisfactory." Lifting most of this line straight out of Journey Of the Magi, Matthews adopts a form of Eliot's own philosophy, that "immature poets borrow, mature poets steal."

While too many unthinkingly declare Eliot "the greatest poet of this century," Robert Frost was no less rash, dubbing him "a tricky poet and mealymouthed snob." Indiscriminate condemnation and equally indiscriminate Eliotolatry have characterized public opinion from the beginning. Matthews consistently avoids, or at least conceals, such head-over-heels bias; he confronts the man on equal ground, as "one of us."

We should take him more calmly, as a human being in many ways very like ourselves. He was one of us. He was terribly clever. He wanted to be good. He was unhappy most of his life. He sometimes made people laugh. He made people anxious--or put their anxieties into magical and memorable lines. But who was he?

Even if Matthews is guiding us by the light of what he has learned, ultimately he leaves the question with the reader--unanswered. The most revealing information he has to offer is anecdotal. One incident in particular presents a disenchanting picture to those who might not be unwilling to think Eliot a saint:

Eliot's first wife did not submit meekly to enforced separation, and for many years (before she was confined to an asylum) made persistent efforts to lure home her estranged husband. Once, having heard that he was to speak at a book exhibition, Vivienne launched off for the lecture room, armed with their dog Polly and his three most recent books. She arrived just ahead of him and in the crowded doorway turned and faced him, saying "Oh, Tom." He took her hand, said "How do you do?" and walked quickly past her. After the lecture, she hurried to the speakers' table while the audience was still applauding; Polly rushed towards Eliot and leapt up at him in delight. When he ignored them both, Vivienne presented the books and asked, "Will you come back with me?"

"I cannot talk to you now" was the answer. Eliot signed his name in the books and left. It was the last time they ever met.

Matthews's subject is as problematical as it is challenging, as impossible as it could be rewarding. Overwhelmed by the problems and impossibilities, Matthews responds fully neither to the challenge nor to the rewards. But in spite of his he has a subject which in itself redeems the book from its author's shortcomings. Eliot is Matthews's greatest asset.