Fame & Folly (3 page)

In my undergraduate years, between seventeen and twenty-one, and long after as well, I had no inkling of any of this. The overt flaws—the handful of insults in the poetry—I swallowed down without protest. No one I knew protested—at any rate, no professor ever did. If Eliot included lines like “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew [sic] is underneath the lot,” if he had his Bleistein, “Chicago Semite Viennese,” stare “from the protozoic slime” while elsewhere “The jew squats on the windowsill, the owner” and “Rachel
née
Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws”—well, that, sadly, was the way of the world and to be expected, even in the most resplendent poet of the age. The sting of those phrases—the shock that sickened—passed, and the reader’s heart pressed on to be stirred by other lines. What was Eliot to me? He was not the crack about “Money in furs,” or “Spawned in some estaminet in Antwerp.” No, Eliot was “The Lady is withdrawn / In a white gown, to contemplation, in a
white gown” and “Then spoke the thunder/ DA / 
Datta
: what have we given?” and “Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose”; he was incantation, mournfulness, elegance; he was liquescence, he was staccato, he was quickstep and oar, the hushed moan and the sudden clap. He was lyric shudder and rose-burst. He was, in brief, poetry incarnate; and poetry was what one lived for.

And he was something else beside. He was, to say it quickly, absolute art: high art, when art was at its most serious and elitist. The knowledge of that particular splendor—priestly, sacral, a golden cape for the initiate—has by now ebbed out of the world, and many do not regret it. Literary high art turned its back on egalitarianism and prized what is nowadays scorned as “the canon”: that body of anciently esteemed texts, most of them difficult and aristocratic in origin, which has been designated Western culture. Modernism—and Eliot—teased the canon, bruised it, and even sought to astonish it by mocking and fragmenting it, and also by introducing Eastern infusions, such as Eliot’s phrases from the Upanishads in
The Waste Land
and Pound’s Chinese imitations. But all these shatterings, dislocations, and idiosyncratic juxtapositions of the old literary legacies were never intended to abolish the honor in which they were held, and only confirmed their centrality. Undoing the canon is the work of a later time—of our own, in fact, when universal assent to a central cultural standard is almost everywhere decried. For the moderns, and for Eliot especially, the denial of permanently agreed-on masterworks—what Matthew Arnold, in a currency now obsolete beyond imagining, called “touchstones”—would have been unthinkable. What one learned from Eliot, whose poetry skittered toward disintegration, was the power of consolidation: the understanding that literature could genuinely
reign
.

One learned also that a poem could actually be penetrated to its marrow—which was not quite the same as comprehending its meaning. In shunting aside or giving up certain goals of ordinary reading, the New Criticism installed Eliot as both teacher and subject. For instance, following Eliot, the New Criticism would not allow a poem to be read in the light of either biography or
psychology. The poem was to be regarded as a thing-in-itself; nothing environmental or causal, including its own maker, was permitted to illuminate or explain it. In that sense it was as impersonal as a jar or any other shapely artifact that must be judged purely by its externals. This objective approach to a poem, deriving from Eliot’s celebrated “objective correlative” formulation, did not dismiss emotion; rather, it kept it at a distance, and precluded any speculation about the poet’s own life, or any other likely influence on the poem. “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” Eliot wrote in his landmark essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” “Emotion … has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” And, most memorably: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” This was a theory designed to prevent old-fashioned attempts to read private events into the lines on the page. Artistic inevitability, Eliot instructed, “lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion” and suggested a series of externals that might supply the “exact equivalence” of any particular emotion: “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.” Such correlatives—or “objective equivalences”—provided, he insisted, the “only way of expressing emotion in the form of art.” The New Criticism took him at his word, and declined to admit any other way. Not that the aesthetic scheme behind Eliot’s formulation was altogether new. Henry James, too, had demanded—“Dramatize, dramatize!”—that the work of art resist construing itself in public. When Eliot, in offering his objective correlative, stopped to speak of the “
données
of the problem”—
donnée
was one of James’s pet Gallicisms—he was tipping off his source. No literary figure among James’s contemporaries had paid any attention to this modernist dictum, often not even James himself. Emerging in far more abstruse language from Eliot, it became a papal bull. He was thirty-five at the time.

The method used in digging out the objective correlative had a Gallic name of its own:
explication de texte
. The sloughing off of what the New Criticism considered to be extraneous had the effect of freeing the poem utterly—freeing it for the otherwise
undistracted mind of the reader, who was released from “psychology” and similar blind alleys in order to master the poem’s components. The New Criticism held the view that a poem could indeed be mastered: this was an act of trust, as it were, between poem and reader. The poem could be relied on to yield itself up to the reader—if the reader, on the other side of the bargain, would agree to a minutely close “
explication
,” phrase by phrase: a process far more meticulous than “interpretation” or the search for any identifiable meaning or definitive commentary. The search was rather for architecture and texture—or call it resonance and intricacy, the responsive web-work between the words.
Explication de texte
, as practiced by the New Critics and their graduate-student disciples, was something like watching an ant maneuver a bit of leaf. One notes first the fine veins in the leaf, then the light speckled along the veins, then the tiny glimmers charging off the ant’s various surfaces, the movements of the ant’s legs and other body parts, the lifting and balancing of the leaf, all the while scrupulously aware that ant and leaf, though separate structures, become—when linked in this way—a freshly imagined structure.

A generation or more was initiated into this concentrated scrutiny of a poem’s structure and movement. High art in literature—which had earlier been approached through the impressionistic “appreciations” that commonly passed for critical reading before the New Criticism took hold—was seen to be indivisible from
explication de texte
. And though the reverence for high art that characterized the Eliot era is now antiquated—or dead—the close reading that was the hallmark of the New Critics has survived, and remains the sine qua non of all schools of literary theory. Currently it is even being applied to popular culture; hamburger advertisements and television sitcoms can be serious objects of up-to-date critical examination. Eliot was hugely attracted to popular culture as an innovative ingredient of pastiche—“Sweeney Agonistes,” an unfinished verse drama, is saturated in it. But for Eliot and the New Critics, popular culture or “low taste” contributed to a literary technique; it would scarcely have served as a literary subject, or “text,” in its own right. Elitism ruled. Art was expected to be strenuous, hard-earned, knotty. Eliot explicitly said
so, and the New Critics faithfully concurred. “It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy,” Eliot wrote (though he himself had been a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and had completed a thesis on F. H. Bradley, the British idealist). “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult
. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”

He had another requirement as well, and that was a receptiveness to history. Complexity could be present only when historical consciousness prevailed. He favored history over novelty, and tradition over invention. While praising William Blake for “a remarkable and original sense of language and the music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision,” Eliot faulted him for his departures from the historical mainstream. “What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own.” And he concluded, “The concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius.” Genius was not enough for Eliot. A poet, he said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” needs to be “directed by the past.” The historical sense “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with the feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

A grand view; a view of grandeur; high art defined: so high that even the sublime Blake fails to meet its measure. It is all immensely elevated and noble—and, given the way many literary academics and critics think now, rare and alien. Aristocratic ideas of this kind, which some might call Eurocentric and obscurantist, no longer engage most literary intellectuals; nor did they, sixty
years ago, engage Edmund Wilson. But they were dominant for decades, and in the reign of Eliot they were law. Like other postulates, they brought good news and bad news; and we know that my good news may well be your bad news. Probably the only legacy of the Eliot era that everyone can affirm as enduringly valuable is the passionate, yet also disinterested, dissection of the text, a nuanced skill that no critical reader, taking whatever ideological stand, can do without. This exception aside, the rest is all disagreement. As I see it, what appeared important to me at twenty-one is still important; in some respects I admit to being arrested in the Age of Eliot, a permanent member of it, unregenerate. The etiolation of high art seems to me to be a major loss. I continue to suppose that some texts are worthier than other texts. The same with the diminishment of history and tradition: not to incorporate into an educable mind the origins and unifying principles of one’s own civilization strikes me as a kind of cultural autolobotomy. Nor am I ready to relinquish Eliot’s stunning declaration that the reason we know so much more than the dead writers knew is that “they are that which we know.” As for that powerful central body of touchstone works, the discredited “canon,” and Eliot’s strong role in shaping it for his own and the following generation, it remains clear to me—as Susan Sontag remarked at the 1986 International PEN Convention—that literary genius is not an equal opportunity employer; I would not wish to drop Homer or Jane Austen or Kafka to make room for an Aleutian Islander of lesser gifts, however unrepresented her group may be on the college reading list.

In today’s lexicon these are no doubt “conservative” notions, for which Eliot’s influence can be at least partly blamed or—depending on your viewpoint—credited. In Eliot himself they have a darker side—the bad news. And the bad news is very bad. The gravity of high art led Eliot to envision a controlling and exclusionary society that could, presumably, supply the conditions to produce that art. These doctrinal tendencies, expressed in 1939 in a little book called
The Idea of a Christian Society
, took Eliot—on the eve of Nazi Germany’s ascendancy over Europe—to the very lip of shutting out, through “radical changes,” anyone he might consider ineligible for his “Community of Christians.” Lamenting
“the intolerable position of those who try to lead a Christian life in a non-Christian world,” he was indifferent to the position of those who would try to thrive as a cultural minority within his contemplated Utopia. (This denigration of tolerance was hardly fresh. He had argued in a lecture six years before that he “had no objection to being called a bigot.”) In the same volume, replying to a certain Miss Bower, who had frowned on “one of the main tenets of the Nazi creed—the relegation of women to the sphere of the kitchen, the children, and the church,” Eliot protested “the implication that what is Nazi is wrong, and need not be discussed on its own merits.” Nine years afterward, when the fight against Germany was won, he published
Notes Toward the Definition of Culture
, again proposing the hegemony of a common religious culture. Here he wrote—at a time when Hitler’s ovens were just cooled and the shock of the Final Solution just dawning—that “the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian faith may have been unfortunate both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves,” because “the effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that there can be culture without religion.” An extraordinary postwar comment. And in an Appendix, “The Unity of European Culture,” a radio lecture broadcast to Germany in 1946, one year after the Reich was dismantled, with Europe in upheaval, the death camps exposed, and displaced persons everywhere, he made no mention at all of the German atrocities. The only reference to “barbarism” was hypothetical, a worried projection into a potentially barren future: “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes,” as if the best of European civilization (including the merciful tenets of Christianity) had not already been pulverized to ash throughout the previous decade. So much for where high art and traditional culture landed Eliot.

There is bad news, as it happens, even in the objective correlative. What was once accepted as an austere principle of poetics is suddenly decipherable as no more than a device to shield the poet from the raw shame of confession. Eliot is now unveiled as a confessional poet above all—one who was driven to confess, who
did
confess, whose subject was sin and guilt (his own), but who had no heart for the act of disclosure. That severe law of the impersonality
of the poem—the masking technique purported to displace emotion from its crude source in the poet’s real-life experience to its heightened incarnation in “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events”—turns out to be motivated by something less august and more timorous than pure literary theory or a devotion to symbol. In the name of the objective correlative, Eliot had found a way to describe the wound without the embarrassment of divulging who held the knife. This was a conception far less immaculate than the practitioners of the New Criticism ever supposed; for thirty years or more Eliot’s close readers remained innocent of—or discreet about—Eliot’s private life. Perhaps some of them imagined that, like the other pope, he had none.