Outside of a Dog (8 page)

Change the date to 1962, and ‘Bernie’ to ‘Rick’, and all the rest stands. I was aware of the parallels without having considered them, and had no sense of pursuing, as it
were, a carbon copy of my father’s life. But the University of Pennsylvania he attended and the one I did, if they had the continuities of genteel Philadelphian propriety and Ivy League
architecture, nevertheless were substantially different places in which to major in English. The very act and nature of reading had redefined itself since my father’s time. He had been
schooled by historicist and belle-lettriste professors (and gentlemen, and Gentiles) for whom understanding a text consisted of placing it squarely in the historical, cultural and intellectual
milieu from which it emerged, and which it might be claimed to represent. To read Shakespeare without knowing about the great chain of being, or to approach Pope lacking an understanding of the
premises of the Enlightenment, were activities associated with amateurishness, of reading for the mere fun of it. Indeed, properly understood, such pleasure was a thin and unreliable product in the
absence of its background.

It was hardly a sympathetic milieu in which to read Eliot.
The Waste Land
was widely reviled by contemporary American critics, and more so by American academics of the Penn sort. In 1930,
of course the poem was still avant-garde in a way that, by 1962, it no longer was. My father would recall, with a smile and shake of the head that carried, still, an aura of astonishment, what an
impact the poem had upon him, how exciting it was to read something like
that
. Modern? That was the naturalist novels of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, the mid-Western twang of Carl Sandburg,
the fine discriminations of Edith Wharton and Henry James.
The Waste Land
was something else, and required a new concept: ‘modern
ist
’, that would do it. Though the term
first appears as early as 1879, its use to refer to the early twentieth century’s explosion of creative innovation in literature, painting and music, is more or less contemporaneous with the
publication of
The Waste Land
. When you wrote or painted, when you
composed
in this new way, you redefined not only what art was, but how it had to be described and discussed.

A key figure in this shift of readerly perspective was I.A. Richards, the Cambridge don whose
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
defined the aesthetic of this new ahistoric
approach to the reading of poetry. Richards would distribute to his classes the texts of poems (which he called ‘protocols’) without divulging the author or the period in which they
were written. There were only the words on the page, and it was the job of each student to produce as detailed a ‘reading’ of them as possible. Under such tutelage, that extraordinary
undergraduate William Empson was soon to publish
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, still one of the great examples of what close reading can accomplish.

In America, the term ‘new criticism’ (after the title of a book by Allen Tate) came to be preferred to ‘practical criticism’, though they were largely the same thing.
Exegesis and formal analysis became the modes. Just as Picasso and Braque required of their critics a fresh eye, and an accompanying new vocabulary and conceptual apparatus, so too did Joyce, Pound
and Eliot necessitate a different set of lenses and critical tools. To understand them required that one re-schooled oneself in the very art of reading. And to do that you had to learn, too, how
not to read.

When I first read
The Waste Land
my response was some literary version of an anxiety attack, accompanied by an enormous exhilaration. As Eliot was to remark, ‘genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood.’ The poem tugged at my mind fore and aft, the images recurring and reigniting as if from a bad dream, or what Eliot called ‘the octopus or
angel’ with which the poet, and the reader, struggles. The poem was like a crossword puzzle or literary quiz, which was rather fun, but the real difficulty lay in assimilating it emotionally.
It had emanated from the immense collapse that followed the First War, as well as Eliot’s own nervous breakdown, leaving that ‘heap of broken images’ that its poetic voices
struggle to preserve: jagged shards, partially apprehended echoes, scenes glimpsed but hardly comprehended, the past confused with the present, mind, body and spirit in collision.

The Waste Land
neither demanded nor allowed paraphrase. Neither did it have a philosophy, a single voice (like a poem by Whitman or Ginsberg), or a clear structure. Though we were
supposed to confine ourselves to the words on the page, we snuck off to the Van Pelt Library nonetheless. It was one of my haunts in my first semester as a freshman, a refuge from that lonely
disorientation that accompanies leaving home for the first time. I had located a comfy chair in a quiet alcove, which I began to regard as my own, and would repair there most days to read: first
the novels of Camus, then all of Kafka, then the major novels of Sartre. Existentialism – in high school I thought the term was ‘existentionalism,’ which I used with embarrassing
frequency – was current and sexy, and I wanted to know more.

My enthusiasm for the new philosophy occasioned one of my very few arguments with my father, who liked plain speaking and caught a whiff of cant in my advocacy of the existential.

‘What does it mean, exactly?’ he asked in a voice I suspect he used for cross-examinations.

‘It’s from Jean-Paul Sartre,’ I explained, ‘it’s a form of French philosophy.’

‘I know that perfectly well. Tell me about this philosophy.’

‘The key is that existence precedes essence, that you choose who you are, you don’t have any nature. You are entirely free to make yourself. If you make the wrong choices it’s
called bad faith, and the responsibility is entirely your own.’

He considered this for a moment.

‘Tell it to the Jews who died in the concentration camps,’ he said tartly. ‘Did they choose that? Do Negroes choose segregation? Have they got this “freedom” to
make themselves whatever they wish?’ A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, he had done pro bono work on cases involving discrimination, was entirely on the side of the underdog, and
had little time for ‘philosophy’ abstracted from the reality of daily engagement with the world.

‘I’m not so sure Sartre is interested in that,’ I said. ‘He’s more concerned with the French bourgeoisie . . .’

‘He should be interested! He lived through the war, didn’t he? But I am more interested in why
you
are so concerned with the French middle classes. Surely there are more
pressing things to worry about right here, and now.’

He was genuinely cross, and we agreed to drop the subject. I’d rarely encountered him in such an unforgiving mood, though it was to recur a few years later, when I wrote from Oxford to say
that I was contemplating a trip to Poland to find members of our family. I got a sharp letter by return, asking why I supposed that any of them had survived, and why it was that I wished to visit a
country from whose barbarous anti-Semitism my grandparents had narrowly escaped? I made other plans.

I suppose my reading in the library during my freshman year was partly designed to frame a rebuttal of my father’s argument, but instead it confirmed it: Sartre had recanted his original
position, for the very reasons my father had given. (I never told him this, and began to suspect he’d read the relevant texts.)

Better to join him in our mutual regard for T.S. Eliot whose palpable anti-semitism my father was curiously able to forgive, I became obsessed with
The Waste Land
, with trying to figure
it out. There were a lot of books about Eliot, confirming how difficult he was, but no
Collected Letters
. His essays were studiedly impersonal, and left his personality a matter of
conjecture. A starchy young man from the mid-West, who had assimilated seamlessly into English social and intellectual life, Eliot evolved into a high church, high table sort of chap: formal,
conventional, retiring. That was the prevailing impression anyway. There were no biographies to be found; indeed, on his death in 1965 he left express instructions that no such were to be
attempted. When Peter Ackroyd published his, in 1984, the Eliot estate refused the author permission to quote from his works, ostensibly on the grounds that Eliot had not wished for a biography to
be written. (The book nevertheless won the Heinemann and Whitbread awards.)

But the pattern of withholding permissions goes deeper than this, and it is a sanitized Eliot that we still read today. The Eliot estate, run by his still enraptured widow Valerie, has offered
us a version of the poet as saint, resisting publication of Eliot’s early King Bolo verses (which are charmingly obscene) and often refusing permission for quotation from his works. I
recently did a BBC Radio 4 programme about the Hogarth Press, and applied to the estate for permission to read the short poem ‘The Hippopotamus’. It was denied. I was cross and bemused,
and demanded that the BBC confront Mrs Eliot.

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ said my producer. ‘We need Mrs Eliot a lot more than we need you!’

I didn’t know, reading
The Waste Land
in my freshman year, that the poet was a more amusing character than one might have supposed. A devotee of music hall, a lover of the Marx
brothers, and an inveterate practical joker, he was a constant source of amusement to his publishing colleagues at Faber’s. He was known to return from his morning visit to the Gents with
pieces of that old-fashioned, virtually grease-proof toilet paper, on which he had written something silly. Examples were distributed at board meetings: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot salutes the Directors
of Faber and Faber.’ (I owned one once, and sold it for £100.) At Christmas parties he would have a few drinks and regale his colleagues with a variety of English accents so
stupendously off key that people would sneak out of the room when they thought he wasn’t looking.

It turns out he was rather fun, this Eliot, but you sure wouldn’t have known it in Introduction to English in 1962. Looking up from the page, bewildered, we begged for help.
‘Ah,’ our instructor told us archly (quoting Archibald Macleish’s dictum), ‘a poem should not mean, but be.’ That wasn’t much help. It wasn’t at all clear
what
The Waste Land
meant, we agreed on that. But what help was it to remind us that it
was
? If it wasn’t, then we could get the hell out of there, but if it
be’d
,
what kind of being did it have?

We canvassed various opinions as to the essence of poetry. Housman reminded us that unless a poem made our skin prickle with delight, so that we cut ourselves while shaving, it lacked poetic
quality. (The girls rather objected to this.) And Wordsworth, evidencing the fatal attraction aesthetic theorists have for the verb to be, claimed that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings’. There was plenty of powerful feeling in
The Waste Land
, but not much evidence that it was spontaneous, or that it had overflowed. Indeed, much of it seemed crimped
and desperate.

The ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, surely, is what you get when you find your neighbour in bed with your wife? Even if this emotion is later, as Wordsworth was hastily
to insist, ‘recollected in tranquillity’, it is hard to see how memory can inject the necessary poetic elements. Eliot is ruthless on the subject, observing that Wordsworth, like some
sloppy undergraduate, has got
every
thing
wrong:

That showed him. And Mr Eliot was prepared to help us as well. When the poem was first published in England in 1923, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Eliot accompanied it
with a set of notes, of limited explanatory value, partly in order to bulk up the slim volume. Curiously, we get a clearer personal voice from these notes than from the poem itself. Whereas
The
Waste Land
is a palimpsest of persons, voice and languages, images, references, and places, and cannot be reduced to a personal statement, its notes, recondite and wry, reveal an Eliot who
takes himself seriously but not too seriously, and is happy to acknowledge how much of the poem is, indeed, personal. The note about tarot cards is a perfect example:

When he was later to describe his masterpiece as ‘just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’, we recognize the tone from the notes, not the poem itself. And, like the notes, the comment
misguides as much as it shows the way. If the grinding, abiding misery of
The Waste Land
is a form of grumbling, it is hard to imagine how Eliot might have sounded when he was really
unhappy.

At Eliot’s suggestion I read Jessie Weston’s
From Ritual to Romance
, consulted Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
, stuffed myself with references to the Fisher King and
associated myths of maiming and regeneration. Coming back to the poem I found I could talk knowledgeably about its structure and cultural references, as if I had constructed an internal version of
what was later to be called a hypertext.

The Waste Land
had thrown down a challenge, and continues to do so. I made of the poem a lifetime companion. Some five or six years later, rereading
The Waste Land
while doing my
BPhil at Oxford, I was surprised to find how much it had changed. I suppose I had too. Texts alter their meaning as readers change their situations, as Eliot argues so cogently in ‘Tradition
and the Individual Talent’. I had been reading Freud and Jung compulsively while Barbara and I were both in therapy, and much given to regarding all utterance as symptomatic of an internal
state. Though himself undergoing psychoanalysis during the composition of
The Waste Land
, Eliot maintained that the poem was not a symptom of mere personal distress, that its ravaged
landscape was an ‘objective correlative’ of a state of mind that was hardly his alone.