LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

The question above sounds rather like a dirge. The menacing approach of death, of the unknown is also the kernel of AUNT HELEN. Miss Helen Slingsby, the ‘maiden aunt’ of the narrator, lived in a small house ‘near a fashionable square’, together with her four servants. The only thing we learn about her is that, when she died, ‘there was silence in heaven’. The poem does not follow her into death, as Portrait of a Lady seemed to try. It is a disillusioned record of how the living react, of how little they see and understand, of how death in its mystery fails to affect them. The servants' appetite for life is even greater after the old lady's death. The undertaker wipes his feet with an expert gesture on entering her shuttered room. His attitude seems to imply that he did this many times before, and may be doing it for a long time still; that he has witnessed many people's deaths and has almost come to feel eternal, as if death were going to spare him. His only reaction to it is:

‘He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before’.

The Dresden clock goes on ticking on the mantelpiece (image which becomes an impressive symbol in Eliot's play The Family Reunion). The dogs are given even more food than before; they are ‘handsomely provided for’. Only the parrot dies shortly afterwards. The footman (not the eternal Footman in Prufrock) is seen sitting upon the dining-table, holding the housemaid on his knees. Life goes on, described in trivial, grotesque details, unaware of what lies beyond its boundary.

The same violently noticed separation between the living and the dead is recorded in a strikingly similar poem by Ezra Pound:

‘This old lady,

Who was ‘so old that she was an atheist',

Is now surrounded

By six candles and a crucifix,

While the second wife of a nephew

Makes hay with things in her house’.

(The Social Order, II)

Using the same pretext – the death of a relative –, the Romanian poet Mircea Ivănescu fuses the two worlds with a pity and sympathy for both living and dead that Eliot hardly ever dared to show:

‘After the funeral, once

back in those tiny rooms, the old woman hurried to bed

(look, the narrator thought to himself, how very much

like the witticism of a certain Frenchman who'd always know

what to do next and who'd say:

'when I'm at a loss what to do, I just go to bed').

The men sat down all round the table – however

they took some more time in taking out the plum-brandy – now

they were merely sitting, quiet – tired maybe – on those chairs

thinking of what to say first.

An aunt, not too old to be elegant, rubbed her back against

                                             the stove soon –

the stove was a spot which, when later the room

grew less and less warm, was bound to be envied

by all the others – some lingered about

the so very, very small room – the deceased's sister

went out to make some coffee – and, well, the cousin coming

                                             down from the capital

seated herself by the window, in the coldest

corner. It was already night outside

with thick snow on fences, along the narrow lanes,

in the longish yard of that very house, it snowed and snowed

endlessly. So brightly lit that room

was. Now and then – finally the quarrel

had started – from the bed,

from under the coloured blanket, the old woman's voice came.

She said – ‘oh, cold in here’. None of them, not even

the cousin down from the capital – paid any attention

                                                         whatever.

The narrator was mentally recording – later

(when he had drunk quite a number of glasses of plum brandy)

he went into the kitchen – was taking something down in a

                                                         notebook.

The sister asked him – 'what are you doing in here?'

He looked up, up, up ...’

                                 (Cold in Here, in the volume Lines, 1968)

Mircea Ivănescu's generosity of feeling and mild dreaminess (coming half a century later, in another geogrpahical landscape, in the Romanian capital, Bucharest) are absent from Eliot's poetry. Eliot's narrative kernels are stated with careful reserve, with apparent coldness.