LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL (1935) uses history instead of a plot. As we know, once upon a time Thomas Becket (1118-1170) was raised by Richard II to the position of Lord Chancellor and then also head of the Catholic Church of England. The moment he had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket refused to go on as Lord Chancellor, and turned against the king. He then seemed to have completely forgotten that, raising him from a very humble state, the king had made him his closest friend for a while, in his youth. From here on, the historical events can be interpreted in quite a number of ways. Fact is, Becket spent seven years in exile on the Continent, presumably plotting with the Pope against the authority of the English king.

Eliot's play begins with Becket's return to Canterbury. The play offers only one major event to be witnessed: Thomas Becket's assassination by the king's men, on December, 29, 1170. The rest we know from history again. Thomas Becket, the stubborn supporter of the Catholic Church in England (which was to become Anglican only centuries later, under Henry VIII), was sanctified in 1173. For a long time, pilgrimages were made to Becket's tomb yearly, on the 7th of July. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales give ample proof of that. Henry II, too, made such a pilgrimage, and had himself flogged there. This theatrical repentance made of the English king and even stronger monarch than he had been before Becket's death.

What does Eliot do with the meagre plot of his play? No historical play, to be sure. He once admitted that the Greek dramatic pattern appealed to him. The fact is obvious in all his five plays. Besides their earnestness (even when they make use of jesting words), there is always a chorus somewhere about. In Murder in the Cathedral, we even find several of them. One is that of the Canterbury women, another that of the Cathedral priests and still another is that of the four knights who kill the main (and only) hero. Aside all that, the audience become a chorus too, a chorus of minds that Eliot would have liked to sway to and fro. A play ought to be a dance of the spectators' nerves, he once stated. This last chorus of spectators, however, is the least successful, because Eliot does not really have a dramatic hold on his audience. He is unable to sweep them off their feet. Somehow, each new incident is felt coming, and is ‘foresuffered’ at least one moment in advance. But the dramatic awkwardness is amply compensated by the poetry in the play. For the sake of the poet (whose Christian name, Thomas, is the same as his hero's), we eagerly put up with the dramatist. The beauty of random quotations often delays the actual examination of Eliot's dramatic skill. The story we follow is a sequence of beautiful lines, rather than a chain of events. If we are to find the charm of Eliot's plays, then our only hope is to leave the stage as it is, and look for the poet behind the scenes.

The play opens with a chorus of women and priests, whose words remind us of almost every poem that Eliot wrote, from Gerontion to The Rock and the Quartets. The mood is uncertain, both bitter and mild. The author's hand is not firm at all. To ‘wait’ and ‘witness’ is an old occupation of Eliot's mind, and a rather poor alliteration at that. The dialogue, which implies that the lines must be uttered aloud, renders the tone even clumsy. This introduction sounds artificial to the point of unreality, or of a mock-reality. Eliot sounds humorous without having meant it. ‘The strain on the brain’: a wasted assonance. When Thomas himself puts in an appearance, he speaks in the words of the Quartets (written between 1935 and 1942). He mentions a ‘wheel’ which must ‘turn and still / Be forever still’. Whatever he or the others say has an air of prophecy. This prophetic zest of every sentence uttered enhances the predictability of the whole play. It diminishes its chances of ever taking us by surprise. The plot, then, is not Eliot's main interest. His forte is still poetry, even though Murder in the Cathedral is supposed to belong to another genre. As the saying goes (no offence meant to Ash-Wednesday), can the leopard change his spots?

A chorus of four Tempters follows. They speak in turn, each bringing a proposition of what Becket finds to be a distasteful compromise. The first Tempter reminds Thomas of the good old times, when he was the king's friend, ‘Old Tom, gay Tom, Becket of London’. The Tempter's invitation that Thomas should resume his old life, is rejected in a dignified voice. Thomas, who already has the feeling of sainthood in his bones, replies:

‘Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns’.

Upon which, the king's friend leaves Becket ‘to his fate’. A fate which, unfortunately, we all know beforehand. If Eliot did not choose to debunk or re-invent history, he might at least have clothed it in a more palatable lyrical mood.

The following Tempters, too, leave Becket to his fate, to his future assassination by the (again four) king's knights. One Tempter offers him back his old worldly, political power, but Becket refuses that too, on account of the fact that he, supreme and alone in England, keeps the ‘keys / of heaven and hell’. The next Tempter claims to be a ‘straightforward Englishman’, to whom Becket recommends to ‘proceed straight forward’ (poor pun). The man offers a ‘Norman’ alliance with the barons, against the king. Thomas cries out in what he means to be a voice loaded with painfully repressed affection:

‘O Henry, O my king!’

Then he informs the third Tempter that he trusts ‘God alone’. But the attempt at persuasion is not left at that. Thomas confesses he had expected three Tempters only, yet a fourth one turns up. He encourages our hero to go on with his dignified stubbornness. His reward will be to ‘rule from the tomb’, surrounded by the ‘glory of Saints’. Thomas admits having thought of that himself, which makes the fourth Tempter a mysterious character, an inhabitant of the hero's own mind. The thought of the glory of martyrdom seems to have brushed Becket, too, but, once uttered, he firmly rejects it. He wants a perfect purity of desire. What his desire, his quest really consist in, that will remain a question to the very end. The same as in the other plays Eliot wrote. Do we know what the hero wants? Will his never revealed desire be fulfilled? Eliot's sense of fear leaves these plays open to many interpretations. Every hero is afraid of his own inner self. That is why he may not reach the end of his quest. Wishes are banished before they have been found. The future is a menacing precipice, enveloped in a concealing haze.

Anyway, Thomas finally states he will not ‘do the right deed for the wrong reason’, whatever the two may be. All the choruses so far mentioned are finally dismissed. He merely announces:

‘I know

What yet remains to show you of my history

Will seem to most of you at best futility,

Senseless self-slaughter of a lunatic,

Arrogant passion of a fanatic.

I know that history at all times draws

The strangest consequence from remotest cause’.

He then preaches in the Cathedral, on Christmas morning (1170), speaking of ‘peace to men of good will’. A peace that never descends on Eliot's stage. His peaceless plays send us again behind the scenes, where Eliot the poet handles all the ropes of restlessness, agitating his poetic words. The Archbishop tries to illustrate this peace (‘that passeth understanding’?) by a definition of martyrdom:

‘A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's will to become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to his ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr’.

Consummate purification of Thomas' motifs. What a pity that, after all, this religious purity sounds so artificial in Eliot's play. Was his own religious conversion more genuine? Was he really a fervent believer? It is not his work that will tell us. We shall always find in it the dramatic ritual of the church, the dramatic devices of a sermon. But the substance of belief, the metaphysical trip into God's realm, well, that is an altogether different matter. Not to be pried into, unless we have more biographical evidence than at present.

Maybe part of the artificiality of Eliot's first play also comes from the repetition of images we already know so well from his poems. How strange to think that a poet with so large a vocabulary at hand should have such a restricted store of images into which to combine those words over and over again. Seasons, earth, city-scapes, sea-objects ... Among these reminiscent signs and forebodings, the murderers do not take long to appear. Becket is on the point of making ‘perfect his will’. The knights kill him. Then a touch of G.B. Shaw's Saint Joan follows. The murderers suddenly turn to face the audience, and they justify their deed to the spectators directly. History becomes (as a Quartet put it) here and now. The stage was previously almost empty. Except Thomas Becket himself, the rest were unindividualized members of various choruses. Now, the stage is suddenly filled with familiar faces. We are all dragged in there by the knights' speeches. These speeches are far from being as witty as Shaw's. Their words are dull as a lawyer's. One thing must be noticed, though. They all support (like the modern thrillers) the image of the lovable criminal, harmless and naive, absolutely ‘disinterested’, as they all say. One explains that they will be severely punished, since the king will never admit he really wanted the Archbishop out of the way. Another explains that it is natural for any spectator to take sides with the victim. The third speaks of Becket's having menaced the political unity from which England (the spectators included) benefits now. The fourth even suggests that, as a matter of fact, Becket must have been insane and committed suicide.

After this prosaic dialogue (which hardly fits into the poetic flow of this monologue-play), the last words belong to the priests' chorus, accompanied by the ‘weak sad men, lost erring souls, homeless in earth or heaven’. So much about Murder in the Cathedral. No plot, no characters, hardly anything interesting revealed about Eliot's mind. A succession of poetic bits, written now and then. If there is anything impressive in this artificial long poem, then it is an emotional lurking behind the historical moment Eliot chose to illustrate: Becket's love and betrayal of the king. This earthly feeling, repressed in the play, is more convincing than Becket's professed loyalty to God. As usual, Divinity is absent from Eliot's text. It is not accessible to the understanding of Thomas Becket himself, who dies his eyes riveted on the world beyond. A play of absences, then. Contrary to the classical French rules, the beautiful quest is hidden backstage, while the horror of the assassination takes place under our very eyes. A play abounding in poetic openings and, since it can hardly be staged, a question play, after all.