LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

This unrest gives way in Eliot's last play, THE ELDER STATESMAN, dedicated to his second wife, and written six years before Eliot died. The same as  the Quartets, this play sounds like a swan song. Something reassuring steals into it and engages our sympathy. The plot no longer contradicts the title. No escape is mentioned. Everything takes place in front of our eyes, on the stage. To quote Eliot himself, when ‘here and now’ ought to have ceased to matter, he ends by discovering them. A backward process of sensibility, which, however, does not miss one single season of a man's life. The tragedy is that each season is discovered at the wrong time, so the experiencing sensibility can never be anything but frustrated.

The elder statesman in question is Lord Claverton, fatally ill. He dies under an oak-tree, at the end of the play. A little before his death, Charles (Hemington), his future son-in-law, just says to Monica, the Lord's daughter:

‘He's a very different man from the man he used to be.

It's as if he had passed through some door unseen by us

And had turned and was looking back at us

With a glance of farewell’.

Innocent of her father's death, Monica listens to Charles' warm words of love:

‘Oh my dear,

I love you to the limits of speech and beyond.

It's strange that words are so inadequate.

Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath,

So the lover must struggle for words’.

Direct as it is, the statement does not sound artificial, or out of place. Neither do the complications of the plot. The plot consists, in fact, merely of memories. The present is only filled by the elder statesman's death and his daughter's happiness. The rest are gloomy, guilty memories, which no longer affect anybody. As Monica says, these memories are ghosts that can easily be ‘exorcised’. Eliot the exorcist? Eliot the sorcerer, who lets go of Ariel, and closes his eyes to look inside himself. The peace of the play comes from the powerlessness of the past pains, past ghosts. Who are they? One is Federico Gomez, formerly Fred Culverwell, a poor friend of Lord Claverton's during the latter's Oxford days. He could easily spoil the image of the impeccable statesman, if he were to say that long ago, one night, while driving, the lord ran over the body of an old man and did not even stop. The old man later turned out to have died before the accident, but the Lord's cowardice stayed, never to be washed away. Later, Fred, a brilliant student, having learnt expensive tastes from his rich friend, forged a cheque and was imprisoned. On being released, he left for Central America (San Marco), where he later became fabulously rich himself. Another ghost is Mrs. Carghill, the former Maisie Montjoy, a music-hall singer. Again, the Lord's father, careful of his son's future, paid her off when his son had an affair with her, and she sued him for ‘breach of promise’. As Claverton himself remarks, these two people remember two moments in his life when he was below the standards he had set for himself: two occasions on which he had run away. These two reappear some twenty years later, seeming to blackmail the lord, imposing their presence and memories upon him. They steal his son, Michael, who follows Gomez to San Marco, to make money. At first, the statesman is slightly upset. He very soon comes to ignore the past, though. Life goes on, the play pines away slowly, between the death of the father and the happiness of the daughter. No question, no quest. A mere tired vacant stare. A disillusioned playwright who cannot have failed to realize that his plays had less of the seasons of literature in them than his poetry. The end of a lifetime, the end of a work. When Prufrock and numberless early writings spoke of imaginary, far-off death with such devastating bitterness, who would have thought real death would bring to Eliot's soul this warm and serene mood?