LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

LITTLE GIDDING (1942) is the last of the Quartets. The title comes from the name of a village in Huntingdonshire. During the plague of 1625, this village became a kind of secluded religious ideal community. man's fight against death by plague may have suggested to Eliot some sort of religious, spiritual access to the ever after. Consequently, the poem is rather abstract, or, in other words, fleshless. It speaks, for instance of the ‘unimaginable zero summer’. We are back in Ash-Wednesday, which tried to approximate eternity (the disappearance of all ends and deaths) by means of self-devouring images. We find in Little Gidding: ‘midwinter spring’, ‘a glare that is blindness’, ‘never and always’, ‘England and nowhere’, ‘the timeless moment’, ‘the recurrent end of the unending’, and so on. The fourth quartet tries to build the image of an untrue end. If you manage to visualize the idea of death in your mind, then death may sometime be defeated, who knows? Yeats used his imagination many times to the same effect. Browning too, if we think of his Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. A dark tower, which meant the end of one kind of life, but by no means the end of everything. This dark tower will catch up with the traveller anywhere, along whatever way he may be walking. It simply springs out of the depths, and swallows the bodies. The intellect survives. It survives – in Browning's imagery – to blow the final sound of the horn, and tell the story. Eliot's image looks very much the same. From wherever you come, he says, by whatever ‘route’, at whatever time of day, and wherever the mystery may overtake you, it will always be the same:

‘If you came this way

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion’.

Eliot writes as if he had already experienced the jump, as if he were already inside the image he is building. Herein resides the novelty of this quartet. Eliot's mind looks ahead into what he always dreaded, and his soul envelops the sight into a carefree mood. A poem for the last season. He actually sees himself beyond being. He has access to the world of the dead. He speaks to the ghost of his dead master:

‘So I assumed a double part, and cried

And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'

Although we were not. I was still the same,

Knowing myself yet being someone other –’

The poet's visionary mind splits into two: one half is sent ahead to witness the nightmarish vision, the other stays behind and watches the show with the contentment of the creator. This vision of death Eliot produces is in fact the best proof that his other half means to stay alive. The whole quartet becomes a sight of life exacerbated.

Eliot's images come closer and closer to Yeats' eternal fire in Byzantium. The same as with Yeats, the ghost that addresses Eliot gives him no clue, no encouragement as to what is to come. The apparition moves ‘in measure’, like a dancer in the flames. Last of all, it vanishes ‘on the blowing of the horn’. Eliot's visionary half is left agape: his words are not any more convincing than Yeats'. Even the ghost's terrifying description of the horrors of old age resembles Yeats' words (‘fastened to this dying animal ...’). Some successful alliteration here and there reminds of Eliot's skill (‘faces and places’). Quotations turn up again, and allusions to mythical times. A shirt of fire, which symbolizes love, some religious female's visionary words, to the effect that

‘... all shall be well

And all manner of things shall be well’.

We learn about some ‘gifts reserved for age’, such as:

‘First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage

At human folly, and the laceration

Of laughter at what ceases to amuse ...’

Gerontion had already told us all this, which obsessed Eliot at thirty-two, as well as at fifty-four. The tone was rougher, more pathetic:

‘I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch ...’

At the age of fifty-four, Eliot is no longer the young man who looks back (or ahead) in anger. He has become an author of all moods and for all seasons. He merely notices. His lack of rage cannot fail to impress, even deeper than the rhetorical winter of his young discontent.

The end of East Coker is – what else could it be called? – sweetly rending:

‘Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning’.

Somebody who knew Eliot, some younger acquaintance, once wrote that, towards the end of his life, Eliot had become a little too ‘pontifical’. By which he must have meant that Eliot was no longer the diffident young man, afraid he would not last through all the seasons of good literature. The remark may have had some truth in it. Eliot had matured since his first Prufrock volume, and he was entitled to this tone of benevolent self-assurance, which charms the more experienced reader of the Quartets.

Eliot's newly acquired protective air makes us share without distaste his metaphysical visions in Little Gidding. The landscape is weird. Midwinter spring, unimaginable zero summer, ‘suspended in time between pole and tropic’. The day is ‘brightest with frost and fire’, ‘the brief sun flames on the ice’. In short, contraries are reconciled. The mere thought of reconciliation is new for Eliot. Ash-Wednesday simply joined opposed, self-devouring words. It defied the reader. Twelve years later, Eliot had learned how to propitiate his readers. He had broadened his own understanding, in order to have these contraries coexist. Which amounts to as much as saying that, by the time he wrote his last major poem, and at the time he was beginning his playwright's work, Eliot had finally found his way to hearts, to readers of all tastes, to minds of all seasons.

We follow him through Little Gidding without objecting at the half-understood lines. We believe him when he assures us that whatever it was we thought we have come for ‘is only a shell, a husk of meaning’. We side with him, because he sides with us. He speaks of ‘other places’, ‘which may just as well be the end of the world (‘the sea jaws’, ‘a dark lake’, a desert, a city), yet we are not afraid, because he himself guides us without fear. After a season of hope, one of dread, and another of pain accepted, a season without hope, without dread, without pain has come. It is a season without emotional barriers, one of generous sensibility.

‘Prayer’ is recommended. We have reached this mysterious final point, Eliot informs us, not in order to ‘verify’, to instruct ourselves, to satisfy our curiosity or to imagine we shall have something unheard of to retell when we go back to the land left behind. There is no way back. This irreversibility was not accepted in Ash-Wednesday. That was the reason why all the imploring words there (pray for us, help us, teach us ...) were desperate prayers. The prayer Eliot mentions here is not really a supplication. It is a strong discipline of the soul. As he says,

‘... prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying’.

His life-long literary love, Dante, interferes again in his lines. As time goes by, Dante's echoed words change. First they can be detected in picturesque, hell-like images. Later, the same vision of after-death is accompanied by Dante's fearlessness, which Eliot previously ‘chose but oppose’. Eliot still descends, but he no longer withdraws. He climbs down the ladder of language, into poetic depths which are so devoid of misgivings and shudder that, to a certain extent, they reassure their author himself. These Quartets are soothing for the readers, but also for the man who wrote them while learning how to master his own hell. The poet finds a new belief in life. Even the dead seem to be more alive than the living. Eliot listens to them reverently:

‘And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’.

They teach him that the seasons follow their course, that

‘... Last season's fruit is eaten

And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail’.

Words go by with their season and, the ghost insists, these consumed words must be forgotten and forgiven. The poet's fate is sad, as Eliot draws it here:

‘For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice’.

Eliot's first major critical essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, was written in a different mood. It forced the words of ‘next year’ upon the words of years gone by. At that moment, Eliot found it natural that today should have its say. It was, for him, the season of certainty, youth and fight. He could not have foreseen, when The Sacred Wood was issued, that his work would experience first praise, then abuse, and that the two would alternate till the next millennium, even after that.

Fact is that, as his seasons followed one another, Eliot's aggressivity relented. His poetic energy did not weaken, it merely learned how to face the world. As shyness vanished, its grotesque masks were dismissed. Prospero was letting go of his Ariel. An air of affectionate freedom stole into the Quartets:

‘... This is the use of memory:

For liberation – not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past’.

Faces and places, memories and hopes, all these vanish away, ‘into another pattern’. What pattern? That of the ‘end’. A false end, since it is in fact a beginning.

‘Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?’

Whether this dying is really the beginning of another ‘pattern’, I must confess that I am not convinced. Eliot's words fail him here. But it is a superb failure, if we consider an image like the following:

‘... And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem is an epitaph’.

Valéry dreaded such ‘epitaphs’, finished poems, finished projects. He was the more sceptical of the two. Paradoxically, however, or because of that very reason, he was the more prolific, as well.

Eliot proves in these liberated Quartets a certain virginity of thought. The submissive candour of a brain which has travelled far out, though not to the utmost (sterile) limits, like Valéry. Far enough to open all gates, and beckon us in. If we accept his invitation, which puts an end to the last quartet,

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing no less than everything)’ ...

For or against Eliot, several generations have already shared his first shyly aggressive, then wisely candid poetic moods. Some prefer the forceful grimness of Eliot's colder spring. Others enjoy reading Eliot's only outspoken love poem (A Dedication to My Wife, 1958), the last he ever wrote (or the last published). It first came out as an introduction to his last play:

‘To whom I owe the leaping delight

That quickens my senses in our wakingtime

And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,

The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other

Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

No peevish winter wind shall chill

No tropic sun shall wither

The roses in the rose garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:

These are private words addressed to you in public’.

Seven years after writing these lines, Eliot passed away. Time and literary tides have carried him up and down, but it hardly matters. His poetry survives. There is, among others, a mysterious reason for that: his crab-like backwardness. Quite a number of his poems must be misread, or read backwards. His sensibility advances gradually from shyness to freedom. Tenderness, the core of Eliot's nature, comes out in the open at the very last. Here is a poet who lived his own life backwards.

Eliot was a poet whose endeavours to record all his ages in poetry left us with the theatrical image of a contorted life. A dramatist who showed more lyrical tenderness in his plays than in his early poems. A literary critic whose dramatic intelligence never had a moment of dull rest. A writer who has bewitched generations of readers, among whom, definitely, the author of this book. The reason? T.S. Eliot is and will always be AN AUTHOR FOR ALL SEASONS. At least I hope so.