Anti-Climacus

There's an interesting, if subscriber-only, article on T.S. Eliot in the latest New Yorker. Eliot's been a figure of interest to me for a long time, though my general opinion of him has trended exclusively in a negative direction for the last ten years or so. His early poetry is brilliant if uneven; if everything after "The Hollow Men" disappeared, I don't think it'd be any great loss. His criticism is notable mostly for being provocative. As a professional reader of texts I find his methods to be irresponsible, though one must always keep in mind that he mostly gave occasional talks and the absence of a deeper, unified critical program is not, therefore, surprising. About his drama--well, an interesting failure is still a failure.

What I found most interesting about the article was its assault on "T.S. Eliot." In W.H. Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," he describes the precise moment of Yeats' death this way: "he became his admirers." For Auden, I think this is supposed to represent the moment of Yeats' ultimate defeat: all that's left is his work. The care of his work is left to the people who most persistently misunderstood him, and misunderstood him by attempting to bring greater unity and clarity to his work than actually existed. All respect to Auden, T.S. Eliot is the best example of this phenomenon: his admirers cling fiercely to their view of him as a great man whose turn in the middle of his life to Anglo-Catholicism and conservatism defined his personality, whose work was the product of a singular view which produced only the great and the worthwhile, and whose personal life is largely irrelevant to the interpretation of his works. One may conduct a conversation with admirers along these lines, only so long as the words are mostly of praise, and conducted with deadly seriousness.* They are interested in "T.S. Eliot," symbolic figurehead, and not with the man himself.

Eliot wrote in a letter Menand quotes in his piece: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the wall. Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." It seems as though the publication of the letters might do much to revivify Eliot and fight back against his admirers who would rather have him perfect and dead. Instead, there will be Eliot as irresponsible youth, neurotic and boring, Eliot with his crude unreformed racial attitudes, Eliot the marginal-quality husband, Eliot the man who married his secretary (just like Don Draper!)--in other words, a human being, and one perhaps worth talking about.


*ie do not alert them to the existence of "Chard Whitlow". They will not think it's funny. Eliot thought it was funny, but they will not.