He gives a large but ironical measure of credit for his final conversion to his former teacher, Bertrand Russell. Eliot read one of his essays, A Free Man's Worship, in which the philosopher gushily described the way he--and a lot of other thinkers--saw the human condition in the hustle & Russell of the scientific age. Man and his hopes and fears, according to Russell, are the product of "accidental collocations of atoms," his sense of sin a trait inherited from the beasts of prey, his life determined by blind, unfriendly forces without plan or purpose, his whole existence on his planet --which is doomed to freeze to death when the sun dies--probably only a cruel practical joke of God. What can man do in this abysmal fix? Says Russell in effect: whistle a pretty symphony in the dark. Man must worship his own visions of beauty and goodness which now & then pop into his brain (Russell does not say whence they pop); in other words, man must worship man. After reading this arid credo Eliot decided that the opposite direction must be the right way. In 1927, he was confirmed in the Church of England.
The same year Eliot also became a British subject. It was no more a sudden decision than his deciding to join the church. Says he: "In the end I thought: 'Here I am, making a living, enjoying my friends here. I don't like being a squatter. I might as well take the full responsibility.'"
1,000 Lost Golf Balls. Critics and fans who had idolized the bitter, brittle Eliot were appalled when in 1930 he published his first religious poem, Ask Wednesday, the sternly beautiful statement of a man who has found his course ("Because I do not hope to turn again . . ."). Undeterred, the "new" Eliot continued to write his faith into his poetry.
T. S. Eliot, ex-banker and successful publisher, has himself raised the question. What are poets good for? The 20th Century is not sure. Eliot thinks that by rights a poet should be useful: he ought to guard the language against becoming barbaric; and that he ought to be entertaining. But the poet must also, as Eliot puts it, "make us from time to time a little more aware . . ."
Against the modern heresy of automatic progress Eliot asserts the Christian insight that sinful man is never safe from evil. Against the notion of quantitative culture (i.e., the more you read, the more you know), Eliot asserts that culture means knowing a few things well rather than knowing many things a little. In his pageant The Rock (1934), he has made his clearest, most striking admonition to his fellow men. Excerpts:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust . . .
The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying:
0 miserable cities of designing men,
0 wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust . . .
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls . . ."
The Door Against Evil. In an age that equals optimism with faith, it is fashionable to call Eliot a pessimist. Eliot is a Christian and therefore in a sense a "pessimist" about the nature of man. Yet in his "pessimism" Eliot is far more hopeful about man's future than most of the more secular prophets. On a recent trip to Germany. German youth enthusiastically responded to his talks about the need for an integrated Christian community in Europe. ("The hell with Oswald Spengler!" cried one Hamburg student, in sudden rebellion against one of the century's foremost gods of gloom.)
Eliot believes that there is only one way out of the waste land--and that is not the middle way. He believes that the Western nations must choose between a pagan society and a truly Christian society. By a Christian society he does, not mean rule by the church, but a society that really lives by Christian principles, with what he calls the "Community of Christians" (a kind of spiritual elite) forming "the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation." In his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the murder of Archbishop Thomas A Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, Eliot reminded his audience that a faith can live only if the faithful are ready, in the extreme of need, to die for it. While lesser men feebly tried to bolt the door against evil, Thomas conquered evil by submitting to death and martyrdom. It is a meaningful lesson for a civilization anxiously trying to bolt the door against an evil whose champions are notably ready to give their lives for its triumph.
Eliot does not believe that the world can succeed in forming a non-Christian, "rational" civilization--though it is now trying to. Says he: "The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
The world came fairly close to suicide in World War II. During the London blitz, Eliot spent two nights a week as a firewatcher on the roof of his office building. From his perch above what he has often called the "unreal city," Eliot observed, with terror and compassion, the relentless fires. Had London's people (and with them, Western civilization) gone down then, Eliot's verse would have served as a magnificent and tender epitaph:
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Polyphiloprogenitive. The war only slightly disrupted Eliot's ordered and somewhat lonely life. His wife, who had been in a nursing home since 1930, died three years ago. Since the war, Eliot has shared a flat in artistic Chelsea with his good friend, Writer-Critic John Hayward (brilliant, witty Hayward, almost completely paralyzed, manages to get about London in a wheelchair). Eliot has the simple but expensive habits of an English gentleman (although English gentlemen usually consider him a typically American gentleman). He dresses well, likes claret and good cheese. As a church warden at St. Stephen's in Kensington he performs his duties conscientiously.
Now a full partner in the firm of Faber & Faber, he takes his work as publisher as seriously as his work as poet ("writing poetry is not a career," he says). He is known as the firm's best and most prolific writer of book jacket blurbs. He has little sympathy for poets who starve in garrets ("It isn't necessary"), but he frequently helps out of his own pocket an aspiring poet who submits work to him.
As precisely as an Eliot rhyme clicking into place at the end of a line, 4 o'clock each day brings tea with friends or business acquaintances in Eliot's rather shabby, faded office, where he is enthroned on a rickety wooden chair behind a massive desk. At 6:30, he leaves for home, dines with Hayward unless he has a pressing social engagement, and retires to his room for what he has called "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings." Eliot admits that he will find numberless little things to attend to rather than buckle down to work.
Eliot types all his verse. He is a slow worker and tireless reviser. He loves words, and when he comes across a particularly fine specimen he stores it away for future use,: sometimes he also makes up words, e.g., "polyphiloprogenitive."
To his friends (who call him Tom or "Old Possum"), T. S. Eliot is a considerate, avuncular Puck who writes rhymes about cats to entertain their children and likes to address letters in verse ("Postman, propel thy feet/And take this note to greet / The Mrs. Hutchinson / Who lives in Charlotte Street . . ."). Eliot is a devoted Sherlock Holmes fan, is apt to emerge from his room clad in Holmesian dressing gown and slippers, and address his startled friend: "My dear Hayward, I am put in mind of the incident in Bosnia, at the time of our struggle with the Professor over the Crown Prince's jewels . . ."
He also loves practical jokes. For years, Eliot patronized a small store which specialized in exploding cigars, squirting buttonholes and soapy chocolates. Once, on the Fourth of July, at a solemn board meeting of Faber & Faber, he set off a bucketful of firecrackers between the chairman's legs.
In a Harvard class history, Eliot has made some frank self-revelations: ". . . I play a bad game of chess and like such games as poker, rummy arid slippery Ann for low stakes . . . I never bet because I never win . . . I cannot afford yachting, but I should like to breed bull terriers. I am afraid of high places and cows . . ."
Civilization & Poetry. Today, at 61, Mr. Eliot is secure and honored in his high place as one of the foremost men of English letters. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the Order of Merit (one of the highest British orders, limited to 24 members). In his critical essays, he has rendered Olympian judgments. Fellow critics swarm about Critic Eliot like an army of Lilliputians, trying to tie him down to some systematic "school"; when he stirs to reverse one of his previous unfavorable decisions (as he has been known to do, notably in the case of Milton), the swarm is agog for months.
As a playwright, Eliot is still a little dazed by the footlights. He resorts to chalk and blackboard to work out his plots. Says he: "My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up & down." (The Cocktail Party is his first play to be produced on a large commercial scale. His only other full-length play, apart from Murder in the Cathedral: The Family Reunion, the story of a modern Orestes haunted by the Furies.)
His collected poems fill only a thin volume--he believes that a poet ought to write as little as possible--but they are as different from most other 20th Century poetry as the sound of bronze-pure bells from the shrilling of a telephone. An age which reads in a hurry and likes to understand familiar meanings with headline speed has accused Eliot of being obscure; much of his poetry does require close attention, but none of it is muddled and much of it is as catchy as a song hit.
Is Eliot a great poet? His own age would not call him so, and doubts that posterity will. In his revulsion from vulgarity and muddled sentimentality, he has perhaps moved away too far from the heat of emotion and the sweat of action. His attitude toward the U.S. is significant. He remembers it fondly, sometimes signs his name Tom (Missouri) Eliot, and likes to sing U.S. folk ballads, though he has a hard time staying on key. But he does not seem to understand America (although he comes to the U.S. on frequent visits), shrinks from its materialistic gusto.
If it ever was, civilization is nothing now to write poems about. T. S. Eliot is a thinking and a feeling man, and a Christian; he is not a happy man. The commentator on a tragedy cannot be expected to sound like a radio announcer lip-deep in molasses. He may sometimes crackle, but he will never snap or pop.
Eliot's indirect influence is wide and deep, but incalculable. He has shown two generations of poets how to write. He has shown that a man can be both clever and religious. More interesting than Eliot's influence on others, however, is the influence of others (notably his Christian predecessors) on Eliot. One compelling reason why the audiences crowd his Cocktail Party is that they recognize it, in the sense that people always recognize a compelling restatement of the old and certain truths. They like Eliot for being clever, and at the same time clear; but what counts most is the common sense, the humility and the hope expressed in such lines as these:
The best of a bad job is all any of us make of it,--
Except of course, the saints . . .
