TOM STOOD IN front of the class, the copy of The Waste Land in his hand while directly in front of him through the window he could see the rowan tree, slim and light, still bearing its berries. It seemed to him that he was in the wrong place, that there was some other place where he could more profitably be at that moment, though he couldn’t think where it was. Not certainly with his legs curled up in a narrow canoe, not climbing dark stairs to a lustful rendezvous, with a bald spot in the middle of his forehead.
“Eliot,” he said, “is undoubtedly one of our greatest poets,” and the words echoed hollowly in the room. One of our greatest poets, what did that mean? It was like saying, Tide is certainly one of our best washing powders, its suds billow more fluently and more abundantly than those of other washing powders.
“He achieves his effects by oblique means,” he continued, “and in this is different from for instance …” Well, who for instance? Cowper? Burns? Thomas Campbell? Dorothy Hemans? And again the image came into his mind, sharp and clear, of that old woman, fat and red faced, walking down the road by herself, her big red hands clutching a shopping bag, while all the time she was talking to herself, a big waddling doll, now and again stopping in front of shop windows and looking into them as if they were mirrors.
They were all—all the girls, fresh-faced and earnest—writing it down in their notebooks. Eliot is certainly one of our greatest poets. If he is not one of our greatest poets then what is he? What to be precise is he? “Nothing. What is that noise under the door? Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing.” There is a sense in which the rowan tree communicates joy, it returns every year, laden with its berries, indomitable, repetitive, its roots sunk in the earth, fighting for their place as once in the tenements people fought for their place, sang, laughed, cried, were alive, drunken, spontaneous, remarkable.
“Thus,” he continued, for their eyes were fixed on him as if he were their guru, their oracle. But what were they really thinking of, behind that bland apparently interested facade?
“Thus we have to consider what poetry is, and in what way or ways Eliot is a new kind of poet, a revolutionary poet. We have to wonder for instance why he is so esoteric” (no, better change that word) “difficult, why he returns again and again to books, preferring to quote rather than to …”
And while his mouth exuded words, his eyes, fixed on what was going on outside the window, saw a big yellow and blue machine with a long neck like that of a dinosaur scooping up earth and rubble from the road, and sitting in the machine was a young man who was leaning forward, naked and brown above the waist, to see what the machine was doing. And it suddenly occurred to Tom to ask himself what the young man was thinking of, what his thoughts truly were at that particular moment. With great intensity he tried to put his own mind into that of the young man, and was repulsed again and again by a blinding darkness, like a star so faint that it cannot pierce the night. He made attempt after attempt to think of himself as bare and tanned in that machine as it dug up the road on an autumn day, but he could feel nothing, not the controls, not the breeze on his bare back, not the sun flickering warmly off the steel. And it came to him with utter certainty, as he watched the young man and the other one who was holding on to a bouncing pneumatic drill, that he didn’t have any idea at all what the lad was thinking of, that he was as distant from the world of the young man as he was from the world of the pupils he was teaching, that never again would he be able to understand that world and not simply understand it but feel it and rest within it, happy and negligent, as if he really belonged to it naturally and without effort.
“Eliot,” he heard himself saying, “can be compared with Picasso for he uses the same techniques. In the same way as in a Picasso painting we can see apparently unrelated images, such as heads of horses, candles, faces with three eyes, so we can find in Eliot as well images which apparently seem set down at random and without order.” But what did they know about Picasso and in order to tell them about Picasso he would have to … There was no end to the complexity and interrelatedness of the world — everything in the world must be talked of in terms of everything else. Except perhaps for the rowan which we do not dare to see as it really is, the rowan tree which is definitely not a system of quotations, unless it was quoting itself endlessly, but certainly not quoting all the other rowan trees that had lived through summer and autumn until they had died and been renewed again.
What was that young man thinking of as he so proudly and arrogantly manœuvred his machine along the road, looking back now and again, and whistling as he did so to make sure that the machine was under his control, that it was gathering together all the rubbish and depositing it where it should be deposited, that its long neck was digging into the ground as a swan into water, that it was fulfilling its proper function in the repair of the road over which so many cars would soon pass to their proper destinations. And the young man was thinking, must be thinking. Well, what were his thoughts? Was he thinking that last night he had managed after all to get that girl without mercy, that he had finally wiped the smile off her face, that he lay afterwards in his bed sleeping the sleep of the tired, and that today he was whistling because he had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish? Or was he thinking only of the machine itself, of the autumn day, of the breeze on his back? And how did the world appear to him? Certainly not distant, certainly not a series of quotations, but immediate rather, the machine immediate, the air immediate and cool, the work he was doing immediate and necessary, his hands there in the actual world clutching, manœuvring, so that if he had been a poet his poetry would have been immediate and without theory, he would grasp the real world as directly and roughly as the machine was doing.
But stop a moment, Tom told himself. For he recognised that he was doing what Eliot had done, that is associating the young man wholly with sex, the young man carbuncular, climbing the dark stairs for a quick piece of intercourse; that to him as to Eliot the young man was not a real being but a caricature, not to be distinguished clearly from the machine, someone who was not really worth taking notice of, someone who had not been seen, for it was assumed that he had nothing important to say or feel. And there in front of him, what were these girls thinking of as they took their notes. What was their world—the desks immediate, the pen or pencil immediate, their clothes immediate and in fact they far more able to approach that young man and talk to him as he whistled from his lordly position on that machine than he himself was, who once had come from a world not all that different from that of the young man.
“In earlier poetry,” he continued, “we don’t have this sort of difficulty or at least not to this extent. For what Eliot is doing is this, he is referring to the past, he is continually evoking it as a part of the present, juxtaposing images of order such as those of the Elizabethan against the meaningless present.” But, he though to himself, he was also leaving out the sweating seething world of the real Elizabethans, the world of the streets, of the ballad makers, of those who sold their wares at markets, of the dagger and the murder and the theft.
“But before I go on about that I should like to talk for a moment about fertility symbolism.”
He drew a deep breath. How could he even begin on that, Frazer and the rest of them? The new leader pursuing the old leader in the dark wood, ready to kill him, as the new stag took on the old stag so that on an autumn slope one might find the two of them dead, their antlers locked together among the stones, their eyes glazed.
They were so docile, so quiet, taking all of it down while, outside, the young man was casually manipulating the machine.
The young immediate stag in the cool of the morning. No, he thought, I can’t go on with this. This is not of their world: they are obedient and they listen but this doesn’t belong to them, this belongs only to the world of those who have left the immediate, who have brooded over it till finally it has become a haze, a mist of the morning.
Why should they listen to this story of those who have seen nothingness, who have walked alone in the middle of London listening to the dead sound from the church clock, who have hollow eyes and hollow hearts. What is this to them? For they don’t have hollow eyes and hollow hearts, they are full of hope, ready to set out into the real world of all of us: they have not yet suffered this dispossession.
Why, he asked himself, was Leicester not carbuncular, or Elizabeth or Tristan or for that matter Iseult? No, they must not be allowed to be carbuncular, but the young man must be made so, for the plot demands it, the symmetries require it.
He shut the book abruptly and said, “I think we’ll leave Eliot for a while.” He left the room and went briskly in search of the plays of Sean O’Casey, walking very confidently and surely as if he were a train that had come at last out of a dark tunnel and was picking up speed again, and would later enter a station where there was movement, people passing and repassing, on different errands, the bustle of life itself which cannot be denied, cannot be avoided, which in all conscience cannot be other than it is, unpredictable, spontaneous, untidy, and in some sense inexplicable and finally perhaps holy.