Early in 1988 I received from Washington University a letter outlining the program of its Eliot centennial celebration; the 22-cent stamps on the envelope bore an image of the head of the poet. Evidently it was not only Washington University, and the city of St. Louis, birthplace of the poet, who wished to celebrate the occasion of his hundredth birthday; the United States took official cognizance of it; by implication the country of his birth had forgiven him for his change of citizenship and for what can be represented as his Euro-centered views on practically everything.
Yet there are voices, and powerful voices, which would speak against the propriety of such celebrations. Eliot has often been accused of betraying his American origins, of having, in his practice as poet and critic, blocked or distorted the authentic native tradition in poetry. This opinion has, over the years, been variously but persistently expressed. William Carlos Williams, Eliot’s contemporary, called The Waste Land “the great catastrophe to our letters … There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” And again: “It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it … Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of reviving my world. And being an accomplished craftsman, better skilled in some ways than I could ever hope to be, I had to watch him carry off my world with him, the fool, to the enemy. If with his skill he could have been kept here to be employed by our slowly shaping drive, what strides might we not have taken! … I have never quite got over it.”1
Williams’ allegation of defection or betrayal may smack of a more general isolationism, though at the front of his mind it was certainly a question of technique—a question ultimately bound up with those of American origins and independence. Williams advocated and practiced a new metrical freedom controlled by an indigenous American discipline. He wanted a distinctive American poetry, responsive to the patterns and idiosyncracies not of just English but of American English. This hope he thought Eliot had frustrated by his voluntary assimilation of British English, and by his choice of a relevant past that was European, and more and more, as time went by, specifically English.
The complaint is not groundless, and its recurrence in New World societies probably inevitable; the conflict between inherited allegiances and the changed conditions of life in a new world has been reenacted, for example, in Australia, though in a different mode. An older language has to be changed—indeed it changes of itself—to suit different and more recent cultures and polities; but it cannot, in the nature of the case, quite cut itself off from its roots, or quite disown membership in a larger language community, which is why the attempt of some Australians to find a new language for poetry by admixing aboriginal words proved unsuccessful. And after a time during which there may linger a sense of deracination, of cultural inferiority, there may develop a mood of defiant self-sufficiency. At that point there can be a revolt, a determination to go it alone, sometimes accompanied by an exaggerated gesture of rejection.
The terms in which quarrels of this nature are conducted inevitably derive from the discourse of the moment when they happen to arise. On a long historical view Williams and Eliot had a good deal in common. They were both, though in different ways, associated with and affected by Ezra Pound, who was himself echt American, though also a very European American, at that time and subsequently not a rare type, though Pound was a rare enough specimen of it. They were both influenced by Imagism, a doctrine ultimately of European origin but raised, as it were, by American hands. At our distance from the events we might suppose the difference of opinion need hardly have been represented on an international scale at all. But that would be to ignore the deeper issue, the natural impatience felt by nations as well as individuals with the burden of an unwanted or inappropriate resented past. Later complainants found other ways of signaling what was essentially the same rejection of or revulsion from Europe—for example, Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school, with its cult of indigenous origins, of the immediacy of American speech and its independence of British-English rhythms.
For a time, it would seem, this American revolt against Eliot attracted no support from the literary academics. Williams must have expected this to be the case when he spoke of Eliot’s “giving the poem back to the academics,” a group perhaps too brainwashed by Europeanism, too inveterately committed to “paleface” cultural values, to produce the American “redskin” response he wanted. But as time went on, the academics themselves found ways of strengthening the cause of the republican American homeland against the authority of the classical, royalist émigré. For father and sponsor they chose Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps a somewhat palefaced redskin surrogate, but a thinker denied his due both by those who reduced him to a homespun pokerwork popular philosopher and by those loftier persons who preferred to pay homage to European sages certain to be more important simply because they were European.
Let me cite some authorities for this account of the contemporary opposition, some representative modern academic-Emersonians, persons of power and influence. Richard Poirier is perhaps the most measured, but he still blames Eliot for his part in the repression of native American literature. As Poirier puts the case (and I quote but one of a number of variously stated indictments), the relation between Emersonianism and “the modernist episode in Anglo-American literary culture” is reflected in the “predominance, over the past sixty years or so, of Eliot as against, say, a combination of Frost or Stevens with William James.” In the 1920s, says Poirier, “American literature was up for grabs.” So, in a sense, it was. D. H. Lawrence, a renegade Englishman, himself in revolt against the paleface, had almost singlehandedly begun the revaluation of “classic” American literature in the remarkable essays he wrote during World War I and just after it. (By calling anything American “classic” you at once dissociate yourself from Eliot’s idea of the classic as something involving Virgil, Dante, Catholicism, and Empire. You are talking about a new civilization, or even of an empire that has decisively taken its westward course, and is not just a new shoot growing out of an old one.) So the 1920s saw the beginning of the rediscovery of Melville, the revaluation of Cooper and the rest; “but the hegemony of Eliot at that time and later delayed if it did not prevent the recognition that America had a literature.”2
Thus Richard Poirier. To the charismatic Harold Bloom, “the American Sublime” and “the Emersonian Sublime” are interchangeable terms, each standing for an ideal in which Eliot had very little discernible interest. Bloom has throughout his career cheerfully disparaged Eliot, which, for an admirer of the Divinity School address and “The American Scholar,” is after all a very logical thing to do. “The malign influence of T. S. Eliot still lingers on,” he says, “in most contemporary accounts of literary tradition,” though he now admits that Eliot sometimes unofficially recognized the truth of the Bloomian version of influence, and calls Ash Wednesday, which he once thought somewhat vacuous, a “crucial crisis ode.” However, this partial reprieve for Eliot seems conditional on his accepting Whitman as his unacknowledged precursor.3 One could complete this sketch of the modern American case against Eliot by observing that Helen Vendler, often described as the most sensitive and authoritative reader of modern American poetry, has never had much time for him, and I am not sure she has ever discussed him in print.
We may be sure that these influential voices speak for many others, less articulate yet still calling for vengeance on the suppressors of the native Emersonian tradition. All three, by the way, are warm in their praises of Wallace Stevens, another great modern poet who professed, perhaps not quite candidly, to have little time for Eliot. Far from emigrating, Stevens carefully avoided physical contact with Europe, and evidently harbored a certain dislike and suspicion of the British, and even of their language, for he maintained that despite appearances the roots of American poetry were actually French. Eliot, on the other hand, did not content himself with merely becoming British, which might have been achieved with the quiet discretion we associate with his habitual manner; rather he felt it necessary to make an announcement about it, and evidently regarded his naturalization, and his conversion to Anglicanism, as a matter of intellectual and public interest. Indeed he showed some of the enthusiasm of the convert, even, on occasion, presenting himself as a presumably slightly ironic caricature of the royalist; he liked to wear a white rose on the anniversary of the battle of Bosworth, and a red tie on the feast of St. Charles—the Church of England’s sole martyr, and appropriately a royal one—much in the manner of the dandy Decadent Jacobites of the nineties. On another occasion one might indeed argue that his debt to the English nineties has not been fully counted. It amounted to much more than a reading of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Poetry and a taste for the London music halls. It might be fair to add that he probably acquired this taste for the music hall in Boston; but the man who gave such cultural importance to Marie Lloyd was behaving like the English literati—like Ford Madox Ford, for instance, who is said to have edited the New English Review in a music-hall box. And anyway my present concern is with the poet’s apparent preference for England and Europe over his native land.
As one would expect, this transfer of allegiance did not happen suddenly, as his early letters show. When Eliot arrived in London, hurrying out of Germany at the start of the 1914 war, he could make very little of the English. “It’s ever so much easier to know what a Frenchman or an American is thinking about than an Englishman.”4 In the same fall he says he doesn’t think he can ever be at home in England. He detested the English middle classes, with their hideous family life and contempt for education. But he was already moving in more exalted circles, introduced to them by Bertrand Russell, whom he had known at Harvard; and before the end of the war he is saying he gets on better with the English than with Americans, who “now impress me, almost invariably, as very immature.” He urges his brother to join him in London; life there was a struggle, but that would be better than living among Americans who had “no consciousness at all.”5 For years he had debated whether he should go home and take up a philosophical career, probably at Harvard; his English wife, and the self-exiled Ezra Pound, had a lot to do with his decision to stay, or anyway not to go. But by the time he wrote that letter to Henry Ware Eliot he had pretty clearly made up his mind.
The English, or perhaps one should say the London, way of life suited him very well. He was a serious clubman, and notoriously wished to be recognized as a connoisseur of British cheese. He believed in empire and the established church (though the one was, to him, not vulgarly terrestrial, more the allegorical representation of an empire laid up in heaven, while the other was the form of Catholicism which he had, after much deliberation and possibly with some reluctance, declared the most appropriate). He had an unaffected but upper-class English accent, with no trace of American. I need say no more by way of establishing that it would be easy to represent him as, from the American point of view, quite exceptionally alienated, cut off from the language and culture of his native land.
Why, then, those centennial stamps? Why do his grandfather’s university, and the citizens of his home town, put themselves to the trouble and expense of celebrating his foreign song and alien fame? Possibly they have considered and rejected the hostile versions of Eliot’s career; or perhaps they are only obeying an instinct to commemorate a distinguished native son, however he may have been thought by others to have lost his way in the world. Or have they rather taken note that there has of late been a good deal of scholarship devoted to establishing or reestablishing Eliot as, after all, a genuinely American poet?
For there has been a change in fashion, and Eliot is nowadays looked at from a new angle. Over the past twenty years or so many commentators have found it necessary or expedient to give up the idea that his poetry was as impersonal as on his own theories it ought to have been; and having become familiar with biographical detail that was inaccessible during the poet’s reticent lifetime, they have warmed to the notion that his poetry was after all written by a real person, indeed that it is in a rather curious way profoundly autobiographical. And if this really is so, St. Louis will presumably have its place in the story, and has accordingly a perfect right to take some proprietary interest in that story.
Eliot himself, lecturing there in 1953, spoke of his grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot, a man of whom it was said that the Day of Judgment seemed to attend him wherever he went. This very remarkable man, who went to St. Louis from Massachusetts as a young Unitarian preacher, was one of the heroes and makers of the city. On his monument it is written that “the whole city was his parish.” After the cholera epidemic of 1849 he took twenty-six orphaned children into his family, adding them to his own five (it is reasonable to assume that Mrs. Eliot was equally remarkable). He entirely reformed the educational arrangements of the city, and his grateful colleagues wanted to name the present Washington University for him; characteristically, he would not allow it. His whole career, as recounted by Herbert Howarth, was as extraordinary as it was noble.6
William Greenleaf Eliot died the year before the poet was born, but, as Eliot remarked in his lecture, his Law of Public Service—to Church, City, and University—still governed the conduct of the household. The poet carefully specified the physical location of these three institutions: Locust Street, Washington Avenue, and the city of St. Louis itself.7 He also remarked that behind the many cities in his poetry there was always the shade of what for him must be the essential city, St. Louis—apprehended by him as the beginning of the Wild West, yet also a displaced piece of New England, dominated by the disciplines of his grandfather.8
When we think about the idiosyncratic and predominantly Anglo-Saxon attitudes of the mature Eliot, it is worth keeping in mind his early and protracted experience of living on the margin. He was born into a place that for all its familiarity and excitements, and for all its essentiality, was not quite his own place; possibly we could say that the essential place must, for him, always be a place to which he could not quite belong. It was manifestly important to him that this city stood on the border between two worlds, at the very limit of the East and facing the relatively unknown and cityless West, where not only the landscape but the people and their rules of conduct must presumably be very different. Dividing these worlds was a strong brown river, “sullen, untamed and intractable, / Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier.” Later, on the Massachusetts shore, the young man had another experience of margins—the margin of land and sea, which was also a margin of past and present, offering to our eyes “its hints of earlier and other creation”—of a history, a territory of time, a west, inconceivably precedent to human history, surveyed from a narrow stockade, the ill-marked frontier of humanity.
In the frontier house in St. Louis there lived another poet, a poet very much of the paleface East, namely Eliot’s mother. It seems usual to speak with some condescension of her poems, and even in her time she had trouble getting them into print. But Herbert Howarth justly commends her “preoccupation with form and with the extension of her technical range”; and it would seem that the first poet Eliot himself ever encountered set an example of precision, and a respect for the transatlantic English as opposed to the Emersonian manner.
Nay, while the soul was in the body pent,
Thy face so shone we knew not what it meant—
this couplet, which occurs in a poem called A Musical Reverie,9 is interesting for several reasons. It is a clear reminiscence of Donne:
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought—
lines which were remembered even in a century which had not yet accorded canonical status to Donne. They express an idea which Mrs. Eliot gives in attenuated form: the soul of the dead person could be perceived during life as animating her physical beauty. Donne’s couplet is of course more powerful: according to his physiology the blood carries the soul so that when it “speaks” its eloquence—its illumination of the flesh—is a statement about its own nature; and as it speaks through flesh it is as if the body itself, perhaps this body uniquely, were capable of making apprehensible such spiritual pronouncements. It was this depth of sense that made Donne’s lines available as an allegorical program for poetry: this is how poems should be, expressing spirit through sense, being indivisible as to what was said and the means of saying it. Here was an emblem of that undissociated sensibility which the Eliot of the early 1920s attributed to Donne and some other poets before the catastrophe of the English Civil War—a sensibility that the modern poet was required somehow to restore, with a new poetry that could not avoid being difficult.
Throughout his life Eliot’s head was full of poetic associations, scraps remembered with or without their original context, and it is easy to imagine that these lines of Donne were made familiar to him in very early life by a mother who admired and imitated them. But, as he was later to remark, immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. Eliot himself was often to steal and often, in doing so, to misquote, but his mother’s imitative lines are an illustration of what must absolutely be avoided: they are not stolen and put to new use, but copied, either consciously or—much worse, he believed—unconsciously. And yet it may be that the mother’s unsatisfactory borrowing became the son’s worthy theft.
The different uses to which mother and son put Donne’s lines illustrate the son’s sense of what it is to be at once new and traditional, whether in the reading or the writing of poetry. Mrs. Eliot must have read them as the apt expression of the truth about the mysterious spirituality of a privileged physical beauty; she could hardly have thought of them as the emblem of a lost tradition to be restored, in an unpropitious age, by immense and lonely effort.
In reading them thus, Eliot was indeed following a tradition partly invented by himself, partly inherited or stolen from his predecessors. Just as the Jacobite red rose for Charles I was the kind of thing the Lionel Johnson era loved, so the thinking body takes one back to Arthur Symons, the propagandist of Decadence, and through him to the offbeat Laforgue, and to Mallarmé, and the serious French doctrine of Symbolism.
Inventing his version of the modern from such an unusual array of sources—Cavalcanti, Dante, Donne, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Symons, John Davidson, and so forth—Eliot certainly seemed to be invoking a tradition quite different from that of his American contemporaries (Pound, that other renegade, always excepted); but it is equally obvious that his tradition was not that of his English contemporaries, either. It is true that he was writing in London, but it was in America that he was, at the insistence of Pound, first published. It was, admittedly, in London that he was soon to establish himself as a writer, but he did so in the first instance rather as a critic than as a poet—original, certainly, holding many unusual opinions and expressing them with remarkable assurance, but doing so in a manner not too outrageous for publication in the TLS (he was many years later to thank Bruce Richmond, the editor of the Supplement, for teaching him “to write in a temperate and impartial way”).10
The TLS was an “establishment” journal; Eliot was proud of being asked to write for it, but to do so was not to write for a minority culture, much less for an alienated avant-garde. Only when he had obtained from Lady Rothermere the funds that enabled him to publish his own quarterly, The Criterion, was he able, without fear of editorial rejection, to lay The Waste Land, a poem whose principal reader and critic to date had been Pound, before the English intelligentsia. And although the reception of the poem was far from entirely frigid, one of the things people tended to say about it was that it attacked the native tradition—“a gash at the root of our poetry,” said G. M. Young,11 and others offered like judgments with even more distress and sometimes with contempt. F. L. Lucas, in a notorious review, quoted Santayana on those who “never … dig deep or build for time,” and who “Forsake the path the seeing Muses trod.”
Perhaps Eliot’s “rhythmical grumbling” succeeded as well as it did because it expressed the disillusionment of a generation, as some claimed; perhaps the recent war had induced the young to wonder whether some traditions were worth having anyway. Or possibly, as Eliot himself remarked, it expressed only their illusion of being disillusioned. In any case the old generally disapprove of disillusion, or the illusion of it, in the young, and if they disliked the poem they would only dislike it more for fostering defeatism or lowering morale. Certainly the complaints of traditional Englishmen continued long after the twenties, and they do seem to form a sort of counterpoint to the American lamentations and accusations of desertion. On both sides of the ocean there were those who felt that Eliot was somehow deviant from, and even destructive of, a native tradition—to the Americans a deserter, to the English a stranger in their midst, metoikos, as he sometimes called himself. The indigenous English view, that he had somehow beglamoured us, induced us to forget our true heritage, was given forceful expression in 1960 by Graham Hough in his book Image and Experience, which treats the “modernist” movement as an instance of “wilful Alexandrianism”—thus repeating and strengthening one of Lucas’s charges. It was an American-influenced departure from the native mainstream, to which English poets should now return. Later still the powerful example of Philip Larkin (a poet of extraordinary powers, yet so echt English that Americans tend to find him dull and insular) encouraged some to affirm that the true line ran through Hardy, not the Americans; and Donald Davie also spoke up for Hardy. Davie is another good poet, and less insular than Larkin—witness his remarkable translations of Mickiewicz and Pasternak—and unlike Larkin he had also wrestled strenuously with Pound and Eliot. Yet he speaks in his turn for counterrevolution.
The point is obvious: a certain resentment, or anxiety about Eliot’s relation to a national tradition, was felt and expressed both in America and England. It was the more potent when, as with most of the writers I have mentioned, it was informed by a real knowledge of poetry and a willingness to admit Eliot’s remarkable gifts.
Looking at the Eliot of the 1920s, we see a youngish poet, who had been exiled from Boston in St. Louis, from St. Louis in Boston, from America in London, and from Europe in England. He has assumed the tone and the manners of an English literary establishment. However, he edits for the English a journal expressly dedicated to propagating the thought of Europe. Soon, on a platform in Charlottesville, Virginia, he is expressing (though he had hardly ever visited the South) his sympathy with Southern Agrarianism, a doctrine to which one supposes New England as well as old England to have been indifferent or unsympathetic. In the same series of lectures he also accused some of his most illustrious contemporaries, including writers who were friends of his and even shared many of his convictions, of what he described as “heresy”—deviation or exile from a central tradition. For he was by now a Catholic, though an Anglo-Catholic, one foot in the universal, one in the regional—a member of the established church and subscriber to a state religion, but dedicated to a universal church; in religion as in politics a European—wearing a red tie for Charles, the single saint of the Anglo-Catholics, and warmly approving of the Roman Catholicism of the atheist Charles Maurras, classique, catholique, monarchiste, disowned by the Vatican but not by Eliot, who managed thus to be an Anglican yet plus catholique que le pape. Bernard Bergonzi even suggests that the papal condemnation of Action française may have been responsible for Eliot’s decision not to enter the Roman Catholic church.12 He not only borrowed Maurras’ credal formula but dedicated his book on Dante to this French anti-Semite, sponsor of the fascistic Camelots du Roi; the dedication gets what propriety it has from his having, years before, called Maurras the “Virgil who leads [some disciples] to the temple gate.” He found in Maurrasian doctrine, sometimes admittedly fascistic, the antidote to both Communism and Fascism. Yet the evidence suggests that even the few Englishmen who knew anything about Maurras and the even fewer who read Action française regarded his ideas as “too alien to British tradition and too foreign to Britain’s twentieth-century interests to be regarded as more than curiosities.”13
I have been trying to establish that Eliot is not really to be thought of as an exile from this place or that, but rather as one who lived in a condition of permanent exile. We can add, if we wish, that in the years between the wars, as editor of a journal of exiguous circulation, held in an unusual posture by its dual loyalties, he was, despite his growing celebrity, in a condition of increasing literary and political exile. And without straining the argument we can say further that in his personal life he was an exile from marriage. It is evident, too, that in many of his personal relationships he was constrained to avoid the degree of intimacy that might require him to confide in, or simply to feel easy with and approachable by, another person. Lyndall Gordon tells us repeatedly of the rhythm by which he would seem to come close to friends or possible lovers and then back off, without explanation and perhaps inexplicably rejecting them, as if isolation or aloneness were something he was compelled to choose.
But we need not dwell on anecdote or gossip, for the real need is to explain that taste for or choice of exile, and perhaps to ask why, for all its apparent eccentricity, Eliot’s attitude proved so powerful, and so capable of resisting a well-provided opposition. His is a poetry of exile, even of what Mary, in an early draft of The Family Reunion, called “perpetual exile.”14 This is most obvious in Ash Wednesday, where exile has to be accepted with patience as the human condition, and in order that the prayer “Salve regina” may be prayed: “And after this our exile …” The spiritual exile, the separation, requires that “I renounce the blessed face / And renounce the voice / Because I cannot hope to turn again …” The poem of Cavalcanti he echoes here, Perch’io non spero di tornare mai, is a poem of exile, and tornare really means not “turn” but “return.”
Cavalcanti is far from being the only exile whose voice is heard in Eliot’s poetry. We may think of Joyce, whom Eliot so much admired, if not for the right reasons, as some say, then for reasons of his own work; of Baudelaire, a spiritual hero; of Henry James, in some ways closest to himself, who wrote in “The Jolly Corner” a story of American exile and return that meant a lot to Eliot; Harry mentions it in that partly confessional play, The Family Reunion. And we must not forget Dante at Verona, or the wounded Tristan; or Beckett, who returned from exile to meet his death; or the voice in The Waste Land of one who weeps, like Israel in exile, by the waters of Leman; or Coriolanus, whose two most celebrated remarks are “There is a world elsewhere” and “I banish you.”
It is easy to imagine Eliot, in certain moods, making both of these remarks on his own account. The world elsewhere was the remembered or imagined world of the past. The world of the present was a world of separation, heresy—an experiment in godlessness, a civilization that the saint and the intelligent man must banish, a time that must be redeemed. From such a deathly world one might seek relief in a mutual banishment; or in a vision, fantasy or memory, of a world elsewhere. But the relief is momentary; exile is to be accepted and the other, the habitable world of memory, renounced. Renounced are “the lost sea voices” and the voices of the children, “containing laughter,” belonging to “our first world”; the “blessed face” is “this face, this life / Living in a world of time beyond us,” of “Marina,” or, in darker mood, the “face still forming” of the familiar compound ghost of “Little Gidding.” All are perceived in separation; the lady to whom one prays “Suffer me not to be separated” is “spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,” the two spirits, in whatever mood, which return in “The Dry Salvages” as the separating Mississippi and the margin of the ocean at Cape Ann.
Exile, becoming the dominant trait of a personality, may take many forms. There is a metaphysical exile, the separation described in the famous quotation from Bradley at line 412 of The Waste Land, where it is given more concrete expression in the reference to Dante’s Ugolino; “I have heard the key / Turn in the door.” There is the exile from eternity, to be spent in the desert of time. Time must be redeemed—either by sitting still, or by right action. But the full redemption of time comes from elsewhere, at “the intersection of the timeless / with time”—of which that “moment in and out of time,” which is all that we who are not saints can expect to experience, is, we are told in “The Dry Salvages,” only a hint or guess. Such moments may occur in “England and nowhere, / Never and always”—the place and the moment always stand not only for themselves but for their absence. Wherever you are in time or space, the condition is exile: “and where you are is where you are not.” You are merely a transient, a tenant, as you “stiffen in a rented house.” “One is still alone / In an overcrowded desert, jostled by ghosts,” says Harry in The Family Reunion, speaking as if for Eliot himself, walking in the city where, as in the city of Baudelaire, the specter in full daylight accosts the passerby.
And it is the city that must give us our final clue to the nature of Eliot’s exile. In finding it we find also a reason for calling Eliot “the last classic,” as I do in the title of this essay. I have given some rather humdrum reasons for Eliot’s fascination with cities: with St. Louis, whose inhabitants forget their river, forget the brown god, now “only a problem confronting the builder of bridges,” though “his rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom”; with Boston, where the slums of Roxbury are ignored by Aunt Nancy Ellicott, and by all who, like Cousin Harriet, read The Boston Evening Transcript, though not by the poet of “Preludes”; with Paris, and the Montparnasse of Bubu; with the Venice of Burbank; with London, “Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,” where each man fixes his eyes before his feet, where Mr. Eugenides makes his immodest proposal, and where with the fishmen, lounging at Billingsgate in the shadow of the splendor of St. Magnus Martyr, one may hear “the pleasant whining of a mandoline,” some sort of exile’s consolation. This city, and the other unreal cities, mime the urbs aeterna, but are also versions of the apocalyptic city:
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
Each is a place where people real or unreal make their homes, yet each is a place of exile, of isolation; each its own desert, its own lack.
The ideas of the city and of the province are inseparable, and while provinciality is clearly a version of exile, that condition can also exist in the city, just as traces, imitations, relics, parodies of metropolitan culture are to be found in the province. Within the limes or boundaries of empire there will be simulacra of Rome that are not Rome, that do not speak its language or even a derivative language. They are associated with the Ovidian tristia as well as the Virgilian imperium. Hugh Kenner, in a fine essay on the manuscripts, has stressed the Virgilian elements in The Waste Land, saying that Eliot, impressed by Joyce’s use of Homer, “may well have had in mind at one time a kind of modern Aeneid.”15 And it has been pointed out that the Virgil of the early poem is not quite the figure represented in Eliot’s later essays about him, with their emphasis on his relation to Dante and the Christian world. Aeneas was an exile, and he never did found a city. The cities in which we see him, Troy and Carthage, are cities famous not for the manner of their foundation but for the completeness of their destruction, just as those catalogued in Eliot’s poem have been or will be; so that Augustan Rome is an example not solely of a glory to which other capitals may aspire, or with which their ignominy may be contrasted, but also of the apocalyptic terrors Virgil associates with the eternal city and its empire.16
It may be that after his conversion Eliot read Virgil by the light of Dante, and in a long tradition of interpretation which included the pax Augusta and the idea of Christian Empire. He developed his rich and complicated idea of the classic on this basis; he settled for a vernacular and provincial Catholicism (the Reformation, too, was a sort of exile) as the world had settled for vernacular versions of the classic.17 But in so doing he did not forget the metropolitan terrors, nor that what the province took from the metropolis—images of the center entertained at the periphery, pride in partaking of the values of the urbs antiqua, and the classic authority—it repaid with the inescapable idea of exile; the more so now that the modern metropolis was itself deviant from the central image of Rome, and so itself an exile.
The sense of perpetual exile, doubtless in its origin very personal, is thus associated with a religion and with a theory of history and culture; and we can see that the St. Louis and Boston, the Paris and London of the poetry are logically connected with the idea of the classic, and of the more or less perpetual exile of literature from the classic. It would be hard to discover a poet or critic now living who shared these views, or held to any that even slightly resembled them; they are more likely to say to the classic “I banish you.” And that is why we may think of Eliot as the last classic, at any rate until some new civilization should construct its own idea of the classic, and its own canon.
So here we confront yet another form of exile. Eliot was conscious of it, so often meditating the classic, so suspicious of its apparent opposite, the romantic, with which he nevertheless had such interesting relations. The more extreme modernisms were programmatically anticlassical, and Eliot knew and was affected by them. Later varieties assumed some connection between classicism and oppressive political prescription, in short, between classical and fascist order. With many aspects of these modernisms, though of course not with all, the early Eliot had a wary sympathy; they coexisted with a classicism he would not abandon, however its political implications might be deplored. The times seemed to insist on so many conflicting tendencies: the reconstruction of the past, the destruction of the past; the modernism of Dada that destroyed, or of Surrealism, associated with psychoanalysis, with what Hulme called “spilt religion,” and a classicism that deplored everything that had happened in the world since the Renaissance. Both were of the city, the city as the political emblem of civility and the classic, but also the immonde cité of Baudelaire; a spiritual desert, yet the symbol of the urbs aeterna. In consciously holding together, as metoikos, these diverse ideas of an ideal eternity and a decadence in time, Eliot was unique among modern poets—and again an outsider, an exile from easy opinion, banished and banishing, honored and deplored.
To speak in this way of the so-much-honored poet as a Coriolanus may seem too high-flown, or excused as centennial rhetoric. One may think that William Carlos Williams was quite right to complain about the academics, who did and are doing so much to procure and preserve that honor. Given the nature of the efforts of Eliot and the other early modernists, it was in any case inevitable that they should fall into the hands of people with leisure to expound them—Joyce said he would keep the professors busy for years, and indeed the correspondence of the literary journals is currently proving, as if proof were needed, that he has done so; nor were the problems set by the others much less exacting. Some were opposed to conventional pedagogy and scholarship—Pound, for instance; Eliot had some respect for it, or pretended he had, when discoursing in that august TLS manner he so carefully acquired. But they also had very large educational aims. They wanted, consciously or not, to produce encyclopedias for the fallen modern world. The result might be ironic; a heap of comic disjecta, like Bouvard et Pécuchet, the preparation of which cost Flaubert years and years of severe but distasteful reading. Or it might be the Cantos, a disordered poem about the causes of disorder, of the world’s usurious exile from justice; or Musil’s strictly interminable study in the corruption of empire, or Eliot’s fragments and ruins and shadows of the empire laid up in heaven. These are the encyclopedias of exile, the great and hopeless attempts to get a world into a book, not a world or a book like Dante’s, to be bound up in one volume of exactly one hundred cantos, but a world of heresies and exile, as seen by a privileged and tormented minority and got into books of strange fragmentary shapes, dreams of an order hardly to be apprehended. To be avant-garde, to be elite (and Eliot very strongly believed in elites) is to be in opposition to whatever simply is, whether you are exiled in Paris or London, Rapallo or Trieste.
It is moreover to confront the corrupt world with messages, mostly about its corruption, which it will not, of its own will, even try to decipher. Yet some vestige of an old civility will ensure that the exiles or their shades are again welcomed into this actual world, the world they banished, with its collapsing imperial cities, its suburban provinces. They return to a world where the idea of the classic is dying or has died, to be celebrated only in doctoral theses and the books of professors. They come as if from classic center to vulgar periphery, no more than shades, still exiles, and still, even for their spectral existence and the tenuous survival of their dreams of order, dependent on the professors they openly or secretly laughed at. We provincials offer our civil respect to a great metropolitan classic, whom we exile and by whom we were ourselves banished.
But disparate, banished ideas can be held together—about past and present and exiles—and we should give our exile the last word, written when, an Englishman of many years standing, he thought about his American origins, which as time went on he did more and more. Perhaps, because one spirit animates the whole, that past was not lost but transformed, and the absent is somehow made present, the exile momentarily at home in his memory, or rather, in his poem:
See, now they vanish
The places and the faces, with the self which, as it could,
loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.