1956 The two great modernists, Stravinsky and Eliot, first met, face to face, on this day in the winter of 1956. The influence of the composer’s Le sacre du printemps (1911) on The Waste Land (1922) was frankly acknowledged by the poet, who hailed Stravinsky, in 1921, as ‘our lion’ – ‘our’ referring to their international artistic movement.
The first personal encounter of these by now grizzled lions was arranged by their mutual friend, Stephen Spender – still something of a literary cub. A nervous Spender drove Eliot to the Savoy Hotel, where the composer was staying. Their subsequent conversation was conducted ‘mostly in English, though some of it was in French, which Eliot talks slowly and meticulously’.
As Spender recorded, the opening topic was unlikely:
Stravinsky complained that … he suffered from an excessive thickness of the blood. Moving his hands as though moulding an extremely rich substance, he said: ‘[The doctors] said my blood is so thick, so rich, so very rich, it might turn into crystals, like rubies, if I didn’t drink beer, plenty of beer, and occasionally whisky, all the time’ … Eliot said meditatively: ‘I remember in Heidelberg when I was in Heidelberg when I was young I went to a doctor and was examined and the doctor said: “Mr Eliot, you have the thinnest blood I’ve ever tested.”’
This strangely allegorical conversation, although Spender does not mention it, was precipitated by an opening inquiry by Eliot about the composer’s health. Stravinsky had suffered a cerebral aneurism in Berlin, in October. He was still disabled and had to delegate the conducting of a new composition in St Martin-in-the-Fields church, on 11 December, to his long-time companion Robert Craft.
Despite his illness, and although being the older man by six years, Stravinsky outlived Eliot by six years. Perhaps the beer and whisky (which, following medical advice, he consumed in heroic quantities) helped. Following their meeting he composed a brief a capella setting of lines from ‘Little Gidding’ (‘the dove descending breaks the air’) as a gift to the poet. On Eliot’s death, on 4 January 1965, he did a more substantial ‘Introitus: T.S. Eliot In Memoriam’. Ever sly, Eliot may have been making a self-depreciating joke about his thin blood. It was emphysema that killed him.