The Vanity of Human Wishes
Abstract: Reading is always the issue in confronting T.S. Eliot’s difficult poetry, The Waste Land being a prime example. The matter may resolve itself into a question of the movement of the poet’s imagination. In this regard, assisted by both statements in his essays and the example of his poetic practice, we may not locate a road map to his intentions, but likely to help is a focus attentive to verbal details, engaging in active comparison of words, images, and passages, and leading to prolonged “meditation.” Shown here to be a satire, Eliot’s most famous and probably most influential poem itself connects with several of his essays written around the same time in seeking to “associate” the separated, to “amalgamate disparate experience,” and to make such connections as the wastelanders are unable to or will not make.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
Thankfully, Ezra Pound got hold of Eliot’s lengthy, rambling verses, applied his sharp critical scissors, and transformed what was, frankly, a hodgepodge into a poem. Otherwise, we would not even be speaking today of a 1922 poem, which Old Possum wanted to call “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”1 Eliot acknowledged his debt—eventually, three years later: “il fabbro miglior.” The dedication is elegant, being an allusion bearing significance for both poets. The words are Dante’s, addressed to Pound’s favorite, the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, words Ole Ez had himself used as the title of a chapter in his 1910 book The Spirit of Romance; Pound also used the words to repeat Dante’s praise of Daniel: “the best fashioner of songs in the Provencal,” he wrote at the beginning of an essay on the twelfth-century poet in 1920.2 Different voices, different registers mark the great poem, accounting for much of its complexity, and not a little of the misunderstanding that still surrounds it as we approach its centennial.
Pound was fresh from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a worthy competitor with The Waste Land for the top spot among twentieth-century poems in English. In these works, both satires, voice plays a crucial role, tonal shifts actually lying at the heart of the difficulty in reading Pound’s poem. Such issues are familiar in satire, even if the works are not so complex (though see Swift’s A Tale of a Tub); accounting for much of the difficulty is, as frequently in Swift, the unreliability of the speaker (Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”)—or, to take but one relevant example, of the central consciousness (Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Eliot knew and admired).
As critical as is voice (and the concomitant matter of tone), there are other issues that face Eliot’s readers in The Waste Land. Some are so well-known as to require no more than passing reference here, including the apparent fragmentariness of sections and even of verses, both the frequent allusions to a wide variety of texts and the use of foreign words and phrases, the abrupt shifts in “coverage,” and the part played by the notes that Eliot added, identifying “sources” and background. The matter of structure, which Eliot found a problem in Dr. Johnson’s poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, of which (along with London) he published an edition with introductory essay in 1930, does not, in The Waste Land, quite seem responsible for the reader’s difficulties so much as movement does.3
It may, in fact, be the lack of authorial direction concerning the poem’s essential movement, a reliable indication of the relation and connection of part to part and part to whole, that troubles us most. It is something to which Eliot alluded in 1923 in praising Joyce’s “mythical method” in Ulysses and that he returned to, at greater length, in introducing his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabasis (1930).4 About the latter, he wrote that “any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain’, of explanatory and connecting matter,” rather than to “incoherence.” He proceeds to distinguish between “a logic of concepts” and “a logic of the imagination.” The latter is that followed by Perse and may be that followed by Eliot himself in such a poem as The Waste Land. The “logic of the imagination” abbreviates, and condenses, but also
the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, the total effect is produced.5
The details that Eliot describes here may, in the event, be of less importance than his fundamental concerns with “arrangement” and with the reader’s responsibility for figuring out the entailed relation. About the reader’s role, he soon adds, in fact:
And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.6
We do not often think of Eliot as being so concerned with the reader or, specifically, as placing such responsibility on the reader. We have to make connections that the wastelanders fail to make, perhaps cannot make. For the reader at least, connecting is not the end, but the beginning. For comparing and contrasting follow, the reader required to see similarities and differences alike, relating one thing to the other and measuring each by the other.
The year after The Waste Land, Eliot predicted, or warned us about, or defended and prepared the way for Modernist poetry such as he and St.-John Perse would make. I refer to his famous statement in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets”:
[I]t appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.7
This forthright declaration stresses the necessity that the poet be not only “catholic” of sensibility and learning but also something not sufficiently accounted for, even today. I mean “indirect”: the poet must not tell but show, and show in a particular way. It is not, pace Heraclitus, that “the way up is the way down,” but, rather, that the way up is in, through, and by means of the way down: no identity of opposites, in other words, but a sort of mediation, even detour (which is not “detour” at all since there is no other way). Opened up, therefore, is a whole slew of effects, not least among them place and prominence of the via negativa and, with it, satire, the indirect genre supreme.
Eliot’s early poems are, most of them, satirical. The earliest appear in Prufrock and Other Observations, whose very title points to the satirical character of these works, including the longest and most famous: “observation” stands, as a matter of fact, in immediate contrast with “reflection,” the Montaignian and Romantic separation from experience that is the object of Eliot’s rejection and repudiation in his first collection of critical essays The Sacred Wood (1920); observation reveals, holds up to exposure, and thus figures as complementary to satire. Crucial, and central to the way satire works—and the way The Waste Land works—is indirectness: you get to the writer’s thesis in, through, and by means of its antithesis. Although their satirical qualities have long been recognized, the poems of roughly the same time period have received scant treatment as satires. I shall perhaps treat them as such elsewhere, only pointing here to a continuity, through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” to The Waste Land. We can no more trust the voice of the latter poem than we can rely on the inimitable voice of the great dramatic monologue.
And yet to grasp the satirical character of The Waste Land, including the qualities of that sometimes-whining but oft-mistaken voice, we have to return to the plaguing matter of the poem’s movement, “the logic of the imagination” that governs it. A hint from outside helps.
I refer again to “The Metaphysical Poets,” published two years after The Waste Land in the Hogarth Essays volume Homage to John Dryden. Here, among others, a statement jumps off the page, offering itself as an insight with far-reaching implications and application. Note the following, resonant, rich, and ever-so-suggestive:
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.8
The mention, alone, of the “fragmentary” experience of “the ordinary man” is enough to recall The Waste Land, frequently said to record the fragmentariness of modern life in the waste land and containing direct statements concerning “fragments . . . shored against [one’s] ruins.” The binary opposition poet / ordinary man leaves me unsatisfied, and wondering whether the latter cannot somehow emulate the former and thus transcend the “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.” Once attentive to Eliot’s words, moreover, you do not fail to notice the whole forming from the apparently disparate experiences the poet has selected; they have to do with reading and writing, themselves attended (at best) with love and providing vital sustenance. Eliot’s own structure thus mimics his claim, form and meaning themselves blended, mixed, amalgamated.
The later prose passage, I am suggesting, points to an essential feature of Eliot’s poem, composed, as it is, of “disparate” experiences, which it is the reader’s responsibility to see as amalgamated. The reader does not, though, as in recent reader-response theories, make meaning unavailable without him; rather, the poet has done the work of writing the meaning, having, before writing the poem, himself amalgamated such experiences. The reader (simply) mimics, antiphonally, the poet’s work, following at one remove the poet’s lead, with the aim of arriving where the poet did before her or him. The burden on the reader is thus considerable—just as it is, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Joyce asks the reader to become the hero (and certainly not Stephen Dedalus, his semi-autobiographical and wholly unreliable center of consciousness). From at least “Prufrock” forward, Eliot was much concerned with the burden of responsibility, in that poem with that of “knowing.”
An earlier essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” supplements Eliot’s hints in “The Metaphysical Poets” regarding reading Modernist “comprehensive,” “allusive,” and “indirect” works. He writes what he practices throughout The Sacred Wood: measuring two things by each other; in fact, there he explicitly calls “comparison” and “analysis” “the tools of criticism.”9 Thus, in this book as well as elsewhere, Eliot makes his essential points by comparing Donne with Tennyson, Lancelot Andrewes with Donne, Pascal with Montaigne, Shakespeare with Ben Jonson and, and in the essay on Phillip Massinger in The Sacred Wood, where he compares that dramatist with his contemporaries Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur.
The critic compares, just as the poet amalgamates “disparate experience.” The process is, I have argued elsewhere, characteristically lateral, rather than vertical (and requiring “deep” reading).10 Both (literary) efforts require close attention to textual, verbal, and linguistic detail—such as Eliot describes Lancelot Andrewes practicing in the reading that makes for the writing of his great sermons in the seventeenth century. Writing about the divine, Eliot is overtly treating his writing, but Eliot’s reader can no more separate that subject from the matter of Andrewes’s reading than Andrewes drew a firm and unwavering line between the two activities. The “surrender of personality,” made necessary by the new premium established by the likes of Montaigne (and to be exacerbated in Wordsworthian Romantic “reflection”), accounts to a large degree for Andrewes’s capacity—note in the following passage Eliot’s recurrence to comparison as an essential way of proceeding:
Bishop Andrewes . . . tried to confine himself in his sermons to the elucidation of what he considered essential in dogma.. . . The Incarnation was to him an essential dogma, and we are able to compare seventeen developments of the same idea. Reading Andrewes on such a theme is like listening to a great Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics: altering the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semi-colon to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote contexts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity.11
Eliot’s following points apply to both the wastelanders and their “semblables,” the modern readers, both of whom come from the same culture, a culture, we might say, borrowing from Paul J. Griffiths, that promotes, and knows only, “consumerist reading.”12
To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing—when a word half understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspaper, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation—Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbal. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent. Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess. In this process the qualities which we have mentioned, of ordonnance and precision, are exercised.13
The strength of Eliot’s feeling appears in the uncharacteristically long and convoluted ante-penultimate sentence here. The similarity of his reader’s burden to Bishop Andrewes’s appears in “the ecstasy of assent” that he or she sometimes experiences after observing, analyzing, and comparing, his squeezing of words.
If not to “surrender personality,” how, at least, to saturate ourselves in Eliot’s poetry so that we may follow “the movement” of his imagination, attending to its “order” and understanding aright his words? It is a tall order.
Of the possibilities that suggest themselves, I single out three, beginning with the notions of “consumerist reading” and its opposite, “religious reading,” formulated by Griffiths and powerfully expressed in his 1999 book Religious Reading. For Griffiths, a convert to Roman Catholicism and now a professor at Duke Divinity School, the predominant mode of reading in our culture follows its essential values of haste, selfish use, impatience, and inattentiveness. His critique is unsparing. He in fact opens with this self-recrimination (for not being such a reader as Eliot describes—even as he confirms the poet-critic’s linking of reading and writing and his use of cooking / food along with reading, writing, and love); Griffiths writes in the preface:
I was never taught, and have still not properly learned, how to read with careful, slow attentiveness; it is difficult for me to read with the goal of incorporating what I read, of writing it upon the pages of my memory; I find it hard to read as a lover [an amateur], to caress, lick, smell, and savor the words on the page, and to return to them over and again. I read, instead, mostly as a consumer, someone who wants to extract what is useful or exciting or entertaining from what is read, preferably with dispatch, and then to move on to something else. My habits of reading are mostly like my habits of purchasing: dazzled by the range of things I can buy, I spend all that I can as fast as I can, ecstatic at the excitement of contributing to the market economy and satisfied if I can assure myself of a place in that economy by continuing to produce and consume.14
He adds, “Most academic readers are consumerist in their reading habits, and this is because they, like me, have been taught to be so and rewarded for being so.” I agree with a great deal here, although I find the cultural critique gratuitous.
To this “consumerist reading” Griffiths opposes a way “to read religiously, as a lover reads, with a tensile attentiveness that wishes to linger, to prolong, to savor, and has no interest at all in the quick orgasm of consumption.”15 By this point, gratuitousness has declined into imbalance and embarrassing incivility. Griffiths would have done better, in my judgment, to restrain himself, resisting the urge toward the literal, and have meant (only) by reading like a lover, reading as an amateur, that is, one who loves. After all, what he repudiates is a kind of professional reading, and more effectively contrasted with it is such a way of reading that is amateur-like, layistic, and thus essayistic. It is the essay that slows (you) down, takes its time, rambling about, observes carefully the flora and the fauna, open to discovery, willing to engage an apparent detour or two, while keeping on exploring. It is, the essayistic, indirect, an in-between thing, born in tension and destined to be gratefully and humbly content with its status as “second-class citizen”, said the master of the familiar essay E.B. White, with a bit of irony.16
At any rate, after thus deconfining the activity of reading, Griffiths proceeds to narrow talk about writing, commonly called criticism. This he does by redefining “commentary” in such a manner as to obviate any applicability for literary criticism (it is, among other things, committed to the same structure as the prior text). So different and differentiated, reading and writing have no chance of joining in that “necessarye coniunction” that we will see Eliot endorsing.
As it happens, Eliot himself opined something similar, in introducing a book of meditations that he published at Faber and Faber. At first, he sounds like Griffiths, attacking modern culture: “Very few people, I suspect, know how to read”—that is, “in the sense of being able to read for a variety of motives and to read a variety of books each in the appropriate way.” He goes on to say that “Philosophy is difficult, unless we discipline our minds for it; the full appreciation of poetry is difficult for those who have not trained their sensibility by years of attentive reading.” By way of tentative conclusion, Eliot then adds: “But devotional reading is the most difficult of all, because it requires an application, not only of the mind, not only of the sensibility, but of the whole being.”17 Speaking of mystical literature—he is here prefacing Thoughts for Meditation, the anthology edited by N. Gangulee—Eliot continues with observations that pertain, with some modifications and due allowance for undeniable differences, to reading well, no matter the material or the text.
We have to abandon some of our usual motives for reading. We must surrender the Love of Power—whether over others, or over ourselves, or over the material world. We must abandon even the Love of Knowledge. We must not be distracted by interest in the personality of particular authors, or by delight in the phrases in which they have expressed their insights.18
Certainly reading well, whatever the book or poem before us, whether The Waste Land or Dickens’s Great Expectations, E.B. White’s essays or Eliot’s friend Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or Allen Tate’s The Fathers, entails abandonment of power over the text as well as at least control of interest in authorial personality, but surely we need not surrender either a love of or a quest for knowledge, for the reading of texts may be our best—if not our only—path toward knowing, and such reading necessarily proceeds in, through, and by means of the letter, that is, the form, made of “phrases” and other units, of the writing itself. Aiming at “the Love of God,” mystical writers, says Eliot, practiced, and they incarnate, “tireless activity and tireless passivity” (italics added).19 To read them well, we must follow suit, matching in our performed response that paradoxical activity.
Reading well is an art, not a science. Some prescriptions and proscriptions thus apply, but no road map exists nor a set of directions, no matter how sophisticated or “progressive.” Hints, guesses, and half-understandings abound. We stand on firmer ground the more willing we are precisely to ground our understanding: the more helps to nature and common sense that we add, the more we incur the risk of that ground rising up to smite us. I am, then, leery of so-called religious readings as I am to read like a writer. That too is too simple, for a writer may be interested in how a work is made, whereas a more responsible reading is less narrow, focusing, differently, on how a poem or story works. It is dangerous, in any case, to separate reading from writing as absolute differences.
1 T.S. Eliot and Valerie Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).
2 Ezra Pound, “Arnaut Daniel,” Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 286.
3 T.S. Eliot, introductory essay, “London: A Poem” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Samuel Johnson (London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald, 1930).
4 T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial, n.s. (Fall 1959), 153–58 (originally published in The Dial, November 1923).
5 T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 8.
6 Ibid.
7 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 289 (italics added).
8 Ibid., 287.
9 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.
10 See, esp., my T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
11 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347.
12 Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 40–45.
13 Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” 347–48.
14 Griffiths, Religious Reading, ix.
15 Ibid.
16 E.B. White, foreword, Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), vii.
17 T.S. Eliot, preface, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, sel. and arr. N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 11–12.
18 Ibid., 12–13.
19 Ibid., 13.