From Hints to Guesses: Eliot “B.C.” and After Conversion
Abstract: The preceding chapters in this book raised new questions concerning Eliot’s conversion in 1927 to “anglo-catholicism.” Hints appear, and the reader is likely as a result to guess, that Eliot not only knew much about Incarnational Christianity as early as 1920 but also showed a tendency then toward its embrace. This chapter considers Eliot’s only “sermon” while emphasizing his commitment to “Catholic Christianity,” his focus on “the dogma of the Incarnation,” and his notion of a “sequence” that leads “inexorably” to the understanding that begins in (often negative and satirical) observation of the world.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
The single-most important line Eliot ever wrote I have claimed is that in “The Dry Salvages,” third of Four Quartets (it opened my eyes, and as a result first this great essay-poem and then his entire corpus, prose and verse alike): “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”1 The omission of the definite article before the capitalized noun points to a universal and timeless pattern, the paradigmatic instance of which in human history is the Incarnation of God in human flesh. The repetition of the adjective “half” points to human difficulty before this central, critical event: we may understand the “half” of the whole that is immanence, or we may understand the “half” that is transcendence, but to grasp the whole, the intersection of the timeless with time, “is an occupation for the saint— / No occupation either, but something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” The words are all resonant with key points in Eliot’s poems. For most of us, hardly saints, “there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time.” Incarnation is the timeless in time.
With literary works, such as Eliot’s, guesses are the efforts of speakers and readers alike, hints the result—and sometimes the extent—of the poet’s understanding. For us here, at this moment, the question concerns those “hints” we find in Eliot’s “BC” writings: are they dropped for us readers, or are they, quite differently, “guesses” on his part that would later become matters of faith and understanding? Does he, in other words, bear early on, like J. Alfred Prufrock, a burden of knowledge, having seen? The poetry, both before and after becoming a communicant of the Church of England in 1927, strongly suggests that Eliot did know—perhaps as early as the mid-Teens, as the biographer Lyndall Gordon, for one, has surmised.2
It is beyond the scope of this book to make the necessary arguments, but I will briefly sketch the outlines they might take. The issue may, in fact, turn out to be less one of knowing than one of acting (on that knowledge). By that, I mean that, as both “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems focus, belief must become incarnate in action; “Little Gidding” powerfully and brilliantly offers confirmation. The “turn” that the so-called conversion poem represents is more than change from unbelief to belief, or from asceticism to Incarnational understanding; it is as well turning from mere knowing to acting on that knowledge.
On this reading, “The Hollow Men” acquires new autobiographical meaning, for it is all about not acting, or aborting opportunity, a “Shadow” forever looming, ready to “fall between,” preventing completion. The betweenness prominent in the poem’s fifth and final section does not appear as the space between verse paragraphs or ideas; no shadow or anything else comes between “sections” rendering them incomplete. More so than in “Gerontion,” I would say, in “The Hollow Men” Eliot achieves successful amalgamation.
The “Shadow,” we may begin to suspect, is another Third, this time of the negative sort, always menacing and distinct from that positive “attended” figure represented as promising in The Waste Land. With new eyes, we can see it as in part of sort of criticism, offered within two years of Eliot’s making his commitment to the Church of England. Four Quartets affirms that “The rest / Is prayer, observation, discipline, thought and action” (italics added). Action is the third, figured as the work of the Third Person of the Trinity, that flows from Being through Understanding, from God through Christ.
About his conversion, Eliot wrote at least three times. The best-known is the statement in the preface to the 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. About the essays included, Eliot said there:
The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion. I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.3
Others had done so in print, including Sheila Kaye-Smith whose still-valuable book called simply Anglo-Catholicism Eliot knew (it was published in 1925) and Geoffrey Faber, his “boss” at Faber and Gwyer, who had also published a book on the Oxford Movement.4 Recently, Barry Spurr has gone well beyond previous studies in his scholarly and thorough book on Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic Christianity.5 For us, the point is that Eliot understood his ecclesiastical position as a form of Anglicanism, one that pointedly considered itself as catholic.
The next statement of Eliot’s to be considered concerning conversion is that in “The ‘Pénsees’ of Pascal” (1931). Here, Eliot valuably describes “the process of the mind of the intelligent believer”—it is very hard to avoid the autobiographical reference in the philosophical language:
The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what [John Henry, Cardinal] Newman calls “powerful and concurrent” reasons, he finds himself committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values.” He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter. (Italics added)6
Several points need emphasizing: first, the commitment to “Catholic Christianity,” second, the (resulting) focus on “the dogma of the Incarnation,” and third, the idea that “the sequence” that leads “inexorably” to that understanding begins in and as observation of “the world” and so is negative. “The heart of the matter” is “the dogma of the Incarnation,” than which nothing could be more important for Eliot.
The third and last statement by Eliot I wish to look at briefly is the sermon he delivered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on March 7, 1948, his only sermon, published in only 300 copies and never reprinted (and very rarely mentioned by commentators, the Rev. William Turner Levy being a notable exception).7 In these few pages, he is directly autobiographical, speaking—again—of his conversion as a negative process. It involved, he says, pursuing scepticism to its end: in other words, he went through the waste land to its end. Moreover, Eliot ends by affirming penitence and humility as the foundation of the Christian way.8 The sermon is a layman’s faith, connecting with that minor tradition of especially seventeenth century works that includes Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and his mentor John Dryden’s Religio Laici, or A Layman’s Faith. Crucial to the layman’s point of view is that “catholicity” that repudiates exclusive availability of salvation and that Eliot successfully addresses in Four Quartets by means of offering Incarnation (minus the) as timeless, universal pattern.9 Critical, too, is avoidance of the pride and the “piety of the convert” (The Cultivation of Christmas Trees):10
I do not go out to an early communion on a cold morning in order to convert my housekeeper, or to set a good example to the night porter of my block of flats before he goes off duty. If this was my motive, I had better not, for my own sake, go at all; and if the housekeeper and the porter suspected that this was my motive, they would—far from being softened—merely be justifiably irritated by my trying to interfere with their lives.11
It is a statement of genuine concern for others alongside a clear-sighted, unblinkered look into the heart of darkness that is oneself, a struggling pilgrim always but on the way.
And so, we—critical pilgrims—have gotten out of The Waste Land quite a lot (whether also out of the waste land is still another matter). Having gone through both poem and condition, the former and its effects incomplete without the latter participation—“mon semblable, mon frère”—we (may) have been disabused of some of our most cherished, and largely unexplored, assumptions.
The insights that Eliot’s poem makes available to you centrally includes its “lessons” concerning difficulty, the advocacy, in fact, of the way of difficulty. If the great American essayist E.B. White offers a “thematics” of difficulty, Eliot may be said to enact a “poetics” of difficulty, begun with his first poems, developed in “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men,” and vitally linked up with Incarnational understanding in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems and Four Quartets; this poetics is, of course, explained in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” where Eliot describes the necessarily allusive and indirect—and difficult—nature of modern poetry.
Explored and defined in his excursus on “the way” in the third section of “East Coker,” “the way of difficulty” is thematically as well as rhetorically critical in the earlier The Waste Land. While the reader negotiates the landmines of falsehood, attempting to sail between the Scylla of ascetic renunciation and the Charybdis of modern despair, the wastelanders keep on desiring the causes of their longing and their death, seeking rain to squelch their thirst and bring relief and in ways divers and horrific aborting life itself, refusing to face the nothingness of their pitiable living. Death undoes them, though the hint is clear that it, and fire, rather than rain, offer an alternative promising and in urgent need of exploring. You go through the waste land, in and by means of it, instead of escaping; desire of a key to unlock the prisonhouse confirms and perpetuates imprisonment.
Purifying fire may, then, be the (desirable) way, and so the pilgrim must keep on exploring. Doing so, s/he will likely meet, somewhere along the way, that “third who walks always beside you”; one hopes that it be, not Tiresias, but more like the “familiar compound ghost,” the eyes that the hollow men avoid, the “you” that evidently accompanies J. Alfred Prufrock, but does not speak, creating the scenario that “human voices will wake us and we drown” in that very water we blithely and rather pathetically mistake as our savior: death by water.
I can, it seems, go in, through, and by means of The Waste Land, but I can never leave Four Quartets.
On occasion, now, I imagine myself on the “white road” of difficulty, blanched and brazen with rocks, past English departments sheltered and shuttered, the blinds closed tight, and when I look, I see a third walking beside “you” my inner critical voice, and for all the world I sense he bears the intimate and undecipherable features of Old Possum.
1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
2 Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), 87.
3 T.S. Eliot, preface, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), ix.
4 Sheila Kaye-Smith, Anglo-Catholicism (London: Chapman Hall, 1925), and Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1933).
5 Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010).
6 T.S. Eliot, “The ‘Pénsees’ of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408.
7 William Turner Levy and Victor Scherle, Affectionately T.S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship, 1947–1965 (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1968); also Rev. Levy’s essay “The Idea of the Church in T.S. Eliot,” a lecture delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1957, which I acquired from Bertram Rota in London (friends of Rev. Levy) in signed original typescript (it was published in The Christian Scholar). According to Rev. Levy in his book, Eliot told him “it was the best thing that had ever been written about his religious beliefs, and urged me to expand it into a book. Prior to your work, all I received was abusive criticism. There was no attempt to understand and define my position. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that this is now available” (100).
8 T.S. Eliot, A Sermon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948), 7.
9 On the “layman’s faith,” see my The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1980).
10 T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
11 Qtd. in Levy, “The Idea of the Church in T.S. Eliot,” 21–22.