At the beginning of the previous chapter I postponed examination of Eliot’s and Stevens’ poetry of the First World War years until I had examined the evidence in Eliot’s prose and correspondence supporting my contention that in those years Eliot adopted – at least provisionally – a Humanist hostility toward religious belief. There was no necessity to demonstrate the same for Stevens, since it is widely assumed that his view of religion was essentially that of a Humanist – that religious beliefs are fantasies or fictions. In this chapter I examine the poems written and published by both poets before, during, and after the war years with two objectives in mind. First, I demonstrate that both men’s poetry exhibits the same Humanist bias toward religion – though Stevens’ ridicule is much gentler than Eliot’s. Second, I assess the degree to which the trauma of the First World War is reflected in their poetry.
Since we have been discussing Eliot’s relationship with Bertrand Russell, it seems appropriate to begin with “Mr. Apollinax” – probably written some time in early 19161 – which looks back to a couple of social occasions of the previous year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which Eliot and Russell were both present. (It is generally accepted that Apollinax is a satirical portrait of Russell.) One took place at the mansion of the art collector Mrs Jack Gardner – at whose home Eliot first met Russell (Imperfect 29); another occurred at the home of a Harvard professor – either William Henry Schofield (Valerie Eliot’s choice) (Letters 483), or Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller (Lyndall Gordon’s choice) (Imperfect 29). Scofield, the much older man, seems a better candidate. And the flattering sketch of Fuller by Jean Verdenal in a letter to Eliot renders him a poor candidate for ridicule.
Verdenal had met Fuller in Paris in 1912; he described him as “un homme charmant, bon garçon, aimable, très joyeux camarade avec tout le monde et plein d’anecdotes” [a charming man, a good guy, friendly, a cheerful companion to everyone, and full of yarns] (Letters 30).2 In the draft version of “Mr. Apollinax” it is clear that Eliot is recalling two separate incidents, for line 6 reads, “In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, again at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s” (March Hare 303). That sequence fits with Gordon’s view that Eliot first met Russell at the Gardner mansion.
The speaker of the poem describes Apollinax in terms of pagan deities – the invented Fragilion, a “shy figure among the birch-trees,” the contrasting “Priapus in the shrubbery,” and “the old man of the seas” (Poseidon or Neptune). None of these allusive characterizations is flattering. In a rather surreal image (nearly a decade before the advent of Surrealism), Apollinax is said to laugh “like an irresponsible foetus” (a line Harriet Monroe suppressed when she published it in Poetry). But his laughter is also said to be “submarine and profound ... like the old man of the sea.” Then, as Neptune, Apollinax tranquilly watches “while the desperate bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence.” This image is so out of key with rest of the poem that one is tempted to seek some personal relevance. The most tempting is to read it as representing Russell’s detached observation of Eliot’s dysfunctional marriage, but the middle of 1916 is too early for such a reading. Another possibility is that Eliot has in mind the myriad deaths in the fields of France and Flanders – deaths that Russell was accused of dishonouring by his opposition to the war. Although it is impossible to be confident of a reading, one can note that images of drowning are recurrent in Eliot’s early poetry – “Prufrock” and The Waste Land being other instances.
The next lines are also surreal, and puzzling. The speaker looks for the head of Apollinax “rolling under a chair / Or grinning over a screen / With seaweed in its hair.” The imagery of submarine existence is reminiscent of the closing lines of “Prufrock”:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The decollated Apollinax calls to mind John the Baptist – also invoked in “Prufrock.” But such “echoes” are of little hermeneutic value. All we are left with are macabre images of Apollinax. It would seem that we are to take them as humorous rather than as intended to induce fear and loathing. The images belong to the internal imagination of the monologuist, and are more indicative of his attitude to Apollinax/Russell, than of any features he actually possesses. One might interpret them as implying that Russell was seen as a disembodied intellect, but the next lines belie such a reading:
I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the soft turf
As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.
Since centaurs are traditionally associated with lustful and boisterous behaviour, this allusion picks up the previous characterization of Apollinax as “Priapus in the shrubbery.” Perhaps it is relevant to recall that the centaur Chiron was mentor to many Greek heroes, including Heracles, Achilles, Jason, and Asclepias – as Russell was mentor to Eliot.
What remains unclear is whether we are to be appalled or enchanted by Russell’s behaviour and manner. All that is certain is that Russell/ Apollinax is too strong for the Scofields. They are unable to understand either his “submarine and profound” laughter, or his “dry and passionate talk,” and what they do understand they disdain:
‘He is a charming man’ – ‘But after all what did he mean?’ –
‘His pointed ears.... He must be unbalanced.’ –
‘There was something he said that I might have challenged.’
The Harvard notables make very little impression on the monologuist: “Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus,3 and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah / I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.”
That the poem ends with ridicule of his Harvard hosts leaves the reader with the impression that it is they who are ridiculed rather than Russell. But in Ara Vos Prec, published in 1920 after the break with Russell, Eliot added an epigraph to “Mr. Apollinax” from the second century satirist, Lucian. Uncharacteristically Eliot gives no attribution: Ωηατ α νοωελτψ! Βψ Ηερχυλεσ, Ωηατ α µαρωελ. Α ρεσουρχεφυλ µαν. (“What a novelty! By Hercules, What a marvel.” “A resourceful man.”) It seems probable that the addition of these ironic remarks is an index of Eliot’s disenchantment with Russell by 1920 – implying that the disenchantment had not yet occurred in 1916 when the poem was written.
The portrayal of Russell is at least ambivalent – although with the addition of the epigraph it becomes more clearly negative. The comparison of Apollinax to Priapus and a centaur stresses Russell’s physicality and sexuality – aspects of his personality that Eliot could hardly have observed at Harvard, but which he must have noticed during the ménage à trois in Russell’s Bury Street flat. He may have had another opportunity to observe Russell’s Priapic personality in January of 1916, when Russell treated Vivien to a holiday in Devon. Eliot stayed behind in Russell’s flat, later joining them for the weekend (Letters 117). There is no indication in the letters, however, that Eliot was disenchanted with Russell until much later. Perhaps he regarded Russell’s flirtatious ways with the tolerant bemusement of a twenty-eight-year-old for the erotic ambitions of a forty-four-year-old.
Whatever Eliot thought of Russell’s social behaviour in those years, we have seen that he did share Russell’s Humanist antipathy for Christianity, and in the last two years of the war he published two poems in the Little Review satirizing Christianity, or at least Christian churches: “The Hippopotamus” (July 1917) and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (April 1918). In contrast to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” (examined below), which merely countenances apostasy, these poems ridicule religious worship. It is hard to see how they could be read in any other way than as condemnations of Christianity – at least as manifested in ecclesiastical institutions and practices of worship.
“The Hippopotamus” is unambiguously a condemnation of the established church (whether Roman or Anglican) for its corruption by worldly concerns. The epigraph, “And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodicean,” tells us nothing unless we go to Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, from whose conclusion it is taken. Paul speaks to such corruption – though in the laity rather than the clergy (of course, there was not yet any clergy in Paul’s day): “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips” (Colossians 3: 5–8). Clearly, the author of “The Hippopotamus” does not believe that the church of his day has heeded Paul’s injunction.4
The contrast with Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (published only nineteen months earlier) could hardly be stronger. Stevens indulges the woman’s shirking of church attendance, synecdochically described as “complacencies of the peignoir,” and poses the rhetorical question:
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
It is precisely these things that St Paul would deny the Colossians and Laodiceans if they are to gain the kingdom of heaven. Where “The Hippopotamus” castigates the Church for its failure to live up to a Pauline ethic, “Sunday Morning” meditates on the futility of such an ethic.
It is true that Eliot’s ridicule of the church need not imply a disaffection with the doctrine for which it ostensibly stands. Believers frequently find fault with the institution of the church. But it is difficult to imagine a believer ridiculing Christ’s ascent in the portrait of the merely “flesh and blood” hippopotamus’ ascent. Although Eliot’s image owes more to painterly representations of Christ’s ascent than to any biblical passage, the parody cannot be mistaken:
I saw the ‘potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Christ’s ascent is much more modestly described in the Gospels. The most circumstantial of the three mentions is Acts 1: 9: “And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.”
It is usually assumed that Eliot’s choice of a hippopotamus as a figure for the hypocritical worshipper is an allusion to Théophile Gautier’s “Hippopotame,” which also mocks smug piety.5 After listing the hazards of the veldt to which the hippopotamus is indifferent because of his size and thick skin, Gautier’s poem concludes:
Je suis comme l’hippopotame:
De ma conviction couvert,
Forte armure que rien n’entame,
Je vais sans peur par le désert.
[I am like the hippopotamus / Covered by my conviction / Strong armour that nothing can damage / I go in the desert without fear.]
But the hippopotamus is hardly an appropriate vehicle for the closing image of a sort of Muslim paradise in which the hippo is surrounded by houris-like virgin martyrs:
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
It is not easy to construe the import of the “True Church’s” condition, “wrapt in the old miasmal mist.” Clearly the appellation “True Church” is ironic, but are we to understand “miasmal mist” as a condition of ignorance, apostasy, or corruption? The OED cites this line from “The Hippopotamus” as the last of three examples for “miasmal,” but its definition is not very helpful: “containing miasmal fluid or germs.” “Miasma” are defined as “noxious emanations.” If Eliot is using the term carefully – as is probable – then the “miasmal mist” would represent erroneous doctrines. On an orthodox view, the Church is “left below” to preach Christ’s gospel (the “good news”) through the apostles and their successors, the anointed bishops. To characterize the Church’s mission as “wrapt in the old miasmal mist” hardly suggests that the good news is to be believed. One can only construe the line to mean that superstition and intellectual darkness enfold the “True Church,” rather than the “good news” it is charged to preach. The fact that the ridicule of Christianity in this poem is not very sharply focused perhaps reflects Eliot’s ambivalence about his beliefs at that time.
“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is even more strongly anti-clerical. It was published in September of 1918, a little less than nine years before his baptism, and four years after his first exposure to Russell. It is probably one of the “several poems” that Eliot told his mother on 2 June 1918 he had written at Marlow House, a cottage the Eliots had leased in January 1918, sharing the expense with Russell (Letters 233). Although both of these poems are difficult to construe, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is perhaps the more difficult – a consequence either of a pompous display of learning or, as I think more likely, of a deliberate effort to mask its message.
Beginning with “polyphyloprogenitive,” a word not listed in the OED, it proceeds with arcane allusions to obscure Christian doctrinal disputes of the third century AD. On etymological grounds, “polyphyloprogenitive” must mean “originating from several phyla or families,” that is to say, a hybrid.6 The epithet is free-floating, but since it is followed by “sapient sutlers of the Lord” who “drift across the window panes,” it is presumably they who are the hybrids – part secular, part divine, I suppose. The epithets characterize them as “wise provisioners to the Lord.” What they provide, of course, is souls. The first stanza ends with the opening words of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” The same line is repeated as the first line of stanza two. The Word, of course, is Christ, the Logos.
The second line of stanza two is “Superfetation of τσ ευ.” The Greek means “The One,” and “superfetation” means a second conception while the first embryo is still in the womb – a common occurrence among felines. “Superfetation of the One,” given its proximity to the in principio implies that Christ’s incarnation in Mary’s womb is somehow a secondary conception of the godhead. This must be so, for Mary’s pregnancy with Christ was not in “the beginning” in any obvious sense. So far, then, the poem appears to be mocking the logical inconsistencies, if not absurdities, of the Christian doctrine of Christ’s incarnation. Since Christ is the omnipotent, eternal deity, “The One,” he has existed always and cannot be supposed to have been born of Mary – except as a “superfetation.” The Christian “mystery” – that is a doctrine that defies reason – of the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost) is, by implication, also mocked.
The introduction of “enervate Origen” in the second line reinforces such a reading. Origen was born in 185 and died in 254, not long after having been imprisoned and tortured during the persecutions of Decius. He remains to this day a controversial theologian, though recognized by Rome as a Greek Father of the Church. The particular doctrine relevant here is called “subordination of the Divine Persons,” that is to say, a ranking of the persons of the Trinity, with the Father taking precedence over the Son, and the Son taking precedence over the Paraclete or Holy Ghost. Such a view is heretical within the Roman Church. It is followed by a parallel principal clause: “And at the mensual turn of time / Produced enervate Origen.” Eliot had originally written “And at the menstrual turn of time / Produced the castrate Origen,” but Pound suggested revising it to the less gynecological “mensual” and the less explicit “enervate,” and that is how it now reads (March Hare 377–8). The tendency of Pound’s emendations is to make the issue of copulation and conception less explicit. The Catholic Encyclopaedia does not indicate that Origen was in fact a castrato, but there is a persistent tradition that he was. The poem then abandons Origen and theology for an examination of a fresco of the “Umbrian school,” a School much praised by the pre-Raphaelites. Its best known artists are Pinturrichio (1454–1513) and Pietro Perugino (1446–1523), both of whom painted a series of frescoes and panels of the life of Christ. Eliot might have seen Perugino’s “Baptism of Christ” in the Pinoteca, Bologna, during his tour of Italian galleries in the summer of 1911 (Gordon, Imperfect 90). It is a very good fit for the poem, although in the detail on the left only the Paraclete can be partially discerned at the top of the painting. There is no nimbus, but it does show both Christ and John’s feet in the water. Another version, in the National Gallery of Perugia, clearly shows the Paraclete, represented as a dove, and provides Christ with a nimbus, but there is no Father, and the feet are not immersed in water.7
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned.
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.
Christ’s feet are “unoffending” because, unlike mere mortals, he did not carry the burden of original sin that baptism is intended to remove. Notice that Eliot’s “painting” includes the entire Trinity, picking up the Origenian controversy. It is difficult not to read the poem as a mockery of Trinitarian Christianity from the perspective of “The Free Man’s Worship.” Although it must be admitted that, having been raised a Unitarian, Eliot would have heard many sermons detailing the logical absurdities of Trinitarian Christianity long before he encountered Russell.
After a break marked by suspension points, the poem returns to the representations of the clerics in the windows. They are now characterized as “sable presbyters,” and represented as if approaching “the avenue of penitence.” In other words, they are in Purgatory, “Where the souls of the devout / Burn invisible and dim.” Some of them are young, described (like the amorous clerk in The Waste Land) as “red and pustular.” These young penitents clutch “piaculative pence,” that is, expiatory offerings – money to purchase pardons or indulgences. Once again the OED is not much help, since it lists only one instance of “piaculative” – its occurrence in this poem. The term “pence” would resonate with Protestant readers who would remember that “Peter’s Pence” (money collected from selling indulgences so as to finance the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome) was one of the targets of the ninety-five theses Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, leading to the Reformation.
Eliot has the “presbyters” passing “through the gates of penitence,” which are “sustained by staring Seraphim.” They reach a place where “the souls of the devout / Burn invisible and dim.” The last line would remind most readers of Milton’s description of Hell as a place of “darkness visible.” No doubt aware of that echo, Eliot originally had a mock scholarly note in the typescript of the poem: “Vide Henry Vaughan, the Silurist from whom the author seems to have borrowed this line” (March Hare 377).
Although the note did not make it into print, it is of some hermeneutic value. The Vaughan poem is “The Night,” a meditation on the afterlife. The lines in question are found in the last stanza, where the poet prays for union with God:
There is in God (some say) A deep, but dazzling
darkness; As men here Say it is late and dusky,
because they See not all clear; O for that night!
where I in him Might live invisible and dim.
Since the phrase is taken from a passage in which Vaughan longs for death, the allusion seems to emphasize the motif of life-denying ascetic Christianity, and also contributes to the poem’s ridicule of Christian fables of the afterlife and mystical revelations of its nature – albeit very obscurely.8
Eliot mentions Vaughan a number of times in his published prose, always characterizing him as a mystic. Although he did not consider Vaughan to be a poet of the first rank, he includes Vaughan in a comment on the prevalence of imagery of light and darkness among mystics: “One of the frequent characteristics of Christian mysticism has been a use of various imageries of light and darkness, sometimes indeed of a light which is at the same time darkness; such imagery is used by John of the Cross, perhaps the greatest psychologist of all European mystics; it is used by Meister Eckhart and the German mystics ... very often Vaughan’s are images of transient light” (Listener 2, 2 April 1930 590. My emphasis).
However, the elided note can perhaps be dismissed as nothing more than a parody of a learned note – like Eliot’s mocking note to the lines, “But sound of water over a rock / Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees / Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” in the last section of The Waste Land: “This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit- thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats ... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated.” But even though the note on the hermit-thrush is unquestionably parodic, it is appended to a section of The Waste Land about which Eliot told Bertrand Russell: “It is not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all. It means a great deal to me that you like it” (cited in Monk Ghost 27). In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot includes “the song of one bird” in the well-known list of “certain images” that “recur, charged with emotion” (178). It is as if he added the note to distract his readers from the strong cathexis which the lines have for him – whether of bird song or mystic union9 – with these parodic notes.
The next scene sketched in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” moves outside – to the garden where sweet peas invite bees, who “With hairy bellies pass between / The staminate and pistillate.”10 Bees fertilize plants by carrying pollen from the stamen to the pistil, but – like the clergy – are themselves “celibate” as far as botanical reproduction is concerned. Indeed, worker bees are sexless, an aspect of bees invoked by the adjectival phrase, “Blest office of the epicene.” The evident parallel is to the role of the clergy in “blessing” sexual unions through the sacrament of marriage – a sacrament that Eliot and Vivien had avoided, choosing instead to be married by a Justice of the Peace. If the poem was written no earlier than the summer of 1918, as I am assuming, it may be that Eliot is musing on his own unhappy marriage as well as mocking the Christian clergy.
The concluding stanza juxtaposes Sweeney in the bath with the theologians in the stained glass window:
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.
Sweeney in the bath picks up Christ’s baptism in the river invoked earlier in the poem. And his unreflective physicality is contrasted to the subtlety (to be read negatively as “artfully contrived arguments”) of the theologians. The poem closes, then, with a contrast between the sexless and subtle theologians and the physical – and presumably unreflective – Sweeney. Spirit and flesh are juxtaposed with no clear preference for either, since both are mocked. The obscurity of these poems is, at least in part, a result of the ridicule not being based on any discernible moral or religious ground; they are fundamentally nihilistic.11
Stevens’ poems dealing with religion are much gentler and much less pessimistic than Eliot’s, never descending toward nihilism. And when he is indulging in ridicule, Stevens is always less obscure and less acerbic than Eliot. A flirtation with nihilism, such as we see occurring with Eliot, is something that Stevens never contemplated. In a letter of 12 June 1948 to Barbara Church, commenting on André Gide’s Journal, Stevens explained that for him, ordinary, everyday experience was sufficient protection against nihilism: “Gide, in his Journal, speaks of redemption of the spirit by work, in this present time of skepticism. Only to work is nonsense in a period of nihilism. Why work? Keeping a journal, however dense the nihilism may be, helps one. And thinking about the nature of our relation to what one sees out of the window, for example, without any effort to see to the bottom of things, may some day disclose a force capable of destroying nihilism. My mind is as full of this at the moment as of anything except unassorted drivel” (Letters 601). On the other hand, Stevens would certainly have agreed with Russell that man should “worship at the shrine his own hands have built” – although he would not have shared Russell’s view that it should be in the spirit of Christian-like humility. Not that Stevens endorses the contrary Nietzschean posture of heroic defiance. It is just that neither the Christian virtue of humility nor the vice of pride figures at all in Stevens’ moral scheme.
One of Stevens’ rare considerations of pride is in the 1917 poem, “The Wind Shifts,” a meditation on the state of the “human without illusions,” that is to say, the Free Man, the Humanist:
This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.
(Collected Poems 83–4)
This short poem highlights the difference between Russell’s Humanism and Stevens’: Stevens’ “human without illusions ... still feels irrational things within her.” (It also illustrates Stevens’ penchant for employing female personae – a rare trait among male poets.) Russell has no place for irrationality (in truth he fears it), nor does Eliot.12
Of course, for the religious believer there is a huge difference between the irrational and the mysterious; the “merely” irrational includes human passions – fears, hopes, and lusts; the mysterious is that which is beyond human understanding; passions are below it. It is clear from “The Wind Shifts” that Stevens does not regard being “a human without illusions” as a desirable emancipation. Although, unlike Eliot, he did not commit to any creed during his active years, Stevens retained a strong sense of the mysterious.
Although Stevens seems not to have been bothered by Humanism’s lack of a sense of evil, he was bothered by its lack of the emotional intensity that had existed in the age of Faith. He had to make do with the contemplation of the beauty, variety, and intricacy found in the mind’s interchange with the sensible world – which he captured beautifully in the closing lines of “Sunday Morning” (cited below) as well as in the much later “Connoisseur of Chaos” (1938): “The pensive man ... He sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.” Stevens’ insistence on passion and delight in the beauty of nature prompts critics to classify him as a romantic – a classification he resists, for reasons that will be considered later.
An almost unique consideration of the problem of evil in Stevens’ canon is the Second World War poem “Esthétique du Mal” (1944), in which he portrays the bleakness of a world without God:
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
This is the sky divested of its fountains. (IX)
But, unlike Russell, Stevens does not strike the heroic attitude of an “unyielding Atlas” sustaining a world that “his own ideas” have fashioned. Instead he closes the poem by questioning the adequacy of the human imagination to people the world, implying that whatever is beyond the human is more compatible with humanity than Russell’s “trampling march of unconscious power”:
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live. (XV)
Although Stevens was not a reader of Bradley, his notion that we are embedded in a world with which our minds and bodies are compatible is consistent with Bradley’s view of human beings as finite centres embedded in the infinite Absolute. All of Stevens’ poetry expresses that sense of creative participation in the world not of our own making, but to which we belong.
So far as I can discover, Stevens did not read “The Free Man’s Worship,” but he refers to Russell’s Inquiry into Meaning and Truth in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.”13 And he did share Eliot’s ambivalent relation with Humanism. As a Harvard man, he could hardly have avoided it. Stevens bought an edition of Arnold’s Notebooks several years after his graduation, and there is a well-marked copy of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism from Stevens’ library at the Huntington.14 Stevens shared a citation from Arnold’s Notebooks with his wife, Elsie, in a letter of 9 April 1907 that captures beautifully Stevens’ poetic personality: “Yesterday I bought a little volume called the ‘Note Books’ of Matthew Arnold. It is made up of quotations jotted down by him from day to day, and of lists of books to be read at various times. The quotations are in a half-dozen different languages ... Here is a Latin one: ‘Angelica hilaritas cum monastica simplicitate;’ and here is what I guess it to mean: ‘Angelic hilarity with monastic simplicity’” (Letters 101). I can think of no better description of Stevens’ poetry at its best.
That Stevens once held a positive view of Arnold’s Humanism is confirmed in a letter to Barbara Church, written late in his life. The occasion was his purchase of a more complete edition of Arnold’s Notebooks in 1953 (apparently having mislaid the one he bought in 1907). On re-reading Arnold, he discovered that he no longer belonged to the Arnoldian “church”: “I used to have a book containing a collection of aphorisms on which Matthew Arnold’s soul depended. Recently his entire collection of notebooks was published. I started to read them as I once read the lesser volume but lost interest. One good saying is a great deal; but ten good sayings are not worth anything at all. Anyhow, it may be that I don’t belong to that church anymore, or that I don’t care for conversation with that particular set of gods; nor perhaps, with any” (8 June 1953. Letters 780. My emphasis). It is the failure to celebrate an intimate and emotional engagement with a world friendly to man that Stevens finds unsatisfactory in Arnold, and in Humanism generally. As we have seen, Russell’s version is even bleaker than Arnold’s. For Russell it is the bleakness of the world that justifies the generation of sunnier fantasies – a kind of whistling in the dark, as Eliot characterized it. Stevens would not concede that his sunny portrayal of the world is merely an avoidance of a cosmos devoid of God. It was for him a celebration of mankind’s kinship with the cosmos.
“Sunday Morning,” one of Stevens’ most celebrated poems, is a case in point. It was finished by June of 1915 (Buttell 63). While trench warfare was in full swing by that date, the terrible blood baths of Verdun and the Somme were still in the future. Although the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania by a German U-boat had occurred in May of 1915, “Sunday Morning” reflects nothing of the war. Stevens had previously written “Phases,” which is a war poem. It is a sequence of eleven poems, four of which had been published in a Poetry Magazine issue entitled “Poems of War” the previous November. Stevens did not republish it, but it was reconstructed by Milton Bates in Opus Posthumous. Bates sees “Phases” as a sort of precursor of “Sunday Morning,” largely on the grounds that both poems strike a Humanist attitude toward religious belief, although he does not use the term “Humanist” (231–41). Nonetheless, his assessment that “both poems indicate that the conception of a heaven has lost its validity” (232) amounts to reading them as expressing a Humanist view. The full sequence vacillates among three stools: celebration of the heroism of the soldier, dismay at suffering and death, and pious sentiments on the futility and brutality of war. Poem V, for example, attempts to celebrate the soldier’s heroism, while simultaneously bemoaning the senseless loss of life:
Death’s nobility again
Beautified the simplest men
Fallen Winkle felt the pride
Of Agamemnon
When he died.
What could London’s
Work and waste
Give him –
To that salty, sacrificial taste?
What could London’s
Sorrow bring –
To that short, triumphant sting? (OP 10–11)
As Bates makes clear, “Phases” is not a very successful poem: “What is intended to be clear is not; what is intended to be highly charged poetry is heavy-handed ... What is meant to be impressive and shocking often becomes melodramatic” (239). Perhaps “Sunday Morning” succeeds where “Phases” fails just because it ignores the war. After all, as a non-combatant living in a country not participating in the war, Stevens had little hope of saying anything of interest about something as unprecedented as the slaughter of trench warfare. Allusions to Homer or Aeschylus hardly meet the need.
“Sunday Morning” is the first poem in which Stevens’ mature voice appears. Rather than being a meditation on war and death in the absence of God, like “Phases,” “Sunday Morning” is a meditation on living well and pleasantly without God. It is organized as a colloquy between a woman and the poet – perhaps dimly echoing conversations Wallace might have had with Elsie – and it expresses a hedonistic version of Humanism, pitting pleasure against worship and giving the palm to pleasure. In Part I the woman in the poem, lounging in her peignoir on a Sunday morning, feels some twinges of guilt at the pleasure she takes in “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” when she ought to be attending church service, “The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.” Perhaps made somnolent by the sun and coffee and oranges, she dreams of “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.”
In Part II the poet attempts to reassure her that she is doing no wrong, since enjoying the sun is just as pious as listening to stories of Palestine:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
....
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
A more succinct and eloquent statement of Humanism as it emerges from Russell’s “The Free Man’s Worship” would be hard to find.
Stevens expressed a similar Humanist perspective in a less celebrated poem published six years later, the somewhat opaque “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Fortunately, Stevens glossed it for Alice Corbin Henderson, telling her “The bland old gentleman who does the talking to the bland and credulous old ladies about him, with whom he is having tea anywhere – at the Palaz of Hoon if you like, is simply explaining everybody in terms of himself” (27 March 1942 in Kermode, ed. 937–8). As with “Sunday Morning,” we have a male lecturing a female audience – though here the women are not permitted any response. The bland old gentleman claims attributes that are normally reserved for divinities – an aggrandizement of the human very much within the Humanist creed:
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.15
The lines “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself” anticipate “Key West,” another thirteen years on, and also echo Eliot’s paraphrase of Bradley previously cited, but worth repeating here: “We have the right to say that the world is a construction. Not to say that it is my construction, for in that way “I” am as much “my” construction as the world is ... the world is a construction out of finite centres16 ... Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself” (Knowledge and Experience 166. My emphasis). As we shall see, the female singer in “Key West” is not as autonomous as the male lecturer in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” which reflects Stevens’ gradual movement away from Humanism toward his own subtle creed.
In Part III of “Sunday Morning,” we have a compressed history of religion from paganism (“Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth”) to Christianity (“Until our blood, commingling, virginal, / With heaven, brought such requital to desire / The very hinds discerned it, in a star.”) But then the speaker asks the Humanist’s question: “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise? And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know?” He does not immediately answer, but promises instead that if we give up our illusion of a transcendent divinity, “The sky will be much friendlier then than now, ... Not this dividing and indifferent blue.”
In Part IV, the woman initially expresses contentment with this new-found Humanist freedom to revel in the innocent pleasures of the world, but then backslides:
“I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
The poet’s response is fully Humanistic. After recapitulating the shattered illusions of myth and religion, he reassures the woman that the birds will endure longer than those illusions:
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures;
But he almost gives away the game in the continuation, which equates the persistence of the natural world with the rather more transient persistence of her memory and desire, thereby risking the woman’s metamorphosis into a Proustian recluse:
or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
Rather irritatingly, the woman is not quieted by these observations, and wants still more reassurance: “But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss.” The speaker responds with a little more male flattery: “Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires.” The comfort he offers this querulous woman, then, is that impermanence is the price of beauty. He (rather manipulatively) appeals to her femininity by invoking the romance of courtship and dalliance: “She causes boys to pile new plums and pears / On disregarded plate. The maidens taste / And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.”
The queries with which Part V begins are not placed within quotation marks, but surely they are intended to be the woman’s questions, whether spoken by her or anticipated by the increasingly controlling male interlocutor: “Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging?” This is the issue Keats had addressed in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” His view was that although “heard melodies are sweet, those unheard / Are sweeter still.” The view of the poet of “Sunday Morning” is quite different:
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
The term “mystical” is certainly not one a Humanist would use. It is recurrent in Stevens’ prose and poetry, and will be discussed later; here, I think it reasonable to read “mystical” as meaning simply “mysterious.”
In Part VII, the poet seems to forget about his complaining female interlocutor, and waxes enthusiastic about some sort of ritual – apparently pagan, pantheistic, and homo-erotic:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
The female interlocutor is twentieth-century, middle-class, and clothed; she is sitting quietly in a sunny chair worrying about her neglect of religious duties. In contrast, the men in Part VII are antique, primitive, and naked. Far from worrying about the silence of “Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” they are in a state of transport induced by a Nietzschean dance of cosmic participation:
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
The woman is solitary, but the men “shall know well the heavenly fellowship / Of men that perish and of summer morn.” No doubt Stevens is thinking of natural, non-violent death, but the date of the poem obtrudes once again, for men were dying in their thousands on the fields of France and Belgium and in Gallipoli when the poem was published. English poets – some of them – were still celebrating death in combat as dulce et decorum, though that sentiment soon disappeared. But, perishing aside, these lines clearly celebrate boisterous male fellowship in contrast to the mild pleasures of the solitary female’s tea and oranges.
The picture of men consorting with the gods is one that sticks with Stevens. When he spoke of the disappearance of the gods in his Mount Holyoke talk of 28 April 1951, it was as if they were real entities that had once existed: “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; not as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.” “It left us,” he said, “feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents.” In a charming and puzzling note he adds: “What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth” (Opus Posthumous 260).
Such nostalgia for something that Stevens is well aware has never existed is extraordinary, but very characteristic of Stevens’ imagination, and of American Humanism as well, which, despite its programmatic atheism, never lost the habit of reverence. Indeed it was not uncommon for its proponents to revert to Christianity as Paul Elmore More did – perhaps the most prominent American Humanist to do so – and as Eliot (and maybe Stevens, too) did. But if the poet feels this nostalgia – despite the advice he gives the woman – she is not permitted such an indulgence. The last section introduces a third, unmistakably Humanist, voice:
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
There is no ambivalence here. Christ’s tomb still contains his bones. There has been no resurrection, hence no salvation, no heaven or paradise. Instead:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
In short we are “dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents,” just as Stevens said thirty-six years later in the Mount Holyoke talk cited above.17
The consolation provided by the poem is very different than that provided by Keats’ famous and gnomic closing lines to “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Instead, Stevens gives us a celebration of the sights, sounds, and tastes of nature – alive and active:
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
The last three lines are truly magical, but what do they tell us? Only the Humanist’s sceptical conviction that we know nothing of what awaits us beyond the grave.
Stevens underwent no life-altering experiences during the First World War such as those Eliot experienced with his marriage and his flirtation with Russell’s Humanism. No doubt Stevens’ age was a factor in the comparative equanimity with which he responded to the First World War. He was just shy of his thirty-fifth birthday when war broke out in August 1914, an age at which a man might be expected to have found his way. (At thirty-eight, Eliot was only a little older when baptized into the Anglican faith.) Nonetheless, Stevens was not unaffected by the war. “Phases” was an unsuccessful attempt to deal with the war in poetry and “Lettres d’un Soldat” represents a second attempt. Stevens was unhappy with both.
“Lettres d’un Soldat” was published – though in a truncated form – in Poetry in May of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. That he did not submit the whole sequence and did not include even that abbreviated version in the first (1923) edition of Harmonium are good grounds for concluding that he did not regard the sequence as a success. When he did print four poems from it in the 1931 reissue of Harmonium, he did not identify them as part of “Lettres d’un Soldat.” They are “The Death of a Soldier,” “Negation,” “The Surprises of the Superhuman,” and “Lunar Paraphrase.” They have all been retained in Collected Poems. The full sequence was first published in Opus Posthumous.
“Lettres d’un Soldat” is much more intimately connected to the soldier’s combat experience than anything Eliot wrote, being based on the letters of a French sergeant, Eugène Emmanuel Lemercier, whose letters from the front to his mother were published posthumously in 1916 as Lettres d’un Soldat. They are characterized by a Catholic piety to which Lemercier appeals in his effort to come to terms with the death, destruction, and suffering that he sees all around him. In his study of the sequence, Glen MacLeod concludes that Stevens was unable to reconcile Lemercier’s Catholic faith with his own agnosticism so that “the series as a whole, trails off into dull irresolution. Not only Lemercier’s faith, but Stevens’ imaginative energy seems to have faltered before the terrible reality of war” (MacLeod 1981 52). While I agree that the sequence highlights Stevens’ disconnect from Lemercier’s Catholic piety, it seems to me that it is marked more by a mockery of that piety than by a failure to reconcile it with Stevens’ agnosticism. On my reading, the sequence is characterized by a Humanist mocking of Christian piety not unlike Eliot’s ridicule of Christianity in “The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.”
Lemercier’s letters are strongly marked by the pious acceptance of death and injury as Christian sacrifice, a position adopted by both sides in the war in an effort to sanctify the outrageous slaughter of young men in futile battle after futile battle. It seems that Stevens came to realize that the anti-war and anti-Christian sentiment of “Lettres d’un Soldat” was inappropriate in wartime – especially after the United States declared war on Germany and Austria on 6 April 1917. And after the armistice, there was no longer any need for a sequence whose motivation was primarily anti-war.
As published in Opus Posthumous, “Lettres d’un Soldat” is provided with an epigraph in French drawn from André Chévrillon’s introduction to the original edition of the letters. The epigraph is a paraphrase of a passage from the Baghavad-gita in which the god Krishna prepares the hero Arjuna for battle. It is the same passage to which Eliot alludes in Dry Salvages III, written during the Second World War. Chevrillon’s paraphrase stresses that the soldier must battle beside his comrades without hope of glory or profit, but simply because that is the law. For readers of Stevens’ poetry sequence, it emphazises the state’s requirement of mindless obedience from its citizens, an obedience sanctioned by religion, but not by Stevens.
Eliot alludes to the following more encouraging – and more mystical – part of Krishna’s speech: “Whosoever at the time of his death thinks only of Me, and thinking thus leaves the body and goes forth, assuredly he will know Me. On whatever sphere of being the mind of man may be intent at the time of death, thither will he go. Therefore meditate always on Me, and fight; if thy mind and thy reason be fixed on Me, to me shall thou surely come.” In Dry Salvages Eliot picks up “goes forth,” rendering it as “fare forward”:
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
Chevrillon’s point was that the soldier must “do or die” and not ask questions. Eliot’s point is quite different, and could be paraphrased as follows: although we cannot know the future, we must nonetheless make choices, and the correct choice may not appear to be in our own interest. However, both Chevrillon and Eliot are both motivated by the desire to boost the morale of fighting men during war.
Stevens provides an extract from Lemercier’s letters as an epigraph for each poem, which then paraphrases the sentiment of the extract; most poems also comment on the epigraph. The very first poem sets the tone of ridicule of the wartime sanctification of sacrifice and death. Lemercier has just joined the army and is looking forward to the adventure: “7 septembre: ... Nous sommes embarqués dans l’aventure, sans aucune sensation dominante, sauf peut-être une acceptation assez belle de la fatalité” [7 September ... We are embarked on the adventure, without any dominant feeling, except perhaps a quite beautiful acceptance of a bad outcome.] Lemercier was an enlisted man, a sergeant, so Stevens titles the poem “Common Soldier.” It sets the ironic tone of the sequence by presenting Lemercier’s naïve acceptance of his Catholic and patriotic upbringing with ironic detachment:
No introspective chaos ... I accept
War, too, although I do not understand.
And that, then, is my final aphorism.
I have been pupil under bishop’s rods
And got my learning from the orthodox.
I mark the virtue of the common-place.
I take all things as stated – so and so
Of men and earth: I quote the line and page,
I quote the very phrase my masters used.
If I should fall, as soldier, I know well
The final pulse of blood from this good heart
Would taste, precisely, as they said it would.
Although Stevens makes no comment in this poem, his ironic detachment from the naïveté of the sentiment is inescapable.
The poems from the sequence reprinted in the second edition of Harmonium lack the epigraphs and any other indication of their connection to Lemercier and the First War. These omissions render them even more cryptic than they were in the context of the sequence. The first of them, “Death of a Soldier,” (XI in Opus Posthumous) had no title as published in Poetry. It mocks the notion of redemptive sacrifice:
Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.
Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops.
The missing epigraph is from Lemercier’s letter of 5 March: “La mort du soldat est près des choses naturelles.” [The death of a soldier is an almost natural thing.] The first strophe restates the epigraph in English, followed by the sardonic observation that dead soldiers, unlike Christ, do not rise again: “He does not become a three-days personage.” The last two strophes, then, represent a rejection of Lemercier’s touching Catholic faith. The sentiment that “Death is absolute and without memorial” contrasts with the easy optimism of “Sunday Morning,” where death is characterized as “the mother of beauty.” The difference between the treatment of death in “Sunday Morning” and “Lettres d’un soldat” marks the watershed in the perception of death that the horrors of the First War represents.
Poem III, entitled “Anecdotal Reverie,” was not included in Harmonium. It is perhaps the most uncompromisingly anti-war poem of the sequence. Its epigraph, from the letter of 22 October, is unusually bloodthirsty: “Ce qu’il faut, c’est reconnaître l’amour et la beauté triomphante de toute violence.” [What is necessary is to recognize love and triumphant beauty in all violence.] The poem is broadly allegorical. It describes a crowd of blind men on a street engaged in ordinary daily activities. Stevens introduces a speaker into this scene:
Am I to pick my way
Through these crickets? –
I, that have a head
In the bag
Slung over my shoulder?
I have secrets
That prick
Like a heart full of pins.
Permit me, gentlemen,
I have killed the mayor,
And am escaping from you.
Get out of the way!
(The blind men strike him down with their sticks.)
The blind crowd must represent the French people who are blindly following their leaders into disaster. The speaker with the mayor’s head in a bag is more difficult to construe, but a reasonable candidate would be the military and civilian leaders who had decapitated the nation in their single-minded pursuit of the war. The final, parenthetic, line seems to suggest some sort of uprising against authority – which had of course happened in Russia in October 1917.
“Negation,” IX in Opus Posthumous with the same title, is the second poem retained in Harmonium. It speaks – uncharacteristically for Stevens – of divine indifference to human suffering. Its epigraph is from Lemercier’s letter of 15 January: “La seul sanction pour moi est ma conscience. Il faut nous confier à une justice impersonnelle, indépendante de tout facteur humain, et à une destinée utile et harmonieuse malgré toute horreur de forme” [The only justification for me is my conscience. We must put our confidence in an impersonal justice, independent of all human factors, and in a useful and harmonious destiny despite every present horror.] In a Humanist spirit, the poem mocks Lemercier’s pious belief in an “impersonal justice”:
Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter’s thumb.
This “creator” is a resemblant of Russell’s “Nature, omnipotent but blind,” though more poetic, for he is anthropomorphized as a “vague idealist overwhelmed / By an afflatus,” and as a “meticulous potter” – a reminiscence of the account in Genesis of God fashioning Adam from clay. For Him, human beings are just “intermediate parts, / Horrors, falsities and wrongs” left behind as He struggles toward “his harmonious whole.” Such a god could easily comment at the end of the play – as Russell’s does – “‘Yes ... it was a good play; I will have it performed again’” (Philosophical Essays 60).
The next poem that Stevens preserves in Harmonium is “The Surprises of the Superhuman,” VI in Opus Posthumous, where it has the same Nietzschean title. Its epigraph is from a letter of November 26: “J’ai la ferme espérance, mais surtout j’ai confiance en le justice éternel, quelque surprise qu’elle cause à l’humaine idée que nous en avons.” [I have a strong hope, but above all, I have confidence in eternal justice, however much it surprises our human ideas.] Once again Stevens mocks Lemercier’s faith in a benevolent God, despite the horrors he faces. The title “The Surprise of the Superhuman” inevitably invokes Nietzsche. It is the only poem of the sequence in rhyming couplets, and the only one that does not begin with a paraphrase of the epigraph from Lemercier.
The opening couplet seems to mock Republican France’s egalitarianism: “The palais de justice of chambermaids / Tops the horizon with its colonnades.” The next couplet implies the overthrow of that egalitarian justice in favour of the Nietzschean superman: “If it were lost in Übermenschlichkeit, / Perhaps our wretched state would soon come right.” There is no clear antecedent for “it,” but the most probable candidate is “the palais de justice.” If so, the sense is that the Nietzschean Superman would overthrow egalitarian principles. But the final couplet belies this reading, for now the courthouse is the creature of kings: “For somehow the brave dicta of its kings / Make more awry our faulty human things.” The message would seem to be that Lemercier’s faith in God and State – in “eternal justice” – is misplaced, for that so-called justice is in fact no more than “the brave dicta” of kings. Instead of ameliorating human suffering, they only make it worse: “Make more awry our faulty human things.”
“Lunar Paraphrase” (VII in Opus Posthumous) is the last of the poems from “Lettres d’un Soldat” published in Harmonium. It was not among those published in Poetry. The epigraph is from a letter dated “Morning of November 29, during quartering.” The epigraph is longer than most and also more lyrical: “Telle fut la beauté d’hier. Te parlerai-je des soirées précédentes, alors que sur la route, la lune me dessinait la broderie des arbres, le pathétique des calvaires, l’attendrissement de ces maisons que l’on sait des ruines, mais que la nuit fait surgir comme une évocation de la paix.” [How beautiful it was yesterday. Shall I tell you of the previous evenings, when, while on the road, the moon painted the embroidery of trees for me, the pathos of Calvaries, the softening of those houses one knew to be in ruins, but which the night made rise like an evocation of peace.]
As in the first two poems discussed, Stevens’ first line restates the theme of Lemercier’s letter: “The moon is the mother of pathos and pity,” and uses that line as book ends for the poem, repeating it after the following lines:
When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness –
Stevens goes well beyond Lemercier’s mere suggestion of Calvary, by evoking the crucified Christ and His mother as at the Nativity: “When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor, / Humanly near, and the figure of Mary, / Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter.” He then returns to Lemercier’s letter with the image of ruined houses bathed in moonlight, evoking a time of peace.
It is perhaps not surprising that Stevens and Harriet Monroe agreed to exclude this poem (Letters 205), since its ironic representation of Lemercier’s sentimental Christianity could give offense – especially while the war was still in progress. By 1931 wartime passions had subsided sufficiently to let these antiwar poems see the light of day in the reissue of Harmonium – albeit without any clear connection to the First War. Whatever motivated Stevens or Monroe to suppress some of the poems, it is clear that the sequence expresses an anti-Christian Humanism much more strident than the mild ridicule of the woman in “Sunday Morning.” But such Humanist ridicule of Christianity does not persist in Stevens’ poetry.
I do not know if Stevens read the war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, a genuine combatant and war protestor, whose poems express the bitterness that many felt about the seemingly pointless slaughter of young men in suicidal frontal assaults involving tens of thousands of infantrymen. One of his most anti-clerical and bitter poems is “They”:
The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back
‘They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought
‘In a just cause: they lead the last attack
‘On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
‘New right to breed an honourable race,
‘They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’
‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find
‘A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’
‘And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’
(Sassoon, Collected Poems 23–4)
Sassoon was a decorated war hero who decided that the war must be stopped. He believed that the killing was senseless, the battles fruitless, the suffering endless. As it happens, Bertrand Russell played a role in Sassoon’s drama as well as in Eliot’s, for Sassoon sought Russell’s help in composing a letter, to be read in parliament, in which he declared sentiments similar to those of the poem.
When the letter was read, in July of 1917, the government was appalled. Sassoon’s pacifism was all the more offensive because he was a decorated hero. To save the day, he was declared to be suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart, a military asylum in Scotland dedicated to the treatment of shell shock sufferers. Wilfrid Owen, another war poet, was a fellow patient. When declared cured, both men returned to the front. Sassoon survived, but Owen was killed in a pointless assault on the last day before the armistice. Sassoon’s poem “They” expresses his disgust with the role that religious leaders played in encouraging young men to go to war, a role that the French, German, Austrian, and Italian clergy played as fully as did the English.
Since Sassoon was – like Eliot – a regular at Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s estate near Oxford, in 1916 and early 1917, and since Sassoon’s letter written with Russell’s collaboration caused a great stir, one would have expected Eliot to be aware of him. However, the only reference to Sassoon that I have found is in a letter to Eleanor Hinkley of 31 October 1917 – months after Sassoon’s public protest. Eliot had been invited by Madame Vandervelde, the wife of a prominent Belgian Socialist politician, to participate in a poetry reading that would include Sassoon and his friend Robert Graves among others. The only name Eliot recognized was Sassoon’s: “What a poor lot they are! The only one who has any merit is a youth named Siegfried Sassoon (semitic) and his stuff is better politics than poetry” (Letters 205–6).18 That Eliot was unimpressed by Sassoon’s rather Georgian war poetry is understandable, but his apparent ignorance of Sassoon’s notoriety despite his intimacy with Russell at the time is as good an indication of Eliot’s detachment from the passions of the war as we are likely to find.
It is unlikely, then, that Eliot’s anti-Christian posture during the war had anything to do with the unedifying spectacle of religious leaders on both sides appealing to God to bless their troops and procure their triumph in battle. In contrast, Stevens’ “Lettres d’un Soldat” reflects a hostile reaction to the wartime sanctification of military death. Like Sassoon, Stevens regarded such clerical behaviour as deluded at best, and hypocritical at worst. He was aware, however, that it was insensitive to express such views when so many young men were dying on the battle field – not a few being American boys after their arrival in France at the end of June 1917. So, at least, his apology to Harriet Monroe in a letter of 8 April 1918 seems to indicate: “I’ve had the blooming horrors, following my gossip about death, at your house ... The subject absorbs me, but that is no excuse: there are too many people in the world, vitally involved, to whom it is infinitely more than a thing to think of. One forgets this. I wish with all my heart that it had never occurred, even carelessly” (Letters 206). While we do not know to what “gossip” Stevens is referring, it is reasonable to assume that Harriet Monroe’s reaction to Stevens’ apparently flippant comment about the habit of sanctifying death on the battlefield was a factor in Stevens’ decision to omit “Lettres d’un Soldat” from the first edition of Harmonium, and to include only four of the poems – without any clear indication of their connection with Lemercier – in the second edition.
It must be admitted that neither poet was especially preoccupied with the war – at least not as a fit subject for poetry. They both seem more concerned with the state of general belief or unbelief in contemporary society. The Eliot poems we have so far examined mock the absurdity of Christian dogma rather than the complicity of Christian clergy in the war, as does “Lettres d’un Soldat.” Even Eliot’s immediate postwar poems – “Gerontion” and The Waste Land – are devoid of explicit reference to the war, though both can be read as reactions to the war. Eliot’s denial that either poem was prompted by the general disillusionment in Western cultural values caused by the war is certainly to be believed, but at the same time, it is hardly credible that he was indifferent to the general mood in the immediate postwar.
The dilemma of the modern – the issue of belief and unbelief – is most carefully explored in philosophical discourse in which Eliot was well versed. That was not the case with Stevens, who cut short his Harvard education to take a law degree. It was not until late in his career that he began to investigate contemporary philosophical discourse. Unlike Eliot, Stevens has left no trace of an early interest in Bergson, but when he referred to him in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” a talk delivered at Mount Holyoke in August 1943, he approved of the views expressed in a late work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1933, trans. 1935), an examination of revealed religion. Taking Bergson’s characterization of religious inspiration as his model, Stevens claims: “We may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experience of the saints themselves. It is a question of the nature of the experience” (Kermode, ed. 674). Stevens seems to be claiming as much for the poet as William Blake, Robert Graves, or Ted Hughes would do. However, his claim is actually the inverse. Instead of claiming the prestige of the saint or prophet for the poet, he would have us believe that the saint or prophet is merely a deluded poet: “If we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called ... if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed ... a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation” (Kermode, ed. 674. My emphasis).
Such sentiments are remote from anything Bergson would endorse, but they are entirely compatible with the avowedly Humanist posture Middleton Murry adopts in his debates with Eliot on Humanism: “The perception of reality which forms the basis of literature and plastic art should be the consummation of that conceptual apprehension of reality which is philosophy, and of that emotional apprehension of reality which is religion. To say that poetry is religion without supernaturalism and philosophy without abstraction is a summary statement easy enough to deride ... It is as necessary to a perfect science as it is fundamental to a pure poetry: it is an apprehension of the things which are as they are. What name it is to bear does not greatly matter” (“Concerning Intelligence” Criterion 6 529–39. My emphasis). And in another of his Criterion articles, Murry deliberately blurs the lines between religion and “Naturalism”: “Because this process of intimate purgation is necessary and inevitable to a naturalism that accepts its own implications, a complete Naturalism can fairly be called religious. But that is not the proper epithet; Naturalism is not religious, but it is completely spiritual. It replaces the hybrid combination of spirituality and morality, which is Religion, by a clean and perfect separation between them. It relegates morals to politics, and purifies spirituality to a quintessence” (“The Detachment of Naturalism” Criterion 9 659).
Murry is merely echoing the long-standing Romantic view of poetry articulated severally by Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley in the previous century – though they all posited a transcendent realm to which poets had access. Eliot was well aware of that provenance for Murry’s views, and had little sympathy with them: “When Mr. Murry makes poetry a substitute for philosophy and religion – a higher philosophy and a purer religion, he seems to me to falsify not only philosophy and religion, but poetry too” (“Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” Criterion 6 343).
Stevens, of course does not comment on Murry’s views, but his early use of the term “supreme fiction” in the opening lines of “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” a poem of 1922, would seem to conform precisely to Murry’s Humanist program:
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven.
Thus, The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
Stevens’ supreme fiction is of a piece with Russell’s injunction that mankind resolve “to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned,” as well as with Murry’s claim that “poetry is religion without supernaturalism and philosophy without abstraction.” Eliot proved unwilling or unable to live as a “Free Man,” to rest in a condition of uncertainty, without a positive faith. Stevens, in contrast – his alleged deathbed conversion aside – seems to have been quite capable, and even content, to live as a “Free Man.” One of the reasons Stevens could rest content with a Humanist ethic and Eliot could not is to be found in their different attitudes toward sin and transgression. The terms “sin” and “evil” seldom appear in Stevens’ poetry, prose, or correspondence. Eliot, as already noted, had a very robust sense of sin and a corresponding belief in evil.
In the Chorus for The Rock, Eliot speaks of the “perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.” In a swipe at the “immorality” of Humanism, he has the women of the chorus complain that the Church “tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.” Similarly he mocks the utopian dreams of Communists and Fabian socialists like Russell and the Webbs by having the women of the chorus seeking to escape “From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
Here Eliot reveals his bias – that virtue is the avoidance of sin, the resistance to temptation, as much as, or more than, acts that bring solace, comfort, or joy to others. Further evidence of that attitude is to be found in his May 1927 review of Arthur Symons’ Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry. There Eliot castigates Symons and the whole English aesthetic movement for its inadequate sense of evil: “What is right in Mr. Symons’ account is the impression it gives that Baudelaire was primarily occupied with religious values. What is wrong is the childish attitude of the ‘nineties toward religion, the belief – which is no more than the game of children dressing up and playing at being grown-ups – that there is a religion of Evil, or Vice, or Sin. Swinburne knew nothing about Evil, or Vice, or Sin – if he had known anything he would not have had so much fun out of it” (For Lancelot Andrewes 92). These remarks appeared just a month before his baptism in June of 1927. And as an Anglican, in Second Thoughts about Humanism (1929), he praised T.E. Hulme’s insistence on the reality of sin and evil: “It is to the immense credit of Hulme that he found out for himself that there is an absolute to which Man can never attain.” And Eliot cites Hulme to the effect that the denial of sin is the hallmark of both romanticism and Humanism: “For the modern humanist, as for the romantic, ‘the problem of evil disappears, the conception of sin disappears’” (Selected Essays 490).
Stevens’ posture was very different. We have to look far and wide in his discourse to find any direct commentary on the issue of sin and evil. A strong indication that he does not believe in an entity called “evil” operating in human affairs is found in his reaction to Delmore Schwartz’s Vaudeville for a Princess: “To say that only the peasant desires happiness and that the evil man does evil as a dog barks overlooks the idea that the Drang nach den Gut [yearning for good] is really not much different from the Drang nach the opposite. You are fascinated by evil. I cannot see that this fascination has anything of the fascination by good. A bird singing in the sun is the same thing as a dog barking in the dark, again, your antithesis between evil on one hand and thought and art on the other involves quite other ideas” (9 October 1950 Letters 693). Stevens’ preference for the celebration of “the good” is perhaps a residue of his early Humanism, but, on the other hand, his rejection of Schwartz’s Humanist notion that art and thought can cure evil is a measure of his distance from that creed.
The First World War was not a war in which it was easy to identify evil with one side and good with the other. The propaganda of the combatants certainly portrayed the other side as evil, but when the shooting ended, it was not at all clear where the burden of virtue lay. In that respect the “Great War” was very different from its successor, for the evil of the Nazi regime was clear to all. When the First War ended in 1918, there was a general sense that the world stood at the end of an era, but here was no clear vision of what would follow the collapse of the ancien régime. Although the massive dying had led to an efflorescence of Spiritualism among many of the traumatized survivors, the war tended on the whole to confirm the widespread conviction in Europe that Christianity was bankrupt; that it was not adequate for the twentieth century. While Humanists and Socialists alike welcomed the increased disenchantment with Christianity, many others were troubled by it – Eliot among them.
Eliot’s expression of that troubled state of mind and heart in “Gerontion” and The Waste Land made him the accidental spokesman for postwar scepticism. “Gerontion” belongs to the period just at the end of the war when Eliot was under great strain because of several factors: his troubled marriage, his uncertain economic prospects, and – above all, I think – his uncertainty about what belief system would meet his emotional needs. We can date its composition fairly precisely, for he sent a copy of it separately to Mary Hutchinson and to John Rodker in early July of 1919. He told Hutchinson that he did not “feel at all satisfied with it” and contrasted it to “Dans le Restaurant,” “Bleistein with a Baedeker,” “Sweeney Erect,” and “A Cooking Egg” as a “new one” (Letters 311 and 312). He also gave Sydney Schiff a copy, cautioning him in a letter of 21 July 1919: “I don’t want anyone to see it but yourself” (Letters 322). It seems safe, then, to date its composition as May or June 1919. We know that he had intended to use it as a sort of preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of that plan by Ezra Pound (Letters 505).
In a 1958 interview with Helen Gardner, Eliot provided her with a somewhat idealized version of the emotional and aesthetic genesis of those poems: “He said that when he came to Europe he became interested in philosophy and did not feel any urge to write poetry.19 Then he began to write little poems in French for amusement, and ‘that,’ he said, ‘got me going again and led to poems like “The Hippopotamus.”‘ Pound’s encouragement and the reading he was doing in the minor Elizabethan dramatists led to ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land.’ ‘They go together,’ he said, and came out of a blend of personal feeling, experience and new reading’” (Gardner 1958 8). About the only aspect of these remarks that can be taken at face value is that “Gerontion” and The Waste Land belong together. Jewel Spears Brooker once thought that “by the time Eliot finished ‘Gerontion,’ he had become disillusioned with most religious substitutes” (Brooker in Olney 51). But on second thought she comes around to my view, attributing the poem’s negativity to the war: “‘The general grimness in ‘Gerontion,’ often attributed to Eliot’s philosophic negativism, is more directly related to a despondency regarding the history of Western civilization, a despondency shared by the most intelligent and sensitive people of his generation ... The unprecedented catastrophe that led to Versailles had destroyed not only the people and the land, but the culture and institutions of Europe” (Mastery and Escape 101).
Unfortunately for Brooker and myself, Eliot has repeatedly denied that “Gerontion” and The Waste Land were prompted by the war, perhaps most categorically in the remark recorded by his brother, Henry Ware Eliot: “Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling” (Cited in the TWL Facsimile 1). While we must take such a private and off-hand remark, reported second hand, with a grain of salt, there is little evidence to support the assumption of its early readers that The Waste Land expresses the disillusionment that the war caused in so many. The despondency of “most intelligent and sensitive people of his generation” was prompted by disillusionment with the prevailing liberal/democratic faith in progress, a faith in which Eliot had never participated. The cultural and political pessimism these poems express has its roots, I believe, in Eliot’s failure to find a faith in a faithless world. In particular, it was his disillusionment with Russell himself and with Russell’s Humanism – in which he had placed so much hope – that prompted the bleak mood of these poems. That “personal grouse” was felt far more acutely by Eliot than was the war and its aftermath – though those world historical events cannot be written out of the story entirely.
Like virtually all of the poems Eliot wrote during and shortly after the war, “Gerontion” is radically opaque. All that is clear is that the postwar poems address the problem of evil and sin – however tangentially. The epigraph from Measure to Measure introduces a motif of cruel deception, for it is spoken by Duke Vincentio, disguised as a friar, to the young lover, Claudio. The duke himself has condemned Claudio to death for having breached an obscure and seldom applied law governing sexual communication. Claudio’s sin was to have got his fiancée, Juliette, with child. The disguised Vincentio offers the condemned Claudio cold comfort:
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
The cruel epigraph contextualizes the reverie of the eponymous “old man,” Gerontion. Eliot’s earlier poetic personae had all been young men who could reasonably be identified with the author. Consequently he took a good deal of criticism for apparently masquerading as an old man when he was only in his thirty-first year. The complaint may seem naïve – or malicious – but his decision to speak through an old man is a departure, and therefore worth noting. Eliot’s generic old man looks back on his life as one without purpose, without issue, and without heroic endeavour:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
Eliot may have been expressing some embarrassment at his own avoidance of combat. A little more than a year after writing “Gerontion,” (20 June 1920), he wrote to Herbert Read – a veteran of combat of about his own age – on Read’s collection of war diaries and poems, Naked Warriors. He had acknowledged receipt of it in March of the previous year (Letters 278), but had not yet offered any comment.
He was careful to explain to Read, whom he knew only slightly at this date, his own non-combatant status: “Not having had that experience myself – I speak not from extreme age but from the advantage or disadvantage of a C2 rating which kept me out of the army – I have been a disinterested spectator of the struggles of others with war and peace” (Letters 386).
After the old man’s admission of his non-combatant status, he turns to complain of his lodgings in lines infamous for their anti-Semitic cast:
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
It is worth noting that Eliot sent this poem to Sydney Schiff and John Rodker – both of whom were Jewish – for their opinion. It is difficult to decide whether that detail is evidence of Eliot’s spectacular insensitivity to others’ feelings or of his confidence that the “symbolic” nature of the reference rendered it inoffensive.
Sydney Schiff, who had largely replaced Russell in Tom and Vivien’s life at this time, was himself a wealthy non-observant Jew. His second wife, Violet Bedlington, was a member of a prominent Anglo-Jewish family and a well-known literary hostess. They kept an apartment in Paris and were friends of Marcel Proust. Schiff had published (in 1919) “Bleistein with a Baedeker,” another of Eliot’s poems that exhibited anti-Semitic sentiments. Schiff accepted it for publication as guest editor of Art and Letters, a journal founded by Herbert Read and Frank Rutter, for which he was the financial “angel.” His response to “Gerontion” has not survived, but there is no indication in Eliot’s acknowledgment of his comments that he registered any objection to the portrayal of Bleistein in the poem: “I am appreciative of your careful study of ‘Gerontion’ and shd be glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it” (Letters 324).
That Schiff did not take offence may simply qualify him for a dismissive characterization as a self-hating Jew, but alternative explanations are possible. The most obvious is that the “Jew” stands as a well-worn synecdoche for the deracinated European financier and war profiteer. Of course, it is impossible for post-Holocaust readers not to find such a synecdoche offensive, but such casual anti-Semitism seems to have been tolerated prior to the Nazi atrocities. Eliot’s Jewish landlord conforms to the cliché of the wealthy Jew, but we should remember that the Jew was also synecdochic of the free-thinking Humanist. Thus Gerontion’s landlord is not just the wealthy Jew, but a post-Christian free thinker, as well as a deracinated cosmopolite.20 A still further possible reading is that the decayed house in which Gerontion resides is to be read as Christianity, which can be thought of as inhabiting a theological house borrowed – though not rented – from Judaism. But even with all of this symbolic moderation of the lines, we are left with an offensive portrayal of the Jew as squatting, as suffering from skin infections (no doubt resulting from poor hygiene), and as being of low social origin – probably born out of wedlock, given that he was “spawned” in an “estaminet,” that is, a tavern. The savagery of the portrayal of the landlord is so egregious, and so like hard-core anti-Semitic portrayals of the Jew, that it is difficult to put that component aside. There is ample evidence that Eliot harboured anti-Semitic sentiments, but he was never a virulent anti-Semite as his friend Ezra Pound became.21
What is of interest for the current discussion is not so much the portrayal of the Jew in the poem as the portrayal of Christianity. Does the poem foreshadow Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism eight years later? Or does it merely express a disillusionment with Humanism as a substitute for Christianity – a disillusionment that might have been occasioned by his discovery of Russell’s misbehaviour with Vivien (if, indeed, he did discover it)? The latter hypothesis is given some credence by the introduction of the motif of sexual transgression – as well as the futility of human existence – through the epigraph from Measure for Measure.
Eliot also had considered a passage from the last canto of the Inferno, XXXIII as an alternative epigraph (Inventions 349). In that canto Dante meets the souls of treacherous murderers, among them Friar Alberigo, who had invited his brother and nephew to a banquet so as to kill them for some unspecified offence. The epigraph was: “Ed elli a me: ‘Come ‘l mio corpo stea / nel mondo sù, nulla scïenza porto’.” (ll. 121–2) [And he to me: How my body fares in the world I have no knowledge.] These words are a response to Dante’s query, “Are you dead already?” Alberigo goes on to explain that in some cases the soul descends to Hell even before the body dies. A devil takes over the body for the duration of its time on earth. It is tempting to read this epigraph as an allusion to Russell’s devilish behaviour with Vivien. Like the epigraph from Measure for Measure, it highlights deception and treachery, but unlike it, does not direct the reader toward the futility of life without belief. By substituting Shakespeare’s Duke Vincentio for Dante’s Friar Alberigo, Eliot replaces a duplicitous cleric with a cruelly manipulative ruler, as well as introducing the motif of lost faith, which was not suggested by the epigraph from Dante.
One plausible – but perhaps excessively biographical – explanation of the egregious animus of Eliot’s portrayal of the Jewish landlord would be that it was prompted by his displeasure at the conclusion of the arrangement he and Vivien had enjoyed with Russell in their joint rental of a cottage at Marlow. In the summer of 1918, Russell finally broke with Vivien – and Eliot could hardly have failed to notice the change in their relationship, especially after Russell informed the Eliots – in August of 1918 – that he no longer wished to continue sharing the rent. He asked them to return his furniture to his London flat, a request they fulfilled – perhaps deliberately – very slowly (Monk Spirit 539 and 544–5). Clearly Russell cannot be the Jewish landlord of the poem. He was neither Jewish, nor the Eliot’s landlord at Marlow. Nonetheless Russell’s withdrawal from the arrangement was precipitate, accompanied by justified bad feelings, and was financially embarrassing for the Eliots – all of which might be seen as feeding Eliot’s bad temper, even though the anger is misdirected toward a convenient scapegoat.
On a less autobiographical tack, if the Jewish landlord is taken to symbolize the Hebraic origins of Christianity, the subsequent lines addressing Christian motifs are susceptible of a fully ironic reading:
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
It has been common to read these lines as foreshadowing Eliot’s conversion eight years later, but I have always been troubled by that interpretation. The Pharisees’ request for a sign in Matthew xii: 38 reflects their denial of Christ’s divinity. It was occasioned by Christ engaging in activities forbidden by the Mosaic Law – performing miracles and dining on the Sabbath. His behaviour scandalized the Pharisees, who accused Him of performing miracles by the power of Satan. Unsatisfied with His answer (which was to challenge the authority of the Mosaic Law), they asked for a sign – confident that it would not be forthcoming; nor was it. Instead of providing a sign Christ castigated them for their lack of faith: “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it” (Matthew 12: 39). Would it be too much to suggest that Christ’s characterization of his accusers as an “adulterous generation” might have struck a chord with Eliot?
The whole passage is derived from Lancelot Andrewes’ Christmas day sermon for 1618. Andrewes’ scriptural text is not Matthew, but Luke 2:12–14: “And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will towards men.” In addition Andrewes cites the unbelief of the Pharisees as recounted in Matthew in the body of the sermon:
Signs are taken for wonders. “Master, we would fain see a sign,” that is a miracle. And in this sense it is a sign to wonder at. Indeed, every word here is a wonder. To bring forth an infant; Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word; 1. a wonder sure. 2. And the sparganismoj [Greek: “swaddling”], swaddled; and that a wonder too. “He,” that (as in the thirty-eighth of Job he saith) “taketh the vast body of the main sea, turns it to and fro, as a little child, and rolls it about with the swaddling bands of darkness;” He to come thus into clouts, Himself! (Project Canterbury, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Lancelot Andrewes Works, Sermons, I 204)
For Andrewes, the “sign” had long preceded the Pharisees’ request, for it was Christ’s miraculous birth that was the sign, rather than those miracles performed by the adult Christ which offended the Pharisees.
The lines that follow are not inspired by Andrewes. They invoke Christ’s Resurrection at Easter – albeit a rather late Easter, since the latest possible date for Easter is 25 April – and the Christian communion service, which Anglicans understand as ingesting the body and blood of Christ, magically consubstantiated in the bread and wine by the officiating priest:
In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers;
I have never seen any satisfactory gloss on Eliot’s characterization of Christ as a tiger. The handbooks’ reference to Blake’s “Tiger” does not carry conviction. Blake’s tiger is not Christ, but a synecdoche for God’s creation: “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Moreover, Eliot’s evocation of the Eucharist is irreverent. It seems designed to remind his readers of Sir James Frazer’s demonstration in The Golden Bough that the Communion Mass is a survival of ritual cannibalism among pagans.
We know that Eliot read Frazer as early as 1913,22 and he invoked The Golden Bough – along with Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance – as a work informing the structure of The Waste Land: “To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” Although Frazer was cautious about drawing the inference that the Christian mass is a survival of the barbaric and superstitious practice of ritual cannibalism, it is clear that the tendency of his study is to discredit the communion rite. The following is one of the more forthright passages – from the 1922 abridgment of the multi-volume work:
It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity. “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus,” says Cicero, “we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?” (Frazer, 498–9)23
“Gerontion” follows the sardonic reference to the communion rite with a rather motley collection of communicants:
by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
It is difficult to be confident of how we are to read these lines. That the names are all non-British (Japanese, Swedish, and German) in an English language poem suggests a cosmopolitan “congregation.” If we assume a degree of bigotry toward the foreign, we would read these lines as implying some debasement of the communion service by the inclusion of all and sundry. In addition, all of the communicants seem to be away from their usual domicile, perhaps engaged in illicit assignations. The whole passage suggest a restless and rootless group – the antithesis of what one normally thinks of as a Christian congregation. But what is perhaps most remarkable about these lines is their opacity. It is impossible to be sure of just what their import is beyond the implication that a unified and uniform Christian Europe is no more. Such a reading is reinforced by the following lines – if the draughty house be read as Christendom, as I believe it should be:
Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
That Gerontion is bereft of ghosts is another ambiguous detail. Presumably the meaning is that he no longer believes in the afterlife. If we read the “draughty house” to be Christianity, that further underlines his unheimlich condition as a modern atheist.
The poem then turns to a discourse on history and the lessons to be learned from it, beginning with the query, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” and enjoining the reader to “think,” to meditate on a catalogue of evils – deception, vanity, and so forth. Intriguingly, Eliot had first assigned the discourse to nature, rather than history. According to Christopher Ricks’ notes in Inventions of the March Hare, the change was not prompted by Pound, who did suggest other emendations. But whether the meditation is on nature or on history seems not to make any difference to what the particular knowledge might be.
If we read the poem autobiographically, the knowledge might well be Eliot’s discovery of Vivien’s adultery with Russell. On that reading, “nature” would be a more appropriate subject of the meditation, for it is in the nature of humans to be deceptive, ambitious, vain, distracted, sceptical, passionate, weak, fearful, courageous, vicious, heroic, and criminal – all attributes listed in the meditation. The substitution of “history” for “nature” prohibits such an autobiographical reading and preserves the poem’s impersonal generality without the necessity of any other revision. Either Nature or History misleads, deceives, and so forth. Neither Nature nor History provides us with answers to the overwhelming questions that Prufrock feared. The lines express the uncertainty and bewilderment that many felt in the wake of the First World War. If we take Eliot’s remarks that his uncertainty and bewilderment were not directly related to the war at face value, we need an alternate cause for his funk. The breakdown of his flirtation with Humanism in the face of Russell’s behaviour fits the bill. The isolated line that follows the catalogue – “These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree” – must refer to the disillusionment expressed in the catalogue. The “wrath-bearing tree” is surely the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis. Like Adam and Eve, Eliot has lost his innocence. Like Europe generally, he knows there is no god.
If we read the following lines as directed toward Vivien, they would apply to Eliot’s discovery of her adultery. The “we” of the lines on such a reading is not a general “we,” referring to all of his contemporaries, but just to himself and Vivien. The lines, then, should not be read exclusively as a prayer, as they usually are, but as a declaration to Vivien – and perhaps to Russell as well – that their relationship was over:
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
But Eliot did not break with Vivien for many years, and the last two lines are a better fit for a prayer than for a declaration of an irrevocable breach in a personal relationship. The list of the five senses inevitably suggests the last rites of the Catholic Church in which each of the organs of sense is anointed with oil, symbolizing the soul’s renunciation of the flesh as it prepares to meet its maker. Of course, the conflation of human sexual passion and mystic transport has a long tradition in devotional verse. Eliot’s conflation of the failure of sexual passion with the failure of mystic transport – if that is indeed what is going on – is an innovation within that tradition, rather than a flouting of it.
The query, “What will the spider do, / Suspend its operations, will the weevil / Delay?” is also less puzzling if the poem is read autobiographically. The spider is a passive predator who simply waits for its victims to fly into its web – as Eliot innocently walked into Russell’s life. The weevil is a parasite that burrows into the seed pod of its host and deposits its eggs. The hatched larvae then eat the flower or seed pod of the plant. No pregnancy resulted from Vivien’s adultery, but Russell certainly contributed to the withering of the Eliots’ marriage.
However we read it, the query is obviously a rhetorical question: the spider and weevil will not delay. It is in their nature to behave as they do, and, in addition, they perform a necessary role, since death by one means or another is inevitable. This last point is driven home by a brief catalogue of deceased souls “whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms.” As with the list of communicants, Eliot once again gives proper names: “De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammel.” The draft version, as printed in Inventions of the March Hare, does not have the following lines, which reinforce the bleakness of the fate of the souls of the dead:
Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
Instead it has the cryptic sentence: “We have saved a shilling against oblivion / Even oblivious.” “To save a shilling” is a British expression equivalent to “putting a little aside for a rainy day.” Clearly such a strategy is not an adequate precaution against oblivion. But to what inadequate strategy in the poem does it refer? I suggest that it refers to the various belief systems that mankind has deployed to comfort itself – from pagan worship, through Christianity to Humanism. Such an interpretation is reinforced by the rather awkward pun on “oblivion” in the last two words, “even oblivious.” I take Eliot to mean that mankind has been ignorant of – that is, oblivious to – his true condition, a condition Russell had described so bleakly in “The Free Man’s Worship” in the passage quoted in the previous chapter, ending: “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built (Russell 1917 60–1. My emphasis). But Eliot did not retain this line, concluding instead with the image of a gull hovering “against the wind” above the cold Canadian wastes of the Gulf of St Lawrence or the frigid barrens of Cape Horn at the Southern tip of Chile. The gull symbolizes human souls whirled “in fractured atoms,” precariously sustained by a cunning and deceptive history (or nature).
About three months after sending “Gerontion” to Schiff for his opinion, Eliot told John Quinn, “I hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind” (5 November 1919. Letters 344). A month later (18 December) he told his mother his New Year’s Resolution was “to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time” (Letters 350). He does not seem to have kept that resolution, for in a later letter he told his mother he needed “a period of tranquillity to do a poem I have in mind” (20 September 1920. Letters 408). We know that Eliot had made a significant start on The Waste Land by early 1921 because Wyndham Lewis reported, in a letter to Sydney Schiff (7 February 1921) that Eliot had showed him “a new long poem (in 4 parts) which I think will be not only very good, but a new departure for him” (quoted by Gordon, Imperfect Life 169). But it wasn’t until December of 1921 that he was ready to show his efforts to Ezra Pound – by then resident in Paris – as he had done with “Gerontion” (Letters 497–9). Eliot thought of “Gerontion” as part of what became The Waste Land, asking Pound if he should print “Gerontion as prelude in book or pamphlet form” (Letters 304). Pound advised against it: “I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don’t miss it AT all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say that I advise you NOT to print Gerontion as prelude” (Letters 505).
An intriguing link between “Gerontion” and The Waste Land is Fresca, one of the souls “whirled beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear.” She reappears in the draft version of “The Fire Sermon” as a figure rather like Belinda in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, but more literary, reading Richardson, Gibbon, and Giraudoux. The section is written in rhyming couplets in imitation of Pope. We are told that “The Scandinavians bemused her wits” – let’s say Ibsen and Strindberg – and that “The Russians thrilled her to hysteric fits” – plausible Russian candidates are Dostoevsky, Kandinsky, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev. Out of this “chaotic misch-masch potpourri” she writes poetry. She is, in short, an intellectual lady in touch with the latest trends, but not to be taken too seriously. Eliot’s tendency to misogyny asserts itself as he indelicately follows her to “the needful stool,” and later adds: “Odours, confected by the artful French, / Disguise the hearty female stench.” Before the bath he has her write letters concerned with social dalliance (Facsimile 23). He remarks that “in other time or place” she might have been “a meek and lowly weeping Magdalene,” but in this day and age she could be no more that “a sort of can-can salonnière” (Facsimile 27). Although Fresca did not survive Pound’s blue pencil, Eliot originally devoted some seventy lines to this intellectual lady of easy virtue, who, instead of being baptized a Christian “was baptised in a soapy sea / Of Symonds, – Walter Pater – Vernon Lee.”
John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater are well known, but Vernon Lee is not. “Vernon Lee” is the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856–1935), author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), Belcaro (1881), Euphorion (1884), and the satirical novel Miss Brown (1884), among others. Miss Brown caricatures English aesthetic circles, making Paget a poor match for Symonds and Pater. She also wrote a pacifist play – Satan the Waster (1920). Paget was a long-time friend of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and when she returned to London from Italy late in 1914, Ottoline invited her and her young companion, Irene Cooper-Willis, to lunch. Russell joined them and became infatuated with Cooper-Willis. Over Paget’s opposition, he engaged the young woman early in 1915 as his research assistant. As was his habit, Russell very soon made sexual advances to her, which she rejected – as she apparently did with all of the men who sought intimacy with her (Monk Spirit 387–94). Although neither Violet Paget nor Irene Cooper-Willis was in the least like Eliot’s Fresca, it may be that Eliot knew something of Russell’s infatuation with Paget’s friend since her employment as Russell’s research assistant overlapped with the period in which the Eliots shared Russell’s flat. Pound did not think the Fresca section worth retaining, though Eliot thought well enough of it, as he recalled in his Introduction to Faber’s edition of The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound: “Pound once induced me to destroy what I thought an excellent set of couplets; for, said he, ‘Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope – and you can’t’” (18. My emphasis).
The other large groups of lines that Pound persuaded Eliot to remove were monologues. The first (more than fifty lines) was an account of an evening of drinking and carousing in London with which the poem would have opened. The second (more than seventy lines), an account of sailing era fishermen on the Grand Banks, preceded the brief lines on Phlebas that now constitute Part IV.
This is not the place to attempt still another assessment of the wisdom of Pound’s advice. The point I want to make is that the early drafts of the poem expanded the motifs of urban decadence, the degradation of sexual relations, and the absence of God that still mark the poem in its canonical form. If those passages had been retained, it would have been much more difficult to assume a single speaker uniting the poem – as most early readers did. In addition, nineteenth-century America would have been represented, as it no longer is. Instead of the poem appearing to be a quest for some revelation, it would have seemed more like a latter-day Satyricon, that is, a picaresque journey through a disintegrating civilization. The inclusion of Gerontion would have reinforced such a reading – giving him the role of observer that by default Eliot assigned to Tiresias by the expedient of an explanatory note.
Pound immediately recognized Eliot’s poem as a great triumph, telling him that he was “wracked by the seven jealousies.” He confided to Felix Schelling, his former teacher at Hamilton College: “Eliot’s Waste Land is, I think, the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900” (Pound, Letters 234 and 248). Unfortunately, Pound never said just what he thought the theme, topic, or message of the poem was. All one can be sure of is that his elisions rendered the poem more “mythopoeic”and less historical.
Three rather distinct assessments of the poem have survived in the literature: Pound’s estimate that it fulfills “the modern experiment since 1900,” Eliot’s claim that he was just working out a “personal grouse,” and the original positive reception of it as an expression of the disillusionment and angst of a generation. (I am omitting for the moment the negative reactions – among them Stevens’.) Of course, these assessments are not mutually exclusive. Lawrence Rainey argued in Revisiting The Waste Land that the focus in the subsequent eighty-odd years of commentary on the first and third assessments has been misguided, and I am inclined to agree (48–9). Eliot himself cast doubt on the pertinence of at least the quester aspect of the mythological schema: “It was just, no doubt, that I should pay my tribute to the work of Miss Jessie Weston; but I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail (“The Frontiers of Criticism” in On Poetry and Poets 122).
Eliot also vigorously dismissed the hypothesis that the poem expresses the disillusionment of a generation, not only in the remark to his brother but also in “Thoughts after Lambeth,” almost a decade after the poem’s publication: “I dislike the word ‘generation,’ which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention” (Selected Essays 368). Although Eliot’s “personal grouse” interpretation cannot be accepted as trumping the other two, it has not been given its due. If we are to take it seriously, the nature of the grouse, and its cause, remain to be specified. The claim I make is that the grouse was Eliot’s disillusionment with Humanism and with Russell as a friend and mentor.
Vivien and Eliot were not estranged at the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land. As is well known, she played a role in the poem’s development, seeing it in draft form, and offering suggestions – some of which Eliot accepted.24 My claim is not that the poem reflects Eliot’s dismay at Vivien’s infidelity – of which he may have been unaware – so much as that it reflects his “loss of faith” in the possibility that Humanism might serve as a replacement for Christianity. That disillusionment preceded his conversion by nearly a decade, leaving him in a state of incipient religious despair for many of those years.
One aspect of the composition of The Waste Land for which I do not have a good explanation, and which has not received any comment as far as I know, is Eliot’s decision – taken shortly after completing “Gerontion” – to write a long poem.25 There is nothing on record to explain why Eliot thought that whatever it was he had on his mind would require a long poem. He did have the example of Pound’s Cantos as a model – though they were still more or less in embryo – only “Three Cantos” and “Canto IV” having been published by 1919. Still, he did submit his draft to Pound for comments and advice, and the draft does look a little like “Three Cantos,” given the difference between their respective “voices.” Both are monologues – though Pound’s cantos are rather Browningesque, with a single voice ranging over an ill-sorted range of topics. The Ur Waste Land, in contrast, had a series of distinct monologists narrating reasonably self-contained stories. In the same year that “Gerontion” appeared, Pound published the sequence “Homage to Sextus Properties.” But that “translation” of a Roman satirist could not conceivably have served as a model for Eliot to emulate. All three – The Waste Land, “Three Cantos,” and “Propertius” – are sequences, which was very much the fashion of the day.26 Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and “Lettres d’un Soldat” are other poetry sequences of the period. It is a fashion that Stevens never abandoned, and to which Eliot returned in Four Quartets. However, The Waste Land is distinct – if not unique – in its use of several speakers without a clear marking of dramatic voices from an over-arching narrative voice.
One aspect of the poem that is seldom, if ever, noticed is that The Waste Land celebrates what Kermode calls “the Time Between the failure of God and the birth of a new age.” Kermode borrowed the phrase from Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin (Kermode 1980 260), and applied it to Stevens’ poetry, but it fits The Waste Land and Gerontion even more snugly. In the Christian story, the “Time Between” is given a very particular locus – the time between Christ’s death on the cross on Good Friday and his manifestation to the apostles following his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Gospels contain only a couple of anecdotes about this Time Between. One is Christ’s magical appearance to the apostles on the road to Emmaus “about threescore furlongs” from Jerusalem (Luke 24:15). Although the incident takes place on Easter Sunday, the Apostles do not recognize Christ until he sups with them, at which time “their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31).
“What the Thunder Said” opens with an evocation of Christ’s passion and death, invoking the Time Between:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead.
In Matthew’s account, Christ was arrested at night as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane (“the frosty silence in the gardens”), and was taken to the high priest’s palace where he was interrogated. The next morning Pontius Pilate brought Him before the crowd, who cried out “Let Him be Crucified” (Matthew 27:11–26) – (“The shouting and the crying / Prison and palace”).
Later in “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot conflates the apostles’ failure to recognize Christ with a modern incident:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?
Since the parallel is hardly self-evident, Eliot’s headnote to Section V directs the reader to the Gospel account of the journey to Emmaus. He also provides a note to this passage, identifying the modern incident: “The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” By conflating the modern hallucination induced by exhaustion with the Gospel account, Eliot puts both at the same level, leaving his reader unable to tell whether they count as miracles or as hallucinations. From a Humanist perspective, both would be hallucinations; while from a credulous religious perspective, both could count as manifestations of the divine. Since the reader has no means of choosing which reading to adopt, he or she is placed in the same uncertainty as the apostles in their first experience of the Risen Christ.
The other incident in the Gospels relevant to this idea of the Time Between is Peter’s thrice-repeated denial of Christ, also in Matthew (69–75). During the Last Supper, Christ told Peter that he would deny him thrice before the cock crew. Peter, of course, indignantly denied that he would ever do such a thing. However, Christ’s prophecy comes true. The denials all take place before Christ’s crucifixion, but after Christ has been arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Peter followed him afar off unto the high priest’s palace, and went in, and sat with the servants to see the end” (Matthew 26: 58). But when a “damsel” asked him if he was one of Christ’s followers, Peter denied it. After he had left the palace, a “maid” confronted him with the same accusation, and he denied it once more. Finally, a group came up to him, saying, “Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech betrayeth thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew” (Matthew: 69–75).
There is no direct allusion to this incident in The Waste Land, but no practising Christian would fail to associate the following passage with the story of Peter’s denial of Christ:
the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.27
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Of course this passage also alludes to the Grail story, and the Chapel Perilous – as Eliot found it in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. In the stories she recounts, the chapel is empty of human presence, as it is here, but is inhabited by an evil figure – typically an agent of the Devil (175–82). An aspect of that work that few commentators acknowledge is that Weston was a convinced Theosophist. From Ritual to Romance argues that a pagan mystery tradition lies behind the Grail stories, which have confusedly transmitted it disguised with a spurious Christian overlay (186–8).28 This Chapel Perilous incident, she says “is the story of an initiation ... carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical (182. Original emphasis). I have not the least suspicion that Eliot was persuaded by Weston’s Theosophical credulity. The point of incorporating her fantasies in the poem alongside the Christian story was presumably to stress the state of disbelief in which he and his age found themselves – Heidegger’s “Time Between.” There is good reason to read The Waste Land as articulating such a moment – though without Heidegger’s confidence that Being would show itself in a new revelation.
In “East Coker” II, Eliot returns to this notion of the Time Between in a spirit little more optimistic than that of the The Waste Land. Here he invokes Dante’s Commedia, which begins “in a dark wood”:
We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.
We can be confident that Eliot contemplated writing a long poem for a period of approximately two years, and further that it would articulate a state of doubt or unbelief. In its earliest, draft form The Waste Land had more in common with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Portrait of a Lady” than with Eliot’s more recent satirical poems. Like those earlier poems, the version Eliot showed Pound was primarily a monologue poem with a strong satirical component that paid particular attention to sexual dalliance – although the behaviour of the denizens of The Waste Land draft is somewhat more sordid, and their attitude more cynical, than that of Prufrock or the monologuists of “Portrait of a Lady.” Pound’s editing accentuated the sordidness and the cynicism, but left untouched the “mythical” component – something largely absent from Eliot’s earlier poetry, as well as from Pound’s.29
The armature of the Grail Legend, on which Eliot disposes his observations on life, manners, and religion, is derived from Joyce’s practice in Ulysses. Despite Lawrence Rainey’s scepticism about the authenticity of the mythical method (Revisiting 48–9), there is no escaping its relevance – however factitious it might be – to the construction of The Waste Land out of the fragments Eliot brought to Pound. And it is worth noticing that in his public expression of regret at having appended the explanatory notes to The Waste Land (cited above) Eliot did not renounce the mythical method itself.
Both poets had been familiar with Joyce’s practice since December of 1917 when, as foreign editor of the Little Review, Pound began to see episodes of Ulysses. When Pound told his former teacher, Felix Schelling, that he thought The Waste Land was “the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900” (Pound, Letters 248), he had in mind primarily himself, Yeats, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s example caused Pound to abandon Browning’s Sordello as the structural paradigm for his epic and to attempt a more Joycean structure. About the time he was editing The Waste Land, he had decided to begin the Cantos with the Nekuia from the Odyssey instead of the Browningesque authorial monologue with which he had begun “Three Cantos.” Eliot’s famous praise of the “mythological method” did not appear until his review of Ulysses, in the Dial in November of 1923, well after the publication of The Waste Land. But he had been reading Ulysses as it came out in the Little Review and commented on it favourably as early as the summer of 1918 – in “Contemporanea” (Egoist 5 June–July 1918). Eliot praised the structure of Ulysses in his “London Letter” for the July 1921 Dial in terms that anticipate his more famous comment of 1923: “The strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure. Mr Joyce has succeeded, because he has very great constructive ability; and it is the structure which gives his later work its unique and solitary value” (216. My emphasis).
In both of these comments on Ulysses, Eliot stresses that the unexampled novelty of the twentieth-century world requires a novel aesthetic form. Since this posture has been a commonplace of commentary on Modernism ever since, it is worth noting that it is one sharply at odds with Eliot’s Anglicanism and his later poetic practice – not to mention his later promotion of a return to the old dispensation of European Christendom. His championing of Ulysses and his own practice in The Waste Land represent his hope that he and his fellow artists had found a mode that would suffice as a response to the loss of faith – not only in religion, but also in long-established cultural and social modes – which represented for them the modern dilemma. Eliot drew explicit attention to that feature of Ulysses in his Dial review, praising the mythical method as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
Eliot produced a steady stream of literary journalism between 1919 and the publication of The Waste Land. Whatever his difficulties with his own and Vivien’s health in these years, he was just as productive as he had been during the war years. No doubt things were somewhat easier for him, since he was no longer saddled with completing his dissertation and the teaching responsibilities he had had from 1915 to the spring of 1919. The striking difference between his poetic activity in the war years and the postwar period was that, following “Gerontion,” he focused on producing a single, major work instead of a scattering of lesser poems. As I have suggested, it is probable that this change was prompted by the vogue for long poem sequences. Largely because of his admiration for Browning, Pound had contemplated a long poem from an early age. As already noted he had published the first (abortive) elements of the poem that became The Cantos as early as 1915. Eliot, in contrast, had looked to the French symbolistes as his models, and they produced only short poems, many of them satirical in nature. Moreover, the long poem had been the specialty of the Romantics and the Victorians, the very poets from whom Eliot wanted to separate himself.
The Waste Land, then, marked a double watershed for Eliot: it signals the abandonment of his hope for Humanism, and a move away from the short lyric and satirical poem in favour of the long poem constructed on the new rhetorical principle pioneered by Joyce – the mythical method. As it turned out – despite the phenomenal critical success of The Waste Land – Eliot did not exploit this new mode in subsequent poems. Between The Waste Land and Ash-Wednesday he published only “The Hollow Men” and the Ariel poems, none of which exploit the new form. Indeed Ash-Wednesday returned to the Romantic mode of the contemplative lyric – albeit highly inflected by Dante’s example.
One of the reasons for his rather slight output in those years was no doubt his preoccupation with the Criterion.30 In the summer of 1921, while The Waste Land was taking its final form, he was in the midst of the negotiations with Lady Rothermere that led to the founding of the Criterion, an ambitious undertaking that would take much of his energy for most of the next fifteen years. His “Commentary” for July 1923 indicates very clearly what prompted him to take on this task. The manifesto has a very Arnoldian ring to it, even to his use of the Arnoldian term “disinterestedness”: “It is the function of a literary review to maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature – not to “life,” as something contrasted to literature – but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life” (I 421). Committed as Eliot was to the notion of “impersonality” in literature, the “other activities” whose relation to literature he intended the Criterion to illuminate would certainly not be the personal trials and tribulations of authors. As the articles in the journal amply illustrate, they would be the cultural, political, philosophic, and scientific issues confronting the men and women of the time. Central among those issues was the search for a philosophy or faith which would provide a compass for a civilization that many saw as adrift in uncharted seas.31
Nothing Stevens wrote ever enjoyed the huge success of Eliot’s Waste Land, but, on the other hand, neither did he experience the philosophical and personal turmoil that Eliot did in the years following the Great War. Stevens’ life went on quite smoothly during and after the war. Like most Americans he was well insulated from the horrors of the trenches – never being exposed to first-hand accounts such as Eliot heard from his brother-in-law, nor losing friends and acquaintances, as Eliot did in Jean Verdenal. Perhaps the greatest disruption Stevens experienced in those years was the birth of Holly in July of 1924. This is not to say that he was complacent and untroubled by what Eliot called the modern dilemma. But it was not reflected in disruptions in his personal life. In addition, Stevens had no mentor to whom he looked for guidance, and hence was not disappointed by him as Eliot was by Russell.32
Although nine years older than Eliot, like him Stevens had published almost nothing prior to the outbreak of war in August of 1914.33 However, he published poems regularly in literary journals during and after the war, collecting them in Harmonium in 1923, the year after The Waste Land. As we have seen, he suppressed “Lettres d’un Soldat” his principal effort to deal with the war in poetry. The only Harmonium poem that employs the word “war” is “Le Monocle de mon Oncle,” first published in Poetry in December of 1918. It is primarily concerned with Stevens’ approaching fortieth birthday. The reference to war is metaphorical, suggesting that his poetry has an intensity – and perhaps also a fatality – comparable to the experience of men in battle:
In verses wild with motion, full of din,
Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure
As the deadly thought of men accomplishing
Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate
The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. (IX)
There is no hint in this poem of the sort of shock and distress that approving readers found in The Waste Land.
“Le Monocle de mon Oncle” (first published in Harmonium in 1923) is somewhat less playful than its title would lead one to expect. It is structured around the Humanist scepticism that also animates “Sunday Morning,” although it is darker. The opening poem mockingly addresses the Virgin Mary, irreverently altering a few of the attributes found in her litany.34
“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.
This ridicule of the Virgin, although reflecting a Humanist bias against entrenched superstition, is mitigated by the query “Or was it that I mocked myself alone?” and the nostalgia for “the radiant bubble that she was.” Such ambivalence about religious symbols is characteristic of Stevens’ poetry whenever he addresses them. However, for the most part, “Le Monocle de mon Oncle” is a lament for the failing of passion that a man approaching middle age commonly feels. Certainly it is not at all concerned with the passing of an era or with disillusionment.
The Stevens poem that is most often compared to The Waste Land is “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Indeed, Hi Simons called it Stevens’ Waste Land. And Roy Harvey Pearce, in 1961, considered it “a kind of reply to The Waste Land (Longenbach 88–9). However, James Longenbach has rejected that reading, preferring Kermode’s new critical assessment of it as a “sustained nightmare of unexpected diction.” There is good reason to reject Pearce’s notion that it is a response to The Waste Land, since Stevens had finished “Comedian” before he had read Eliot’s poem. In striking contrast to the long gestation of The Waste Land, the origin of “Comedian” was highly contingent. Stevens was prompted to write it by the announcement of the Blindman Prize. The Dial prize, which was awarded to The Waste Land, was in fact invented to satisfy Eliot’s demands for more than the $150 that Thayer first offered him.35
Stevens told Harriet Monroe, in a letter of 21 December 1921 that he had “been churning and churning”on a poem he planned to enter for the prize (Letters 229). He got it in on time, but the prize was awarded to Grace Hazard Conklin (Martz 4–5). The poem he submitted, now printed in Opus Posthumous as “From the Journal of Crispin,” was rewritten over the summer of 1922. Since The Waste Land was first published in the first issue of the Criterion in October of 1922, and in the Dial the next month, there is no possibility that “The Comedian as the Letter C” could have been a reply to The Waste Land.36
Nonetheless, “Comedian,” a poem of some length, was written at about the same time as The Waste Land, competed for a poetry prize, and, like The Waste Land, takes issues of history and culture as its theme. Its failure to win the Blindman Prize was perhaps an omen of its relative lack of success. Joseph Riddell’s comment a half century ago is no less valid today than it was then: “‘Comedian’ is an engaging tour de force which has baffled more critics than it has satisfied” (93).
Any discussion of it must begin with Hi Simons’ article, “‘The Comedian as the Letter C”: Its Sense and its Significance,” which Stevens read and approved. On reading the essay he told Simons: “What you have said is correct, not only in the main but in particular, and not only correct but keen” (Letters 350). Even though Stevens did quibble over some details, we cannot ignore his general approval of Simons’ interpretation. Even by 1940, Simons notes, at least eight distinct interpretations of the poem had been published – all of which he found to be “mutually contradictory” (97). According to Simons, the poem “tells both how a representative modern poet tried to change from a romanticist to a realist and how he adapted himself to his social environment.” His reading is quite closely autobiographical, interpreting Crispin’s life story as parallelling Stevens’ poetic and intellectual development to 1923 and culminating in an “‘indulgent fanaticism’ and skepticism” (98).
Although Stevens does not reject outright Simons’ autobiographical reading, he does indicate that the pattern of Crispin’s life is typical of all men, not just himself: “I suppose that the way of all mind is from romanticism to realism, to fatalism and then to indifferentism back to romanticism all over again” (Letters 350). While accepting the pattern that Simons sees in the poem, Stevens does not accept his autobiographical slant, seeing it as a general cultural pattern common to “all mind.” Moreover, he does not (in 1940, at least) think of the poem as coming to rest at any particular point in the cycle, implicitly rejecting Simons’ view that the poem comes to rest in an “indulgent fanaticism and skepticism” – or at least he rejects the supposition that he has stopped there.
It seems to me that Simons’ focus on the undeniable autobiographical aspects of “Comedian” deflects attention from the general cultural and historical references of the poem, which are equally undeniable. Criticism of “Comedian” following Simons has continued to stress its autobiographical aspect. Thus, its critical reception has been the inverse of that of The Waste Land, criticism of which long neglected its personal aspects in favour of its cultural and historical import. Clearly, “Comedian” is not autobiographical in the sense that Wordsworth’s Prelude is. Indeed, no details of Crispin’s life correspond to Stevens’ life. If we have an account of the “growth of the poet’s mind” (Wordsworth’s characterization of The Prelude) in “Comedian,” it is a growth that is typical rather than specific. It represents the mind of Europe as it left behind not only the land, but also its culture and civilization – in particular, Christianity. (Of course, such a characterization of the European settlement of the New World is not at all historically accurate.) Just as Wordsworth recounts his spiritual and intellectual growth through a dialectic operating between “Nature” and “Civilization,” so “Comedian” recounts the dialectic between the Judæo-Christian illusion that man is God’s steward on earth and the Darwinian perception that he is “a native in this world” – as Stevens puts it years later in poem XXVIII of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (first published in Poetry 52 in May 1937).
Stevens’ comments on his motives for writing a long poem are – as always – somewhat mischievous; nonetheless, they are remote from suggesting any personal motives such as Eliot claimed were the germ of The Waste Land: “I know that people judge one by volume. However, having elected to regard poetry as a form of retreat, the judgment of people is neither here nor there. The desire to write a long poem or two is not obsequiousness to the judgment of people. On the contrary, I find that this prolonged attention to a single subject has the same result that prolonged attention to a senora has according to the authorities. All manner of favors drop from it” (Letters 229). Even though “Comedian” is scarcely marked by a despairing sense of disillusionment, Stevens does describe poetry generally as “a form of retreat” – thinking, no doubt, of a withdrawal from the world so as to attend to spiritual matters, rather than a military retreat. He told Ronald Latimer a dozen years after writing “Comedian” that Crispin was a “profitless philosopher,” that is, one inclined to speculation, but whose speculations lead to no solutions. “Life, for him,” he continued, “was not a straight course; it was picking his way in a haphazard manner through a mass of irrelevancies. Under such circumstances, life would mean nothing to him, however pleasant it might be” (Letters 293).
Crispin, then, is as disillusioned as the denizens of Eliot’s Waste Land, though not as despairing. He is, in effect, the “free man” celebrated by Russell. In contrast to the speakers in The Waste Land, Crispin appears to be comfortable in his disillusionment. But Stevens sees him as hollow – just like Eliot’s Hollow Men:
He was in this as other freemen are,
Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
His violence was for aggrandizement
And not for stupor, such as music makes
For sleepers halfway waking. (II 115–19)
For Stevens, the choice, then, was not between ignorant and muddled superstition and rational clarity of thought, as it was for Russell. Stevens’ dilemma lay between a violent aggrandizement and a “stupor, such as music makes” – that is, between the Humanist’s faith in “progress” however disruptive and the believer’s faith in an imagined world of beauty and justice.
Moreover, Crispin is not as indomitable in his freedom as Russell would have his free man be. Frightened by thunder out of the West,
Crispin, here, took flight.
An annotator has his scruples, too.
He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,
This connoisseur of elemental fate,
Aware of exquisite thought. (III ll. 163–7)
Crispin is said to be an “affectionate emigrant” who finds “a new reality in parrot-squawks.” The motif of transplantation is evident – although it is not clear to me why he places Crispin in Yucatan instead of Connecticut. Perhaps it is simply to emphasize the radical change of environment; Connecticut is not nearly so unlike Western Europe as is Mexico. In any case, Crispin is not sufficiently emancipated from European mythology to risk the wrath of an angry God, should He exist. He chooses to adopt the protective colouring of a believer – just in case! And Stevens seems to endorse his caution, noting that “The storm was one / Of many proclamations of the kind, / Proclaiming something harsher than he learned.” We are not told just what it was that he had learned, but – once again – his intellectual freedom is stressed: “His mind was free / And more than free, elate, intent, profound.” Although free, Crispin’s mind is not autonomous, for he was “studious of a self possessing him, / That was not in him in the crusty town / From which he sailed.” The “crusty town from which he sailed” is a town in Europe and he has acquired in the New World a “self” that he lacked in the Old World.
The first section, entitled “The World Without Imagination,” begins with the standard Humanist proclamation: “Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, /The sovereign ghost.” That is to say, the beliefs mankind has entertained are – as Humanists maintain – fables invented by humans. Although the ecological detail that he is “the intelligence of his soil” is not typical of Humanism. Stevens follows that rubric with a comic series of powers that evince the sovereignty of man, “the sovereign ghost”:
As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium [“beginning”]
And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig [“law”; “but let us ask”]
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. (I ll. 1–7)
According to Genesis, sovereignty was bestowed on man by his creator. Stevens’ “principium” echoes the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning”– in principium in the Vulgate. A few verses later in Genesis, Man is given dominion over God’s creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 27–8). In leaving Europe it seems that Crispin has turned his back on the Judæo-Christian view that God had given man sovereignty.
But the poet, Crispin’s biographer, doubts that he possesses such sovereignty – as, indeed, does Crispin:
[Crispin] ... now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? (I ll. 27–31)
The poem never answers the question directly, but Stevens hinted at an answer of what the name “for this short-shanks” might be twenty years later in a letter to Simons: “It is true that the letter C is a cypher for Crispin, but using the cypher was meant to suggest something that nobody seems to have grasped. I can state it, perhaps, by changing the title to this: “The Comedian as the Sounds of the Letter C” ... Now, as Crispin moves through the poem, the sounds of the letter C accompany him ... I don’t mean to say that there is an incessant din, but you ought not be able to read very far in the poem without recognizing what I mean. The sounds of the letter C include all related or derivative sounds. For instance, X, TX, AND Z (12 January 1940 Letters 351–2).
The practice of referring to Crispin by the “cypher” of the letter C, inevitably invokes the Jewish practice of avoiding the name of God by a similar cipher, the Tetragrammaton, the four letters comprising the unspeakable name of God – JHVH in the Latin alphabet.37 Christians supply the missing vowels, to produce the name, “Jehovah.” Crispin, of course, is given a determinate name in the poem since he is merely Man, not God. It is only the letter with which his name (as well as Christ’s) begins that is deliberately “split up in flickering syllables.” The polymorphous nature of Crispin’s name rather cryptically reiterates the fundamental Humanist point that God in his infinite variety is the creation of mankind, not the other way around.
The world without imagination, then, is a world dominated by doctrine – primarily Christian doctrine in Crispin’s case, but a Rabbinic, Islamic or Hindu doctrine would serve as well. As the doctrine becomes discredited, Crispin is diminished “until nothing of himself / Remained, except some starker, barer self /In a starker, barer world” (Ill. 60–2). In the world from which Crispin is departing “What counted was mythology of self.” He “Became an introspective voyager.” Invoking Kant, Stevens observes: “Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last” (I ll. 68–9). However, Crispin’s introspective discovery would be more properly labelled by the Husserlian sich selbst. Both German phrases can be translated as “the thing itself,” but Husserl’s sich selbst is the introspective, phenomenological certainty with which we experience our own perceptions (our “phenomenology”), as opposed to the actuality (the ding an sich) of external reality, which, Kant believed, we can only infer but never know. Crispin is a post-Kantian, then, freed from the romantic illusion that the world his consciousness projects is the veritable world:
free
From the unavoidable shadow of himself
That lay elsewhere around him. Severance
Was clear. The last distortion of romance
Forsook the insatiable egotist. (I ll. 73–7)38
He now sees plain and true, like Russell’s free man:
The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.
Here was no help before reality.
Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. (I ll. 78–80)
Part IV, “The Idea of a Colony,” inverts the opening lines of the poem, “man is the intelligence of his soil, /The sovereign ghost,” declaring instead that “his soil is man’s intelligence.” The inversion marks the difference between the Judæo-Christian belief that man has been made sovereign over God’s creation and the post-Darwinian belief that man – like all “creation” – is the product of his environment. Instead of being creatures created by God together with the birds and beasts over which we were given dominion, we are equal with the birds and the beasts. A corollary is that the Europeans, transplanted into the New World will be transformed by their new environment, creating a new human type and a new culture and society to go with it. Accordingly, “lex, rex and principium,” that is the law, the king, and the “beginning” of the Old World, are now cast off in the New:
Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence.
That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. (280–1)
By discarding the “principium” Stevens means that Americans (both South and North) have cast off the imagined or mythical beginning that animated European culture as found either in Genesis or in the Gospel According to John: “In principio verbum erat” (“In the beginning was the word”). The new man in America, then, is post-Christian, and perhaps a Humanist. Of course, history belies this account of the settlement of the Americas, which was motivated for the most part by national rivalries, Christian piety, and a lust for wealth. But Stevens leaves no doubt that his meaning is much as I have suggested:
Here was prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail? (II ll. 286–94)
Stevens’ poetic account of European migration to the New World as the sluffing off of the Christian skin of the Old World has some historical plausibility – although we must collapse the chronology a good deal and regard the rise of Unitarianism and Humanism as the fulfilment of the European settlement of America. Of course such a fulfilment applies only to that part of North America which became the United States of America – the only part that citizens of that nation typically count as “America.”39 Stevens not only collapses the chronology of events but he also omits any reference to the violence that marked American history from the so-called French and Indian War, to the recent (1916) excursion by General Pershing into Mexico in a vain search for Pancho Villa.
Setting aside the question of historical accuracy or adequacy, Stevens leaves no doubt that Crispin is a refugee from the debunked beliefs of the Old World, including, it seems, faith in progress:
Shrewd novitiates
Should be the clerks of our experience.
These bland excursions into time to come,
Related in romance to backward flights,
However prodigal, however proud,
Contained in their afflatus the reproach
That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
He could not be content with counterfeit,
With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
That must belie the racking masquerade,
With fictive flourishes that preordained
His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree
Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. (353–66)
“Bland excursions into time to come” are those Utopian dreams in which Europe has indulged itself since the Enlightenment, the most consequential of which is Marxist Communism. The “backward flights” are surely the nostalgic dreams of such men as William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, who regarded the medieval world as a viable model for a modern society. Eliot might be included in that group, though not at this date. The “counterfeit,” “masquerade of thought,” and “hapless words” suggest European political and social practices and their justifications – royal and aristocratic regimes together with their pomp and ceremony.
“The Comedian as the Letter C” extends “The Journal of Crispin” with two new sections: IV, “A Nice Shady Home,” and V, “And Daughters with Curls,” both of which describe a domesticated Crispin settled in America. These sections give some credence to an autobiographical reading of the poem – though Stevens had one daughter and Crispin has four. But whatever autobiographical component there might be, Crispin remains an allegorical figure representative of America.
In the opening lines of “A Nice Shady Home” we learn that Crispin is falling away from philosophical realism:
Perhaps if discontent
Had kept him still the prickling realist,
... he might have come
To colonize his polar planterdom
And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.
But his emprize40 to that idea soon sped. (383–91)
Given this disillusionment, the poem asks if Crispin is to give up his dream:
Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
Was he to company vastest things defunct
With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong
His active force in an inactive dirge,
Which, let the tall musicians call and call,
Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen
Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? (417–25)
These lines – like most in the poem – are difficult to construe. “Arointing,” for example, is a very obscure verb. The OED has an entry for “aroint,” but is uncertain of its meaning, guessing that it means “avaunt!” or “begone!” in the imperative. That meaning would fit the context. Shakespeare uses it twice, in both instances as an injunction to a witch: “Aroint thee, Witch the rumpefed Ronyon cries” (Macbeth I iii) – itself not a model of clarity. So Crispin is asking if he should renounce and bury his dreams. In the event, he does not; he builds his cabin, plants his trees, and marries:
And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,
His trees were planted, his duenna brought
Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,
The curtains flittered and the door was closed.
Crispin, magister of a single room,
Latched up the night.
He is unafraid of the “quotidian [that] saps philosophers”: “Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, / The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, /... / While he poured out upon the lips of her / That lay beside him, the quotidian / Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner” (464–74).41
Insofar as Crispin’s choices represent Stevens’ choices, “The Comedian as the Letter C” is certainly an anti-Waste Land, even though its composition was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of The Waste Land and therefore cannot be a response to it. The more relevant question for this study is whether it is a pro- or an anti-Humanist poem. Certainly Crispin’s realism is compatible with Humanism, as is his rejection of “racking masquerades” and “fictive flourishes.” His return to “social nature” in part V, “And Daughters with Curls,” also supports a Humanist reading of “Comedian.”
In order to explore the different solutions that Stevens and Eliot survey to resolve the issue of belief, we need to explore the very different paths they pursued in the immediate postwar years. Eliot sought to influence the course of events through his editing of the Criterion and his own articles. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetic output declined markedly.
Stevens similarly paused in his poetic output, but did not take on the role of a public intellectual as Eliot did. Both men were taking stock as they sought some resolution to the intractable social, religious and cultural issues that all thoughtful people of their generation had to face. But having written a dissertation on the idealist philosophy on F.H. Bradley, Eliot was exceptional among his fellow poets and artists. He came to the question of belief in an almost professional manner. Stevens had no such formal engagement with the issue of belief, nor is there any clear evidence that he sought a determinate belief, as Eliot did.42 However a concern with something “beyond ourselves” (as he puts it in “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”) was a preoccupation from his late adolescence, and is a constant theme in his poetry. In contrast to Eliot’s clear-cut adoption of Anglican Christianity, Stevens’ views underwent a long development and articulation without passing through any stage of radical revision – at least none that I can identify.
As early as 1 August 1899, two months before his twentieth birthday, Stevens confided to his journal that he “would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine,” but lamented that “modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain, so unmeditative” that there is no room for a twentieth-century St Augustine. It is tempting to speculate why he picked St Augustine instead of St Francis or some other saint. I do not think he had in mind the fact that Augustine was a convert to Christianity (from Manichaeanism). More likely it was Augustine’s role as a great explainer of, and apologist for, Christianity in what was still a pagan world. In any case, Stevens’ entire poetic career can be characterized as an effort to explain his “vision” of poetry and the transcendent to a largely sceptical and materialistic world – which is presumably what he meant by “Chicagoan.” Chicago, which was one of the fastest growing cities in the world in the late nineteenth century and boasted the world’s first skyscraper in 1885, is presumably a metonymy for the brash, aggressive, and commercial. Its reputation as a centre of violent crime belongs to the later, Prohibition, period.
In the same entry Stevens considers how a man such as himself could lead a righteous life in a world in which divine providence has been displaced by the Darwinian struggle for survival: “We must come down, we must use tooth and nail, it is the law of nature ‘the survival of the fittest’; providing we maintain at the same time self respect, integrity and fairness. I believe, as unhesitatingly as I believe anything, in the efficacy and necessity of fact meeting fact – with a background of the ideal” (My emphasis). He adds to this rather bleak view an unqualified statement of belief in some sort of transcendent realm: “I’m completely satisfied that behind every physical fact there is a divine force. Don’t therefore, look at facts, but through them” (Letters 32). This almost Sweden-borgian conviction repeatedly causes Stevens to draw back from the Humanism that most of his Harvard contemporaries would have casually adopted.
In 1906, by then an articled lawyer, Stevens was still bemoaning the loss of faith in his diary, and affirming a conviction that there must be something “beyond ourselves” – as he had done seven years earlier:
Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure ... I wish that groves still were sacred – or, at least, that something was: that there was still something free from doubt, that day unto day still uttered speech, and night unto night still showed wisdom. I grow tired of the want of faith – the instinct of faith. Self-consciousness convinces me of something, but whether it be something Past, Present, or Future I do not know. What a bore to have to think all these things over, like a German student, or a French poet, or an English socialist! It would be much nicer to have things definite – both human and divine. One wants to be decent and to know the reason why. (Letters 86–7. My emphasis)
Stevens never lost his desire for belief that these remarks evince or his distaste for being obliged “to think all these things over.”