| T.
S. Eliot Society Newsletter |
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| In the story of the artistic period we term High Modernist, T. S. Eliot's name stands as tall as anyone else's--perhaps even taller. It is also true that thanks to the effects of canon-building and academic preference, Eliot is a perpetual presence in textbooks, anthologies and course syllabi. And this Eliot is not the critic or the playwright that he also was, but primarily the poet. Such is the effect of his dominance that, perhaps next only to Shakespeare, Eliot's lines and phrases lie strewn about the popular and mass cultural spaces of our times. As William Harmon pointed out some years back in his Memorial Lecture to the members of this Society, we meet Eliot at virtually every turn of our reading and ambulation--on billboards, sports page captions and news tickers making their way across the bottom of the television screen. Surely, such a phenomenon raises important questions about the relationship between the popular and elitist in the contemporary cultural landscape. Although these are not quite the issues David E. Chinitz addresses in his fine book on Eliot and the "cultural divide," he provides enough material to make further inquiries about the osmotic nature of culture itself. Chinitz addresses more directly a corollary issue: what elements of popular and mass culture made their way into the making of Eliot's mind, and consequently, into his work, both creative and critical? Also, he considers at some length the matter of Eliot's reputation as a definer and defender of "high" culture. The main strength of T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide is its meticulous documentation of the components of popular culture that entered, sometimes willy-nilly, Eliot's poetry and plays. Some of these influences or presences are well known-as in the case of music hall performances-some others not so. Even when a particular influence does not recognizably enter the art, Chinitz is able to demonstrate its traces in the life of the poet, in his taste for that popular form of entertainment, or in his various prose writings. Eliot, moreover, appears to have been aware of the futility of separating the usually value-laden categories "art" and "entertainment," although he veered at times toward the position that privileged the former over the latter. The author of this study demonstrates that Eliot's personal enthusiasms did |
not always carry through effectively enough in the influence
Eliot produced as a cultural arbitrator and a shaper of taste during the
mid 20th century. That legacy was created by the later Eliot's often modulated
but seldom absent tone of sober-sounding pessimism. Chinitz reveals for
us a more divided taste than is usually suspected in the case of Eliot
as a cultural icon. Thus, we note how the poet's personal and often persistent
fondness for elements of so-called "low brow" stuff of culture did not
prevent him from making often-quoted and widely noted remarks about the
supposedly urgent necessity of preserving a "higher" order of cultural
awareness and appreciation. The influential criticism failed to carry
forward the formative impulses of the poet's mind-ones that were syncretic,
comedic, and free from any acute sense of cultural hierarchy. The pervasive
effect of Eliot's writing unfortunately promoted a bifurcation between
"high" and "low" cultures and art.
In the last chapter of this study, one wittily titled "The T. S. Eliot Identity Crisis," David Chinitz studies closely the generation and propagation of what we might call the Eliot Effect, one that inculcates in its adherents an elitist and exclusionary notion of culture. In this section of the book Chinitz highlights and anatomizes the academic and institutional forces that perpetuated an uppity Eliot, pace, it seems, Eliot himself. This task or project was made the more easy for a person like F.R. Leavis by Eliot's own many loudly-announced conservative pronouncements and prejudices. Chinitz's well-written, clearly documented and persuasively argued study takes us beyond the heated and often intemperate writing about Eliot we have seen emerge in the last two decades. Looking carefully past simplistic and one-sided positions, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide demonstrates a useful method for studying Eliot in which one excavates often overlooked constituents of the poet's work and his imaginative make-up. The resulting Eliot is complex, multi-faceted, and deserving of careful scrutiny and well-tempered judgement.
Shyamal Bagchee | |||