Twentieth Century Literature
2006
 

Ambivalence All Around

T. S. Eliot had an audience problem. Which is one way of saying that sometimes T. S. Eliot thought he was making sense when his audiences thought otherwise. In an anecdote told by A. N. Wilson in the Spectator, Eliot was invited to Windsor Castle during the war for a poetry evening, arranged by the Queen Mother who was solicitous of her daughters’ education. The somber poet showed up and began reading through The Waste Land to his baffled listeners. First the children, then even the Queen and King tried unsuccessfully to suppress their laughter through what the Queen later misremembered as “The Desert.” In subsequent reactions to this story, Wilson was scolded by royal-watchers for presenting the beloved Queen Mum as a philistine.< 1 > But among Eliot-watchers the story might hold a different meaning. Faced with the inscrutability of such a text, the royalty come off as rather sympathetic, while the poet looks like a pedant for inflicting such a performance on them.

The problem with such delicious stories—and there are many of them starring Eliot as benighted protagonist—is that there is a dirth of anecdotes that tell the other side of the story: the many times when Eliot conveyed something powerful and meaningful to an audience broader than the coterie readers of avant-garde poetry. In his fine study that explores Eliot’s desire to reach a wide audience, David Chinitz tries to even this score, grappling with Eliot’s failures and successes in this regard. Though the anecdote about the royal family does not appear in his book, Chinitz does tell a more familiar story of Eliot missing the mark with an audience. After a performance of his experimental play Sweeney Agonistes at Vassar in 1933, Eliot addressed the audience, answering questions and making unprepared remarks in an animated session. The author of The Waste Land confidently concluded at one point: “My poetry is simple and straightforward.” At this assertion, the assembled—who did not have the curb of royal manners—burst into laughter, and Eliot “looked pained” (qtd. in Chinitz, 127). Fitting this oft-quoted story into the trajectory of Eliot’s career, Chinitz assigns a new meaning to it: Eliot “was about to embark on what was to become a quarter-century’s effort to quell the laughter that pained him at Vassar—to make himself over as ‘something of a popular entertainer’ and to communicate […] with a ‘large and miscellaneous audience’” (127).

Chinitz is one of a number of cultural studies scholars who have been busting up complacent ideas and crusty binaries that have become associated with modernism and with Eliot in particular. But Chinitz’ book is the first full-length study of Eliot’s relationship to popular culture, and for that reason alone should be considered groundbreaking. What makes his book particularly important is that what Chinitz has to say does not merely contextualize old ideas about Eliot and popular culture, but practically overturns them.

In a brief but cogent introduction, Chinitz maps the polemics of modernism and Eliot’s place in its shifting terms. He finds that one of its few constants—because it is shared by both enemies and defenders—is that Eliot stood for, in Cynthia Ozick’s phrase, “high art, when art was at its most serious and elitist” (qtd in Chinitz, 2). This last standing term, a cornerstone of the Eliot Myth, is handily demolished by Chinitz’ study, which argues that Eliot’s attitude towards popular culture was far from the contempt attributed to him. Though the biographies and anecdotal essays offer abundant evidence of an Eliot who devoured many elements of popular culture—comic books, boxing, music hall, detective fiction—Chinitz here offers an answer to the obvious question: how could such a complex and life-long engagement with popular culture go uninvestigated after some 80-plus years of Eliot criticism? One answer that Chinitz proffers is that Eliot’s widely known essays—many of which touch on securely “literary” themes—do not reflect the much broader range of articles that have not yet been collected or republished. (Yet another annoyance attributable to the mysterious Eliot Estate.) The more nuanced answer to the question is the burden of Chinitz’ study.

Chinitz shows how critics have willfully ignored the changes of artistic direction in Eliot’s work, even when the evidence was right before their eyes. For example, in spite of producing almost no poems in the last twenty years of his life, and openly devoting himself to the “large and miscellaneous” audiences of Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue, Eliot was still pinned as the guardian of high culture. Chinitz’ final chapter on this subject, while not a novel explanation, gives an incisive account of how Eliot’s public persona lent weight to such a view, even though his artistic persona was working in an opposite direction. When Eliot’s audiences consistently expected him to play the part, in Chinitz’ neat formulation, of “the Grand Old Man frowning magisterially on the culturally irredeemable present” (225), then Eliot was likely to sometimes oblige, even though, as Chinitz notes, Eliot more often surprised his uncomprehending interviewers by refusing that very role.
The short version of Chinitz’s thesis is that Eliot had a productively ambivalent relationship with popular culture, the kind of relationship, Chinitz argues, that any mature person is likely to have with such a varied phenomenon. Some elements of his book are so forcefully argued that they can only bear repetition rather than commentary, such as his chapter on music hall culture. Chinitz argues that Eliot’s “Marie Lloyd” essay—an unabashed celebration of working class art, and often seen as an anomaly in Eliot’s work—emphasizes “mutual sympathy and… an immediate connection between artist and audience.” This “immediate connection,” alas, does not bear much relation to the early Eliot and his own audiences. “But,” Chinitz continues, “Eliot himself was cognizant of that gap, to him the deplorable consequence of a fragmented culture. What seems anomalous in Eliot is in reality an expression of yearning for an end to exile. Nothing less can explain the future direction of his career, which would take him out of a waste land and into a cocktail party” (104). This chapter on Marie Lloyd and music hall culture is excellent, showing careful attention to subtlety and detail: Eliot’s own politics, his blindnesses, and his insight into that popular phenomenon.

Chinitz makes a new and important contribution to our understanding of Eliot’s early poetry by adding to the standard account of how Jules Laforgue’s poetry gave Eliot a pose and a tone with which to work. Chinitz’ expansion of that argument reveals how the metrical rhythms of American popular music undergird Eliot’s first efforts: “What the apprentice poems of Inventions of the March Hare now enable us to see is that the acknowledged influence of Laforgue was complemented by the nearly suppressed yet indispensable influence of American jazz. It was the convergence of these elements—or their chemical interaction in the presence of the poet’s mental catalyst—that produced the masterpieces of the Prufrock period. Laforgue showed Eliot how to adapt his voice to the popular material around him, and jazz gave Eliot a way to bring Laforgue into contemporary English…” (36). The regrettably short section in which Chinitz lays out the evidence for this claim leads him to the enthusiastic conclusion: “Eliot’s patented cadences—his characteristic rhythms, the ways he uses rhyme, the tonal contours of his lines—were discovered in the sounds of popular music circa 1911” (38). This is perhaps too broadly argued, but the point is well taken. Subsequent critics might quarrel with the details of the argument, but not the importance of his find. That find is not entirely original; Chinitz acknowledges critics who make vague references to possible influences of St. Louis culture on the early poetry. But Chinitz is the first to hunt those elements down and reveal in any detail how they work their way into the poetry.

While Chinitz gives us a new understanding of how popular music works its way into the juvenilia, what he has to say is relevant as well to the


<1> In her book The Royals (1997), Kitty Kelley presses this interpretation, as does the Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk, 19 Sept. 2003), which uses the anecdote as a measure of how the Spectator can still cause “a huge kerfluffle.” The moral of the Eliot-Bores-the-Royalty story for the Socialist Worker is more vitriolic: the supposed denunciations Wilson received from the press in its aftermath an indication of how the Queen Mother’s “ignorance has been deliberately hidden from the world” (www.socialistworker.co.uk, No. 1706). Curiously, Wilson, perhaps concerned about losing backstage privileges at Buckingham Palace, later downplayed the effect of the story, claiming that it hardly raised an eyebrow (The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor, 1993). I would like to thank Nancy Heil for her help in tracking these reactions. <return to text>

 

great early poems. After his extended reflection on the place of the music hall in Eliot’s imagination, Chinitz offers a suggestive reading of the fishmen reference in “A Fire Sermon”: “Here the fishmen’s bar, an analogue of the music hall, represents a vestigial enclave of living (popular) culture amid London’s commercial center (the ‘City’). From this oasis, however, the speaker, the poet-flaneur wandering the streets outside, is painfully excluded” (104). With Chinitz’ understanding of what working class art meant to Eliot—an end to exile—this passage from The Waste Land comes poignantly alive.

Chinitz does not shy away from the defensiveness of his position: The Waste Land, and even more, those prickly quatrain poems of the 1920s, do not betray an author interested in cultivating a broad readership. Chinitz tracks how Eliot made a series of inter-related choices that turned him in the direction of the popular. One of these choices can be seen in the difference between his essays for the Egoist and those for the Dial. Eliot’s 1917-19 essays for the avant-garde Egoist reveal an aesthetically minded littérateur who renders high-handed judgements about art, while the 1921-22 articles for the broader readership of the Dial show a chatty, sophisticated Eliot who addresses a variety of cultural topics in his “London Letters.” And it is this latter Eliot, Chinitz reminds us, who sustains the inquiry for the rest of his life, exploring “most persistently the relations between social conditions and art” (64). Thus, the essays. As for the art, Chinitz pursues a parallel argument: “Ultimately, then, Eliot did deal with modernist complicity in the cultural divide [i.e., the off-putting difficulty of his early poetry], not by betraying his allegiances but by walking away from them: by asserting that he was no longer interested in ‘literature’ as an autonomous practice carried on for ‘art’s sake,’ and by turning instead to drama as a popular vehicle with ‘direct social utility’” (69). And a further evolution: from the unfinished and unfinishable melodrama of Sweeney Agonistes to the finally popular-if-not-quite-blockbuster-success of the late plays: “Drama for Eliot was popular by its very nature, and in the end he would even compromise with the devil, the despised middle class, rather than create a coterie theater. This decision, taken gradually over the quarter century spanning Sweeney Agonistes and The Cocktail Party, is the logical consequence of Eliot’s aversion to the cultural divide” (72).

It is Chinitz’ reading of Eliot’s unfinished fragment, Sweeney Agonistes, that serves as the crux of his multi-layered argument. Chinitz’ own attitude toward Sweeney Agonistes could be described as ambivalent. On the one hand, Chinitz admires the daring scope of the play, its attempt to serve up a jazzy version of themes of The Waste Land in a popular form: “Rejecting the view that Eliot treats this assemblage of popular forms with a superior irony, I argue that he deploys them in Sweeney Agonistes with such powerful intricacy of feeling and complexity of attitude as to keep the spirit of the play profoundly enigmatic; indeed the delight of the work resides in its unresolvable compound of grotesque disaffection and outright enthusiasm” (15). Here and elsewhere, Chinitz seems almost unwilling to concede that the play is a failure. Considering its use of American vernacular, Chinitz argues that Sweeney Agonistes “must be counted a singular success, for, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, the play achieves a great deal with the ‘American vulgar tongue’ and its rhythms” (119). On the other hand, Chinitz knows that such standards of success are not the same as the standards of the popular audience to whom the play was addressed: “the play was based from the start on an unworkable conception,” he reluctantly concludes. “The project fell victim to Eliot’s cultural ambivalence, which resulted in irreconcilable conflicts among his goals and premises” (119).

Reviewing the marginal annotations I made while reading his book, I find that Chinitz has always anticipated my own objections or ambivalence, a testament to the thoroughness with which he has approached this complex topic. A mild criticism I have is that I would have preferred more of the lively footnotes to have been incorporated into the argument of the text itself. For Chinitz writes with a light touch, and an occasionally cheeky tone, exactly the right note to sound in considering the would-be-popular Eliot.

Chinitz skims past the inner turmoil in Eliot’s work—he seems testily impatient with those who reduce the work to this category. It is not because he does not notice any anguished content, but because it has such little bearing on his thesis: the spiritually penitent Eliot is packaged for a different audience than the mass-marketed Eliot. Noting the absence of the spiritual or psychological in a book on popular culture hardly rates as a criticism, merely an acknowledgement that the scope of Chinitz’ project—in trying to construct a new Eliot, or resurrect a buried one—cannot comprehend all of the old Eliots we’re familiar with. Thus, we may feel ambivalent about a critical project that attempts to show us how Eliot saw himself, rather than the Eliot we would like to see.

Chinitz is right to be annoyed by critics who see the delightful cat poems as a betrayal of the Grand Cause of Art. Yet, I will here confess my own ambivalence—not about Chinitz’ argument, but about Eliot’s own agenda. The cat poems can only be described as great fun, while Prufrock and The Waste Land are great poems, forged in the crucible of Eliot’s private sufferings. The later Eliot, in trying to be fun rather than great—or trying both—missed his vocation. Those early, electrifying poems continue to speak, perhaps not to the royal family, but to critics who study them, and to average readers who turn to poetry as monks turn to prayer. Those poems may not bridge the cultural divide, but they bridge the historical divide between their original audiences and us.
It is admirable that Eliot turned away from the brilliant success of such work to speak to a broader public. But it must be admitted that Sweeney Agonistes—even in Chinitz’ marvelous reading—is an unfinished failure. Chinitz’ achievement is in explaining why it is a failure, and why Eliot never tried such an “unworkable proposition” (119) again, turning instead to a bourgeois genre, the drawing room comedy. As Chinitz acknowledges, by the time Eliot chose to transform the drawing-room comedy to his own purposes, it was already a moribund genre.

What might have happened, one wonders, if instead of trying to reach a “large and miscellaneous” public in the theater (and writing poetry haphazardly on the side), Eliot instead had studiously attempted to create a slightly broader reading public for his poetry? Then, one speculates with mounting ambivalence, we might have more poetry like the Four Quartets and “Journey of the Magi.” But who would want that? Surely another consequence of the polarized attitudes towards Eliot—besides blurring our understanding of how Eliot wanted to be popular—is that the embattled defenders of his work have spent little time analyzing how much of the late poetry is so mediocre. Undistracted by the claims of the theater, such a hypothetical Eliot might have written poetry of decidedly better quality than the late poetry often exhibits. If the consequence of Eliot’s attempt to bridge the cultural divide is that we are served up quasi-metaphysical comedies that are none too convincing, and the late poetry that isn’t quite poetry, then I’ll take neither.

But Chinitz’ thesis seems to me to be unassailable. Chinitz is not trying to re-popularize work that only had qualified success. Rather, he wants us to note how seriously Eliot took the matter of speaking to a broad public, how he used his considerable talents and prestige in the service of a project which most ignored or rejected, and how seriously—if not always successfully—Eliot adapted the rhetoric of popular forms and turned their devices in the service of his evolving artistic agenda.

The image of an Eliot disdaining “mere entertainment,” or hurling potshots at the booboisie on the other side of the cultural divide is not one that holds up under inquiry. And we now have sufficient historical and critical distance for understanding why such a false image was needed by Eliot’s detractors and defenders, and how that image was unintentionally propped up by the author’s own fame and his ambivalence towards popular forms.

So what we have learned from Chinitz might be marked by the following unambivalent decree: henceforth, anyone caught repeating the cliché that Eliot’s work decries the decadence of popular culture shall be fined $75. Payable to Dr. Chinitz.

Jayme Stayer, SJ