Every year I’m stumped by a simple question: “What do you want for Christmas?” A.E. Stallings has come to my rescue. In The American Scholar she reviews The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis. T.S. Eliot was the first “grown-up” poet I adopted as my own and the first whose work I set out to memorize.
I can date
this resolution with some precision. I was in seventh grade when Eliot died on
January 4, 1965. Our junior high school had a small bookstore in a closet just
off the cafeteria. Previously, my only purchase had been a paperback reprint of
One, Two, Three . . . Infinity: Facts and
Speculations of Science (1947) by the theoretical physicist and cosmologist
George Gamow. I had heard of Eliot’s death, probably from the newspaper. I saw
this book on the rack and bought it – for 60 cents:
I know the
objections some have to Eliot, and I agree with most of them. Stallings writes:
“Hollis forcefully calls out anti-Semitism when it occurs, as it not
infrequently does, in the writings of Eliot and Pound, and to a lesser extent,
their garden-variety casual misogyny (for a time, Hollis points out, all of
their publishers were women). The ‘worst mistake I made,’ Pound would later
lament, ‘was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.’”
I’ve never bought Pound’s too-little, too-late excuses. With Eliot I’ve reached a workable if not entirely satisfactory rapprochement. He wrote some stupidly anti-Semitic things familiar to serious readers, though he later said Jew-hatred for Christians was a sin. Unlike Pound, he never committed treason. I concur with Joseph Epstein's conclusion: “But might it be allowed that one can write or say anti-Semitic things without being an anti-Semite? Eliot is guilty of the former, but does not, I think, stand guilty of the latter.”
Pound remains the model for poetic monomania. There will always be that qualifying asterisk beside Eliot’s name but I remain his devoted reader. When walking I still recite to myself scraps of “Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men.” It’s these Dantean lines that get me every time, from “The Burial of the Dead” section of “The Waste Land”:
“A crowd
flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not
thought death had undone so many.”
5 comments:
Oh man, you've done it again. I have enough to get through already. I recognize the author as the Edward Thomas biographer, which makes it even more interesting to me. Thanks for the heads up.
In the room the women come and go. Talking of Michaelangelo. (You mentioned reciting lines when you walk and this one always rolls in my head.)
What are we to make of our imperfect artists?
Can we only celebrate the work of an artist if they can survive our modern microscope of their life and beliefs? Or may we still praise imperfect men and women? (I don't ask with the presumption of an answer. This truly is a quandary of balance we have not yet resolved.)
Bought the same copy of The waste Land, I was in 7th or 8th grade, 1965 or 66.
One, Two, Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
That, and Microbe Hunters.
I must have been about 9 when I read them.
They did not turn me to science, but looking back, I think they were foundational to my general education.
@JohnD
My approach is to try to take - and accept - everyone in context.
Kudos to those artists (and others) who escape their context, but that’s not very many of us.
Let us grant to those who lived in the past the same understanding that we would hope for ourselves from those who live in the future.
Post a Comment