Light On Dark Water

Funny.
AMDG

I’d heard that before. I think it made the rounds when the Queen Mother died, as a gesture of sneering at the recently departed. Alas. It is pretty funny, though. That “lugubrious man in a suit. . . “

Probably no one would have been more amused by that description than Eliot himself.

Ryan C

The relationship between C.S. Lewis and Eliot would be interesting to write an article or a book on; I don’t mean a personal relationship, but just their different approaches to literature and Christianity. Lewis refers to Eliot quite a bit in his criticism of poetry.
I love that story about The Waste Land. It’s ironic they should be giggling, because the whole poem is about sex (not in a crude way, I mean just erotic desire in general).

Janet Cupo

I wish I could remember exactly how this goes, but I can’t and I’m too lazy to look it up. Lewis and his friends in an attempt to ridicule the sort of poetry that Eliot wrote, wrote some poems under assumed names and tried to get them published. I’m thinking that they thought it would be a sort of embarrassing send up. But, they couldn’t get them published and I wonder if it made them think a bit about why not.
AMDG

I tried that when I was a freshman in college, starting from Berryman rather than Eliot. I quickly saw that however random Berryman’s remarks seemed to me at first glance, there was something there that I couldn’t imitate. I don’t think I ever actually submitted mine.
Lewis detested Eliot’s poetry, as I recall, and therefore wasn’t keen on the man, but at some later point declared that Eliot was “one of us.” I don’t know if he ever developed any taste for the poetry, though.
“the whole poem is about sex” Ryan, you ain’t turning into one of them intellectuals, is you? 🙂 That does seem a rather reductionist view.

Ryan C

It’s not reductive, although I was being intentionally provocative. 0: ) Eliot had experienced aporia and was close to suicide around the time he wrote it, due to his disastrous first marriage (there’s a story involving him, Ezra Pound, and a gun I believe).
The poem is full of “memory and desire” and images of failed relationships (Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, for example). To take just one example, the second section tracks disastrous love through the three social classes–the upper class (“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne”), the middle class (“‘My nerves are bad to-night”) and the lower class (“When Lil’s husband got demobbed”). In that last section there’s reference to abortifacients.
The rest of the poem is full of images of abortion, infertility/unfecundity (the dry chapel, the dry land), and rape (the Tiresias section in the Fire Sermon, in which Tiresias emphasizes with the gramaphone girls rape, which is one of the most horrible moments in any 20th century poem).
The poem is basically an anatomy of the sexual instinct corrupted by original sin (note the reference to Augustine, “To Carthage I came…” who prayed “Lord make me chaste, but not yet!”). And this is how it clearly anticipates his conversion (Ash Wednesday being a poem of purification).

Ryan C

I apologize for my poor writing–it’s getting close to bedtime, but you’ve gotten me riled up. 😉
I think you’re both right about Lewis’s dislike of Eliot’s poetry (he also doesn’t seem to like Donne very much, for similar reasons–sees his poetry as parasitic upon an older tradition). I think Lewis especially hated how Eliot had influenced so many lesser writers–he speaks of Eliot “haunting” modern poetry. But he also praises Eliot’s literary taste at times. And then there’s his ripost to Eliot’s infamous statement that Hamlet is “certainly a failure”:
“The method of the whole play is much nearer to Mr. Eliot’s own method in poetry than Mr Eliot suspects. Its true hero is man–haunted man–man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling t get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him.”
Now, if that’s not a backhanded compliment I don’t know what is! haha! He made those comments in 1942, so this is after Murder in the Cathedral and the Four Quartets, which is what I think he’s referring to.
Then there’s this kind of comment, in discussing Dryden (who he also doesn’t seem to like): “Classicists like Mr. Eliot (and myself) should not accept any amount of littered poetry as a poem–which seems like a dig to me hah! That’s from 1939.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: trying to explain what reading Dante is like, Lewis said it was like Milton + Shelley. He actually seems to have liked Shelley a lot, which surprised me at first, but then I could see why as I thought about it some more (both are attracted to the notion of joy).

Ryan C

This is Eliot at his naughtiest. Although, like the typist/gramophone girl, it’s actually quite sad in its portrait of human sexuality, male aggression and indifference:
Sweeney Erect
“And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!”
PAINT me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Aeolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne’s hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands
(Nausicaa and Polypheme).
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees
Then straightens out from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed full length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the female temperament
And wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced,
Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste
Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.
But Doris, towelled from the bath,
Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat.
Sweeey (basically just a phallic symbol as he shaves) thinks the woman’s “in heat” when she’s really having an epileptic fit, and actually all the neighbors think something is going on too. But thankfully Doris comes in to help her out of her fit. In The Waste Land the same kind of thing is going on, but it’s more subtle…

I only have a second right now (getting ready to go to work) but: it’s the formulation “the whole poem is about” that I was reacting to, because it implies “only about”. Definitely there’s no denying that sex is a major theme in The Waste Land, but the sexual desolation is all mixed up with spiritual desolation.

Paul

No, Ryan – I’m pretty sure the whole poem is about merchant banking. Bankers (and typists) just happen to be sexual beings, too.

Ryan C

If I wanted to say that the poem was only about sex, I would have though!
Haha. And very funny Paul.
But if you compare ‘Sweeny Erect’ to the ‘Waste Land’ you’ll see the same continuum of though.
I really don’t think what I said is that shocking, if one keeps in mind that I’m a big proponent of theology of the body. I think Eliot was courageous for going into the nitty gritty of fallen man like he did. And so I also don’t think what I said is reductive, because gender and sexuality are woven through the universe and salvation history.
It’s true there’s other things in the poem, the bureaucracy, the unreal city, etc… There’s this wonderful recollection of a time before WWI for example:
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
But notice how this is filtered through a male-female relationship.
And then there’s this:
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.
What happened in the garden? Eliot does not say, but we can imagine some sort of sexual betrayal–especially with the quote from ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in the last line. And of course, Baudelaire’s influence on Eliot probably influenced his treatment of sexuality too.
Here’s another image of rape, in section II like I said:
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.
This is a quotation from Spenser’s Prothalamion, which depicts the betrothal ceremony of some noblewomen:
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
Which nicely coincides with the reference to Leicester and Elizabeth’s failed courtship.
So yes, I think male-female sexuality and all the ways it can go wrong is the dominant theme in the poem, as in many of Eliot’s early poems (‘Sweeny Erect’), and in keeping with his troubled personal life at the time. That’s all I meant!

Ryan C

If you love “The Waste Land,” you must read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Revisiting-Waste-Land-Lawrence-Rainey/dp/0300123728/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293039111&sr=8-1

Well, I still balk at “the dominant theme.” I agree that the motif is pervasive. I would say that the typist scene et.al. about not only sex itself but a particularly modern dessication and trivialization of sex, and this in turn is enlisted as part of a general spiritual and cultural indictment. I think the objection has been made–at any rate I’ve thought this–that Eliot really was reaching too far in projecting his own neuroses as evidence of a sickness in Western Civ. But yet the fact that the poem was widely recognized as correct in its diagnosis argues that whatever the material facts might be, the poem worked.
Btw I’ve never seen the typist scene as a rape exactly, but rather as a sort of deadened passivity on the typist’s part

That book looks interesting, although I’d feel slightly dishonest in saying I love The Waste Land. Admire and respect and find interesting, definitely, but I don’t often read it for pleasure. It succeeds all too well at conveying fragmentation by being fragmented.

Ryan C

Right, I agree with you about the typist scene, but I think that’s what so horrifying about it–it’s portrayed both as a rape and as passivity in the language and with the Tiresias/Philomela resonances.
The book is excellent. He talks about the different typewriters Eliot wrote the poem with, which allows him to date the different parts of the poem. He releases unpublished letters that shed light on Eliot’s state of mind at the time. And he shows how initial readers reacted to the poem (much differently from the Queen Mum haha).
The typist stands in for the “New Working Woman” of the teens and 20s. Eliot has a funny poem about them:
“Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.”
The irony of Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson being guardians of a “faith” is devastating. What Eliot does, and why I love him so much, is he goes through literary history and shows how the same problems of original sin keep cropping up. This is what his brand of literary modernism is–seeing the modern dilemma as an extension of previous dilemmas, uniting past and present.

Yeah, I like the Miss Nancy poem. And it’s really prescient about where the contest of spiritually hollowed-out moralism vs. animal spirits was going. You can read the whole collapse of upper-class WASP culture into that. Fifty years from Miss Nancy Ellicot to Edie Sedgewick.
I’ve always found the Sweeney poems irritating, btw. Unpleasant in detail and unintelligible as a whole. Your explication of that one is interesting–I never could figure out exactly what was supposed to be going on there.
Oh, by the way, I had to chuckle at the suggestion that I was finding the discovery of sex in The Waste Land to be shocking. I could almost wish that were true…

Ryan C

Well, not the discovery of it but the idea that its the foundation of the whole poem, but that came out wrong (it’s hard to revise a Renaissance dissertation and debate modernist poetry at the same time). 😛