T. S. Eliot

When he was a younger and a crueler man, T. S. Eliot once sketched himself:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Ellot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim,

And his mouth so prim,

And his conversation, so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And if and Perhaps and But....

Whatever became of this unpleasant Mr. Eliot, whose brow was ever so grim, and whose mouth was ever so prim, the present Mr. Eliot is a mellow, gracefully old and skeptical man, who was perfectly relaxed before his Boston College audience Monday night.

He is much bigger than I expected, and his large, broad face swivels slowly around at the audience, alternately pointing sharp nose and sharper chin at text and people. His hair parts, clerical-tightly, very neat; and his steel-frame glasses glitter and twinkle angrily. He stoops a little, like an old professor, and stands reading without a gesture. The tone and what he is reading give one the sense of listening to the words of a great stone oracle. All this makes him sound much more formidable than he really is, for what makes this stone oracle in black tie seem human is its weary, benign expression, and its sense of the playful.

The voice speaks drily and deeply, and despite Eliot's accent, there are unmistakably American qualities in his speech: its slowness, precise, though not pedantic, and its American "--and--uh." You notice the Yankee in his talk when he reads the second part of "The Waste Land," Lines like:

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag

It's so elegant

So Intelligent

or

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

sound strangely American mingled in with his Cockney dialogue.

After a time his voice rather gets on your nerves, even though an impersonal tone is perhaps just right for this kind of poetry. Much of Eliot's violent and intellectually lush symbolism really is a way of escaping from the whirr and bang of feelings into an impersonal, almost codified moral and aesthetic order; and his reading, like his poetry, too often has the deadness and woodenness of perfect peace. Even when Eliot reads a passage like this from his New Hampshire "Landscape":

Children's voices in the orchard

Between the blossom and the fruit-time

Golden head, crimson head,

Between the green tip and the root...

Golden head, black wing,

Cling, swing,

Spring, sing,

Swing up into the apple tree.

the voice is disconcerting, like a blind man's cane, tapping and feeling its way down the colored lines.

I suppose much of his poetry isn't really meant to be read aloud. In his essay, "The Three Voices of Poetry," Eliot distinguished between the voice of the poet talking to himself, the voice of the poet addressing an audience, and the voice of the poet talking with imaginary characters; certainly Eliot's choices Monday night conformed to his distinctions: some of the poems were nearly impossible to follow in a reading, because they were in Eliot's own psychological shorthand, and spoken as though he were thinking out loud. The dramatic poems were easier to follow, and easiest of all were those addressed to an audience. It is only in these last, clearly orated poems that Eliot seemed conscious that he was reading publicly, and then he was magnificent. (An exception to all categories, of course, is his delightful "cat" poetry. He read a charming sort of Browning monologue given by an alley cat named Morgan, who wandered into the offices of Faber and Faber in London during the Little Blitz.)

Eliot's "Quarters" are elegaic lyrics, meant to be orated, and they are therefore ideal for a public reading. Their musically recurring themes and sentences are exciting for people to follow, and the language of the "Quartets" is colloquial and modern; they are free of the pedantry and metaphysical conceits that make his other poems the kind you have to re-read. This is not to say that it is easy to understand Eliot's mysticism. It is only to say that one can follow Eliot's emotion in their stern music better than in any of his other poems. He read the last ("my best"), called "Little Gidding," and he enchanted his audience: the lines spread and flowed, sometimes it was a sermon, sometimes an elegy, and always it was harmonious and beautiful--not at all like Eliot's older dissonances:

If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would be likely to come from,

If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges

White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.

It would be the same at the end of the Journey,

If you came at night, like a broken king...

* * * * *

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.