| Review
of English Studies |
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| The standard-issue Eliot is the defender of and spokesman for high culture, a high modernist whose interest in music hall can quickly be dismissed as whimsical. This book sets out to present a more interesting and ‘conflicted’ Eliot by showing that his engagement with popular culture and its influences on him were various and ran deep. David Chinitz’s claim that Eliot’s modernism lay in ‘a paradoxical attitude of ironic affection for the popular ... as much as in his formal innovations’ (p. 28) accounts better for the humour evident in so much of Eliot’s work than the received image perhaps too greatly coloured by his late conservatism, and allows a perception of him as more attractive and less sneeringly superior. His claim that the removal of the standard image of Eliot will allow a fuller picture of modernism and its relationship with popular culture is well argued and entirely reasonable. The book examines the whole of Eliot’s career, the drama being a particular feature, though Four Quartets fits less well with the topic. The influences of popular forms such as jazz, minstrel shows, and music hall are well discussed. For Eliot, the music hall audience worked in collaboration with the performer, rather than merely passively consuming art, as with the cinema. He seems to have seen music hall as a living ritual, though Chinitz is careful to question the authenticity of music hall as an expression of working-class culture, and reads Eliot’s view as perhaps something necessary to his way of thinking about the relationship between art and society. Eliot sought the kind of organic relationship with the audience that was natural to an artist like Marie Lloyd. Chinitz points to Eliot’s youth in St Louis as one vector for the influence of jazz on him. He traces jazz influences on Eliot’s style from his early poetry through to The Waste Land. One can hear the American popular music of ragtime and Tin Pan Alley in the poems of Inventions of the March Hare. Chinitz also indicates the symbolic significance of jazz, representing modernity, the vitality of American mass culture, and reaction against Victorian values. Pound’s editing makes it less problematic to cast The Waste Land as high culture, part of the ‘Great Tradition’. Chinitz points out that in its very technique of ‘quotation, imitation, and parody’ (p. 46) it is like jazz, but also like American vaudeville and English music hall. Minstrel shows were allusive, giving new meaning to what they took from other genres by giving it a different context; this is also a technique of The Waste Land. Chinitz refers to the original ‘Shakespearian Rag’ (from the 1912 Ziegfeld Follies) to illuminate what he sees as Eliot’s view of popular culture, to counter the tendency of his later ‘explicators’ to attribute their own scornful view to Eliot himself. An interesting contribution to reading The Waste Land in itself, this discussion also points to a complex, intelligent, but not over-serious quality in Eliot’s relishing of popular culture. There is careful tracing of the influences of music hall, vaudeville, burlesque, and jazz on Sweeney | Agonistes, which for Chinitz is a ‘jazz Aristophanes’. He believes that Eliot liked the forms of popular culture too much merely to use them in order to ‘expose them as vacuous—as symptoms ... of modernity’s spiritual emptiness’ (p. 118). His discussion of why Eliot failed to finish Sweeney Agonistes picks up his theme of the poet’s cultural ambivalence,‘ which resulted in irreconcilable conflicts among his goals and premises’ (p. 119). He wanted the play to be popular drama, but it could only have been alien to any mass audience. ‘The effect of authentic ritual cannot be aroused in the absence of a live tradition’ (p. 121). Society was not suitable for Eliot’s drama. In abandoning Sweeney Agonistes and writing The Hollow Men, Eliot was moving towards his conversion to Anglicanism and the need to live within a pre-existing tradition of faith where ritual would be possible. Chinitz understands the personal imperatives that drove Eliot towards writing popular drama, rather than seeing this move as a betrayal of the principles of high art. It seems to me right to say that only those who insist, against the evidence of Eliot’s own inclinations, on seeing him as a representative of high literary art and culture in some kind of battle against the popular can still see the move as a betrayal. The issue of the extent to which a writer’s opinions and beliefs influence our valuation of his art is raised for me in Chinitz’s sympathetic appraisal of The Cocktail Party: ‘Though many have found its vision unpalatable, The Cocktail Party is a successful work of theatre’ (p. 143). Eliot’s incorporation of popular forms and his attempts at expression through popular drama are seen in this book as part of a commitment to a unified culture, a resistance to the fragmentation of modern society. There is positive but sensibly critical discussion of Eliot’s ideas on society, though, for me, Eliot’s interest in working people and popular culture seems that of an outsider, and so lacking in real sympathy because necessarily reviews anthropological at best, if not patronizing. Even Chinitz, in his well-argued case for Eliot’s enthusiasm for some forms of popular culture, accepts that Eliot’s interest in music hall persisted through its decline. Chinitz’s scorn for the circularity of that academic view of The Waste Land whose reading of the poem is conditioned by the new criticism and then condemns the poem as the repository of new-critical values is just. It might be mischievous to suggest that, in showing an Eliot more receptive to popular culture, this book falls in with more recent critical demands to find a place in modernism for popular culture. Chinitz’s rereading of Eliot, giving due emphasis to the drama, rather than seeing it as a betrayal, and stripping away the misconceptions created by confusing Eliot with Leavis and miscasting him as high culture’s champion against the popular, reveals a figure in whom academic criticism could take fresh interest, if it can bear to part with the Eliot constructed for its own needs by its successive generations. Richard Greaves | |||