American Literary Scholarship
2003
 

For some time now scholars have been discovering that their sage and serious Eliot had a Doppelgänger: Tom Eliot, the lover of music hall, minstrel show, jazz, comic strips, bawdy verse, Edward Lear, detective novels, Brer Rabbit, and Groucho Marx. The leader of the movement to recognize and analyze this other Eliot, David E. Chinitz, has now published a fine book on the subject, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago).

In his introduction Chinitz notes that in the debate that has developed between Eliot’s admirers and detractors the two sides ‘‘share with equal assurance the identification of Eliot with high art.’’ Chinitz promises to show both sides that Eliot ‘‘is a multidimensional thinker and artist, whose approach to the modern popular, both as theorized in his critical essays and as practiced in his art, is supple, frequently insightful, and always deeply ambivalent.’’ The rest of the book accomplishes this aim admirably, with unfailing thoughtfulness, balance, careful scholarship, and lucidity.

In chapter 1, ‘‘A Jazz-Banjorine,’’ we meet the Eliot who called himself a metic (foreigner), a migratory bird, and an organ grinder—even as he labored to adopt a wholly British persona. In a letter to Mary Hutchinson, he says his instrument is not the lute but the ‘‘jazz-banjorine,’’ identifying him with the blackface comics in the minstrel shows of his homeland. Chinitz shows that there are echoes of popular culture in the early poems—for example, the ‘‘dull tom-tom’’ in ‘‘Portrait of a Lady’’ and the ‘‘modern dances’’ in ‘‘Cousin Nancy’’—and that popular culture is not seen as degenerate there. A subtle metrical analysis lets us hear the jazz rhythms in much of the early verse. The Waste Land drafts were full of popular music. The bits that remained after editing—especially the ‘‘Shakespherian rag’’ and the ballad of Mrs. Porter—have been taken as signifying the emptiness of modern culture, but Chinitz shows that they are ambiguous.

Chapter 2, ‘‘The Dull and the Lively,’’ reveals Eliot’s lifelong belief that high art must be entertaining and therefore seeks to be popular. In his essay on Marianne Moore, for instance, Eliot insists that ‘‘[f ]ine art is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art.’’ Eliot thought the abyss between high and low to be something created in the modern world. Though he championed tradition, it was a living, changing tradition, and he thought middlebrow art was the true enemy of both the popular and the refined. In spite of his connections with the New Criticism, Eliot never thought of art as autonomous.

The next two chapters focus on Eliot’s desire to write drama, an inherently popular genre. ‘‘Backstage with Marie

 

Lloyd’’ (chapter 3) starts from Eliot’s conviction that drama derives from ritual and is thus communal, a conviction that led him to seek, Chinitz argues, ‘‘a new drama in verse that would recover the satisfactions of ritual and thus restore a public to the theater.’’ At one point Eliot goes so far as to say, ‘‘I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write.’’ When Eliot decries the modern mob, it is ‘‘always specifically middle class.’’ Eliot’s first attempt at verse drama, Sweeney Agonistes, is the subject of chapter 4, ‘‘Sweeney Bound and Unbound,’’ where Chinitz examines the use of jazz ‘‘backchat’’ in the play and the presence of Tambo and Bones, the standard ‘‘endmen’’ in the minstrel shows. The connection between the modern jazz age and primitive ritual also becomes apparent. The work ultimately failed, Chinitz argues, because it ‘‘fell victim to Eliot’s cultural ambivalence.’’

For some time Eliot gave up on his dream of writing poetic drama, returning to it when he was asked to compose a pageant play, The Rock, performed in 1934. With Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Eliot went far toward achieving his goal, for the play was performed 400 times in London and then toured other cities in England as well as New York and Boston. It was also broadcast on both radio and television. In the plays to follow, Eliot worked at creating a verse that would be almost entirely unobtrusive, that would work on the audience subconsciously. This he achieved most successfully with The Cocktail Party (1949), which was given 409 performances on Broadway.

In his final chapter, ‘‘The T. S. Eliot Identity Crisis,’’ Chinitz is able to use the vantage point he has built up in the rest of the book to reconsider Eliot’s lifelong engagement with the question of culture and to readjust much critical thought on the subject. It is the critics (both on the right and the left) who have made Eliot an icon of highbrow reactionary conservatism; Eliot’s conservatism is of a diverent type. Even in The Idea of a Christian Society ‘‘Eliot struggles mightily, though with uneven success, to leave behind the narrow, Arnoldian equation of culture with the fine arts and to embrace the broader, modern, sociological definition of culture.’’ In his final pages Chinitz points toward Eliot’s love of ordinary, popular pleasures: Kipling, Stilton cheese, cats, and Groucho Marx (who surprised many by giving one of the eulogies at a memorial for Eliot).

This essential book has redrawn the literary map, drawing what Chinitz calls ‘‘the cultural divide’’ right through the middle of Eliot country. Many of us stand corrected.

Benjamin Lockerd
Grand Valley State University