| Amherst |
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| T. S. Eliot has been unsettled, if not to say unseated, in the literary pantheon. You may shake your head in disbelief, smile in smug satisfaction, or shrug as if to say, what’s academic literary politics to do with me? Never mind that Eliot helped create Literary Criticism as a profession. What David Chinitz has done in his important new book is show that, pace Cultural Studies critics, whose privileging of the popular over the aesthetic has helped render Eliot unfashionable, T. S. Eliot was in fact passionately interested in popular culture, and it was this very interest that led him to abandon poetry in favor of verse drama. Eliot’s graduate studies in anthropology and his experiences in music halls led him to believe that popular theater was in fact a vestigial relic of religious ritual. Indeed, Chinitz shows us how Eliot’s conservatism and conversion to Anglicanism was a necessary outgrowth of his commitment to the popular. He writes, “No group identity, apparently [to Eliot], can outlive its specific culture, and a culture, in order to survive, requires ritual and the communal sense that ritual maintains” (93). Eliot’s conversion is nothing less than the conclusion of his search for the scaffolding of art, the faith that supports a community’s necessary ritual, and might we say, by extension, the poet’s. Eliot’s carefully crafted persona as the British “Grand Old Man” of Letters is largely responsible for his reputation as post-Modernism’s straw man of High Culture, and Chinitz goes to some pains to illustrate this point. In his introduction, for example, he writes, “Arguably, Eliot’s persona represents his single greatest triumph in the realm of popular culture: the conversion of himself into a world-famous literary legend” (17). Chinitz documents Eliot’s lifelong engagement with popular culture, beginning with the birth of ragtime in the first decade of Eliot’s life in St. Louis. Chinitz is at his best discussing music, and his close reading of the Pereira passage in Sweeney Agonistes in Chapter 4 is particularly instructive to the non-musical. So thorough is Chinitz’s research, in fact, that I found myself wishing that he had published a companion CD of Eliot’s ragtime, jazz, and music hall sources. | Recuperating an Eliot who loved to dance, to sing, to read detective fiction, and to perform vaudeville sketches for his friends is, of course, helpful; a kinder, gentler Eliot is certainly new to many. But perhaps Chinitz’s most valuable contribution to the scholarship of Eliot is to put Eliot’s truly breathtaking innovations in his unfinished Sweeney Agonistes in the context of his aim to revive ritual within popular entertainment. Who but Eliot could have successfully combined Seneca’s stichomythia (where one speaker repeats a word from the previous speaker’s phrase, twisting its rhythm) with jazz syncopation, added vaudevillian backchat and put it all together in the format of a minstrel show? And our estimation is not lessened even as we are persuaded by Chinitz that Eliot could not have finished Sweeney Agonistes, and had he done so, it would have been doomed to unpopularity:
Likewise, Chinitz allows us to see Eliot’s verse drama, to which he devoted twenty-five years of his life, in the context of what by now we might admit was a life-long obsession with popular culture. (Here perhaps is the place to note that popular is not to be confused with either mass or middle-class culture, both of which Eliot abhorred.) It used to be possible to take numerous undergraduate English courses in both Modernism and modern drama and never read a single one of Eliot’s plays; presumably this is still the case, but thanks to Chinitz, it shouldn’t be. While this is slim volume is a work of considerable scholarship (the list of works cited runs to 18 pages), the prose is spare, at times elegant, and often funny. Chinitz is a wonderful guide not only to the works, but also to the life, of T. S. Eliot. Eva Rosenn is a writer | |||