T. S. Eliot and Cinema

On 24 April 1915, T. S. Eliot wrote to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley from Merton College, Oxford, where he was at that time a student. He reported that, as a diversion from his studies, he had been "to a few music-halls, and to the cinema with a most amusing French woman who is the only interesting acquaintance at my boarding house."¹ The point of this latter expedition was presumably the amusing French woman, rather than the cinema. Of her, alas, we hear no more. But there is sufficient scattered reference to the cinema, in Eliot's letters, essays, and poems, to suggest an enduring preoccupation, and one with definite consequences for his development as a writer.

The recent intensification of interest in literary modernism's relation to cinema, on the one hand, and Eliot's relation to popular culture, on the other, has created a curious blind spot. Enthusiasts for cinema's formative effect on modernist writing have on the whole felt that there is little or nothing to be done with Eliot; while critics who place great emphasis on Eliot's endorsement of popular forms such as music hall argue that it strengthened yet further his already powerful "aversion to cinema."² On both sides, the tendency has been to quote his remarks about cinema at their most dismissive, and in isolation.³ Eliot has been cast as the mandarin high modernist who remained, in this one respect at least, a mandarin high modernist. I shall argue that, contrary to common belief, he does not fit the part.

Modernism and Cinema

In recent years, cinema has been proposed as a context for the work of an increasing number of writers who published in the period between the two World Wars, and whom we now regard as modernist.⁴ The great majority of the enquiries into literary modernism's relation to cinema undertaken during the past thirty years or so have been committed, implicitly or explicitly, to argument by analogy. The literary text, we are told, is structured like a film, in whole or in part: it has its "close-ups," its "tracks" and "pans," its "cuts" from one "shot" to another. Writers and film-makers were engaged, it would seem, in some kind of exchange of transferable narrative techniques. The transferable narrative technique which has featured most consistently in debates about literary modernism is montage. Michael Wood, indeed, argues that the "principle of montage," together with the "construction of imaginary space through the direction of the gaze," is "quintessentially modernist."⁵ It is a principle active, for example, according to an already voluminous scholarship, throughout the work of James Joyce.⁶ The Waste Land has recently been described as the "modern montage poem par excellence" (CM, 40).⁷

There has always been an advantage in thinking of the modernist text as though it were a film structured by the principle of montage. Louis MacNeice, for example, remembered encountering Eliot's poems for the first time in 1926, when he was in his final year in high school: "we had seen reviews proclaiming him a modern of the moderns and we too wanted to be 'modern.'" To someone his age, MacNeice recalled, The Waste Land's literary allusions and "anthropological symbolism" meant nothing. What did help was going to the movies. "The cinema technique of quick cutting, of surprise juxtapositions, of spotting the everyday detail and making it significant, this would naturally intrigue the novelty-mad adolescent and should, like even the most experimental films, soon become easy to grasp."⁸ MacNeice's recollection may be entirely faithful to his own experience of The Waste Land, and sound advice to boot, and yet not tell us anything at all about how the poem came to be written as it was written. For what the novelty-mad adolescent knew about film technique, in 1926, was already a world away from what the poem's author might or might not have known when he wrote it. Experimental cinema—a cinema of "surprise juxtapositions"—only arrived in Britain with the founding of the London Film Society in 1925.⁹

Historically...