T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (review)

"All art is a collaboration," wrote Synge in the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, taking delight in paying homage to the folk-imagination and language that he had richly drawn on in the Aran Islands:

and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children.¹

W. B. Yeats readily acknowledged the collaborative role of Lady Gregory in providing "country speech" in several of his plays, often stating his wish that she would allow her name to appear as coauthor. Though she always declined, at least two anthologists in our less happy age feel that the over-modest silence of Lady Gregory's contribution should be radically corrected, intervening to assign sole authorship of Cathleen ni Houlihan to her.² T. S. Eliot lived with the discomfort of not recognizing Ezra Pound's collaboration on The Waste Land for three years, until he found the opportunity to dedicate the poem to him as "il miglior fabbro" in Poems 1909–1925. Most critics in this burgeoning field are content to unveil the fact and extent, the anxiety and guilt, of collaboration, but in T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration, which employs as epigraph Eliot's declaration that "No writer is completely self-sufficient," Richard Badenhausen argues that in Eliot's major works and plays collaboration was a psychological necessity of composition.

The focus of the study is on the nature of Eliot's creative process, and the analysis is based on the author's contention that Eliot was psychologically dependent on collaborators to complete (and sometimes initiate) his poems and plays. The principal partners and the facts of their participation in Eliot's texts are well known—Vivien Eliot and Pound in The Waste Land, E. Martin Browne in the plays, and John Hayward in the Four Quartets. In seeking to reunite the man who suffers with the mind that creates, Badenhausen pursues a "species of biographical criticism" that lifts these relationships into a psychological realm of amorphous identity, submissive passivity, dominance, codependency, authority figures, pathological withdrawal, schizophrenic attitudes, and a succession of needs, desires, fears, impulses, postures, threats, concealments, and suspicions, all part and parcel of Eliot's alleged creative insecurity and "lack of self-assurance." In the diagnosis that Eliot was fully conscious of his psychological and creative shortcomings, Badenhausen attempts to reconstruct the elaborate "theory of collaboration" that Eliot developed in his prose to justify his dependency in the composition of poems and plays. To Baudenhausen, the necessity of collaboration for creative completion is the "controlling principle" (110) of Eliot's career, and throughout the narrative he frequently reiterates his unswerving conviction that the "only way" that Eliot could create was with outside agents; he had "no choice but to seek out collaborators who could help him realize his art" (26). Eliot is seen to be fearful of the dangerous creative process, in the midst of which he becomes helpless without his enablers: "Not only does poetry emerge through violence against the self but the poet is then forced to stand by idly to see if that poetic material will grow and take shape on its own, which is one of the reasons Eliot looked to collaborators at this moment in the creative process—he required assistance in helping his fragments 'sprout'" (31). At best, Eliot becomes a cocreator; at least, a choreographer: "if he could not completely make sense of his poetic material, he could at least choreograph the circumstances under which it would be addressed" (13).

The author brings a wide-ranging familiarity with Eliot's uncollected and unpublished...