Eliot & Collaboration

ELT 49 : 2 2006 "grimly funny" the description of Lady Bexborough's decision to open the bazaar while holding the telegram that tells of her favorite son's death in the war. Lady Bexborough's stiff upper lip may not entirely escape Woolf's criticism, but it is hardly the occasion for dark humor. One may end with a different example of dark humor: the striking disparity between the cost of this book ($69.95) and its length (154 pages). A study that recommends itself to general readers for its perceptiveness and accessibility is denied to them by its exorbitant cost; instead, the book will find itself in university libraries, on whose generous funds Palgrave Macmillan cynically depends. Furthermore, for $69.95 readers should expect a more carefully edited book than this. Latin seems to have baffled the copy editor, who has allowed to slip through "non-sequitor" (sic) and "momento mori" (sic), as well as, among other errors, "Sir and Lady Bradshaw" and "Modern Novels" as the title of Woolf's 1919 manifesto, rather than the correct "Modern Fiction." ALISTAIR M. DUCKWORTH ________________University of Florida, Gainesville Eliot & Collaboration Richard Badenhausen. T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xi + 256 pp. $75.00 BADENHAUSEN'S carefully argued study helps us rethink key aspects of Eliot's theory and practice—from his insistence on poetic impersonality and his concept of Tradition to the theory of drama developed later in his career—in terms of Eliot's collaborative impulse, a "life-long habit" of eliciting and depending on the assistance of others. Initially, readers may find it difficult to reconcile the notion of a collaborative Eliot with his notorious inscrutability, his almost pathological need for privacy and concomitant revulsion to personal self-revelation, his forbidding allusiveness and posture of unassailable authority—all characteristics, after all, that seem incompatible with the essentially democratic ethos of collaboration as we encounter it in contemporary pedagogic practice and collective political processes. Fully aware that his findings on the "omnipresence of collaborative voices in Eliot's texts" challenge the cult of Eliot as "solitary and isolated, a lone poetic deity among mere mortals," Badenhausen sets out to show how for Eliot collaboration was never simply a choice, but a creative necessity, one that eventually drove him to abandon his youthful modernist disdain for the "common reader" in favor of an aesthetic explicitly designed to invite audience participation. Moreover, despite his frequent discomfort with the ceding of control exacted by his cooperative habits, Eliot went on 238 Book reviews to employ collaboration as a cornerstone of his conservative cultural agenda bent on retrieving a hierarchical social order that alone, he believed, could ensure cultural unity and tradition. This new image of a collaborative Eliot advanced in Badenhausen's study not so much supercedes as extends and vastly complicates that of the elusive, regal man of letters. Eliot, Badenhausen maintains, "tended to view the writing process as one that could succeed only through the presence of a companion, since he found the poetic material generated by his imagination unwieldy and, at times, overwhelming." Thus Badenhausen traces Eliot's "constant impetus" toward relying on external entities, "whether they take the form of Pound and other collaborators , a broad system of allusion, or an artificial poetic framework," to his tortured relationship to poetry itself, exemplified in a stunning comment to Conrad Aiken: "[I]t's interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout." Associating the creation of poetry with both violence against the self and the passivity of a patient watching his own dismemberment, Eliot required "companions," other writers or external entities who could help provide the shape or boundaries that would deliver, even absolve him from the morass of his "unwieldy" poetic imagination. Not surprisingly, this constant impetus toward giving in to outside entities, caused by his "horror of writing and speaking his poetry into a void," led to collaborative ventures that routinely fell short of Eliot's idealized constructions, featuring a "passive artist who struggles to take responsibility for artistic creation and a cooperative collaborator who is able to offer assertive...