Eliot & Modernism

BOOK REVIEWS Wells during the last phase of his life and Foot's friendship with some of the people—particularly Rebecca West—involved with him) on Wells's relationships with women (his two wives, Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, and that strange personality Moura Budberg), Wells remains a somewhat unattractive, self-centered, and enigmatic person. Unfortunately, Foot's sincere efforts have not succeeded in rationalizing Wells's many contradictions and inconsistencies. But Foot is certainly not guilty, as Massie implies, of "uncritical hero worship"; in fact he is more aware of, and candid about, Wells's shortcomings than Carey and Kemp concede and does not deserve to be so severely criticized for his endeavors at a reassessment of Wells. At least he should be accorded some proper credit for his most insightful final chapter ("Some Mind, Some Tether") on Wells's despairing view of the dismal prospects of the human race. Since Foot did not intend to produce a full biography of Wells, this work should not be judged by comparison to Foot's excellent biographical studies of Jonathan Swift and Aneurin Bevan. However it is regrettable that this book is marred by several misspellings of names and some titles of Wells's works, a few lapses in the chronology of events in Wells's career, and (so unusual for Michael Foot) some infelicities in style and sentence structure—all of which might have been avoided by alert editing and proofreading on the part of his publishers. Happily, these blemishes are countered-balanced by the book's clear print, fine photographs and illustrations, and its very helpful index. J. O. Baylen Professor Emeritus Eastbourne, England Eliot & Modernism Jewel Spears Brooker. Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. xi + 274 pp. Cloth $35.00 Paper $16.95 JEWEL SPEARS BROOKER'S book, recently released in paperback , collects fifteen essays, most published during the past decade, that explore modernism as a cultural and literary phenomenon and position T. S. Eliot at the center of that influential movement. The key terms "mastery" and "escape," which Eliot used periodically in his own essays, provide the focal point for Brooker's understanding of the poet's dialectical imagination. Brooker sees a pattern within modernism in general and Eliot's work specifically of moving forward by recovering and refiguring the past. Consequently, the essays are arranged in three sections examining the pervasiveness of that pattern in the fields of 89 ELT 40:1 1997 history, psychology, and philosophy, the three major outside areas Brooker views as giving shape to high modernism. This results in an assortment of extremely thoughtful, compelling discussions that celebrate Eliot as the most significant modernist figure and effectively correct some of the more glaring misconceptions that have surrounded the poet's work in the past number of years. The understanding of Eliot's imagination as dialectical has become commonplace over the past twenty years; but Brooker is one of the few critics to connect that configuration to the intellectual and cultural influences most evident in Eliot's work. As such, Brooker's writing consists not of dreary scavenger hunts for individual sources—the activity that used to make up much of Eliot scholarship—but treats in detailed and lively fashion the background to Eliot's work, found in artists and thinkers like Bradley, Hulme, Mallarmé, and Sir James G. Frazer. What Brooker's application of these influences finally reveals is that critics would benefit from a fuller understanding of the complex texts that affected Eliot's work, for to come to the poet's work with only partial knowledge inevitably leads to misreadings. Contextualization of Eliot's different "lives," to borrow Lyndall Gordon's metaphor, would encourage more honest accounts of his work and help make the poet more accessible to students in the classroom. To illustrate that connection between criticism and teaching, Brooker (editor of an MLA volume of approaches to teaching Eliot) concludes Mastery and Escape with two essays on teaching Eliot's texts that show how and why those texts are relevant and accessible to today's college students. One impulse that connects all of these essays is a driving...