Creation's Lonely Flesh: T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry on the Life of the Senses

CREATION'S LONELY FLESH: T. S. ELIOT AND CHRISTOPHER FRY ON THE LIFE OF THE SENSES THE PLAYS OF Eliot and Fry exist on a level of awareness and discovery seldom reached by dramatists since Shakespeare. Eliot, partly because of his poetry and criticism, is more often praised; yet of these two Christian dramatists, I find him less orthodox and less successful in his handling of Christian belief. He has failed conspicuously and chronically in one important area-in his handling of the relation between the natural world and God, that is, in his doctrine of Creation. As an artist, and a Christian artist, he knows full well one must approach the physical world with respect, even with a kind of joyful receptivity. But Eliot's receptivity, no matter how keen, is almost totally devoid of joy. He consistently understates when he describes that which is beautiful or happy. A kind of fear of enjoyment , perhaps a Puritan fear, dilutes even his finest responses to the world of smell and sight and hearing. In "Whispers of Immortality" he says the senses only waken further that "fever of the bone" which neither thought nor love can assuage. The spring is "an evil time, that excites us with lying voices." (Family Reunion in The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 251) Such happiness as we find is forever mixed with something else: ... the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror. ("East Coker") Enchantment in "Burnt Norton" is "enchainment," for the senses and the emotions mislead us. Even in "Little Gidding," when Eliot dares to hope for new life for the shabby hollow of the soul, this invigoration comes by means of ascetic experience, not through the phenomena of a good Creation. In the new life There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. Beatitude is found in "the still point," which resembles the mentally conceived pure point of mathematics. It is a timeless release from the compulsions and enchantments of the world. In "Triumphal March," "The Difficulties of Being a Statesman," and "Burnt Norton" 141 142 MODERN DRAMA September it is this state which beckons as man's highest goal. In "Ash Wednesday " it is the silent Word which brings relief. In "East Coker" it is the way of ignorance and dispossession which we must seek if we would be truly happy. Such chronic asceticism is strange in the light of what Grover Smith has called the "romantic residuum" in Eliot. This residuum is concealed in the earlier work by satiric comment and pessimism. Yet "Prufrock" states Eliot's standard theme: "the idealist's quest for union with the vision forever elusive in this world." (T. S. Eliot's Poems and Plays, p. 6) The later work modified this attitude somewhat . The old sarcasm and bitter austerity are gone, but the romantic theme of the isolated and unfulfilled self remains. And the answer Eliot attempts derives from St. John of the Cross: "Created things have no savour." The soul "cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings." (This quotation from The Ascent of Mount Carmel was used as the epigraph for "Sweeney Agonistes.") The question arises: in the form Eliot gives it, is this asceticism only romanticism turned upside down? Except for brief moments in Eliot's poetry he clearly says there can be no compromise with earthly desire if one would seek God. "Marina" is, as Elizabeth Drew points out, the "only purely joyous poem" he has ever written, excepting of course his light verse. (T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, p. 127) "Ash Wednesday" and "Burnt Norton" have their glimpses of joy, but it is a mental joy in which flesh does not participate. The rose-garden passage in The Family Reunion and the secret garden in The Confidential Clerk come nearer to expressing true joy. But the garden is mentioned more often (see "Burnt Norton" and "Little Gidding") as a temptation than as a gift from God. Eliot's attitude toward people as part of the Creation is also pertinent here. Much of his message and appeal from the "Preludes" onwards is found...