Great Whiners

GREAT WHINERS 359 McKay's book tenaciously wrestles with contradictions inherent in seemingly authoritative pronouncements by some of Tennyson's most influential critics, including T.5. Eliot. His study also provides valuable correctives to two popular misconceptions about Tennyson. He dispels the myth that the influence of Tennyson's father upon his gifted son was merely debilitating, and he lays to rest the notion that Tennyson was incapable of assimilating Hallam's loss by 'organizing and getting on with his life' after Hallam's death. McKay's study is a signal achievement: instead of trying to see all the glancing colours at once, McKay accepts as a condition of seeing anything at all in Tennyson's shot silk poetry the need to delineate with clarity and precision a few of the leading ideas and methods that contribute to the iridescence of the whole. Great Whiners JEFFREY MEYERS The Collected Letters ofJoseph Conrad: Volume 3, 1903-1907. Edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies Cambridge University Press 1988. 532. us $49.50 The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898-1922. Edited by Valerie Eliot Faber and Faber 1988. 639. £25; us $29.95 The main point·of contact between Conrad and Eliot, who never met, was that Heart of Darkness supplied the epigraph (/Mistah Kurtz - he dead') as well as the content of 'The Hollow Men.' In the early years of the century, when he wrote Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Conrad was isolated and lonely in the country, overworked and ill, burdened by domestic and financial problems. He slaved away at his writing but could not earn enough to support himself. Married to a boring, bese, and crippled wife, with whom he had nothingin common and who was politely tolerated by his literary friends, he produced two sons whose arrival always took him by surprise and who were dreadfully sick throughout their early childhood. His letters - stiff, flattering, and elaborately phrased - are bulletins of despair mixed with pathetic pleas for visits, sympathy, and money. Both the Conrad and Eliot volumes are records of intelligent, hard-working, and talented outsiders making their careers in the English literary world. Both suffered from poverty and Sickly wives; but Conrad expected Jessie (crippled or not) to be up to the mark while Eliot, after eight hours in the City, 'filled hot water bottles, and made invalid food for his wretchedly unhealthy wife, in between writing.' Both had incongruous extra-literary careers - the merchant marine and banking - though Conrad, despite his past responsibilities as a sea captain, found it difficult to cope with the problems of everyday life. Both were irritable, gloomy, and depressed, and suffered nervous breakdowns. Both were politically conservative and deeply pessimistic. Both were cautious and formal. Conrad unbends a 360 JEFFREY MEYERS bit with Cunninghame-Graham; Eliot, who has more epistolary voices, ranges from laboured attempts at arch humour to a bash of bawdiness with Ezra Pound. Both found imaginative writing a form of exquisite torture. Conrad converted nervous force into phrases, felt as if each page were written with his blood, and needed crisis and frenzy to conclude his work. He felt his brain going at the end of Nostromo and finished the book with thirty-six solid hours of work, interrupted only by the botched extraction of a broken tooth. Eliot agreed that creation was 'a painful and unpleasant business; it is a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death.' Both were extremely touchy about the necessity of receiving charity. Conrad protested to Edmund Gosse about the imposition of trustees to dole out his Civil List grant: 'the appearance of "Conrad having to be saved from himself" ... casts a doubt on a man's sense of responsibility, on his right feeling.' Eliot felt that Pound's well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to gather patrons and rescue him from Lloyd's Bank bordered on 'precarious and slightly undignified charity.' The plan caused considerable embarrassment when it was maliciously misrepresented in the Liverpool Post. Both wrote many letters in French, and were foreigners in England. Conrad, though angry at being categorized 'as a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in...