In Pursuit of Wilde Possum: Reflections on Eliot, Modernism, and the Nineties

Introduction: Eliot, Modernism, and the Nineties

One of the ongoing concerns of Eliot studies, at least since the 1980s, has been to explore the increasingly apparent "disparity," to quote Colleen Lamos, between the literary progenitors that Eliot acknowledged and the figures in Decadent England and America (principally Walter Pater, Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman) whose influence he passively or actively "suppressed."¹ Nearly a hundred years after Eliot's emergence as a poet, we are only beginning to reconstitute his temperamental and intellectual connections with the generation that shaped his earliest verse.

Readers have turned most recently to examining the sexual politics underlying Eliot's reluctance to speak about his Decadent heritage, but not always in a way that does justice to the complex relations between life and art. Take the striking story of Eliot's secondary residence starting in 1923 in Burleigh Mansions on Charing Cross Road. According to Virgina Woolf, Clive Bell, and the Sitwells, Eliot took to wearing green face powder during private parties in the rooms—according to Osbert Sitwell, face powder "the colour of forced lily-of-the-valley."² Since the color green was a common emblem of the aesthetic movement—as for instance in Oscar Wilde's subtitle ("A Study in Green") to his sketch of the Pater-like author Wainewright in the essay "Pen, Pencil and Poison"—Eliot's makeup would seem to signify some kind of willful effort to identify himself with the culture of the nineties.³ But must we conclude with Carole Seymour-Jones in her recent biography of Vivien Eliot that the powder was in fact a statement of Eliot's sexual preference and that the Burleigh House pied-à-terre was a venue for homosexual assignations—"the hub of [Eliot's] secret life"?⁴ Seymour-Jones, after all, offers no evidence beyond the face powder, and Peter Ackroyd, who first discovered Sitwell's memoir, argues that the powder was merely a gesture of solidarity with Eliot's artist friends. ("It is significant that the only people who noticed his make-up, and probably the only ones in whose company he wore it, were writers and artists . . . wearing face powder made him look more modern, more interesting, a poet rather than a bank official."⁵ )

The public/private valence of Eliot's gesture, furthermore, is as unclear as its symbolism. Did Eliot intend the face powder as a public statement? Or, given the short-lived and private nature of the evenings, did it represent a half-censored rebellion against his own social reserve? The latter is more likely, as is the possibility that Eliot's relations to the 1890s were less a matter of conscious strategy—a willingness to "traffic in . . . homoerotic rhetoric in a private context [but] not a public forum"—than the expression of a genuine and unresolved personal conflict.⁶

Since the 1980s, though, literary and cultural historians have glossed Eliot's relation to the 1890s by explicating his elaborately constructed prose style, with its plainspoken display of rational control, as the calculated censorship of a foresworn emotional expressivity. First Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 1988 explained Eliot's exaggerated rationality as a way of resisting the growing influence of literary women at the turn of the twentieth century. More recently, Cassandra Laity, Colleen Lamos, Ann Ardis, and others have contextualized it as a response to what Richard Dellamora has called the "crisis of sexual identity and male privilege" that started in the generation of Pater.⁷ Most of this criticism assumes, in Ann Ardis's words, that Eliot evaded identification with the 1890s by a "deliberate erasure" (68), and Ardis herself specifies that Eliot's criticism deliberately transformed gendered discussions of self and poetry into a "highly abstract figuration" of literary genealogy (69).

This promising work, I think, needs to be qualified in several respects. As I have argued elsewhere, while it seems reasonable to argue that modernist poetics represents a gendered reaction to post-symbolism's emphasis on the poetry of the body, one should recognize that the definitive move in that reaction...