T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (review)

As David Chinitz points out in his fascinating new book, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, T. S. Eliot acknowledged his fascination with popular culture (emergent jazz, minstrel shows, the music hall, vaudeville, children's poetry, ballads, the detective novel, practical jokes, comic strips, radio plays, melodrama, drawing-room comedy) every time he drew on an "extravagant popular" phrase to supply a working epigraph or title. The "poems that reached print as The Waste Land, Sweeney Agonistes, and Ash-Wednesday," he reminds us, "began their lives as 'He do the Police in Different Voices,' 'Wanna Go Home Baby?' and 'All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis,'" and "Eliot's inspiration" remained rooted in the popular forms that "provided [his original] references." It was only when Eliot removed his working titles (he "took them down, like scaffolding, or buried them out of sight") that he cordoned off his inspiration (187-8) and obscured one of his most interesting poetic qualities—what Anthony Burgess called his distinction as "the one poet and critic of the age who was qualified to recognize that certain reaches of popular art protected traditions of craftsmanship, intelligence, wit and taste that artists acclaimed by the intelligentsia had abandoned."¹

The purpose of Chinitz's book is threefold: to recover the popular materials that Eliot engaged with; to explore the ideological pressures that caused us to forget his interchange with popular culture; and to consider what difference recovering Eliot's popular roots makes to our present view of Eliot and modernism. To those who read Eliot with pleasure, Chinitz's excavations will surprise and delight. They extend from a brief account of Eliot's taste in comic strips (Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff, and Pogo [154-5]) to a bravura, chapter-length account of Eliot's early poetry against the background of emergent American jazz. In the latter, Chinitz reports that when Eliot's English friend Mary Hutchinson invited the poet to a party and suggested he bring his lute, he replied that "it is a jazz-banjorine that I should bring, not a lute" (21). Nor was his response cavalier. Eliot not only "danced all the modern dances" (27), he crooned their tunes as well, once delighting a friend by "singing, in a single evening, 'the verses of more [George M.] Cohan songs than I knew existed'" (32). He also, starting with an unpublished poem of 1911, incorporated "the angular rhythms and sudden, unpredictable rhymes of popular ragtime lyrics of the period" (including "Cubanola Glide," "My Evaline," "By the Watermelon Vine," and "Harrigan") into his own poetry (37). Chinitz produces several illuminating instances of the way Eliot built poems around such rhythms and might have included more.

In the theoretical disquisition that frames these explications, Chinitz laudably sets out to interrogate the academy's prevailing view of modernism as high-brow, exclusionary and elitist—a view, he notes, to be found in Andreas Huyssen's use of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde to "argue the existence of a strict separation of 'modernism' and the 'historical avant-garde'"(81). Huyssen maintains, Chinitz recalls that "[i]n modernism art and literature retained their traditional nineteenth-century autonomy from every day life," whereas the avant-garde sought "to undermine, attack and transform the bourgeois institution of art and its ideology of autonomy rather than only changing artistic and literary modes of representation." Eliot in particular, Huyssen holds, "felt drawn to the constructive sensibility of modernism, which insisted on the dignity and autonomy of literature, rather than to the iconoclastic and anti-aesthetic ethos of the European avantgarde which attempted to break the political bondage of high culture through a fusion with popular culture and to integrate art into life."² Yet, Chinitz asks, how could this be true, given that "what Bürger and Huyssen identify as the avant-garde project" corresponds in many ways to Eliot's own practices, which were deeply involved with the practices...