Kate Chopin, Frédéric Chopin, and the Music of the Future

In T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” (1910–11), the lady in question is hardly that in the jaundiced eyes of the speaker. Like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the poem dramatizes a hypothetical situation, set in the near future. Both characters anticipate but also dread a potentially sexual encounter. In this case, a younger version of Prufrock suspects an older woman of scheming to entrap him. After a concert, as he imagines it, she will lure him to her parlor, revamped as a love nest for the occasion. “I’ve saved this afternoon for you,” she will purr, casting him as Romeo in a scenario contrived to recall “Juliet’s tomb”: one calculated to evoke, as she confides, “all the things to be said, or left unsaid.” Either way, these things will include what Prufrock professes to desire, as the women come and go talking of Michelangelo; that is, a proposition. In “Portrait of a Lady,” the woman will speak instead of Frédéric Chopin:

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips. “So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”¹

Three is definitely a crowd when so desperate a woman aims to capitalize the good fortune of landing so simpatico a “friend,” as she coyly addresses him.

In Prufrock and Other Observations (1915), Eliot positioned “Portrait of a Lady” just after the “Love Song” and just before a suite of tone poems titled “Preludes”—as Chopin called the melancholy pieces comprised by his Opus 28. Eliot had no better ear for Chopin’s music, however, than did il miglior fabbro, Ezra Pound. During his impoverished early days in London, Pound somehow managed to acquire a custom-built clavichord, and he admired the “brown amber” tones of European music “before Mozart and Purcell.” Music was “vorticist,” he opined, “before it went off into romance and sentiment and description” in “the slop of the damned XIX century.”² Pound’s summary judgment of Chopin was implacably dismissive: “What was good from 1830 to 1890 was a protest. It was diagnostic, it was acid, it was invocation of otherness”; whereas Chopin “carried over precedent virtue” from the detestably stolid Victorians.³

At the turn of the twentieth century, nonetheless, it was not only Poles who were transmitting Chopin through their hair and fingertips. In the United States and across Europe as well, the adulation rivaled the zeal of a religious revival. James Gibbons Huneker, the chief American proselytizer for the cult, worshipped on a higher plane than those he denigrated as “Chopinzees.” These preferred keyboard acrobatics over the performances of I’gnace Jan Paderewski, whom Huneker praised for his pianistic restraint.⁴

It was to Paderewski that Eliot was likely referring in his snide allusion, and the audience he imagined evidently consisted of Chopinzees. But few such vulgarians were numbered among the forty ladies of the Wednesday Club in St. Louis, founded by Eliot’s mother to foster mental stimulation and cultural elevation. Round robin, the women assembled in each other’s homes to discuss learned lectures prepared by each of them in turn.

Such Women’s Clubs were commonplace during the late-nineteenth century, and Ernest Hemingway was all too familiar with the one in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, which accommodated the vaunting ambition of his operatic mother. Grace Hemingway’s self-aggrandizing performances mortified her son and aroused his abiding detestation.

Neither Hemingway nor Eliot nor Pound would likely have appreciated a paper presented to the Wednesday Club on “Typical Forms of German Music.” Its author, herself the hostess of a respected but sparsely attended literary salon in St. Louis, had earned a literary reputation for local color stories of bayou life. Kate O’Flaherty had been delighted to acquire, through marriage to a Creole, the Polish composer’s name for her own.

Although she was...