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2. Cunning Passages and Contrived Corridors: Rereading Eliot's "Gerontion"
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“Gerontion,” written in the summer of 1919 and originally intended as the prelude to The Waste Land,1 was ¤rst published in T. S. Eliot’s 1920 volume Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid Press).2 It did not have a good press. The anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement complained that the poet’s world-weariness was no more than a “habit, an anti-romantic reaction, a new Byronism,” while Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman describes “Gerontion” as follows: The whole poem is a description at once of an old man’s mind, and of a mood which recurs often in Mr. Eliot’s poems, namely, that of one to whom life is largely a process of being sti®ed, slowly hemmed in and confused. . . . His problem as a poet is the problem of the adjustment of his sense of beauty to these sorry facts.3 MacCarthy goes on to say that the symbolism of the ¤rst verse of “Gerontion ” is “obvious”: “When the old man says he has not fought in the salt marshes, etc., we know that means that he has not tasted the violent romance In 2002 Professor Shyamal Bagchee invited me to give the annual T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture for the Eliot Society, which meets annually in St. Louis, the place of the poet’s birth. For the occasion, I thought it would be valuable to reconsider one of Eliot’s most well-known but still highly controversial poems. 2 Cunning Passages and Contrived Corridors Rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion” Ce que dit la poésie ne peut être dit autrement. Jacques Roubaud, “Poésie et Pensée: quelques remarques” of life. We must not dwell too literally on the phrases by which he builds up the impression of sinister dilapidation and decay.” And these reservations about Eliot’s language lead MacCarthy to the conclusion that “He belongs to that class of poets whose interest is in making a work of art, not in expressing themselves” (Critical Heritage 116). Imagine criticizing a poet for his desire to make a work of art rather than “expressing” himself! If MacCarthy’s distinction sounds naïve, we should bear in mind that the expressivist theory that animates it is still very much with us. Indeed, the assumption that a poem’s language is no more than a vehicle that points to a reality outside it—in this case, “the description of an old man’s mind and mood”—still animates most criticism. In this regard I am particularly intrigued by MacCarthy’s “etc.” in the sentence “When the old man says he has not fought in the salt marshes, etc., we know that means that he has not tasted the violent romance of life.” The phrases “heaving a cutlass” and “Bitten by ®ies” are presumably part of this etcetera, as if to say that, well, these are just more of the same. “Fought,” moreover, despite its chiastic use in the ¤rst six lines— Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by ®ies, fought4 — doesn’t really mean “fought”; the verb must be understood as a metaphor for “lived” or “had intense experiences.” “In reading Mr. Eliot,” says MacCarthy, “an undue literalness must at all costs be avoided” (Critical Heritage 115). Such reservations about the role played by a poem’s actual language stand behind many of the critiques of “Gerontion.” The most common charge has been that, brilliant as “Gerontion” is at the local level, it is ¤nally not a coherent poem. “‘Gerontion’,” writes Bernard Bergonzi, “is Eliot’s one poem where the language itself forms a barrier or smoke screen between the reader and the essential experience of the poem. . . . it fails because of the slipperiness of its language: the desire to preserve a maximum openness to verbal suggestiveness makes ‘Gerontion’ an echo chamber where there is much interesting noise but nothing can be clearly distinguished.”5 And the case is made even more forcefully by Stephen Spender: If the second half of “Gerontion” doesn’t really convince, either on the level of imagination or of intellectual argument, this is because the attempt to draw a parallel between the poetry of the Jacobean playwrights about political intrigues at small Italian courts with the situaEliot ’s “Gerontion” 21 tion of Europe at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles doesn’t work. The modern political theme, which affects the whole world, is being forced...