Too much Eliot can be too much

The Journey Of The Magi

We spent our second week on T S Eliot at this evening's class. The more one studies the poet the more impressed you have to be. Prufrock and the other poems in that first collection of iconoclastic brilliance still have the power to overwhelm the senses, particularly when taken together; as the whole they seem to be:

Lines two and three of Prufrock are famously, When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table.

The second of the Preludes begins ... The morning comes to consciousness / Of faint stale smells of beer.

Different poems. Same world. The poems connect not just in content and subject matter and voice but in the way the lines and images relate to one another.

Fiona Morrison (our tutor) ended the class with a reading and discussion of The Journey Of The Magi. Andrew Calder's critical essay cites the poem as an indication that Eliot had begun his descent. Fiona suggested it marks the high-water mark of a mature poet, on his game so to speak. I'm inclined to agree with her, which means my opinion of the poem has changed.

Fiona asked us to speculate on what made the Magi particularly appealing to her. We tried to guess but none of us hit the answer. It was this section, she said:

...................................... but set down
This set down
This:...

I see her point. It is confident. We are persuaded by / of the poetic voice. We suspend disbelief. We're sitting with an old, wise man; a real man rather than some religious icon or signifier. He's telling us his story. He wants us to be sure we write down the crucial, epoch-turning truth he recalls from an earlier time. He is insistent that we get his point; that we get the point. It is, I agree, mightily impressive craftmanship.

I looked for images, settling on this one. It has a realism about it that contrasts strongly with other 'Adoration' paintings of the time. Worth a look.

Jacopo Bassano

(b Bassano del Grappa, c. 1510; d Bassano del Grappa, 13 Feb 1592).

Son of Francesco Bassano il vecchio. He was apprenticed to his father, with whom he collaborated on the Nativity (1528; Valstagna, Vicenza, parish church). In the first half of the 1530s Jacopo trained in Venice with Bonifazio de’ Pitati, whose influence, with echoes of Titian, is evident in the Flight into Egypt (1534; Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.). He continued to work in the family shop until his father’s death in 1539. His paintings from those years were mainly altarpieces for local churches; many show signs of collaboration. He also worked on public commissions, such as the three canvases on biblical subjects (1535–6; Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.) for the Palazzo Communale, Bassano del Grappa, in which the narrative schemes learnt from Bonifazio are combined with a new naturalism. From 1535 he concentrated on fresco painting, executing, for example, the interior and exterior decoration (1536–7) of S Lucia di Tezze, Vicenza, which demonstrates the maturity of his technique.

Prufrock and the women?

When asked by my English tutor, on Monday night, to interpret the Michaelangelo couplet in Prufrock I dropped the ball. Some of the group felt the women are prostitutes. You can see how that reading is possible; the women appearing, as they do, after the grimy first fragment. Our tutor favours an inside / outside reading. Prufrock is in the "half-deserted streets". The women come and go in a room beyond a window.

The tutor turned to me then said ... you like this poem Dougie, what would you say? To which I answered both readings are possible, although nothing else in the poem supports the prostitute reading.

Poor response Douglas, is what I thought then and now.

Answering the question has been bugging me all week. This much I now know. The famous couplet,

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo

is lifted, almost directly, from something written by the French 'symboliste' Jules Larforge. The original reads,

Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent
En parlant des maitres de Sienne.

That, of course, shows us something of Eliot's brilliance. And (for reasons I can't quite pin down) argues further against the prostitute reading.

I am being driven nuts, however, in my attempts to source the original. I find reference to it in many Googled places but no citation of the source. That's very, very annoying.
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Prufrock

We started on the 20th Century Modernists at tonight's literature class. And with what other than The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock could one begin?

I stumbled over this rendition of what might be the most important single poem of the Twentieth Century. Not a bad reading, at all. Persuasive interpretation. Quite a character reciting it too.

A mixed bag of a day

Porridge for breakfast, which is a sign of some significant change in the way I chart my course through life. Porridge? It came with jam ... so I remain a wuss, lest anyone think I'm wholly transformed.

Porridge came with salt when I was a child eating at my grandmother's kitchen table in Rockbank Street, Bridgeton. I loved my grandmother when I was a wee boy. I even suffered her daily dose of cod liver oil with something approaching forebearance but salty porridge is a taste one has never acquired.

After Spike had left to travel to work at the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association I settled down with a pot of tea to finish reading Angus Calder's 1987 introduction to the work of T S Eliot, which is one of The Harvester Press "New Readings" series. It is a decent introduction, well worth reading although it draws a rather condescending conclusion with this observation:

"I suppose that I have in the past pushed [Eliot's oeuvre's] claims largely because it seemed to rebuke the timerity and insularity of much recent British verse; now that poets neither timid nor insular such as Geoffrey Hill, Norman McCaig and Charles Tomlinson have produced notable post-Modernist oeuvres of their own, Eliot's is no longer so needful for that purpose. He is not yet 'folded into one party' with such adversaries as the Georgians but I no longer feel so inclined to fight on his behalf, in a battle for 'Modernism' against easy-oozy English continmuity."

Frankly my dear Angus, who gives a damn? The end apart, however, it's a decent, even informative read.

After my taking of tea and deconstruction of Thomas, I ventured out into a day of domestic chores; buying stamps at the post office, shopping for milk, fruit juices and tissues at the supermarket, picking-up Spike after work. We took a chance on finding late-night-shopping parking at the Westfield Mall in Parramatta. There, we bought essentials: a new iron, a four-slice toaster and some emergency hosiery. Who could have guessed that all three would be put to use so quickly or so memorably?

I posted a copy of Kaboom to Johnny Geller at Curtis Brown in London. So maybe it was a day of domesticity; maybe a day with a touch of ectasy; maybe a day that the label 'writer' came a little closer. Maybe it was a day including all three, although the latter is still open to question.
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So this is the next Monday of your life ...

I'm just about finished preparing committee meeting papers that have to be ready for distribution by Noon today. There's a sense in which this moment sums up my dumb ass life.

It's what? Two eighteen on a Monday morning and I'm at my desk in an empty apartment working on committee papers that almost no one will read and even fewer will remember in four days time. Simply Red's Holding Back The Years has just been been followed on my PC by Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars. It's a bit fucking much when your MP3 downloads comment more perceptively on your existence than you can. When I say "you", by the way, I mean me.

And in a typically unprofessional act of public servant preparation I've included T S Eliot in my introduction to this month's report of work. It's an extract from Four Quartets, which came to mind when I had to think about how to refer to Matt's death. These words:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Will I feel more hopeful when I wake? I certainly hope so. Do I believe that I will? Not really but we'll see. Besides, what other option presents itself? That's right. None. You get on with it because you lack the imagination to do anything more creative or courageous, which is sad in a way. A moment of less than triumphant self-awareness in a life capable of all kinds of mediocrity and under-achievement. Situation normal.
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First Monday back at work ...

... and one thinks of T S Eliot's Preludes which (according to this page on the web) "deals with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal, tawdry modern city. "Preludes" impressionistically captures the impoverished spiritual lives of those living in a lonely, sordid, decadent culture."

It's not really how I feel but it fits parts of my day somehow. Go figure.

PRELUDES

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.