Professor David Peimer
T.S. Eliot: Visionary Poetry, Ordinary Prejudices

Professor David Peimer - T.S. Eliot: Visionary Poetry, Ordinary Prejudices

- And welcome to everyone. Hope that you’re well everywhere. So today we are going to dive into this remarkable, visionary poet and highly complicated personality, Mr. T.S. Eliot. And I’m sure many of us have studied some of his poetry, school, university, wherever. Know it, read it, and know a fair amount, obviously, about his work and about his life. So I thought I’m going to try and show something a little bit different from the more predictable, I guess, which is first of all a little bit about him and his life, of course. Then also a little bit about his friendship with Groucho Marx, which is a fascinating period of his life and that connection between the two. And they really were actually, at least in terms of correspondence or pen pals, I guess, wrote to each other hell of often. Then I’m going to talk obviously about his prejudice, about Jewish people and his antisemitism because it cannot be ignored and shouldn’t be. And then I’m going to go into the poetry and in particular, look at the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I think is one of the great poems of the 20th century and The Hollow Men, and obviously, The Waste Land. For me, those are his three finest poems which really stand out and in a way, kickstart so much of the 20th century in terms of poetry or at least let’s say British European poetry plus certain amount of America, I think. And for that, I’m going to show clips of Eileen Atkins, the fantastic British actress, and Jeremy Irons, wonderful actor reading some of those aspects. Brando reading the one other poem of his and so on. So, I’ve got some of these others that we’ve got lined up. So I hope a juicy feast as we dive into this. To me, fascinating, complicated individual.

And I think he would’ve probably been the first to be honest and self-aware about so many of his, let’s say, internal complications as a human being and as a poet. He’s born in St. Louis, Missouri. And he moves to England in 1914, at the age of 25. Before that, he was a philosophy assistant and studied at Harvard. And then in 1909, he also later studied at the Saban and briefly at Oxford as well. So he comes from a highly educated, let’s say institutionally, highly educated university background as an individual. I’m going to mention, of course, which we must, his relationship with Ezra Pound, the very interesting American, shall we say, poet and poetic advisor, and, of course, pretty virulent, antisemite. He’s influenced by James Joyce. Cannot be underestimated, Joyce. I think Joyce rarely begins the 20th century with so many innovations in writing, not only novels or short stories, but with a whole approach to begin what so much in English literature becomes known as modernity or modernism. And Joyce has a huge influence on Eliot as he does with many, many others. He worked mostly, after he worked for Lloyd’s Bank for a while, then he worked for Faber and Faber, the fantastic publishing house in London, basically for the rest of his life. So from the age of 25, he’s living in England, briefly in Paris, but basically in London all the time going to his job, which is rare and interesting for a poet of those times or any times. He goes to his banking job first and then his job as a director with Faber and Faber, the publishing house.

And he goes in for decades every day to his office, works, helps encourage and nurture many young writers to be of the times, some of which have become world famous names today. Importantly in 1927, he converts to Anglicanism. And I think that’s very important because there’s this whole religious trajectory that he first of all comes from, Eliot, and then follows through in terms of his life. He said himself about his religious views, and I’m quoting that he combined a Catholic mind, Calvinist heritage and a puritanical temperament talking about quite a heady, complicated, possibly confused mix in the guy’s head that’s going on there. Knowing all the nuances of those three aspects of Christianity. Interesting and very important, I think, in him. It shows also the seriousness with which he really takes his religious upbringing and his life with religion. It’s a reaction to Rudyard Kipling and Tennyson’s poetry and others of the Victorian era and the Edwardian era in England, in English literature anyway, which he and others would’ve seen at the time, early 20th century, would’ve seen at the time. They would’ve, I think, imagined it as a little bit pompous, propagandistic, maybe moral morally, versified type of ideas inside poetry and the poetic form a bit stilted and belonging to empire and an entirely different era. And the focus that he shifted to was the focus on individual experience. Ezra Pound is a huge influence on him and others. We get it with Walt Whitman.

There’s so many others around happening in the English language and others where the individual experience takes over from this more structured, highly structured Victorian type of poetry of Tennyson and to a degree, Kipling as well. Not knocking ‘cause they wrote some fantastic poems, but there’s an entirely different rhythm and structure, which I think comes out of the sense of solidity and semi-certainty of empire for them. Christopher Hitchens, who is one of my favourite intellectuals who died some years ago, a brilliant mind. And he wrote this in 2008, about the connection between Ezra Pound, who was really the advisor, the critic, and the one who nurtured the early T.S. Eliot the most. And Christopher Hitchens wrote this about Eliot, “Ezra Pound had found his two muse in Eliot. Eliot was a blend of the folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith.” And I think that captures an aspect of this guy’s very complicated mixed set of attitudes. Life nuanced, not nuanced. We have to see all the areas of his life, I think, in order to get to grips reasonably with him. In fact, at the beginning of The Waste Land, everyone knows the great poet of Eliot’s, the beginning of The Waste Land, Eliot dedicated it to Pound and he said, “Il miglior fabbro,” which loosely means the better craftsman. So he was seen as the craftsman, the editor, if you like this, the sculptor who really helped shape so many of his earlier per Waste Land and others to become what they were are today.

Pound had this sense of individual experience and the idea of fragments, cutups has became known in Dono Ziman, and Duchampian and fine arts. And I think that this influences this era, this sense of the beginning of modernity in the 20th century and away from the very different Victorian structured verse. Ezra Pound certainly met Mussolini, I’m sure many know, lived in Italy for quite a while and was convinced that the First World War had been caused by Jewish people. He blamed usury, he blamed finance, capitalism, and that the Jewish people had been to blame. And there’s so much more about antisemitism with Pound, I don’t want to go into it again and again because I’m sure everybody knows about this. But suffice it to say that the mere fact he’s working with him and getting all his help and being nurtured by Pound is significant because I think it fed into Eliot’s own antisemitic behaviour. And some of his writings. Pound meets Mussolini and so go on and on and on. The other thing about Pound is that he married twice and the first marriage was fraught, fraught with who was rarely the neurotic or who was rarely the so-called nervous breakdowns or would be having nervous disorders as they were termed at the time. More Eliot or his wife Vivian or both of them. Obviously a complicated marriage, which just didn’t work.

But I think it’s felt deeply and it comes into his writing and I think it colours his writing in to a certain degree. He actually wrote about The Waste Land in a letter. Eliot wrote, “When I wrote The Waste Land, some critics said I had expressed the disillusion of a generation. That may be, but it was not my intention. I was going through so many of my own personal problems. So it may not have been as conscious intention, but he’s certainly aware. And that word disillusionment, which is taken up by the critics and many others is classic for the post Victorian post Edwardian era in literature and in history. Why? Because I think of the biggest influence of all, as with many of these writers of this time, was the First World War. Industrial scale, mass slaughter, horror and horror beyond belief, as we all know. So this period is completely, I think, influenced and in Eliot with the First World War, and I’m going to come on and touch a bit more. He’s hugely influenced by James Joyce, as I said, Joyce’s Ulysses. And together, I think, they really kickstart the 20th century literature in the English language. Eliot more in poetry and James Joyce in novels. The influences today are so huge. From Virginia Woolf to Bob Dylan has spoken about him. Andrew Lloyd Weber, obviously with Cats. Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, Scots Fitzgerald and so many others we can go on and on. Eliot, of course, wins the Nobel Prize in the late '40s after the war for his poetry.

Mentioning that he comes from a highly educated background, is important because he is so much part of the western canon. He’s writing in the tradition of all the poetry of Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid, Milton, Blake, on and on. We can go back to the ancient Greeks. He’s so aware of that entire trajectory and that’s very different. And I’m going to compare him to Walt Whitman later who comes from a much more subjective personal approach. And to Dylan Thomas, who I spoke about before, who left school at 16, never went to university and so on. This is a highly sophisticated, educated individual. It doesn’t mean that he’s any less prejudiced 'cause he isn’t. And in fact, they are far less prejudice than he is. So it’s, again, as we all know, education has nothing to do with prejudice or not. The Waste Land, whether he likes it or not, is about disillusion. It’s a serious, serious indictment influenced by the war, the fragmentary, the sense of what experience became after that horror of the First World War. The lost hope, the sense of civilization. This is what the pinnacle of western civilization is. Well, if that’s the case, what on earth does colonisation mean? What on earth does it reflect on us as human beings living in those times? And obviously, leading up to the second world war and beyond. What does it mean for these great civilised nations who, David Livingston’s phrase, "The aim was the three Cs.” For the British Empire, it was to go out three Cs. Civilise, Christianize, and Commercialise. Well, where was the great civilising endeavour if this is what resulted, 22 miles across the English channel in Europe and so on.

So I don’t know if it’s about despair or disillusion or the sense of a lost civilizations or more of a lamentation, The Waste Land and some of these other writings. For me, what is crucial is that all those emotions are written about so eloquently and so fragmentary style. And that’s, I think, the contemporary impulse. That’s the modernist impulse. It’s deceptively eloquent. It’s not just snapped phrases, it’s not just a found few phrases thrown up. They’re highly crafted and worked to produce the emotional effect. As Hemingway said, “Write the dramatic sequence in your story that will produce the emotional effect on the reader.” And as Hemingway’s definition of writing, and I think these guys follow it, this guy. There’s a powerful vision of post-war readers. There’s a powerful vision of what the war has done. And I think the word is disillusioned. Having thought quite carefully and written about this a lot. I think that would be the word for me because the ideals, the hopes of Empire of America, of so many other countries around in the western hemisphere, the western sphere of influence. I think it would’ve been that. Okay, we can go to the next slide, please. So I’m going to look at The Waste Land, Prufrock, and The Hollow Men. If we go on to the next slide, please. I’m going to begin, probably surprisingly with Eliot at the end of his life, at his funeral, where Groucho Marx was invited and came to London to give a speech at the ceremony or the service for his funeral.

Groucho is asked to give the speech at this guy’s funeral. Let’s never forget he comes from a wealthy Missouri family, brought up in the WASP tradition, goes to Harvard, goes to Saban, goes to Oxford, all of this extremely sophisticated, all the Christian aspects of Christian religion I mentioned. But who does he write letters to for three years? Groucho. They’re excited to meet, it’s a disaster. Groucho comes to London and in 1965, Groucho wrote a letter to his brother, the younger brother. We all know Gummo. Where he wrote that, yeah, at the meet at the dinner, Groucho, he’s talking about himself. “I was expounding on King Lear and Eliot asked suddenly if I remembered the courtroom scene in Duck Soup. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten every word in the scene. Well, it was obviously the end of our literary evening. I wanted to talk about King Lear and could quote it and his poetry. And I quoted Eliot’s poetry. He kept asking me about my movies,” my film, sorry. So this is in a letter from Groucho to Gummo. So what is this connection between these two? Can we imagine a more set of more unlikely friends? I said that Eliot was a complicated guy, certainly, and Groucho to his benefit as well. Eliot, in one of his early letters, wrote to Groucho and he asked for a signed photo of this image. The iconic cigar smoking Groucho. Groucho just sent him back an image of himself looking very serious like a poet or serious writer. To make more difference. What is this connection they both feel? Groucho obviously, he’s the son of Jewish immigrants in Manhattan.

Drops out of school in the seventh grade, becomes a vaudeville performer. Eliot comes from a wealthy Missouri WASP family that I mentioned. Highly educated, becomes a British subject as he said off of himself. “I am,” this is Eliot, “I’m Anglo Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” Couldn’t get more different to Groucho, who was unabashedly Jewish and an arctic performer, a new deal Democrat. And Groucho said Eliot was a British poet from St. Louis. Eliot had his defenders. He helped get academic positions for Jewish refugees. It’s a little known fact, but he did help some. The others argue against Eliot that he never apologised for his anti-Semitic poetry, which is a really important point. If Eliot wasn’t a fascist, he was certainly a particular kind of conservative. And after his conversion, as I mentioned earlier, to high church Anglicanism, he almost, I get a sense he retreats into hierarchy and deep traditionalism, very different to Groucho. Is there a link in the poetry modernist literature? Is there a link between them? They’re living at the same age, the same era, rather. Is there a link of displacement, rootlessness, alienation, that are defining the disillusion, defining life at this time? Certainly Groucho understands rootlessness, displacement, and alienation. Eliot tries to fit so hard into England, to fit so hard into being an English poet, not an American. But in his private letters, he talks about America and England so much in European culture. In that distinction. And I think it’s very important 'cause we don’t pick it up in the poetries, we pick it up more in his private letters.

This sense of displacement he felt and alienated and the anxieties he was riddled with, I think, cause constantly full of so-called nervous disorders. The term at the time. For Groucho, the Jewish people from shtetels, ghettos, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, everywhere, pogroms, persecution, but exile and diaspora. And Eliot is living in an exile and diaspora, even though it’s totally different obviously to Eliot’s, I mean, there’s nothing like it, but the mere notion of exile, belonging, diaspora, that conceptual through line perhaps some scholars have argued length them. For me, what’s fascinating about the Marx Brothers and Groucho’s brilliance is that obviously what did the immigrant and audiences in America and the world love to see? It’s how his characters, the characters in the Marx Brothers movies, ingratiate themselves into an elite space and then subvert them with comedy and mock the status quo. In the soup, it’s a government. They ingratiate themselves into an elite space. You’ve got to. How do you survive? Immigrants come to another country. You’ve got to get in somehow. You’ve got to find a way in and that to ingratiate or at least find a way in to. It’s pure survival, not only learn the language, pure survival. And in a way, that’s what Eliot does. He ingratiates himself, he puts on the English accent. He tries to get rid of the American accent.

He meets the people of London literati. An intellectual life. More and more ingratiate in the great tradition of royalty, of English literature going all the way back, and all the great English literature writers. Is there something that between the two of them that is similar? I don’t know. I merely throw it out as an interesting thought to share about the friendship between them. It’s Eliot. Eliot wrote to Groucho that, “His friendship has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, particularly with a green crosser grosser across the street. Now I am somebody of importance because I know you Groucho.” And Groucho replied to that letter saying, “Ah, the poet is originally Tom from St. Louis. Well, the name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashefsky. All male cats are named Tom unless they’ve been fixed.” So we get this witty repertoire between them. Eliot is not exactly known for his wit. He’s not exactly known for his wit in his poetry or anywhere else, but this playful wit at the dinner, the one wanted to speak about the movies and the other one speak about King Lear and his poetry. So, we go on. Is there a hint from the cats, The Poems of Cats, Old possum, which Ezra Pound called Eliot. Okay, we can go on. There’s many things written about this possible friendship. I want to play Groucho’s, a little bit of Groucho’s speech at at Eliot’s funeral because he’s the main speaker. Fascinatingly, okay, if we can play that please.

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• [Groucho] There’s an old vaudeville story about a man who was about to be hanged and they had brought him out on the scaffold there and put the rope around his neck. And the minister in the prison said, “Have you any last words before we spring the trap?” And this thing was kind of shaky. And he looked up and he says, “Yes.” He says, “I don’t think this damn thing is safe.” That’s precisely the way I feel about coming out here tonight, surrounded by all those great actors. I never knew what an anachronism was until I was invited to appear on this show. Why they didn’t ask our great American poet, Cassius Clay to appear here tonight. I don’t even know. He would’ve done a wonderful job. I hardly knew anything about Mr. Eliot’s works. I knew he had written The Waste Land, which is the history of American television. And BBC two. So anyhow, I am about to read a poem about a cat. And this has some meaning here tonight because this is a theatre and this is a cat about a theatre. After I recite this, you will realise what Mr. Eliot meant by mire in the cathedral. And now here I go, head foist. “Gus is the cat at the theatre door. His name, as I ought to have told you before, is really Asparagus. That’s such a fuss to pronounce. We usually call him just Gus. His coat’s very shabby. He’s thin as a rake and he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake. Yet he was in his youth quite the sum of cats, but no longer a terror for rats and do rats For he isn’t the cat that he was in his prime, though his name was quite famous he says in his time and whenever he joins his friends at their club, which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub, he loves to regale them. If someone else pays with anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days or he once was a star of the highest degree, he has acted with Irving, he’s acted with Tree.

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• Okay, if we can hold it there, please, Karina. Just hold that image, thank you. So I just want you to give that a little bit. I love that part in the beginning. And then at the end he talks a little bit tiny bit about the poetry and the search, spirituality, et cetera. But I think that opening by Groucho, is brilliant and fantastic as only Groucho could be. And yeah, I leave it at this. I leave this the image with all of us imagining this. If you look at the correspondence, pretty close friendship and constant witty and teasing, playfulness with each other to the point that where at his death, Groucho comes all the way from the states to London to give a speech at the ceremony after his funeral. Okay, I want to go from here to something which is far more disturbing onto Eliot and antisemitism. So this, and I’m going to use a little bit of the book by the wonderful British lawyer, a lawyer and solicitor, and writer, Antony Julius, who I think has made, wrote one of the fascinating books about T.S. Eliot and antisemitism, probably the classic book written about the connection in 1995. And I’m just going to try and tease out a couple of key ideas of Anthony Julius’s. He was also the legal expert who acted for Princess Diana at some points. So he talks about that Eliot was not just a typical antisemite. One could expect predictable, the usual comments, and phrases. And Julius talks about how he didn’t only reflect antisemitism of the times, and, of course, this is pre and post First World War.

He also contributed to it. That’s an important point, that he contributes to the furthering of antisemitism of this era. And how he talks about the point precisely that I mentioned earlier. Because he’s such an elegant poet. If he can be about the elegant, brilliant poet about disillusionment and make fillet with mood and atmosphere, that it’s so seductive and so inspiring and emotional for us to read and powerful in thought so he can about antisemitism. And the point that Anthony Julius makes, which I think is profound, is that the way of him, because he’s such a good writer and use of words and language, the influence is far greater than it would’ve been if he weren’t. Which makes the disgusting aspect of Eliot’s character even bigger in my opinion. And Julius says, and I think he’s right. So if we can go to the next slide, please. Okay. Sorry, the one after this. Number, yeah, seven. Okay, so this is just some of the, he didn’t write all that much that was intimate in the poetry, but I want you to share a couple of lines. "My house is a decayed house and the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, spawned in some estimate of Antwerp, sorry, estaminet of Antwerp. The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot.” I mean, that is a hell of a couple of lines to write. The rats are underneath the piles of the house. We get the image 'cause he’s a really good poet. He’s eloquent. The Jew is underneath the lot. What an extraordinary, in a couple of lines, you cannot forget this once you’ve read it. “Full fathom five, your Bleistein lies.”

Obviously, the Jewish name took early in the permeate Bleistein with a cigar, et cetera. “Four fathom five, your Bleistein lies under the flatfish and the squids. Graves’ disease in a dead Jew’s eyes when the crabs have eat the lids. Lower than the wharf rats dive.” What an extraordinary phrase, “In a dead Jews’ eyes.” And the smaller j which he kept until the early ‘60s, was not changed in publications of the poetry, even after the horror of the Second World War, the Holocaust. So what for me is important is, there are a couple of other examples, not many more, but these ones, one other example to read you, which is not in here, and he mentions the Rialto, which is the Rialto is in the Merchant of Venice, of Shakespeare’s, where Shylock and the other financiers or traders would’ve gone. The Rialto was known as the, what we would call the stock exchange of Venice, of the times in Shakespeare. So the Rialto is directly linked to Shylock and Merchant of Venice. This is Eliot’s four lines, “On the Rialto once the rats are underneath the piles, the Jew is underneath the lot. Money infers, the boatman smiles.” We get the image immediately again, we get the images here in the four lines. The antisemitism is vicious, violent, and virulent. These are the main lines of his. After that, there’s hardly any. But even Ezra Pound, he wrote more for The Waste Land. Even Ezra Pound said to him, “Take it out, it’s too much. It’s over the top.” Some other phrases that he had originally, if you look carefully in some of the very early versions of The Waste Land. So there’s this guy with all this other stuff I’ve mentioned, able to write this kind of nausea and nauseating garbage. More intellectually reinforcing stereotypes. Anthony Julius’s phrase contributing to the development of antisemitism because he’s being read by influential people, literati intellectuals, many others.

And because he’s able to put the words together so well, so elegantly and eloquently that the image sticks el a classic old, old image and trope that is used of rats and Jews, which we see obviously going all the way through literature, certainly in English literature, and for centuries and many others from Europe and elsewhere. So we cannot ignore this. What I do want to say is, this is in contrast to some of the great English critics of the times and poets, Matthew Arnold, one of the great intellectual scholars, poets of the times as well in England. He puts Heinrich Heine right up there with Goethe, next to Shakespeare, et cetera. Heine, the Jewish poet. And he writes fascinatingly to Matthew Arnold about how brilliant the poetry of Heine is and as a human being, understanding being an outsider, being a displaced, being a disillusioned. All these phrases I’ve mentioned and the lost civilizations in Heine, who’s writing in the 19th century. So they’re very different attitudes. So not everybody is just giving rise to this kind of antisemitism. People hate Jews or have an antisemitic attitude for different reasons. Some because of what they imagine and some because they’ve had real experience, some because of both. Whatever that real experience might have been in their reverted minds.

I want to be as directly and blunt as I am being because I don’t think the effect can be denied and it’s important. Okay, I want to move on to the next. We’ve gone from the Groucho influence to this and now we’re going to go into the poems themselves. Can we just go back to the number six? Yeah, thank you. Karina. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality. I measured my life in coffee spoons. I’m an Anglo-Catholic in religion, classicist in literature, a royalist in politics.” What this shows is a character, T.S. Eliot is so aware of himself and others. The compartments to use the contemporary phrases or jargon, the compartmentalization of life, how you can compartmentalise this in religion. I’m that in literature, I’m that in politics, I’m something else with Jewish people, I’m something else with poetry. I can be this, I can hold together so many fragments or compartments. And that is something of, to me, the highly alienated and fragmented individual who has the illusion can hold it all together and he does through his job and other things. But is he really holding so much together? And I find that these splits is what exactly gives rise to great poetry. It also gives rise to a very complicated individual, who’s so self-aware with of all the compartments of their identity in classical identity politics theory. Okay, this is important in terms of who he is. He also writes in the great essay of his tradition and the individual talent, the essence is that art can only be understood in the context of previous great pieces of art. So he’s always referring back to the traditionalist approach of ancient Greece, Rome going all the way through Shakespeare towards all the way through the great penon of the great tradition in English literature as it’s known, and Dante in Italy and many others. And yet is so fragmented in his soul, in his being.

And that’s what comes out in the poetry. Conrad Aiken, who was a friend of his and a poet at the times, wrote this about T.S. Eliot, which I think is, captures him in three words. “That even though I am a great friend of Eliot’s, I find him a bafflingly peculiar man.” A bafflingly peculiar man. And that’s what I’ve been trying to tease out today. All these baffling, peculiar, or compartmentalise aspects. We cannot just dismiss everything because he’s one thing or another because he is a great poet. Therefore we cannot just dismiss the anti-Semite because of the anti-Semite, we cannot dismiss what he’s done with poetry. And so we can go on and on. That would fall into the polemic, which is precisely the aim of anti-Semites and others. We’ve got to see the full complexity, I think. “A bafflingly peculiar man, a foot in America, a foot in Europe, a foot in the traditions,” this Aiken writing, “A foot in the great traditions of English literature and a foot in the disillusioned, fragmented experience after the First World War.” He was friends, Eliot was friends with Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, many others. And of course, again, he had to survive. He had to meet them. He had to find a way to belong to all these literati of London. Meanwhile, Bertrand Russell seduced his wife Vivienne, in under the guise of, “I’ll help this new young couple.”

So everybody has their shadow, everybody has their dark side. Russell seducing Vivian. The First World War is the key as I mentioned, it’s the bitter irony of it. The ominous atmosphere before it becomes horror. Everybody feeling nervously alive. What does this phrase shell shocked really mean? PTSD, we call it today. The ancient Greeks called it divine madness after war. Shell shocked, the mind is so fragmented and shocked. Well, Eliot’s, as much as anybody else, his brother-in-law was at the front and he was there for quite a few years. He survived the war. Look. But he wrote letters to his sister, Eliot’s wife. And we have some of those. The vulnerability, the unnerving, the destabilising of any illusionary sense of empire and solidity from before. So there is this great sense of Eliot’s caught up in that as well. He tried to be a combatant in the war, but he failed. He tried to enlist but he wasn’t allowed to. And I think there is an element of him, which is a war poet because of all this that I’m mentioning as well. The reports Eliot got in 1917 and '18 from the brother of his wife. And I’m reading some here, “A lepers earth scattered with a swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with sickening smell of exploded bodies, trenches that stink in the mud and the sun, wounded men lying in shell holes among decaying corpses, helpless under the scorching sun, et cetera, et cetera.”

That is in a letter that Eliot wrote the cover letter for to the nation Newspaper and Eliot’s enclosed parts of the letter written by his own brother-in-law, Maurice Haywood who’d been at the front since he was 19 years old. So, I think this is often ignored. He, by osmosis or by direct connection, was so in, could understand the war and I think it in goes all the way in to the bits and pieces of Flotsam and Jetsam that he comes up with about civilization, Western civilization in The Waste Land finally. He lives himself in a no man’s land between the self and what the self can create as a poet. Poetry, he wrote in that same essay, tradition, individual talent. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, it is an escape from emotion. It’s not the expression of a personality but an escape from personality. Fascinating. In other words, he himself feels he’s got to put up a wall and he then be able to write about poetry, write about whatever he wants to. Wasteland, war, or anything else. There’s that always that dislocated link between the experience and the self. And we all know the phrases between the shadow and the reality between the reality and the motion falls, the shadow, et cetera, that he writes about in Hollow Men. So, I want to play the next one. If we can go onto the next slide, please. Okay, this is about The Love Song of Prufrock, read by Jeremy Irons. We can play that please, Karina.

CLIP BEGINS

• [Jeremy] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherized upon a table. Let us go through certain half deserted streets. The muttering retreats of restless nights in one night, cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells. Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask what is it. Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go. Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes, licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys slipped by the terrace made a suddenly leap and seeing that it was a soft October night, curled once about the house and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window panes. There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. There will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate. Time for you and time for me. And time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare and do I dare? Time to turn back and descend a stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. They will say, “How his hair is growing thin?” My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin. They will say, “But how his arms and legs are thin?”

Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute, there is time for decisions and revisions, which a minute will reverse for I have known them all, already known them all, have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. I know the voices dying where the dying fall beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already known them all, the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. And when I am formulated sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the buttons of my days and ways and how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all, arms that are braceleted and white and bare. But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair, is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress. Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume and that how should I begin? Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas and the afternoon, the evening sleep so peacefully, smoothed by long fingers, asleep, tired, or it malingers stretched on the floor here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, though I have seen my head grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet. And here’s no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker.

And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it after all, after the cups of marmalade, the tea among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile to have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it towards some overwhelming question to say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all I shall tell you all. If one, settling a pillow by her head, should say, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.” And would it have been worth it after all? Would it have been worthwhile after the sunsets and the door yards and the sprinkled streets after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts, the trail along the floor and this and so much more? It is impossible to say just what I mean, but as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen, would it have been worthwhile if one settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl and turning toward the window should say, “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.” No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be. I’m an attendant lord. One that will do to swell a progress. Start a scene or to advise the princes. No doubt. An easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous. Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse. At times, indeed. Almost ridiculous, almost at times. The fool. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back. When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by seagulls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown.

CLIP ENDS

• Okay, thanks, Karina. If we can go down a few, I want to go to the Brando one, reading Hollow Men. This is based from the beginning of Apocalypse Now, the great film on Vietnam, as we all know, apocalypse now by Francis Ford Coppola, where Brando plays Kurtz, Colonel Kurtz, which is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness novel, about colonisation in Africa, the horror of the horror of what was happening with colonisation and mass slaughters in Africa. So this is The Hollow Men, which is read by Brando. Beginning of the film.

CLIP BEGINS

• [Brando] We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men. Leaning together. Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

♪ This is the end ♪ ♪ Beautiful friend ♪

• [Brando] Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion. Those who have crossed with direct eyes, and to death’s other Kingdom, remember us. If at all. Not as lost violent souls, but lost, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men. Eyes I dare not meet in dreams, in death’s dream kingdom, too. These do not appear. There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column. There, is a tree swinging and voices are in the wind’s singing. More distant and more solemn than a fading star. Let me be no nearer in death’s undead kingdom. Let me also wear such deliberate disguises. As rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves in a field. Behaving as the wind behaves, no nearer. Not that final meeting in death’s twilight kingdom. This is the dead land. This is cactus land. Here, the stone images are raised. Here, they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand. Is it like this in death’s other kingdom? Waking alone. At the hour when we are trembling with tenderness. Lips that would kiss, form prayers to broken stones. The eyes are not here. There are no eyes here in this valley of dying stars. In this hollow valley. This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. In this last of meeting places, we grope together and avoid speech. Gathered on this beach of the tumid river. Sightless. Useless, the eyes reappear as the perpetual star. Multifoliate rose of death’s twilight kingdom. The hope only of empty men. Between the idea and the reality. Between the motion and the act falls the shadow. For thine is the kingdom. Between the conception and the creation between the emotion and the response falls the shadow. Life is very long. Between the desire and the spasm. Between the potency and the existence. Between the essence and the dissent falls the shadow. For thine is the kingdom. life is. For thine is. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang. But a whimper.

CLIP ENDS

• Thanks, if we can hold it there please, Karina. So just to pull a couple of quick thoughts together. For me, these are the two greatest poems written of the last century. Obviously with The Waste Land. If anybody wants, I’ve got some extracts from The Waste Land, read by Jeremiah Irons and the fantastic Eileen Atkins. Just a couple of extracts where they read it. In Prufrock, it’s the ultimate of the Kafka kind of sense of disillusion, self breakup almost in a way, but written in the most elegant, beautiful poetry. Some deceptively simple images and poetry. The eternal footman that want to advise the helper. Basically the cog in the machine of so many different kinds of not only work but kinds of social activities and life. For The Hollow Men, is something here, for me, it’s all that influence of the war and all these other things I said. It’s again, the compartmentalization that’s split in him and in all what he’s seeing in the early 20th century together with James Joyce and others of between the this and the then. That lies the shadow between that and this lies. It’s a constant set of broken splits of seeing the fragmentation of the human individual, the human soul, and the great gladly being it’s in the time of individualism of the great conflicts between democracy and dictatorship of many different kinds. So, these things are going on and on while he’s writing.

But it’s a great hope that I mentioned in the beginning, the hope before the First World War and then the disillusion. And what comes after that disillusion, I think, is so much of all of this embodied in that First World War experience that I mentioned. Eliot is a visionary poet, but he’s a poet of the dark knight of the soul. He goes into stony dark places like Kafka. He goes through cactus lands, dead lands, valleys of dying souls. We don’t love T.S. Eliot’s poetry, but we have to listen. We can’t ignore it. We love Walt Whitman, we love Dylan Thomas. They speak to our emotional, alive, celebratory, almost joyous sense of life and spirit and engagement with the senses of life. He uses the senses an entirely different way, but it’s as evocative and as powerful and with a sense of musicality and mood, I think, in the work. And I think that this all gives it such an enormous power. And ultimately, maybe he’s not so far from Groucho because in the writing of all of these things I mentioned, we get the othering of the self with the self, the dislocation of the self, with the self, the aloneness split in all these ways, displaced in refugee within one self, not only within a society of constant exile, movement and literal refugee. It’s an inner refugee, psychological and internal in so many ways with the societies. And I think all of this makes him, yes, with those prejudices, absolutely with all the other qualities. But a poet who cannot help himself because of his own life and the times he’s living in. Give us these visions which are not so far from Kafka, James Joyce, and so many others of the greats and which is why they are great. Okay, so thanks very much everyone. And I can take the questions now.

Q&A and Comments:

Okay. No, I can’t. Why can’t I? Oh, the questions’ not coming up. Oh, you have to hold sharing the screen, there we are. The questions are coming up. Thanks, Karina.

Q: David, “Was he in World War I?”

A: No, as I mentioned, he tried to enlist but was not allowed in. But he did try, once the Americans came into the war.

Q: Susan, “What attracted him to England?”

A: Great question. And I think that he was attracted because he wanted to belong to what he saw as the centre of culture, the centre of art, literature, which was London for him of the times. This is before the First World War. And then after the First World War. It would’ve been London or Paris, I guess. But I think he wanted to, he imagined his identity being mostly connected there rather than in America. And there’s a lot of discussion. He loved Mark Twain as a kid and others, the frontier adventure stories and so on, which I think there is that spirit. But I think what we get in the poem, like Prufrock, he’s an attendant lord, he’s this, he’s that, he can help this, so all of this, this sort of cautiousness inside him holds him back. But on the other hand, he does venture to London and try and break in, which would’ve been a pretty tough ask to go to. What was the centre of art and culture of the time in literature as a young unknown poet. To try and break in and ambitiously make his mark, which he achieved.

Ita, “Eliot and Groucho.” You can imagine them having dinner, they had a big dinner together with their wives and everything. And Groucho literally, he writes in his letters to his brothers, Gummo and the other brothers, Harper, I think as well. Groucho’s reciting King Lear. He can recite chunks of The Waste Land and his other poetry. And it’s not vaguely interesting. He just wants to know all about how he made the Duck Soup. Other movies, how he does it, what’s he doing, all of that stuff. It’s a fascinatingly, some guy’s written a play about it, in England. But it’s okay, but it’s fascinating. If you imagine this level of connection between these two.

David, “In the photo, Groucho’s moustache looks like it’s painted.” I don’t know, I’d have to check that.

Myrna. “A lot of the insights of the lives of the literati of the electronic age come from letters.” Yep. So with text ed email and the public domain, it can be lost or changed. Yeah. ‘Cause these are from the original letters. There are a lot of them between Eliot and Groucho.

Rose, “Graves disease is a thyroid condition. Thank you. Where the patient is bulging eyes with a terrible analogy with a Jewish person.” Absolutely. And you would’ve known that, Eliot, exactly what you’re saying Rose, and one cannot ignore and must not the level of prejudice and antisemitism in this guy’s writing.

Q: “Why did Groucho choose to go?”

A: Well I think he obviously must have known 'cause he knew his poetry. So he must have known that he was antisemite. And yet I think, there was other things that Groucho felt the connection, maybe because Groucho in some of his letters said that he’d always wanted to be a writer to Eliot. He saw Eliot as the great poet and writer of the early part of the century. Why did he really choose to go? Well, I’m not completely clear from Groucho, from the letters, but he wanted.

Q: Sandra, “How did Eliot reconcile his classism with a modernist Joyce?”

A: I think it’s a great question, Sandra. I think that he saw traditionally individual talent that essay where he talks about the classical, the tradition of the great penon of English literature. But how the individual, the tradition and the individual talent, the individual talent must take that, absorb it and take it further or make something new from that, Cannot write pretending a naivety about past literature, but take it, be imbued within deep inside it and take it much further. I think it was that paradoxical link.

Susan, “Among the treasures in the library of Congress, some of the graft edited correspondence Mrs. Tom.” Yep, he did. Groucho. So much playfulness and wit between the two.

Patricia, “Groucho was starstruck on the wrong star.” Let’s align, worthy of Groucho, Patricia, thanks.

Ann. “Unexpected Eliot’s odd connection with Groucho. Eliot’s wide literary references worth beyond full fathom five.” Yeah, exactly. Echoes the Tempest, Ferdinand. And, of course, Ferdinand’s father being drowned. Let’s also not forget that Ferdinand is the king of Spain who is partly responsible with about the king, the expulsion of Jewish people from Spain. Maybe I’m speculating too much of the link there. What I think of the film, Tom and Viv, I thought it was quite interesting, quite nice, but I wasn’t that wild about it. I didn’t find it that memorable or I think it skimmed the surface a bit. But that’s me.

David, “No one reads his work better than Eliot himself. He has authenticity which no actor can remotely emulate.” Yeah, I agree. That’s a very good point, David, and I thought about that a lot for today. So I have Eliot reading it or Jeremy Irons or Brando who reading it. But then I thought, as something is a bit different, let’s see how some others have interpreted as well. Eliot reads it with less emotion than these actors do. That’s absolutely true. He’s more detached and guarded.

Rita. Oh, thank you. Very kind of you and takes a real actor to bring Prufrock alive. Yet I think that Jeremy Irons really does bring it alive because he’s able to inhabit an imagined character called Prufrock in the reading of a poem. And that’s the difference. With Eliot, I think it is a slightly detached element of the poet when he is reading his own work. Not that in Thomas when I did it last week, but with Eliot, you can imagine himself into the character with all the splits and contradictions of Prufrock. Great point, Ann.

Barbara, thank you. Appreciate it.

Q: “Can you repeat?” 308. The title of the poem, read by Jeremy Irons.

A: It’s called the, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” And if you want to email, you can get it, I will email you back with it.

With pleasure, Marcel. So one of the great poems of the last century together with The Hollow Men and obviously The Waste Land, but I think Prufrock almost, I think, rises above them all. I think it’s lasted without needing to. The Waste Land would’ve so many literary and historical illusions in Western literature and western civilization. It’s huge and brilliant. But Prufrock somehow captures something much more, I think contemporary of today.

Stuart, thank you, kind words.

Q: Irene, “Why did he leave America?”

A: I think we mentioned, thank you very much, Marcel.

David. “Both he and Groucho were outsiders.” Yes. Well, I think, David, that’s exactly what I was trying to tease out. 'Cause I thought this would be something different with such a huge iconic figure. Why were they writing so much letters and connecting and meeting and all the rest of it. I think in the end, the one is an immigrant outsider and the other, maybe from a forced immigrant, the Jewish, with Groucho, Jewish history. Whereas Eliot coming from that, very wealthy, educated, English fired, WASP fired if you like, American elite, Harvard, coming to London. There is an element of the outsider, which you get more in the letters. And I think in the truth, in the poetry, Prufrock is an outsider. There’s no question. “I should have been a pair of rugged claws, scuttling along ocean floors. I’m not Prince Hamlet, I’m not Lazarus risen from the dead, I’m not a fighter, I’m not an action man. I can only be an attendant, a lord, a helper or this or that. Behind the scenes guy, I’m not a leader. The action man on centre stage of history.” And that’s the quality in tears in Prufrock. Nima, thank you.

Q: Lorna. “Isn’t it that Brando reads it with a British non-American accent?”

A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he’s trying to fit the character in the film as well. The way that Brando’s doing it for that section anyway.

Barbara, “Tell a bit about the religion he converted from.” That’s going to take me into a whole long time. Thanks. But he was deeply religious in Christianity and that feeds so much of his other war stuff. About these ideas.

Q: Barbara, “What year did he write the line, Graves’ disease in a Jew’s eyes.”

A: I need to check exactly when the poem was written. I’ll check it for you. Get back to you, Barbara.

Q: And then Carol, “What influenced him to become antisemitic?”

A: That’s a great question. I mean, there’s so many possible. We can only speculate. We can only speculate, was it Christianity? Was it the Christ killing? Was it money? The stereotype of money and user was the stereotype. Oh, there’s so many possibilities.

Harold, “Groucho’s moustache was makeup.” Okay, great, thanks.

Q: Barbara. Do you think he had a complex attitude towards domesticity?

A: Yes. I think he was so complicated and so mixed up and had clarity, with so many contradictions in his own life. Yes, domesticity and not be an action man in life. No. Be an action man with words, or not.

Susan, “Jeremy Irons is brilliant.” Yep, thank you, I agree. And if you want to, you can get hold of The Waste Land where Irons reads it with the brilliant Eileen Atkins.

Monty, “May I suggest you do a lecture on the Israeli Hebrew prophet, Yehuda Amichai. Whoa, he is one of the greats.” That’s a fascinating idea, Monty. I’ll have to have a think about it but thank you. Appreciate it.

Linda, “Maybe he was going away from America. The mass of European immigrants rejecting escape to traditional lineage.” Yeah, I mean he also, when you get it, when he reads his own stuff is he tries to get an English accent. And I’ve met a lot of people who come from Ireland, from America, from South Africa, from many parts of the world who try the quickest and damnest to get the best English accent of the queen’s English as quickly as possible. An accent is huge in England, as we all know, it is cultural to use the jargon. So all of this, he’s trying to fit in and belong to what he sees as the centre of art and literature of his times and escape the kind of, I suppose what he might’ve seen is the rougher parts of America, culturally, I mean.

Q: Greta, “What did Groucho say at the funeral?”

A: Ah, he tells that joke of how he feels so uncomfortable. If you get the link, you can hear it again because I recorded the whole like the whole of Groucho’s speech at the funeral. He quotes from his cat’s poems a bit at the beginning and other things at the end.

James, thank you. Kind thought. Feel like one of the soldiers of Cortes looking in the white Pacific. He on looking into Chapman’s Homer. I think with these really brilliant writers, we keep feeling like it again and again. And this is a hundred years later from when this guy wrote his best poems. I mean, we’re nearly a hundred years away, which is a phenomenal achievement for any writer, I think.

Hannah, I definitely want to do Yates, there’s no question. Oh, you’re writing a screenplay, that’s fascinating. Please email me if you want with pleasure. It’d be great to hear about it. I love Yates’s approach.

Delia. “I want to point out the significance of coffee spoons in a smart set of old sets of old fashioned cutlery. Coffee spoons are really tiny.” Ah, smaller than teaspoons. That is a fascinating point, Delia, thank you. I didn’t know that, but it makes a lot of sense now.

Okay. That culturally specific, the nuance that Eliot would certainly have known.

Okay. Well, thank you very much, everybody, and hope you all have a great rest of the weekend. And I think next week I’m doing Sherlock Holmes, if I remember. And we’re going to August soon, which is to have some fun, some playfulness. Okay, thank you, everybody. And Karina, thank you so much and as I said, have a great rest of the weekend.