A Long Way from St. Louis

By Paul Gray

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on Sept. 26, 1888. He died in London on Jan. 4, 1965. These dates and places bracket a life but are swamped by its reverberations. For Eliot, in transit, not only wrote The Waste Land, the single most influential poem in English of the 20th century. He also produced a body of work -- poetry, criticism, plays -- that permanently rearranged the cultural landscapes of his native and adopted lands.

Exactly how he created himself and his era remains something of a mystery, the topic of continuing debate. And this discussion is about to intensify nearly everywhere, thanks to the occasion provided by Eliot's centenary. For openers, a long awaited addition to the Eliot canon will be published next week on his 100th birthday: The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1898-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 736 pages; $29.95), the first of four volumes of Eliot's correspondence, edited by his second wife Valerie. Presses on both sides of the Atlantic are churning out new issues of Eliot's writing. The British Council has mounted an exhibition illustrating Eliot's life and work that will eventually travel to 70 countries. The U.S. observances will include a memorial lecture at the Library of Congress and a gathering of Eliot scholars + and critics at Washington University in St. Louis. There will even be a conference in Japan.

And then there is Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's extravagant musical adaptation of Eliot's book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). The smash show has been seen by some 25 million people in 15 countries and contributed more than $2 million in royalties to the Eliot estate. Purists shudder at such commercial success and its spin-offs. Says Critic Hugh Kenner: "Eliot wanted to connect with a popular audience, but Cats wasn't what he had in mind."

But Cats and the hoopla still surrounding Eliot attest to the poet's surprising vitality. By many standards he should have been old news by now. He professed conservatism, elitism and sectarian Christianity at a time when the fashionable tides were running against all three. As a shy, uncertain young man, he was torn between the dictates of his proper upbringing and the tug of his emotions. He looked inward and saw himself coming apart; he looked outward and saw Western civilization dissolving into chaos. He tried to heal these rifts with words: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . . April is the cruellest month . . . I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . . This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper . . . And let my cry come unto Thee . . . In my end is my beginning."

His poems struck many readers as acts of mind reading. There was no need for them to memorize Eliot; he had, it seemed, already memorized them. He became famous by age 35 without growing satisfied with his accomplishments or happy with himself. Words were not enough. Behind the lectures and public appearances of the latter decades -- the tall, stooped figure in the three- piece suits, issuing pronouncements -- was concealed a soul in torment, trying to purge itself of sin and of the world that lavished so much praise on what he considered his unworthiness before God.

Much of this struggle remained hidden during his lifetime. As befitted a son of an old, distinguished American family, Eliot was fastidiously private about his inner life. Several important caches of the letters are still embargoed until the next century. But his spiritual autobiography, the only sort that mattered to him, is displayed throughout his poems. The Waste Land, it is now clear, is not simply an impersonal, jazz-age jeremiad. It is also a nerve- racking portrait of Eliot's emotional disintegration during his 20s: his emigration, against his family's wishes, from the U.S. to England and, once there, his disastrous marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a vivacious but increasingly unstable partner whom Virginia Woolf once described as a "bag of ferrets" around Eliot's neck. To read The Waste Land's overwhelming catalog of cultural decay is also to eavesdrop on a typical evening with Mr. and Mrs. Eliot. The wife is overheard: "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak."

The belated recognition of Eliot's intimate presence within his poetry has spurred some controversy. Two of his early poems, Gerontion and Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, contain traces of anti-Semitism. Last month in London, an outcry by several prominent people questioned why Jews should be expected to cooperate in the commemorative raising of funds for the London Library, one of Eliot's favorite projects during his later years.

The answer must be sought in individual consciences. Eliot was guilty as charged, not so much in his poems, which mingle his thoughts with those of other, indeterminate voices, but in scattered remarks elsewhere: a few slurs in his letters, a stunning prescription in a 1933 lecture for the establishment of a "living tradition" in a society: "What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Such an abominable opinion cannot be excused, yet Eliot has defenders who find the issue regrettable but overblown. British Poet D.J. Enright notes, "A friend of mine made the best observation: 'But good Lord, he did not like anybody.' " Critic Alfred Kazin seems inclined to set Eliot's lapses in a larger context: "As a writer of Jewish background, if I had to ignore all the great writers who made anti-Semitic comments, I'd have nothing to read."

Paradoxically, Eliot's failings are magnified by the enormous moral authority he acquired through his writing. He did not speak with the flamboyance of personality, that itch toward originality that distinguishes this blood-soaked century. Instead, he offered his words in the service of a long tradition, from Vergil to Dante to Donne to the Puritans among his ancestors. He saw himself, at times, as a modern Aeneas, compelled to struggle, suffer and carry old burdens to a new synthesis of civilization. He knew he was courting failure. He mocked his own earnestness in verse: "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!/ With his features of clerical cut."

Even now, amid the gathering celebrations, his contributions provoke disagreement. Sir Stephen Spender, who was a member of the first generation of English poets to emerge in the shadow of Eliot's fame, calls him "perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century." Donald Hall, who has published nine books of poetry and who interviewed Eliot for the Paris Review in 1959, observes, "His status as a minor poet is secure. He is not coming back into vogue." But the final truth, as Eliot so often suggested, may lie somewhere in the rack and ruin of the middle distance. His claims were modest. He asked only for a hearing -- say, between cleaning up after supper and getting ready for bed, a few moments' attention to a poet speaking as if speech could still alter society and the perception of hours. On his birthday, unbidden, hundreds and perhaps thousands will give him an audience. Nothing has changed for these solitary readers, who have been massing over the years and decades. Some, indeed, may not know that he is gone and that one of his more memorable lines has become self-descriptive: "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London and Martha Smilgis/New York