For our June meeting we had an illuminating talk by Chris Joyce, lectures organiser for the T. S. Eliot Society (UK) and former university teacher, on T. S. Eliot and the influence of his American origins on his work. Chris began with reference to Eliot’s ‘Defence of the Islands’ (written at the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk) to illustrate the Britishness that Eliot had confirmed in himself by that time. He had been born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888; (he died in 1965 in London aged 76). He came to Britain in 1914, becoming a British subject in 1927. In England he adopted an English persona and tried to expunge his American accent, which is not noticeable in his recordings. In his religious beliefs he moved from his parents’ Unitarianism to High Anglicanism and confirmation in the Anglo-Catholic faith. His parents had strong Bostonian and New England family connections and these and his upbringing in the Mid-West influenced his poetry. From the mid-1890s the Eliots took their summer holidays at Gloucester, Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where Eliot learned to sail. His experiences are reflected in such poems as ‘Cape Ann’, ‘New Hampshire’, ‘Marina’ and parts of ‘Ash-Wednesday’, and in his last sequence, Four Quartets. In all of these, marine imagery, observation of the natural settings, and images of childhood play prominent parts.
Chris read some excerpts from these poems, setting them in the context of Eliot’s period and biography. Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard and at Merton College, Oxford, later taking a job with Lloyds Bank in the City while forging a reputation as a poet and critic, especially with his highly innovative poem The Waste Land(1922) and the essays in his collection The Sacred Wood(1920). In 1925 he joined the publishing firm Faber & Faber; in 1922 he had become founder and editor of The Criterion, a quarterly review which embraced a range of European cultural issues. His marriage in 1915 to Vivienne Haigh-Wood was not a happy one. They had marked differences of personality, Eliot’s sober and constrained, hers vivacious and outgoing but combined with a tendency towards nervous illness. They separated and some years after Vivienne’s death Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. There was a thirty year age difference between them but they had a contented partnership. Valerie became his literary executor.
One other woman in particular, Emily Hale, whom Eliot had known since his Harvard days, would play an important part in his relationships. Eliot commemorated it in the first of his Four Quartets (1936-42), ‘Burnt Norton’, in which he recollected (‘Footfalls echo in the memory’) something that didn’t happen: their not having taken the passage “towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose-garden”. The second ‘quartet, ‘East Coker’ alludes to the village in Somerset from which his ancestors had set out for the New World in the 1660s. The third, ‘The Dry Salvages’, takes its name from a group of rocky islands off the coast of Cape Ann and sets the eternal power of the sea against the struggles of humankind. The last of the sequence, ‘Little Gidding’ (after the 17thcentury religious community in Huntingdonshire), was influenced by Eliot’s living through the Blitz and serving as an Air Raid Warden. Like much of his work it shows the influence of Dante, especially in the ‘All Clear’ section in which the narrator meets ‘a familiar compound ghost’:
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: “What! are you here?”
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other–
Of the sequence, this is the one which preeminently wrestles with problems of innocence, sin and its expiation, and the affirmation of faith.
Chris read the close of the poem:
We shall not cease from exploration
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
…
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Thanks from Lois to Chris for improving on my rather sketchy notes and for a very interesting presentation.