Making No Portraits: T. S. Eliot, Mimesis and the Politics of Mediterranean Classicism

Abstract

feeling am not quite alive, he wrote, that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing else. Eliot's sense of empty cerebration was not specific to Oxford. you know, he told Aiken, I hate university towns and university people, who are same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on walls. As a remedy, Eliot proposed to install two bell pulls at entrance to his rooms, one labelled Visitors and other Professors and their wives. He stipulated the second should have bell, and moreover within this professorless, wifeless space there should be no pictures on walls, but should like some good china. Of my own choosing: solid glowing colours, and a few Indian silks, and perhaps a terracotta by Maillol. Finally, his fantasy of making his rooms into a refuge gave way to a longing for escape: Come let us desert our wives and fly to a land where there are Medici prints, nothing but concubinage and conversation. That is my objection to Italian Art: originals are all right, but don't care for reproductions (Eliot, Letters 74). It is not altogether surprising Eliot would see in Indian silks and colorful china a kind of antithesis to pallid complexions and tweedy monotony of English academic life. By 1914, motif of civilizing, enlightening journey to distant isles had long since been transformed by figures like Paul Gauguin and Arthur