T. S. Eliot by Craig Raine (review)

Abstract

YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 205 T. S. Eliot. By Craig Raine. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. xxi + 202 pp. ?12.99. isbn: 978-o-53?993-5 Craig Raine's short, insightful, generously spaced book on Eliot appears inanAmerican series entitled 'Lives and Legacies', but it isno critical biography.Aspects of Eliot's life are presented ina fewpages of 'Preface' thatprecede thebook's Introduction, and ina final 'Appendix 3'. The main textofferskeen insightsintoEliot's poetry,with an eleven page chapter on the drama, twenty-one pages on the criticism, and a thirty-page appendix on 'Eliot and Anti-Semitism'. If itsproportions are provocatively odd, then, given that thisbook isfrom theUS imprintofOUP, and sopresumably aimed not least atAmerican students, the tone can be inappropriate: 'We are all of us familiarwith the poem whose real subject is less important than itsrhyme scheme. F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing", for instance.Reading such a poem is likewatching show jumping at Hick stead' (p. 32). There are toomany nods and winks towriters, writings, and assumed cultural co-ordinates tomake thisa book suitable for introducingEliot to, say,first-year students.This is a great pity (and could have been sorted by tough-minded editing), because Raine's study comes closer than most others to communicating on paper the strengthsof a traditional, rather combative Oxford tutorial. The lastwords of Raine's main textare both rhapsodic and donnish: 'Breath taking.Discuss' (p. 147).Repeatedly he offers good one-liners ('TheWaste Land is Eliot's greatest dramatic work', p. 90), telling points about selected details (as when he quotes the sentence of Lucian's ^euxis, which follows thewords Eliot chose as his epigraph to 'Mr.Apollinax'), and finely phrased evaluation: 'overall, Eliot's tart,pitiless, unforgiving irony has none of Laforgue's wry, sprighdy self inculpation' (p. 42). His book is full of intelligence and communicates a strong sense of writerly personality: 'Wewriters frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors' (p. xiv). This poet-critic has a passion for Eliot's poetry, seeing it inmany ways as exemplary. Yet when Raine tells readers Ash-Wednesday 'isEliot's indestructible Das Lied vonderErie' (p. 33), he appears unconcerned that tomany modern readers this statement will mean litde.Raine's book seems the product not least of excited, potentially exciting pedagogy; but there are also pedagogical issues it shirks.The danger is that, however brilliant, this litde volume will be seen as preaching to the converted. I enjoyed it,but I have taught a course on T. S. Eliot for twenty years. Raine's index has no entries for Cats or even Old Possum's Book ofPractical Cats\ nor for Marie Lloyd, Dracula, or music hall. So Eliot too often emerges as a highbrow poet admired by people with donnish tastes and a gift forwaspish put-downs, rather than as a poet of intense emotion, able to fuse nursery rhymes with high culture to incendiary and moving effect ? yet also to create Macavity. Raine relishes Eliot's work, but his taste for intellectual jousting and a desire to exhibit his dauntingly well-stocked mind too often get in theway. This brilliandy opinionated study is at times too show-offy towin many new readers forEliot. Deeply honourable both in theway itdefends its subject, and sometimes in the way itjustly reserves judgement, theAppendix that deals with anti-Semitism is 206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and...