The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933 ed. by Jason Harding, Ronald Schuchard, and: Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931 ed. by John Haffenden

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933 ed. by Jason Harding, Ronald Schuchard, and: Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931 ed. by John Haffenden Matthew Creasy (bio) Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, editors. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933. Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. xlvii + 873 pp. £n/a. isbn 978 1 4214 1891 9. John Haffenden, editor. Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931. Faber, 2015. lxi + 862 pp. £40. isbn 978 0 5713 1632 8. Towards the end of his final Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard on 31 March 1933, T. S. Eliot addressed “the vexed question of obscurity and unintelligibility,” identifying “several reasons” for difficulty in poetry that range from “personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way” and “novelty,” to the nature of readers’ expectations and the “difficulty caused by the author’s having left out something which reader is used to finding” (689). The editors of the most recent volume of the ongoing edition of his Complete Prose, Ronald Schuchard and Jason Harding, suggest that these comments indicate how “stung” Eliot felt by “perplexed responses” to his meditative poem, Ash-Wednesday, after it was published in 1930 (xxix). Eliot’s correspondence in the fifth volume of John Haffenden’s edition of his letters, provides some confirmation about his personal motives. Sending [End Page 559] copies of Ash Wednesday to friends and acquaintance proved a mixed experience for Eliot, who discerned disappointment in the response of the critic, A. L. Rowse and took humorous umbrage at Virginia Woolf’s observation that she could not “fathom” it (“Are you not aware,” he wrote, “that there are many people who consider your own works the depths of obscurity?” [229]). He also had to field earnest inquiries about the poem’s “symbolism” from Oxford students and other enthusiasts. Away from his audience in a Harvard lecture theatre, Eliot took a slightly different stance on “obscurity.” Writing to a new friend, the Reverend Geoffrey Curtis, he observed: As for obscurity, I like to think that there is a good and a bad kind: the bad, which merely puzzles or leads astray; the good, that which is the obscurity of any flower: something simple and to be simply enjoyed, but merely incomprehensible as anything living is incomprehensible. (220) This reference to “the obscurity of any flower” recalls Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers” (“I say: a flower!”) with its relish for formal poetic difficulty as a response to the inevitable disparity between language and the objects it seeks to describe. Ten years previously Eliot had felt a sense of obligation or imperative here. In his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), he had declared that “poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” Whilst not wholly incommensurate, tensions between his open critical pronouncements and his correspondence in the 1930s make it clear how much Eliot’s sense of his public position and the degree to which he felt accountable to readers had shifted over time. The allusive connection to Mallarmé broadens the scope of Eliot’s letter to Curtis, suggesting a consciousness of the way that other voices might impinge on their conversation, drawing it into relation with wider literary discourse. It illustrates how letter writing is not simply a private act and straddles public forms of utterance too. Eliot, for example, wrote officially as the editor of the Criterion magazine or on behalf of Faber and Dwyer, the publishing company where he worked, but also adopted more intimate forms of expression when writing to friends on other occasions. As Haffenden records, Eliot expressed dislike to an old girlfriend, Emily Hale about the idea of exposing his “private life” to public scrutiny by publishing [End Page 560] his letters (xxi). But for someone of Eliot’s stature and repute, it must have been hard not to write with a sense that his words might resonate beyond his immediate interlocutor. The Complete Prose and Letters speak to each other in important and significant ways. For example, Eliot...