Winter 1965
Old Series · Volume XXVII, No. 104

a conversation with t. s. eliot

I have always been interested in the great and lively sweep of T.S. Eliot's ideas and interests, and usually take the opportunity to discuss them with him on the too-rare occasions when we meet.  His political ideas, for instance—aristocratic and theocratic in a time barren of political ideas—and I think fascinating and seminal and too little pursued. In 1958, I arranged with the European Service of the BBC, a discussion with Eliot that would cover many of his ideas and activities.  I hoped to draw out the whole politico-literary, and Christian, man.  We talked in our shirt-sleeves in the board room of Faber and Faber on the hottest London day I can remember.  The first part of our conversation, mostly about Dr. Erich Kahler's The Tower and the Abyss, is lost forever because the technicians were so interested that they omitted to switch on the tape, and we were wise enough not to attempt to repeat a spontaneous discussion.  Fortunately, the omission was soon discovered, but it accounts for the seeming abruptness of my first question.  For reasons that are now obscure to both Eliot and myself, the conversation was not published at the time.  —L.P.

LESLIE PAUL:  The first question I want to ask you is really a political one.  In The Idea of a Christian Society, which you wrote almost twenty years ago, you said, I think, that the choice before us was between the formation of a new Christian culture and the acceptance of a pagan one.  Do you still feel that this is the choice before us?

T.S. ELIOT:  Well, I don't know whether or not I'd use those exact words.  I think I should prefer now to say a new or renewed Christian society rather than "culture," but I never remember exactly quotations from my own works—neither can I identify them.  However, in any case, I no longer feel that the most likely alternative is a pagan culture.  I shouldn't use that phrase any longer.  You see, we've had since I wrote—or it was going on then—the attempt in Hitler's reign to foster a Germanic culture, and that, if it wasn't altogether an attempt to suppress Christian culture, was at least an attempt to bypass it.

Paul:  A deliberately pagan one.

Eliot:  Yes. A conscious attempt to be pagan.  Well, the doctrines of this non-Christian pan-Germanism appear to us ridiculous, I think, if we read their pronouncements nowadays.  They're merely ludicrous. There's still going on today, of course, the attempt of Communism to foster a kind of religion of humanity...

Paul:  That's not pagan?

Eliot: I think the real paganism is something which arises naturally, like the culture among primitive peoples. And, of course, the religion of humanity turns out often to be a religion of inhumanity. But it is an attempt to replace the religious emotions by a kind of deification of an abstract humanity. We need a new word other than "pagan," but even so what I'm attempting to get at is this: that what we notice about the emotions aroused by either Nazism or Communism, emotions which attempt to replace religious emotion, is that they can only be kept alive—kept hot—by presenting always the image of an enemy; an enemy and an earthly god, I think. Well, the earthly god is inseparable somehow from the enemy. He only remains in the position of a good so long as there is an enemy.

Paul: You're speaking of Stalin or Hitler?

Eliot:  Yes. Now, I don't think that either of these religions should properly be called pagan, but if you do call them pagan then we must say that they're inferior as religions to genuine primitive pagan religion. And I don't think that they can survive. That is my point. The religious fervor can't last as time more and more shows the speciousness of the doctrines. Supposing Communism became so fully established that there was no longer any enemy of it remaining—though possibly the enemy would always have to be invented—if there was no enemy remaining, there would be no religion left. It would merely become another regime of some people controlling others, with no fervor about it at all. In short, I don't believe that any religion can survive which is not a religion of the supernatural and of life after death in some form.

Paul: That means goodbye to Auguste Comte?—and all the ideas of a sort of religion of humanity?

Eliot:  Yes.  It's very instructive to study Comte and to see how pathetic it looks nowadays—this ambitious attempt to do something which cannot be done by direct human willing.

Paul: I see that.  It has the pathos of some sort of faded fashion now, doesn't it? Well, there's a question that's begun to perturb me very much. It is not so much this business of a new pagan culture but rather what I would like to call a "cultureless culture"—on the lines of the "foodless food" which I think Orwell spoke about.

Elliot:  Yes, exactly.

Paul:  What I really mean by that, I suppose, is this mass entertainment culture which is absolutely, as far as I can see, without any values at all—and yet is getting hold of the world. I think that it seems to be part of a whole process of spiritual drying-up, as if man no longer possessed or even wanted to possess any kind of spiritual inwardness, as though the whole business of inwardness or spirituality just bored him stiff. ...Well, you're the poet of The Waste Land and what you have to say on this ought to be important.

Eliot: I do think that what you are pointing to is exactly what seems to me to be happening.  One sees so many signs in literature and the theatre of absence of values. The only values expressed in many plays and novels are, I suppose, the values indicated by their absence. I think that a good deal of what's happening now was foreshadowed long ago.  You know Ortega y Gasset's remarkable book, The Revolt of the Masses?  It was published in the Ô20s, but it is certainly worth rereading now. There's a deterioration, it seems to me, in the quality of amusement as it becomes more mass entertainment and as the media for mass entertainment becomes more highly developed. The cinema first; now, television. It's profitable to appeal to the largest audience and therefore to the lowest common denominator. I think that the end of a purely materialistic civilization with all its technical achievements and its mass amusements is—if, of course, there's not actual destruction by explosives—simply boredom. A people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for. I did touch on this problem a good many years ago in an essay I wrote on the death of a great music-hall artist, Marie Lloyd.

Paul: But what about nihilism?

Eliot: I don't think nihilism can be kept up indefinitely. What is the source of refreshment in nihilism? One generation can find satisfaction in expressing nihilism, but where does the next generation go on from there?

Paul: Nihilism against boredom hasn't much meaning, has it? You must have nihilism against some established order, some set of values, or there's nothing to destroy—you can't find anything to strike at.

Eliot: Quite so.  Nihilism would have been impossible without the things that nihilism condemned. If the objects of nihilist attack disappear, there is nothing left. Nihilism itself disappears with them.

Paul:  Nihilism itself becomes boredom. Well, the awareness of this spreading of a spiritual desert has been acute in all your plays and many of your poems. I would go back to "The Hollow Man" as well as The Waste Land, and to some of the choruses in Murder in the Cathedral.  To me, you have been very much the one who saw this desolation coming. Do you feel that, looking back?

Eliot: I think that you are perhaps exaggerating the conscious element in it when you saw "saw it coming." I never venture to interpret my own poetry, and I would hesitate to make myself a prophet. In any case, you see, the prophetic element in poetry very often is unconscious in the poet himself. He may be prophesying without knowing it. What he absorbs from the atmosphere is not altogether conscious in him.

Paul: Still, if the reader sees this prophecy, I think he is entitled to say it is there.

Eliot: Sometimes, as Godfrey Benn said once in a very interesting essay, the poet is aware only when he starts a poem of something inside him that needs to come out and be shaped.  He doesn't know what it is, but his poem, the poem he eventually makes, is a release for him. It may at the same time be expressing the hopes or the fears, the anxiety or the faith, which he shares unconsciously with the rest of humanity or with the rest of his people.

Paul:  All the same, although you are a poet you are also a prophet, you know, because The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes toward the Definition of Culture have been efforts—at least, I seem them as efforts—to put into ordinary, workaday language some of the ideas there in your poetry. There's a question I'd like to ask: in The Idea of a Christian Society you spoke about a Christian elite, a kind of clerisy, like Coleridge's clerisy, as a means of salvation. But in Notes towards the Definition of a Culture you seem to me to put more hope in the class structure of society.  I won't say the class structure because that sounds like the present one. But a society with a class structure. This is an age in which even to appear to approve of class is regarded as a bit outrageous. So I'd like to know whether you still stand by this position today?

Eliot: First of all, as far as the two essays are concerned, they are not dealing with quite the same problem—or, alternatively, if it's the same problem they are not approaching it from the same point of view. The Christian elite which I spoke about in The Idea of a Christian Society is an elite which may be drawn from all classes and from all cultural strata. In that, I wasn't so concerned with the question of class or classless society.

Paul:  But I thought you had moved from one position to the other?

Eliot: Well, in the second essay I was considering more the actual class structure. I think now that the problem of a class or classless society is one of the permanent problems of humanity, because all abstract statements are unsatisfactory.

Paul: Thinking of class as an abstraction?

Eliot: Perhaps I can express it as a kind of paradox: whenever one contemplates a stratified class society one is emotionally moved toward classlessness, and whenever one contemplates an actual, existing classless society—if there is anything of the sort—one sees the faults of that and is moved emotionally toward a class structure. In these matters one is contrasting something actual and observed with an idea or ideal preferable to the actuality one sees—because in practice every society is very imperfect, and every society commits injustices of one kind of another. But today it seems to me more important to argue the case for a class society because the general accepted idea is one of equalitarianism. And when one considers the classless society, even so far as it has been adumbrated itself in the present situation of the world—its mediocrity, its reduction of human beings to the mass...

Paul:  And this boredom, listlessness, too...

Eliot: That comes later. But the reduction which Plato foresaw, the reduction to a mass ready to be controlled, manipulated, by a dictator or an oligarchy—observing all those things one is emotionally disposed toward a class society.

Paul: Yes, as a protection against the Hitlers and the Stalins, and the Kruschchevs.

Eliot: But, on the other hand, one might say in general that any healthy—of course, the word "healthy" may be begging the question—but shall we say any healthy classless society will tend to form itself into classes? On the other hand, any healthy class society will tend to facilitate the transition from one class to another. It will be flexible; it will somewhat blur the outlines of its classes. A very rigid class distinction is petrifaction. So when I defend a class society it is because its merits should be emphasized at the present time.

Paul: But what was in my mind, I see now, in linking the clerisy with the class was the idea that the clerisy was of people dedicated in some way to service in society, irrespective of reward. And the idea of a class structure is that it enables society to be held together in a way which is difficult to describe but which creates a nation because such a class is prepared to serve without reward. It is this idea, which is not really present in democracy, that privileges in society should go along with responsibilities, that interests me.

Eliot: The fault, the evil, in a class society is when privilege exists without responsibility and duty. The evil of the classless society is that it tends to equalize the responsibility, to atomize it into responsibility of the whole population—and therefore everyone becomes equally irresponsible.

Paul: I'd like now to change the conversation and go on to the arts. I want to ask you about the position of the writer or the artist in contemporary society. One problem seems to me roughly this: there don't appear to be any accepted norms any more, any standards and values, for the arts. Another problem is the divorce which has occurred between the poet and the people. The poet has become a poet writing for himself or just for a very few people. There's no longer anybody writing for the masses as Tennyson was, or Kipling was. And then there's the financial problem young writers must face if they are to try and get established. I don't know whether you feel prepared to speak about that? Do you see a way forward?

Eliot: There are so many questions involved here, and some of them go so deep, that it is awfully difficult to deal with them all in any brief form. For instance, the arts are sometimes accused of obscurity and preciosity—of being remote from the people. But is it altogether that the artist is leaving the people or that the people are leaving the artist? This is all bound up with the problem in our minds of cultureless culture. Then I think there's a special problem for the dramatist (I can't speak for the novelist): we have a rather unsettled state of society—and the dramatist ought to know exactly whom he is writing for...

Paul:  Or, what the society is he's writing about? You mean that society isn't moving in any direction that can even possibly be understood or conceived?

Eliot:  Then there are the practical economic questions which I think are less, or should be less, severe for the poet than for other writers, or for the painter, sculptor, or musician, because the poet can get a part-time job; he can earn his living in other ways

Paul:  Not always.

Eliot: He ought to be able to get a job somewhere that will keep him alive. I know that doesn't invariably work, but then poets always have had difficulties at one time or another. I just say that I know some poets who manage to earn their living in one way and write poetry as well.

Paul:  Such as schoolmastering or broadcasting?

Eliot: And there is this further difficulty, which is perhaps more acute in some countries than others: the problem of publication of poetry. The cost of producing books goes up all the time.

Paul:  You're speaking now as a publisher?

Eliot: I'm speaking now as a publisher, and I know what I'm talking about here. It's interesting to find that the number of the elite of the public, the people who are interested enough to buy works by new, modern names, and little-known writers, or to patronize rather superior magazines, remains more or less constant, however the population goes up.

Paul: Yes, that's very strange.

Eliot: The costs of publication go up, but our readers do not go up in proportion. Therefore, it is much more difficult to get poetry published, especially by unknown poets. It really depends on a small number of people in the publishing world discerning the best and seeing that it gets published.

Paul: What about your own poetry? We've had a series of brilliant plays from you, and I myself feel that they've done something quite unique for the English theatre. But in pure poetry, we've had nothing since the very deeply moving, philosophical Four Quartets.  What about that? Are they really your last words?

Eliot: I never make rash vows or acts of renunciation.  I only know what to do next; I can't think ahead of that. But I can tell you this much, that in the past my poems and my plays were somewhat sandwiched together. For instance, the first of my Quartets is "Burnt Norton":  the inspiration for that was certain lines which were cut out of the beginning of Murder in the Cathedral. The lines are not identically reproduced, but essentially they are the same. This was my first actual play, of course, and the producer pointed out to me that the lines were strictly irrelevant to the action and didn't get things forward. Well, those lines led to "Burnt Norton." After that, my next production was The Family Reunion. When I saw it produced I thought that there were certain obvious faults of construction and I wanted to sit down and write immediately another play free from those faults. Well, then the war came and I had other duties and things to do, and I was here and there, so I turned to writing the other three Quartets, and they occupied the war years very well.  I was able in the conditions in which I was living to write poems of that type and length. When the war was over I wanted to turn again to write the play which I had planned to write in 1939, and since then—since 1948—I've written three plays.

Paul: Do you feel that you've written the play—or plays—that you wanted to write in 1939?

Eliot: I hope that, altogether, the plays are better than what I would have written then. I think that a certain suspension was good for me.

Paul: In that case, we may hope that a certain suspension will produce more poems.

Eliot: I hope so, too. But I can't look as far ahead as that. I just wait to see what I am impelled to do next.

Paul: Do you feel that in the Quartets and in the plays you succeeded in a personal prosody? You were always interested in forging a loose, flexible, and accentual line instead of a heroic line. I thought you feared the gigantic shadow of Shakespeare over poetic drama. Have you laid that ghost, do you think?

Eliot: Well, in a sense, it's the shadow of Shakespeare, but it's also the shadow of non-dramatic blank verse since Shakespeare. It's a shadow of Paradise Lost, of Wordsworth's Excursion; it's the shadow of Tennyson and Browning—of all the people who have written blank verse. It's very difficult to write blank verse which is both good poetry and sounds like people talking...

Paul: —Which is realistic?

Eliot: Therefore, I felt it was necessary to find a metric which was as far removed as possible from the iambic pentameter. That's what I hammered out for myself in The Family Reunion and have used since.  You asked if it was a personal prosody: it may be too personal a prosody. What I mean is that I should like—my ambition would have been—to start a prosody which would be an impersonal one, so to speak, useful to other dramatists—poetic dramatists—coming after me.

Paul:  A public prosody.

Eliot: I don't know whether what I've done is a personal prosody or to any degree a public one. On the other hand, there's this: it may be the norm of English versification is iambic pentameter, but that the only way to refresh it from one time to another will be to get away from it in a curve which will gradually return—having freed itself from the stiffness of previous generations. It may mean future verse dramatists will be able to go back to the iambic pentameter as a fresh instrument. And if I helped in bringing that about I should be very happy, beyond the grave.

Paul: One last question.  I think you once said in The New English Weekly that The Waste Land as published was as revised by the hand of Ezra Pound. Now, is there ever likely to be a chance that we may see the original? If you will publish the original, that will be most exciting.

Eliot: It was more a question of excisions, as I remember, than of revisions. He cut out a lot of dead matter. I think that the poem as originally written was about twice the length. It contained some stanzas in imitation of Pope, and Ezra said to me, "Pope's done that so well that you'd better not try to compete with him."—Which was sound advice.  And there was also a long passage about a shipwreck which I think was inspired by the Ulysses canto in Dante's "Inferno." At any rate, he reduced it in length. Well, the fate of that manuscript or typescript with its blue-pencilings on it is one of the permanent—so far as I know—minor mysteries of literature. It was bought by a man named John Quinn in New York who was a patron of art and letters. He bought the manuscript from me. I don't remember what he paid for it, but I'm sure he was generous. It went to him. I gave him out of gratitude for other things he'd done for me another manuscript—a manuscript book of early poems of mine, certain few of which have been printed but most of which remain unprinted. Years later, John Quinn died. There was a sale of his collection of manuscripts as well as of his works of art. Neither of these items appeared in the sale. We don't know, nobody knows, what became of them. Or who was responsible for their disappearance. Perhaps someday they will turn up.  Perhaps not.

Paul: I think what we'd better suggest is that there should be a Rockefeller fellowship for the search for The Waste Land. And I think, having proposed this, I'd be entitled to apply for it.

Eliot: You know, I'm in two minds about that search.  I should like it to be found as evidence of what Ezra himself called his maieutic abilities—evidence of what he did for me in criticizing my script. On the other hand, for my own reputation, and for that of The Waste Land itself, I'm rather glad that it has disappeared.

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