1920s: T. S. Eliot and Modernism: Of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot and Modernism (with some reference to the Ballets Russes).

T S Eliot was a, if not the, major figure in English literature for much of the 20th Century. Is his attempt to reconcile modern modes of expression with ancient traditions reflected in British ballet?

Some fragments:

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table; …

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  …

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’  …

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?  …

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;  …

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

from The Waste Land (1922)

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.  …

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.  …

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag —  …

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.’  …

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

from The Hollow Men (1925)

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass. …

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

For many, T. S. Eliot’s early poetry is the voice of Modernism, but he is an unlikely flagbearer for the movement. The son of a Boston Brahmin family with strict Unitarian principles, he ended his life as a naturalised Briton, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a member of the Order of Merit. It was three years only after the publication of The Hollow Men that he declared himself: ‘a classicist in literature, a Royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion’.

‘In my beginning is my end.’  (Four Quartets  1943, East Coker  1940 )

As a young man, leaving Harvard for a year in Europe, he was much influenced by French Symbolist poets, and wrote some of his early poetry in French. After a year in Paris, 1910 – 1911, and a brief return to Harvard, he settled in England for most of the remainder of his life. His friendship with the ultra-Modernist, Ezra Pound, had a direct influence upon the composition of his most celebrated Modernist work, The Waste Land (1922). He acknowledged Pound’s influence in his dedication of the poem:

For Ezra Pound

Il miglior fabbro

 His widow, Valerie, published the annotated manuscripts and typescripts in 1971 which revealed just how much of the jagged incoherence was owed to Pound: he stripped out and re-shaped much of Eliot’s originally more conventional and formal prosody.

Eliot’s originality had been established earlier, however, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) dedicated to a French friend, Jean Verdenal, killed at the Dardanelles. The accompanying quotation from Dante expresses love for a departed friend. Multi-cultural references abound in Eliot’s work. My opening fragments echo Chaucer and Dante as well as the obvious Shakespeare. For Eliot, past tradition had to be incorporated into and transformed by the modern(ist) writer. He found some inspiration for this in the world of ballet.

He was a great admirer of Diaghilev’s creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in which all elements – story, music, décor, choreography – were commissioned to form a complete whole, as in Parade seen in London’s 1919 season where Cocteau, Satie, Picasso and Massine collaborated; but he was also admiring of the deep-rooted traditions of Russian ballet and folklore which were the starting points for creation.

Eliot’s London Letter, published in The Dial (Oct. 1921) reviews the revival of The Rite of Spring in the Ballets Russes’ London season that year:

‘Whether Stravinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motorhorn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.’

Eliot published The Waste Land, his own transformation of the ‘despairing noises of modern life’, the following year.

There is much uncorroborated speculation and much accurately referenced detail to link Eliot to the world of dance, and to the Ballets Russes in particular.

John Hayward, his friend and editor, assumed that the ‘spectre of a rose reference in Little Gidding (1942) was derived from Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Burial. Eliot corrected him: ‘I suppose it is reminiscence, but I was thinking of the ballet.’ If he saw the ballet, it must have been during his Paris year. He preferred Massine’s choreography of The Rite of Spring to that danced by Nijinsky, which seems to corroborate visits to the 1911 Paris season. His admiration for Massine led him to push for an invitation to dinner with him, and his subsequent references in Dial and Criterion essays to the ‘impersonal’ nature of the dancer’s art, where hard work, discipline and painfully acquired technique turn the artist into a vessel  in which tradition is invoked and reinvented lies behind many of his ideas on art and writing in the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). In this essay he claims that a poet must embody ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’, while simultaneously expressing their contemporary environment.

In his London Letter, The Dial, July 1921, while anticipating seeing the new season of the Ballets Russes, he remembers their 1919 season and comments on its importance as a model: ‘what is needed of art is a simplification of current life into something rich and strange.’

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is referenced throughout The Waste Land but this reference to Ariel’s song is particularly echoed in the poem’s first section: ‘the drowned Phoenician sailor/(Those are pearls that were his eyes}’

Both Eliot and Yeats saw the contemporary ballet (Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev’s company) as the inspiration for their visions of new types of theatre.

Valerie Eliot stated that Eliot had the marionette in Petrushka in mind when creating the Straw Men in The Hollow Men (1925).

There are come celebrated references to dance in the Four Quartets.

In Burnt Norton  (1936) dance is invoked to signify ‘the eternal moment’ (to cite E. M. Forster’s story title) the transcendent moment both in and out of time:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement form nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

[The Bloomsbury Group, of which Eliot could be said to be an occasional member, was paradoxically focused on the transience and confusion of life, as in ‘stream of consciousness’, and art’s ability to fix and find significant form in it. J. M. Keynes, a central member, married Lydia Lopokhova of Diaghilev’s company.]

In the first section of East Coker Eliot, returning to his ancestral English roots, and the village where his ashes are now interred, quotes his Tudor predecessor, Sir Thomas Elyot:

“The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie –

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eceh other by the handor the arm

Which betokeneth concorde”

Significant patterning, but linked in this section to the rhythm of the seasons in country life, rooted in:

“Dung and death.”

At the end of the second section:

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

Gone to the darkness which awaits us all.

In the third section, the paradoxical link between movement and stillness is joined to meditation:

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.

This reaches a culmination at the very end of East Coker:

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union. A deeper communion

I am going to interleave two passages from Eliot’s essay Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924) with extracts from East Coker and The Dry Salvages  (1941) to suggest the ways in which dance can be seen to have influenced his thinking and to emerge in his writing:

Anyone who has observed one of the great dancers of the Russian school will have observed that the man or woman whom we admire is a being who exists only during the performances, that it is a personality, a vital flame, which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance.

As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment   [East Coker]

The difference between a great dancer and a merely competent dancer is in the vital flame, that impersonal, and , if you like, the inhuman force which transpires between each of the great dancer’s movements.

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is merely moved

And has in it no source of movement –

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers.   [The Dry Salvages]

In the concluding Quartet, [Little Gidding], Eliot ends the second section dialogue with the ‘familiar compound ghost … of some dead master’ with this invocation of purgatorial release:

“From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure like a dancer.”

In Section V, as a conclusion to the entire sequence, he employs the image of dancing to signify the pleasing effect of a successful poem:

The complete consort dancing together

In homage to Eliot’s consistent theme of the renewing of tradition, I should like to trace a less obvious. But no less significant sequence culminating at the conclusion of The Four Quartets which reveals the transformation of tradition, making:

My words echo/ Thus in your mind. [Burnt Norton]

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, Prince Florizel is trying to evoke his admiration for Perdita in the guise of the queen of the feast:

When you do dance I wish you

A wave of the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that, move still, still so,

And own no other function. Each your doing,

So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,

That all your acts are queens.

Shakespeare uses exactly the same puns on ‘still’ to mean both permanence and continuity, and ‘move’ to mean both motion and emotion, which Eliot employs in the opening of section V of Burnt Norton:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

[Keats employs one of these puns in his Ode: On a Grecian Urn:

‘Thou still unravish’d bride’.]

The paradoxical tension between stillness and movement which is so essential to ballet is evoked in Florizel’s image of the wave, particularly the still point, the zen moment beloved of surfers, when the wave gathers its energy before breaking. Shakespeare brilliantly requires us to enact that moment by making the line metrically deficient, requiring a pause between the two ‘stiil’s; Eliot drops the line between the two key words to achieve a similar effect.

Observers felt that Nijinsky achieved some such still point at the height of his leap. A moment in and out of time.

At the conclusion of The Four Quartets, Eliot reaches into his memory and finds:

the stillness/ Between two waves of the sea.