T.S. Eliot's Orchestra

Critical Essays on Poetry and Music

John Xiros Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781136523717
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

First Published in 2000. Nearly everyone who addresses T. S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This collection of original essays thoroughly explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.

PART I
Eliot and Popular Musical Culture

CHAPTER 1

A Jazz-Banjorine, Not a Lute

Eliot and Popular Music before The Waste Land

DAVID CHINITZ

Strong Weather

Speaking in his native St. Louis in 1953, Eliot recounted the adventure of a certain American native who had survived the arduous voyage to Great Britain: “In October last occurred an event which, while not as spectacular as the descent of Col. Lindbergh at Le Bourget in ‘The Spirit of St. Louis,’ is equally remarkable in its kind. For the first time, apparently, an American robin, well named turdus migratorius, crossed the Atlantic under its own power, “favoured” according to the report, by ‘a period of strong westerly weather’” (To Criticize 50). Eliot went on to identify this expatriate with the “American language,” extending its influence eastward through the mass media, global capitalism, and the other phenomena of postindustrial modernity that seemed to emanate from the United States. Yet it is hard not to identify the robin with Eliot himself—and it is difficult to believe that Eliot himself did not do so, especially when he contrives (as if their parallel courses were not already obvious) to associate the bird’s point of origin with St. Louis. Moreover, the “strong westerly weather” that had blown Eliot along his own passage to prominence was essentially the same force that was backing American English. During his rise to what Delmore Schwartz would call “literary dictatorship” (312), Eliot had been an American poet in England (it is not clear that he ever really ceased to be), and his ascendancy seemed related in some mysterious way to the other cultural developments blown over from America by the proverbial winds of change. The conviction that Eliot’s work was, somehow, fundamentally connected with jazz in particular has been held with assurance, even taken for granted, by critics since the earliest years of Eliot’s career. This essay will show how that notion, though often vaguely apprehended, contains a genuine insight with a basis in both history and prosody.¹

In his 1953 address Eliot proceeded to “speculate on the future” of the transatlantic robin. Would it soon be joined by a mate of its own species to populate England with American robins? Otherwise—what seems far more likely—”our lone pioneer must make the best of it, and breed with the English thrush, who is not migratorius but musicus. In the latter event, the English must look out for a new species of thrush, with a faint red spot on the male breast in springtime; a species which, being a blend of migratorius and musicus, should become known as the troubadour-bird, or organ-grinder” (To Criticize 50). Again, drawing a parallel with T. S. Eliot is irresistible. For Eliot was himself, as poet, just that combination of migratorius and musicus, an original blend of Yankee revolutionary and Great Traditionalist, peripatetic haranguing prophet and patron of the “music of poetry,” exile and tribal bard. Eliot himself, to complete the analogy, was the “troubadour-bird,” or else— and how much homelier it sounds!—the “organ-grinder.” Of these two epithets, the early Eliot at least would have embraced the second. We will see presently how he chose to depict himself as a kind of literary organgrinder: a rude musician, inelegant, impoverished, unrefined, an American migrant worker in the rich but overcultivated aesthetic fields of the Old World.

To play this role in the culturally conservative enclave of early twentieth-century London was, for Eliot, to present himself as something of a barbarian at the gates. His status as an outsider was enabling. Only by speaking as an American could Eliot write to Maxwell Bodenheim in 1921, “I have … a certain persistent curiosity about the English and a desire to see whether they can ever be roused to anything like intellectual activity” (Letters 431). This is Eliot at his most secure, certain that England needed him to rouse it. “This is not conceit,” he assured Bodenheim, “merely a kind of pugnacity.” By positioning himself as an American intruder, Eliot could critique British culture from a seemingly independent point of view.

Although Eliot found it useful in this endeavor to be an American, his pugnacity found no object in America. He showed little interest in attempting to establish “anything like intellectual activity” in the United States—considered this, in fact, an unlikely prospect.² The letter to Bodenheim explains the English difference: “Once there was a civilisation here, I believe, that’s a curious and exciting point” {Letters 431).³ And this opposition of a once civilized England to an ever heathenish America gnawed at Eliot precisely because he was an American: he feared that his roots would forever snarl him in what he regarded as the morass of American nonculture.⁴ In 1919 he spoke to his British friend Mary Hutchinson of his struggle to understand the national character: “But remember that I am a metic—a foreigner, and that I want to understand you, and all the background and tradition of you. I shall try to be frank— because the attempt is so very much worth while with you—it is very difficult with me—both by inheritance and because of my very suspicious and cowardly disposition. But I may simply prove to be a savage (318). Shortly after this letter, Eliot was writing “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and attempting to reassure himself that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (Selected 4). If so, then being born, as Pound was to put it, “[i]n a half savage country” was no disqualification (61): everyone had to labor to obtain “civilization,” a term Eliot uses interchangeably with “tradition” in his letter to Hutchinson. But this idea could not dispel the anxious concern that Eliot, as an American, had simply missed out on the opportunity to be civilized. Civilization, he wrote to Hutchinson, “forms people unconsciously—I don’t think two or half a dozen people can set out by themselves to be civilised” (Letters 317-18). Thus Eliot himself, for all his efforts, might “simply prove to be a savage.” He would like to have been Henry James in Rome but dreaded that he might instead be Burbank, or even Bleistein, in Venice.⁵

Six months later Eliot was writing again to Mary Hutchinson in what appears to be the same tone of self-doubt: “I am glad to hear that you enjoyed yourself and didn’t get tired, and that Lytton’s life is so perfect. But it is a jazz-banjorine that I should bring, not a lute” (Letters 357). While it is impossible to reconstruct the full context of this enigmatic remark, it appears that Hutchinson, addressing Eliot as a troubadour (i.e., poet), had invited him and his “lute” to a social occasion.⁶ Perhaps Eliot’s lute was to balance Strachey’s prose instrument. What is clear, at any rate, is the denial in Eliot’s reply that he is the sort of poet who sings to the classic lute; it is rather the “jazz-banjorine” that suits him. Correcting his friend’s contextualization of his poetry, Eliot bases himself in America rather than England, in the contemporary rather than the classical, and in the “jazz movement” of modernism rather than the Great Tradition.

Eliot’s seizure of the “jazz-banjorine” is, on its face, self-abnegating. The banjo, popular in stage entertainment and parlor music, certainly lacked the cultural cachet of the lute; in fact, it had a reputation as a crude instrument with little expressive range: “With its African percussiveness and short sustain on stopped strings, the banjo was ill-suited for the slow legato melodies of much European music, and so seemed, by European aesthetic standards, to be emotionally limited and incapable of musical profundity” (Linn 2). And since the banjo was still best known as a fixture in the minstrel show, Eliot’s comment effectively cast him as a blackface comic—or even as the “plantation darky” such a comic would have played. By consigning his talent to the banjo, Eliot is foregoing any claim to the bardic mantle that Mrs. Hutchinson’s reference to the lute would ascribe to him. He is no troubadour, but merely, as he described himself to Herbert Read in 1928, a “southern boy with a nigger drawl” (Read 15), merely a “savage.”

Eliot’s selection of the “banjorine” in particular only reinforces his self-denigration. Variations on the banjo proliferated during its heyday: there were mandolin-banjos, zither-banjos, banjolins, cello-banjos, tenorbanjos, and so on.⁷ Eliot’s instrument of choice (often spelled banjeau-rine) was a diminutive, high-pitched member of this family. In assigning himself a jazz-banjorine, Eliot was making the humblest available selections in both genre and instrument.

Yet when Eliot offers to play his jazz-banjorine, there is a deeper claim to power underlying his modesty. For seventy-five years, the banjo had spearheaded the “Americanization” of Europe—the infiltration of American mass culture into European life. The instrument seemed to have been present at every turn. In 1843, when the minstrel show stormed into England, the banjo (then a novelty) led the charge. By the 1880s it had made its way into more “elevated” performance settings, becoming in the process an acceptable musical study for respectable ladies and gentlemen. By the 1890s it had become positively “a fixture in fashionable … parlors” (Winans and Kaufman 13). The fashion became a rage around the turn of the century, when even the Prince of Wales began taking lessons. As ragtime reached England, American banjo virtuosos were on the scene again to facilitate its entry, so that in the early twentieth century the instrument was commonly associated with ragtime (20-21). By the time Eliot claimed to wield a “jazz-banjorine,” the humble banjo had ushered in an enduring taste for the “unofficial” artistic expression of American popular culture. And so the banjo prepared the arrival of Eliot and his modernism—his own challenge to the official culture of England. For Eliot, to play the “jazz-banjorine” was to be an agent of change.

There is another, related sense in which Eliot’s banjorine signifies a kind of modernist bravado. As Michael North has shown, Eliot and Pound’s assumption of African American “trickster” personae (“Old Possum” and “Brer Rabbit”) in their correspondence, together with their appropriation of black dialect, functioned as a private code, a “sign of [their] collaboration against the London literary establishment and the literature it produced” (Dialect 77). By “blacking up” in their communications with each other, the two poets affirmed their mutual shame and pride in being American “savages” in exile. But in claiming to play the banjorine, in thus professing his abjection to Mary Hutchinson, Eliot is not only blacking up: he is also concealing his strength from his British correspondent while pretending to weakness. This is, of course, precisely the distinctive strategy of the trickster in African American folklore, and in the enormously popular semiauthentic tales of Uncle Remus that fune-tioned as the sourcebook for Eliot and Pound in what North calls their “racial masquerade.”⁸ Meanwhile, by wearing blackface, Eliot again associates himself with the popular culture that was America’s most important export—for the African American was always at the center of its creation and development.

“It is a jazz-banjorine that I should bring, not a lute”: Brer Rabbit himself could not have framed a brag with warier calculation. Yet its anxious humility is genuine too. Eliot’s deliberate association with popular culture, and with its largely African American roots, provided a way of laying claim to revolutionary cultural power while simultaneously acknowledging ambivalence about his relationship to it.

“Amurrican Culcher”

In “Cousin Nancy,” a poem of 1915, Eliot thematizes his anxiety over his own cultural identity. Nancy challenges the stale New England tradition of her aunts through her participation in the nascent culture of what we have since learned to call the jazz age:

Miss Nancy Ellicott

Strode across the hills and broke them,

Rode across the hills and broke them—

The barren New England hills—

Riding to hounds

Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

And danced all the modem dances;

And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,

But they knew that it was modern. (Complete 17)

The second stanza historically situates the poem by alluding to the craze for “social dancing” that was sweeping across America (and blowing on to Europe) at just that time, an extension of the popularity of ragtime. Restaurants were laying dance floors and hiring dance bands in 1912; by the next year, theaters and ballrooms were beginning to sponsor dance contests and department stores were advertising thés dansants (Ewen 181-82). Nancy Ellicott’s “modern dances” followed one another in rapid succession. And of course the establishment voiced its disapproval, continuously and strenuously.

Eliot was not about to range himself with that reflexive opposition and its expressions of alarm. His endorsement of Nancy’s offensive against social authority is signaled by his comic po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Eliot and Popular Musical Culture
• Part II You Are the Music
• Part III Eliot and the Composers
• Checklist of Musical Settings of Eliot’s Works
• Contributors
• Index