T.S. Eliot Volume 2

Michael Grant, Michael Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134722990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

‘The Cocktail Party’

151 I.H., MR. T.S. ELIOT’S NEW PLAY, ‘MANCHESTER GUARDIAN’

23 August 1949, 3

Edinburgh, Monday Night

More than a comedy, Mr. T.S. Eliot’s new play, ‘The Cocktail Party,’ which was given its first performance here this evening, is as clear a definition of comedy itself as has been seen; and in search of its immediate ancestry one must go, strange though it may seem, to neither ‘The Family Reunion’ nor to ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ – nor, for that matter, save in theatrical technique, to any comedy ancient or modern – but to the ‘Four Quartets,’ that long meditative poem in four parts.

This play is largely a dialectical expression in theatrical terms of that sombre poem; but, lest there be misunderstanding, it should be said that this play pays its way very well as a play. Mr. Eliot has coated a bitter pill with much success. The main characters are a barrister (Robert Flemyng) and his wife (Ursula Jeans), a young novelist (Donald Houston), and a young woman poet (Irene Worth), four persons engaged in diagonal adultery, and a strange figure, played finely by Alec Guinness, who is all at once Tiresias, the voice of conscience, and a psychiatrist of that ideal sort who causes the patient to cure himself. The barrister and his wife are, ostensibly through the agency of this person, brought to realise one another’s isolation, and so through this realisation they reach eventual reconciliation; the young novelist also in the end realises that other people are not merely projections of his own desire; but the young woman poet dies in desperate circumstances – the result, however, of her own conscious choice.

The play begins with a cocktail party and it ends with one. At the first the protagonists are ignorant; at the second, having recognised the tragic nature of existence, they realise, in spite of the news of the young woman’s death, that they must make the best of a bad job – that is, get on with the cocktail party. They have had their vision. Dr. Edith Sitwell once wrote of life as a play conducted on a match-boarding stretched over hell; and this is a comedy in that it insists that the play must continue – on the match-boarding. It is, that is to say, only a fraction of a millimetre from tragedy. Hear how the phrases recur: ‘The same isolation.’ ‘We must make the best of a bad job.’ ‘An awareness of solitude.’ ‘A sense of sin.’ ‘The kind of face that arises from despair.’ ‘Go in peace; work out your salvation with diligence.’

If this seems a queer sort of comedy, let me quote the words of Julia (Cathleen Nesbitt), a woman gloriously of the world of necessary convention and perhaps the greatest character in the play: ‘You think I’m a silly old woman – but I’m very serious really.’ The core of the play is this, that her words might quite easily be reversed: ‘You think I’m a serious old woman – but I’m very silly really.’ Eliot’s difficult, extremely precise, and stoical thought has never been expressed with more clarity, and the result is remarkable.

152 PETER RUSSELL, A NOTE ON T.S. ELIOT’S NEW PLAY, ‘NINE’

Autumn 1949, vol. i, 28–9

Russell (b. 1921), an English poet and critic, was founder-editor of ‘Nine’. The first issue, from which this review is taken, opened with an encouraging message from Eliot.

A note on a play which has neither been published nor widely presented on the stage, is no place to attempt a general appraisal. In spite of difficulties encountered by both audience and newspaper critics, the play was an outstanding success. Considering the fact that the actors neither knew their parts well nor even professed to ‘understand’ them, only strengthens one’s conviction that ‘The Cocktail Party’ will take its place with others of Mr. Eliot’s works, among the great achievements of our time.

Let us consider the factor in the play which baffled so many people – namely, the contrast between its apparently frivolous humour and its earnest contemplative philosophy. It would be almost a platitude to say that most good works of art act on the receptive mind at several simultaneous levels. Dante even defined four of these ‘levels’ of appeal in his ‘Commedia’. Mr. Eliot’s poetry is no exception to this principle yet it was a long time before his method was accepted by more than a very small number of serious readers. One of the main reasons for this appears to have been the extreme diversity of the ‘levels’ in his verse. A common seriousness of purpose appeared to be the property of Dante’s four levels and this was easy to appreciate. Accordingly, it is through his later and apparently more homogeneous verse, namely the ‘Four Quartets’, that wide recognition has come to Mr. Eliot. On the other hand it is possible to see a similar unity in the contrasts of ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, and there is no reason to be surprised that the author of these is the same poet who ‘sits writing verses upon cats that speak’. Few critics have mentioned the relevance of Edward Lear, and this is perhaps symptomatic of the age we live in, for we tend to be specialists not only in our work but also in our leisure. The brilliant literary critic of, say, the Queen Anne period is happy if not proud to be quite unable to tell the difference between Bach and Handel, and content never to have heard one note of Vivaldi, Couperin or Rameau. Mr. Eliot has been sneered at as ‘academic’ both by the most academic of critics, like Dr. Leavis, and the most individual, like Ezra Pound, but be that as it may, he has always had an all-round grasp of the ‘situation’. Eminently gifted for an àcademic career of outstanding success, Mr. Eliot has chosen the harder way, and kept not only the element of novitas in his vision, but also the diversitas. In this century few ‘academics’ have been śtrong enough to do this.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the critics of the play have divided into two parties, each baffled. One lot felt it had had an evening of wit and fun worthy of Oscar Wilde, or at least of Noel Coward in his better moments, but found the play clouded by gloomy Hamlet-like soliloquies, private jokes, and subversive Christian propaganda. The other lot laughed too – they could not help it, for the play is an extremely witty one – but they were really waiting for the recurring old shiver of recognition when Mr. Eliot’s ‘real message’ came through. Probably both factions were scandalized by the surprising identity of the ‘guardians’. These latter appeared, in fact, to be quite ordinary people, who, happening to have accepted entirely their lot on earth, have become agents of Divine Providence. Undoubtedly people were shocked by the almost inhuman levity of the description (in the last act) of the death of Celia, the society-girl, who became a missionary nurse among savages. This was indeed melodramatic (more like the work of Charles Williams than of T.S. Eliot), but once granted that what happened had to happen, there can in the intelligent Christian mind, be neither surprise nor censure for the mature sophisticated attitude of the teller of the story. He is a serious and responsible character. He understands. The honest pagan mind, I think, would also react in this sensible way. Naturally the unoriented humanistic pseudo-Christian reacts with all the petty rage of extreme sentimentality.

The play was cut considerably it seems, and no doubt revision could make certain events and circumstances clearer, but even as it was acted, it was an uncommonly good theatrical piece. The curiously moving and obviously effective moral philosophy of ‘wait, and reflect’ is as much an integral part of the play as the farcical reversals and surprises. Contrary to common opinion, Mr. Eliot’s style and method has produced a play which is very near to life as we suffer it to-day.

153 DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR, FROM A REVIEW OF THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL PRODUCTION, ‘NEW STATESMAN’

3 September 1949, vol. xxxviii, 243

Shawe-Taylor (b. 1907) was music critic of the ‘New Statesman’ from 1945 to 1958.

A masked ball and a cocktail party, with Verdi and Mr. Eliot, respectively, as our hosts: these have been the outstanding diversions of the first week at Edinburgh. They were not so dissimilar as you might suppose: one culminated in murder, the other in martyrdom, and both contrived to introduce a good deal of light relief along the tragic path.

‘The Cocktail Party,’ unlike Mr. Eliot’s two earlier plays, is on the surface a specimen of contemporary dramatic style, as it is understood in Shaftesbury Avenue. The curtain rises on the usual stylish flat, with a white telephone, a Marie Laurencin, and a group of rather exasperated people determined to make the party go. The host, we begin to perceive, is also anxious to make the party go – in another sense; but when at last they depart, he persuades one of them to stay, a stranger to whom he can blurt out the embarrassing truth which he has tried to conceal from the rest: his wife has left him, and the guests we have seen are merely those who couldn’t be reached and put off. A first-rate situation, and what follows is better still. The hitherto obscure and taciturn guest comes to life with a bang, takes command of the situation, and pours out a stream of sardonic and paradoxical home-truths to the egotistical husband; finally, like Mr. Bridie’s lady, he bursts into song. The spirit Of early Shaw hovers deliciously in the air; the wit sparkles and we begin to feel pleasantly sure that everything will be turned inside out and upside down in the second act.

So it is. The obscure guest is revealed as the eminent Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, of Harley Street; the two most tiresome of the guests turn out to be his assistants, almost his spies. The party-givers (the husband who is incapable of loving, and the wife who can never inspire love) are shown the truth about themselves, and persuaded to make the best of it. Making the best of it, says Sir Henry (and here for the first time we detect the accents of the lay preacher), making the best of a bad job is what we all have to do – all except the very few who are potential saints. One of these also comes to his consulting room: a girl who has just seen the bottom fall out of her ideal of romantic love. It is she who chooses the via crucis which leads from Sir Henry’s mysterious ‘sanatorium’ to literal crucifixion, accompanied by revolting details, at the hands of fanatical natives. When the news reaches another cocktail party, two years after the first, everyone shudders, except Sir Henry, who smiles his inscrutable smile. It was an issue which he had more or less foreseen.

No less inscrutable must be the author’s smile. He has written a dazzling light comedy which is also a tract for the times; and the audience, who lap up the surface cream, don’t know what to make of the depths, while suspecting that they must be more interesting than milk. Will the author help them? Only, a very, very little. When Sir Henry, accustomed to pronounce a priest-like benediction on his departing patients, remarks, ‘I do not understand what I myself am saying,’ a slight ripple of mirth went round the audience. Pressed by one of the characters for an explanation of his philosophy, he quotes Shelley:

Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden,

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

In short, know yourself; choose; come to terms with your insignificance, or – if you happen to be one of the saintly few – face the full consequences of your choice.

If the moral, as I attempt to put it, sounds rather thin and milky, it is doubtless my fault – one which deeper acquaintance with this fascinating play might mend. But there is something about it which chills me: perhaps the lack of delight in the rich variety of human nature. Mr. Eliot’s characters are admirably amusing puppets, he manipulates them as cunningly as the magician in ‘Petrouclika,’ but, like the host at his own party, he seems incapable of love: of warmth towards the particular, as opposed to a diffused benevolence. The muddy adorable substance of life as it is lived-seems curiously far from this fragile community, and I find something faintly repellent in the quiet smiles and antiseptic wisdom of Sir Henry and his two pals. Considered as moral teachers and ‘guardians’ (a key-word of the play), they suggest a group of infinitely superior Buchmanite leaders, out of the Upper Sixth instead of the usual Lower Fourth; but considered simply and solely as theatrical figures they are superb, just as the whole play is a superbly contrived conversation piece – lively, often cynical, sometimes profound. The verse is perceptible only as a gentle rhythmic pulse, and the language is almost that of life except for the substitution of ‘was not’ for ‘wasn’t,’ etc., which gives a pleasant stiffening to the dialogue. The play is capitally produced by E. Martin Browne, and finely acted by Robert Flemyng, Irene Worth, Ursula Jeans, Donald Houston, Cathleen Nesbitt and Alec Guinness. Mr. Guinness lends an extraordinary sort of comic authority to Sir Henry: with his long quizzical face, his sardonic humour and his impressive delivery, he conveys (am I wrong who never saw the Great Man?) something of the magnetism of another Sir Henry.

154 ROBERT SPEAIGHT, A REVIEW, ‘TABLET’

3 September 1949, vol. cxciv, 154–5

‘The Cocktail Party,’ presented last week at the Edinburgh Festival, is the most advanced and original point yet reached in Mr. Eliot’s dramatic writing. Yet of his three plays this one will surely prove the most accessible to the ordinary playgoer. ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ presupposed a certain familiarity with Christian dogma and liturgy, and a readiness to accept a poetry which never concealed its metrical diversity. In ‘The Family Reunion’ the Greek Eumenides were made the messengers of grace; and although ‘The Family Reunion’- marked a long step forward in theatrical technique, and although Mr. Eliot had discovered a verse form suitable for a contemporary subject and setting, the play moved a little stiffly and its climax of conversion was not dramatically realized. It was the actor rather than the dramatist, who had to sharpen the play to its point in the great dualogue between Agatha and Harry. But in ‘The Cocktail Party’ there is little impediment for anyone who is not tone-deaf to the supernatural. It is a profound and subtle play, with multiple layers of meaning and an intricate symbolism. But the poetry, more loquative than the poetry of ‘The Family Reunion,’ is precise and lucid; and the design is clear.

In the play’s centre are four people whose lives have become entangled. Edward, a middle-ageing barrister, whose wife, Lavinia, has just left him, and who has for some time been in love with Celia; Peter, his friend, who is also in love with Celia; Celia, who loves Edward; and Lavinia, who loves Peter but knows herself to be unloved by him. It is a familiar mixture, but it is not the mixture as before. Around this central group are two friends, Julia, a grey-haired, good-natured society chatterbox, with Alex, a bright young man about town, and a third figure, unidentified at first, whom they have introduced to the Cocktail Party which opens the play. This is a well-known psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, and his purpose is to set these frustrated lives in order. In the first act the pattern of personal relationships unfolds itself. In the second, Lavinia returns to a husband who surprisingly wants to take her back, although he has not yet learned to love her; and Celia says good-bye to a lover whom she had thought to marry but has now mysteriously outgrown. In the third act the scene shifts to Sir Henry’s consulting-room. The psychiatrist, whom both Edward and Lavinia have been persuaded to see, neither of them knowing that he is their unidentified friend of the Cocktail Party, confronts husband and wife with each other and sends them back, not to the ecstasies and illusions of romantic love, but to what is still ‘in a world of lunacy, violence, stupidity, greed … a good life.’ From now on they will be

…contented with the morning that separates

And with the evening that brings together

For casual talk before the fire

Two peopl...