INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE: Poems 1909-1917.<i> By T.S. Eliot</i> .<i> Edited by Christopher Ricks</i> .<i> Harcourt Brace: 428 pp., $30</i>

T.S. Eliot seemed to us as inevitable as Shakespeare. The first words of his we read were the first he published as a mature poet, beginning with that magisterial and irresistible invitation, “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky. . . .” Entranced, we followed, as we followed no other poet and as most of us were never to follow one again.

Why? It was the meter, the diction, the address. The verse that as Eliot himself said was related to living speech, the rhymes and stress there because they had to be there, even though you had not known that they would be there, and finding them there took your breath away.

*

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

[from “Burnt Norton”]

*

We were marvelously drawn into these journeys not taken, into places furnished with a Weltschmerz (or is it mal du siecle?) that thrilled us, as only the young can be thrilled by Weltschmerz, actually knowing nothing of it.

We--my generation--at the same time knew not only that we did not know enough of the world even to begin to be weary of it but that we were avid for it, eager to learn what to become weary of, to discover this entrancing and romantic wasteland into which we were evoked to learn to despair of it and, because Eliot had turned Christian, to hope for it.

That of course was a time, in the decade after World War II, when Christianity and issues of metaphysical and ontological truth, sin and salvation were taken very seriously in certain universities: at Oxford and Notre Dame here and the Benedictine Saint John’s, the Jesuit colleges and all of the nuns’ various Saint Marys, which were then at the trail’s end of a Catholic philosophical, theological and artistic revival that had begun decades earlier in France, Germany and Italy.

We were American products of what was, in terms of secular and materialistic America, a subversive movement, producing an internationalist and historical consciousness rare among Americans and also what Mary McCarthy once described as a straining against American reality, “a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America. . . .” We read neo-Thomist philosophers and the aesthetics of Aristotle and Maritain, as well as Dostoevsky, Bernanos and Baudelaire and the French prophetic polemicist and novelist Leon Bloy’s furious denunciations of a hated “bourgeoisie” of which we, somewhat mystified, were mostly products. We recognized in Eliot’s monarchism and romantic high Anglicism something we could not accept, indeed something phony for an American, as we might have put it, but we could understand his stance and were moved by his poetry and believed that he was ours.

It was a time--the end of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, when earnest and intellectual young Catholics read Thomas Merton’s autobiography and wrestled with their consciences over whether to become Trappist monks or nuns, or Carthusian hermits, to pray for a world in recovery from the atrocities of the war. Major writers identified themselves as Christians and argued about the moral responsibility of the author to the eternal salvation of the reader. The French novelist Francois Mauriac, the English Graham Greene and later America’s Flannery O’Connor were the cases most debated, but it was taken for granted that the serious subject for an artist was the human condition considered in terms of sin and transcendence.

Eliot the playwright moved us when, in “The Cocktail Party,” his holy conspirators assist the young mistress of a worldly barrister to find martyrdom by crucifixion, near an anthill in an unnamed country of “natives” and when the mysterious psychiatrist says to the barrister and his wandering wife:

*

When you find, Mr. Chamberlayne,

The best of a bad job is all that any of us make of it--

Except of course, the saints . . . you will forget this phrase,

And in forgetting it will alter the condition.

[from “The Cocktail Party”]

*

I have quoted or misquoted that line for nearly 50 years, since first hearing it spoken by Alec Guinness on the second night of his New York debut as “An Unidentified Guest, later identified as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly,” the psychiatrist as agent of salvation, Eliot’s elegant rebuke to a contemporary sensibility that in America was Freud-obsessed.

All of this was struggle for the soul of man. Only the naive, we believed, thought Marx and Freud the serious contenders. We and Eliot had 2,000 years of Christian civilization to validate our affirmation that this was not so. For us it was duty to redeem time past in time future.

*

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us.

[from “Ash Wednesday”]

*

And as it turned out, Marx and Freud lost. The Christians did not expect to “win” in terms the others would recognize; that was the point of the historical Christ, that he was crucified. Not a particularly seductive message to America even then, when it was a soberer place than it is now, but it was a view of human nature and possibility that improved upon positivism, a desiccated liberal optimism or a Marxism that already had foundered in Stalinism.

But how is our pious Christian Eliot to be reconciled with the Eliot now under Philistine fire for anti-Semitism and racist sexual buffoonery (and anti-democracy, elitism and monarchism--let us complete the bill of indictment; and indeed, what are we to make of “Apeneck Sweeney”)? For the anti-Semitism itself, the several poisonous references to Jews and the condescending references to blacks, there is no particular excuse other than the empty one that such was common currency before the war, when the words were written. Eliot was what he was, take him or leave him. The virtue of the artist has nothing to do with the virtue of the art; nobody burned their Picassos when they discovered that Picasso was not nice to women.

On the other hand, there is the much-quoted statement in “After Strange Gods” (1934, never reprinted), that in Eliot’s ideal society “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” I find it hard to imagine that a “free-thinking Jew” would want to live there, given the nature of the society Eliot wanted. “After Strange Gods” was an attack on the secularization of culture, which Eliot believed led to barbarism. He had an essentially medievalist conception of “organic” society, in which culture is “an incarnation” of religion.

He maintained in “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” that there is no culture without religion, an organic social structure, hereditary transmission of culture and the persistence of social classes. W. H. Auden’s own Eden was not dissimilar, so Auden (Eliot’s fellow poet and fellow Christian) told us in the 1962 prologue to “The Dyer’s Hand.” It would be of “highly varied” ethnic origin “but with slight nordic predominance” and Roman Catholic “in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of Local saints.” It would be an absolute monarchy, Baroque in state architecture, without newspapers, with public entertainment by “Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.” The climate would be “British.”

Eliot’s Eden was an American’s Puritan version of Auden’s Christian utopia, Puritanism being unknown to the latter. (Despite his St. Louis birth, Eliot was of Puritan origins on both sides. The Eliots came to Massachusetts in 1670, and his mother descended from the Stearns, original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony.) Eliot took hell and damnation seriously and held the view that the “Christian culture of Europe” is the highest culture the world has ever known.” That would earn him no applause in California today. What is a commonplace to one generation shocks the next, but then this is not automatically a matter of progress.

He also thought that the United States turned into a plutocracy after the Civil War and with the great immigrations found itself with a “multiplying . . . danger of development into a caste system . . .” (in which “the dominant class comes to consider itself a superior race”). That today does not sound so far off the mark.

Eliot was a figure of cultural as well as literary consequence at a particular moment now passed, and those of us for whom his criticism as well as his poetry were important are survivors from an alien world, stranger than Saturn to readers today. His cultural stance is probably incomprehensible to any American under 50 and to most over 50. But there you are. That’s the way it was.

These remarks are prompted, of course, by reading the “Inventions of the March Hare,” a newly published volume of Eliot’s early poems and notes. Eliot sold the notebook containing them to a New York collector and patron, John Quinn, in 1922. He had offered Quinn the manuscript of “The Waste Land” as a gift, in thanks for Quinn’s support, but Quinn insisted that he should pay for it. The two then agreed that “The Waste Land” manuscript would be Eliot’s gift but that Quinn would buy this notebook of early work. Eliot’s condition for the sale was that as these were fragmentary and juvenile works “they never are printed.” (To a New York Times headline writer last fall, this meant that they are “40 Poems That Eliot Wanted to Hide.”)

Their publication now, with a conscientious apparatus of annotations by Christopher Ricks and with the authorization of his wife, Valerie Eliot, raises an obvious ethical problem. Eliot explicitly said in 1962 that he would “not allow any academic critic . . . to provide notes of explanation to be published with my poems” and also forbade their graphic illustration or setting to music on grounds that “I want my readers to get their impressions from the words alone and from nothing else.”

One would think that an author has a right to decide what is to be published as his (considered and finished) work and to have his drafts or the early work that he cannibalized to make the great poems discarded (or disregarded). However, author’s wishes now are frequently ignored either in the interest of the academic English literature business (and readers’ understandable wish to know more about an author’s development) or in the quest for profit. In this case, the manuscript, which had ended in the collections of the New York Public Library, had since 1968 been available to scholars, who nonetheless were not permitted to quote the contents. It is Valerie Eliot who commissioned this publication, and Ricks observes that she “is the best judge of what her husband would have wished in changed cultural circumstances. . . .”

The book contains much that is interesting and amusing, some of it rude and bawdy, and has touched off what by now is the familiar uproar that follows publication of letters, journals or notebooks that reveal that a writer of another generation possessed views or suffered prejudices unsuited to our own virtuous times. But nothing in the book can amend or affect the rank of T.S. Eliot as the man who by the power of his poetry, and by the transformation he produced in the nature of modern English poetry, made himself the greatest English poet of the century.