At the time of its publication in 1915, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was outlandish, a shocking drama of an urban man racked with feelings of isolation and impotence. It is a stream of consciousness, in which Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunity in life and lack of spiritual development. He – like many of us – is also haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. Life was supposed to be better; more Bollinger in hot tubs, less longing. Less regret, less embarrassment, less awareness of mortality and overwhelming sense of physical decay. More skinny dipping with French foreign exchange students in the stagnant ponds of large country houses. And sigh. Prufrock has since become one of the most recognised voices in literature marking a massive cultural shift from Romantic verse to Modernism. The poem’s structure is influenced by Dante, refers to the Bible, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the poetry of the late seventeenth century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was written by British poet T.S Elliot.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, social critic and one of the twentieth century’s big-league poets. He was also born in America, in St Louis; a major port in the state of Missouri built along the bank of the great Mississippi River. Eliot later wrote to a friend that ‘Missouri and Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world’, suggesting Eliot never made it to Croydon. His love of literature, though, was due, in part, to an isolated childhood. He suffered from a double inguinal hernia, which sounds particularly sticky, and so was unable to play six down in the yard with the other boys. He had five older siblings. Four sisters and a brother, who was closest to him in age, but some eight years his senior. Mom and Pop were both 44 years old when he was born. It seems the only thing to break the dusty silence at home when he was a young lad, was the grandfather clock. There was no Subbuteo in the 1920s and so Eliot learned to read. And once he had learned to read. He read. A lot. He was soon stretched out in the bay window of the sitting room immersed in the adventures of Tom Sawyer. ‘I bet he went to Harvard’ you mutter. Indeed, he did. After school he read Philosophy at Harvard, taking a bachelor’s degree in just three years, leaving precious little time for games of beer pong, jelly wrestling the lacrosse team or running amok through town with a traffic cone on the head.
On New Year’s Eve 1914 Eliot wrote to his friend, the American writer Conrad Aitken: ‘I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls.’ His academic mojo well and truly shot. ‘He went to Oxford too’ you mutter. Indeed, he did, as by this time Eliot was at Merton College on a scholarship but seemingly not loving all the public schoolboys and stripy blazers. Consequently, he spent a lot of his time in London, where he met the influential American literary figure, Ezra Pound, who played a strong hand in the modernist poetry movement. Pound’s work was most influential through his development of imagism, an approach that derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry that stressed clarity, precision and economy of language. Think tight lines and sharp punctuation, and verse delivered with bold hand gestures and taut chops. Mixing with other like-minded artists, Eliot soon jacked in Oxford and moved to London full time. He later found it in himself to complete a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Bradley being the idealist philosopher, who was a Fellow at Merton and who spent many hours pacing the quad asking, ‘Why should I be moral?’, before scurrying up to the SCR for sherry and long debate on the sexiest undergraduate in college. Due to tensions leading up to WWI, Eliot never returned to Harvard for his viva voce exam, and so never got to be a Doctor.
Eliot then taught. He also married. This after writing another letter to Aitken saying, ‘I am very dependent upon women’. He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess, although it is whispered that the philosopher Bertrand Russell once joined her in the shower when the newlyweds were staying in his flat. The allegations were never confirmed. Illicit soapy rub downs or not, it wasn’t a happy marriage as Vivienne was ill. She was anxious, plagued by migraines and they would spend long periods apart. They separated in 1933. Vivienne was later committed to a lunatic asylum by her brother, an institution that she would sadly never leave. A 1984 play Tom & Viv, explores the relationship in more detail but Eliot later admitted that he married Vivienne as he wanted to commit himself to staying in England. The weather, orderly queues and liberal use of custard were clearly not enough.
Eliot finally ended up working at the publisher Faber and Gwyer after the acerbic journalist and author Charles Whibley, recommended him to Geoffrey Faber one day over seared scallops and a crisp, white Burgundy. Faber and Gwyer later became Faber and Faber when Faber and Lady Gwyer decided to go their separate ways. Liking the ‘and’ bit, Faber decided to rebrand as Faber and Faber, despite there only ever being one Faber. Customers, he whispered to a wide-eyed intern, ‘would never know’. Faber and Faber went on to become a titan of British publishing and was the first house that nodded and smiled nicely when the then unknown William Golding came in one morning with sweaty palms to pitch his debut novel, Lord of the Flies. Eliot would remain at Faber and Faber for the rest of his career.
By 1927 Eliot was a British Citizen and had converted to Anglicanism although he would later admit to a friend when they were out walking the dog one morning, that his religious views combined ‘a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.’ His religious conversion was once again, according to his biographer Peter Ackroyd, partly about giving Eliot some hope for himself, but also a means by which he could feel attached to English culture and be accepted into the community. He also joined the Parish Council of St Stephen’s on Gloucester Road for good measure. Eliot was all in on the English thing and later, aged 68, affirmed his credentials by marrying his secretary, Esme Fletcher, who was a whopping 38 years his junior. Tweed all round. He died of emphysema in 1965 at his home and if you ever find yourself near Kensington Court Gardens with half an hour to kill, go and find his plaque outside No.3.
Despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 ‘for his outstanding contribution to present-day poetry’, Eliot was a little French in his output, and produced – for a man of his poetic ability – a relatively small number of poems. That they were exceedingly good poems perhaps is a lesson to us all. “My reputation in London’ he wrote on a postcard to one of his Harvard professors, ‘is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event’.
In a vapid world of rabid consumerism, besieged by the promotional guff for the newest and shiniest product from the same tired old brands, perhaps the marketing moguls could learn a lesson from Eliot’s parsimonious approach to his poetry.
Less is more. Quality, not quantity. And certainly no tweeting.
Good man.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Hepburnsays 