Eliot, Allusions by and to

Perhaps you are like me, and you have a general interest in literature, and therefore in your younger days you made a few valiant efforts to scale the tallest peaks of High Modernism, T.S. Eliot's poems among them, and when you did so you came away with a few memorable quotations and passages, and a great deal of other stuff that was wholly impenetrable and useless to you. And perhaps, if you are even more like me, you now find yourself approaching thirty, and are increasingly filled with a superstitious feeling that there are certain things that you just want to be able to say you did while you were still in your twenties, and you unexpectedly had a snow day from work today, and you are encouraged by seeing from the book on your shelf that the "Complete Poems" in Eliot's case are really not so great in number, even if they are dense in mystification, and so you decide to make another attempt upon that mountain that defeated you in the past, and you open the book and read.

And maybe, you are more like me still, and you find on this latest attempt in the same effort that you get roughly the same result as before, and there is still no natural sympathy of attitudes and sensibilities between yourself and Eliot, he being a conservative and a Christian and a cat person (no doubt he prefers Coke to Pepsi too, and the two of you would truly have nothing to talk about); but perhaps the number of striking and memorable and useful lines is slightly greater this time than the first, and the amount which is wholly impenetrable slightly less, and there is something else too that you discover this time: there is the fact that, whatever else Eliot may be, he is indisputably a sort of hyphal knot or node in the midst of modern literature, on the sense that he was himself the dispenser of allusions to all that had gone before him in the written word, and his own works have gone on to become the source for endless allusions by everyone else.

Indeed, it is fitting that one of Eliot's most famous -- notorious -- statements was about how "mature poets steal" (a quote that MacDiarmid liked to cite in justification of his own burglarious tendencies). One picks up unacknowledged allusions and resonances throughout the corpus of Eliot poems, and for the most part they are to sources sufficiently well-known that they could not have been intended to pass unnoticed by the initiated, and therefore cannot fairly be construed as authorial theft. (Echoing a beloved line from a Shakespeare sonnet, say, no more needs to be written in quotation marks with an attribution attached than would a passage from the King James Bible.)

In a few cases, however, Eliot may have drawn without acknowledgement upon works, such as Madison Cawein's "Waste Land" of 1913, that obviously do not fall into this category of the already well-established and therefore not in need of attribution (though the now-prevalent accusations of outright plagiarism in this case seem far-fetched to me -- you can read both poems for yourself and decide where you come down).

If Eliot was a master of stealing, however, he has proven over the years to be even better at being stolen -- and for every allusion one detects in Eliot to earlier authors, one recognizes several more phrases in his work that oneself recognizes now from their echoes in later literature and popular culture. And I don't just mean the relatively well-known cases (Kurtz reading a passage from Prufrock in Apocalypse Now, for example, since Conrad's Kurtz is himself referenced in The Waste Land).

Since spotting these passages provided some mental diversion and interest for me today, while work was out, and even provide the jumping-off point for the occasional Shandean digression into a long Google search, I thought I'd share them with you as well, dear reader. Especially as we are operating on the chance, as we discussed earlier, that you might be something like me.

1.) "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?" This from the famous "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I was aware of the "Do I dare" line because the great radical attorney Bill Kunstler once used it in a powerful piece of rhetoric, when he was addressing a group of college students. Describing a situation that demands moral courage, Kunstler remarked: "You will say, like Prufrock, 'Do I dare? Do I dare?'"

The connection I didn't make until I read the next line that follows it in the poem today, however, is that this is also then the source of the title of the documentary Kunstler's daughters made about their father's life, in which I first heard this piece of oratory. It is called, after all, Disturbing the Universe. They're clever and literate people, those Kunstlers.

2.) "The army of unalterable law." This appears in a poem called "Cousin Nancy," but the line is not Eliot's invention -- it is an ironic allusion to a poem originally about Lucifer, and his futile revolt against the dictates of heaven. I knew the quote from Orwell, who in his autobiographical essay about his school days, "Such, Such Were the Joys," writes the following: "There was a line of verse that I came across not actually while I was at St Cyprian's, but a year of two later, and which seemed to strike a sort of leaden echo in my heart. It was: ‘The armies of unalterable law’. I understood to perfection what it meant to be Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge."

All this time, however, I had always assumed Orwell had found this quote and his sense of personal identification with Lucifer in Milton -- Paradise Lost being the most obvious place to look for both. Only today, however, did I bother to look up the source of the original line. It turns out to be from a someplace else entirely: a short poem by Victorian novelist George Meredith, "Lucifer in Starlight." The original line reads:

He reached a middle height, and at the stars, 
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. 
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, 
The army of unalterable law. 

3.) "in a dry season" -- is the title of André Brink's novel A Dry, White Season, in some way a reference to this line, from Eliot's "Gerontion"? Perhaps a bit of a stretch to think so, but maybe.

4.) "a handful of dust" -- this is from "The Waste Land" and is the source of the title of Waugh's famous 1934 novel. Hadn't realized that until today, silly me. I thought Waugh just made it up.

5.) "the grass is singing" -- also from "The Waste Land." Reading it, I was like, wait, that's a Doris Lessing novel that hadn't been written yet! How could Eliot have known that?! Then I was like, oh, right.

6.) Along similar lines, my brain picked out the words "Sunlight on a broken column," in "The Hollow Men." Why was that familiar? Then I remembered the 1961 Attia Hosain novel whose title is drawn from the Eliot line.

7.) "desiring this man's gift and that man's scope" -- in "Ash Wednesday." The line is borrowed from Shakespeare's famous sonnet 29, except in the original, "art" appears in place of "gift."

Also, let me pause to acknowledge here that I recognize that we're dealing in Eliot's work with poems that have been among the most thoroughly scoured and picked-over by academics in history, so I'm not pretending I'm going to notice anything here that no one else has ever spotted before. I just want to have my fun as if there were still truths to be uncovered on one's own and as if all important thoughts hadn't already been posted on the internet somewhere else, okay?

8.) "Reflected from my golden eye" -- a line that appears in the short poem "Lines for an Old Man." It seems very likely that this was the inspiration for the title of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, especially given the novel's close observations of the behavior of quirky oddballs on a Southern army base, which jives with the poem's description of a cynical and jaded elderly man's survey of the follies of his fellow humans.

The poem is not cited explicitly as an epigraph of the novel (or elsewhere) as the source of McCullers' title, but a quick Google search does reveal -- aha! -- that one of the files in Carson McCullers' personal papers is nothing other than a copy of Eliot's "Lines for an Old Man" set to music. Bingo!

Here -- as in the case of the Doris Lessing novel noted above -- we also have another of those mind-bending instances of cultural transmission (I once noted a similar phenomenon in the case of "Betelgeuse"), in which the order in which I learned about a received phrase in our broader culture was the exact reverse of the order in which it actually appeared in history!

In this case, as a child I -- and just about everyone my age -- played a shoot-em-up video game called Goldeneye. Years later, as a teenager, I found out that one of Carson McCullers' novels was called Reflections in a Golden Eye, and I thought, well, that reminds me of the video game. But surely that's just me being silly and juvenile, because of course they can't actually have anything to do with each other.

But then it turns out that Goldeneye the game was based on Goldeneye the Bond movie (okay, that much I knew), and then that Goldeneye the movie was named after "Goldeneye" the fictitious estate owned by James Bond in the original Ian Fleming novels (this part I hadn't realized until recently), and then it turns out -- what I just learned today -- that Fleming had in fact named the estate after the McCullers novel! Which, to bring us full circle, was named after the Eliot line.

Okay, and then, just to dig a little deeper still, it turns out that Ian Fleming and T.S. Eliot were once neighbors, as they would have been living in the same apartment building in Chelsea as each other for a period after the war. So it hardly seems a stretch to imagine Fleming's true source of the name of the Bond estate might have been Eliot's poem.

Ah, this is the sort of discovery one can make from the comfort on one's own couch that makes life worth living! This is what keeps the literary Sherlock in all of us from succumbing to one of his black moods and reaching for his cocaine bottle.

Anyways, what does it all mean? It means surely that Eliot has -- while pillaging from others -- also provided many a turn of phrase that has proved worth pillaging in turn by subsequent generations. He is a source of marvels and prodigies of language. And surely this is enough to make him worth reading, even when one cannot follow him for long stretches, and when one does, it is often to places one does not want to go.

Perhaps Eliot's moral maunderings about the modern age are tiresome. Perhaps he is lacking in the sense of his own ridiculousness that often redeems the keen observer of the sins and follies of others. Perhaps he fails to appeal as a person and friend. In spite of this he has, if nothing else, given us immortal phrases. Ones that I too -- being a pilferer myself -- have used, and will no doubt go on to use again.