Dumpster Diving for T.S. Eliot
Last year I wrote of my experience jumping into a school’s dumpster in order to rescue books that had been thrown out for reasons unknown to me.[1] The rescued book I highlighted then was Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods. Now, as an anniversary of sorts, I thought I would revisit the experience and highlight another rescued book: Selected Prose, by T.S. Eliot. My copy was published in 1958, and donated to the school by the Grey Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. The pages of this book have grown brittle in my office, where the furnace fan blows constantly, but throughout the book are neatly underlined passages suggesting the careful reading of students, and maybe teachers and nuns, from a bygone era.
A book containing over 50 essays is not easy to review, but the reader of Eliot’s essays sees themes emerge in the treatment of society and culture. T.S. Eliot was concerned with tradition, transcendence and the virtues, Christianity in the modern world, and the forces of disorder that threatened the well-being of the person.
The final essay in the book, Culture and the Family (1948), was the first one I read even while I stood in the dumpster, sinking into the garbage bags before landing on my seat upon a box of discarded magazines. This essay told me the book was a keeper. Eliot begins by discussing the nature of family in familiar ways such as being the transmitter of culture and so on. Then he swings his analysis to what at first glance is the innocent depiction of the family in advertising, that being, a happy mother and father with two glowing children. “It is a rare exception,” he writes, “when an advertisement depicts a large family or three generations.” What we are drawn to feel when looking at the four member nuclear family “is not devotion to a family, but personal affection between the members of it.” Small families make it easier to sentimentalize this affection on the advertising boards. What Eliot has in mind with the family, however, is something much richer, involving generations, “a bond which embraces…a piety towards the dead…and a solicitude for the unborn.” Things can always be understood at a deeper level, even our comprehension of family. Fortunate are those people who have known their grandparents, and have heard tales from a time before them that speak to the experience of forebears. How can this not aid a person in appreciating much more naturally not only the mystery of historical existence, but the reality of transcendent mystery? A strange and sometimes unbelievable trail of events and chance meetings, to say nothing of God’s grace or plain good luck, has brought each of us into existence, and to the current circumstances of our life.
Because I am first a writer of fiction, I was especially interested in the 1935 essay on Religion and Literature. As I read the essay, I also added movies to some sentences, since many of us have left reading behind for the streaming of movies on our flat screen televisions, mounted on walls where book shelves used to be. The Christian reader, writes Eliot, needs to “scrutinize their reading…with explicit ethical and theological standards.” He understands the sway held over us by the writer who first introduces us to a character with questionable mores, and then goes on to celebrate the character’s means to their ends. We need to be wary of the books we read strictly for pleasure or amusement, warns Eliot, for they may have much more of an influence on us and our culture than we typically would give them credit for. I shudder to think what Eliot would make of the mass media presented to us in this day and age! Eliot rejects cultural critics of literature who celebrate religious or philosophical writing based solely on literary merit as “parasites… Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” In Eliot’s day, as in ours, is an understanding that “everything should be tried,” with the stress on learning “from experience,” based on an understanding that we are all individuals, and that eventually the truth will emerge for us. Eliot counters this view with an understanding that the majority of writers are not individualists, guided by a unique vision, a la Blake. Instead, contemporary writers are part of a mass movement who all work in the same direction, not understanding the “primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.” In modern writing there is a great concern with “changes of a temporal, material and external nature,” and a support for “morals only of a collective nature.” As a form of response, Christians who read literature should know not only what they like to read, but what they should like to read. Using Chesterton as an example, Eliot explains that what he wants “is a literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian.” This subtle approach can counter a form of modern literature that repudiates, or is ignorant of, the Christian faith, a modern literature that encourages people to “get what they can out of life while it lasts,” to sacrifice—if at all—“only for the sake of tangible benefits.”
This leads to a broader critique of Eliot’s English society in general. In Condition of Culture, written in 1948, he asserts “with some confidence,” that the culture of his day is in decline. No government program can rescue a culture, for culture “is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of…harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.” The artist concentrates on their art, the poet on his page, and the civil servant on the proper settling of problems. Likewise, our own responsibilities for the betterment of culture and society involve our own work to better ourselves. Can the field of education help with the problem? In Modern Education, written in 1932, this seems relatively far-fetched an idea, for pursuing more education today is inspired “not as an aid to the acquisition of wisdom,” but for increased technical prowess in order to make more money and increased social status. “The continuity of culture,” Eliot writes in A Valediction (1939), “may have to be maintained by a very small number of people indeed—and these not necessarily the best equipped with worldly advantages.” On a hopeful note that affirms essayists from the most accomplished to the most humble, Eliot continues, “It must be the small and obscure papers and reviews, those which hardly are read by anyone but their own contributors, that will keep critical thought alive, and encourage authors of original talent.”
Over twenty writers are critiqued by Eliot, including a favourite of mine, Thomas Hardy. My literary tastes received a shock when I read of Hardy. He is described as a “powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective belief,” which leads to a focus on “self-expression.” As a “consequence of his self-absorption, he makes a great deal of landscape.” Ouch! Hardy’s writing always struck me differently, and I admit to wrestling with Eliot on this point, turning to Hardy for support. A page into chapter 2 of Far From the Madding Crowd, the paragraph dedicated to “persons standing alone on a hill,” always moved me as a testament to the wonder of the human person who can reach out with a quiet and steady mind, participating in the mystery and beauty of a universe that dwarfs us. In the prose of Eliot, Hardy’s only defense is found accidentally, when Eliot meditates on the New England mountains in Man and His Environment, (1934). The mountains impress Eliot, putting perspective on the work of human beings on this earth. Suddenly our trials and tribulations appear as transitory, “more desperate than the desert.” Hardy writes at the end of chapter 5 of the Madding Crowd that the world is made up “largely of compromise.” Perhaps that is the case here in Eliot’s overall understanding of landscape!
Regarding politics and society, Eliot’s Christianity obviously informs him of his world, and, so it seems, provides him with a distance with which to look critically at the world in which he is immersed. In The Reformation of Society (1939), Eliot writes, “A Christian society only becomes acceptable after you have fairly examined the alternatives.” One possibility in the future will be a “totalitarian democracy” where there will be “regimentation and conformity, without respect for the needs of the individual soul.” There will be a “hygienic morality in the interest of efficiency; uniformity of opinion through propaganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official doctrines of the time.” Does any of this feel familiar in 2022? If a society or civilization could become Christian, Eliot suggests there would be a sense of balance and renewed “creative activity in the arts.” This possibility “involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience, and discomfort.” Eliot is no gnostic dreamer or revolutionary, however, as he makes clear in Church and State (1939), where he reveals a happy middle way that honors the human place in the cosmos. “We have to remember,” Eliot writes, “that the Kingdom of Christ on earth will never be realized, and also that it is always being realized.” As far as political action is concerned, “we must remember that whatever reform or revolution we carry out, the result will always be a sordid travesty of what human society should be—though the world is never left wholly without glory.” This is a hopeful note on which to end, a hope I happily agree with, for this is where my dumpster diving derives its meaning! Glory can be found in all sorts of places as long as we have eyes to see it.
NOTES:
https://voegelinview.com/dumpster-diving-for-cicero/
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