Except in his lucid essays (some of which I recommend you try), Eliot is a difficult writer, though as the years pass he seems less so, for he educated us to understand him. His achievement may be stated simply. He altered, deepened, and refined the character of English and American poetry in our time. He supplied modern criticism with a set of elevated and rigorous standards useful as a counterweight to the prevailing sleazy impressionism. In so doing he retrieved for us or set in a new light a whole series of writers: the minor Elizabethans, the seventeenth-century divines, Dante [30], Dryden, Donne [40].
Read his poetry in chronological order. Eliot—and this is not true of ali the Plan's writers—was by nature a developer. His growth was both technical and spiritual. Technically he passed from verse filled with allusions and quotations, verse often rather tricky and fantastically clever, to verse of great purity, sonority of rhythm, and symphonic form. Spiritually he moved from the dandyish irony of the Prufrock poems of 1917 through the detached, terrible despair of The Waste Land (1922) to the brooding metaphysical religiousness of Four Quartets (1943).
During the whole of this evolution he held fast to his original aim: "to digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects." Many of these objects and feelings are unpleasant, corresponding to our modern waste- land as the traditionalist eyes of Eliot saw it. But his purpose was neither to enjoy the luxury of misery nor to shock us with the disagreeable. "The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory." Ali three—the boredom, the horror, the glory—are woven into his verse.
Though it has forebears, Eliofs poetry is nonetheless truly revolutionary, like the fiction of Proust [105] or Joyce [110] or the plays of Beckett [125]. It is exact and condensed on the one hand and rich in magical suggestion on the other. Every word or allusive echo carries its proper weight, and ali is borne upon a rhythmic current whose effect becomes evident when you read the lines aloud or listen to Eliot's own recording of them. At first the language seems private, impossible to pene- trate. But as one gains familiarity, it begins to emerge as a mar- velously precise and evocative rendering of states of mind peculiar to sensitive Western men and women at this particular stage of our evolution or devolution. And it shares at least one quality with the greatest verse, Shakespeare^ [39] or Dante's: It is rich in lines so finally expressive that they remain in our heads forever and become part of our emotional world.
C.F.
117
ALDOUS HUXLEY
1894-1963 Brave New World
T.S. Eliot [116] and Huxley had much in common. Both were formidably intelligent, as well as formidably learned. Both summed up in their personalities a large part of the Western tradition. Both moved from a position of destructive criticai irony to one of faith—Eliot to Anglo-Catholicism, Huxley toward a mysticism drawn from the East but also from such Western visionaries as Blake [63], Eckhart, Tauler, and others. Eliofs may have been the profounder intellect, as he was cer- tainly the greater artist. But Huxley's intellect was more adven- turous, more playful, and more closely involved with insistent concrete problems of our time, particularly those pointing the way to race suicide, such as total war and murderous overpop- ulation.
The variety, the flexibility, the erudition, the sheer bril- liance of Huxley's restless mind may be enjoyed through a reading of his essays. He leaves few of humanity's major con- cerns untouched. His skepticism, never cheap or easy, has a cleansing power still to be properly estimated. I know no other single English or American writer of his time who reflected with such clarity certain shifts and modulations in the Western intellect, including a shift toward the thought of the East.
Huxley was famous before he was thirty, a circumstance
perhaps not entirely fortunate for him. But the book that gave him a worldwide audience was Brave New World, published in 1932, reissued in 1946 with an important new Preface by the author. Probably this terrible fable will lose its point and force as unconsciously we take on in reality the condition he describes in fantasy. For our period, however, it is what might be called a temporary classic. No one who really wishes to learn what is happening, not to our environment but to our souls, should remain unacquainted with this nightmare of a book.
The utopian literature of the twentieth century, unlike that of the Renaissance, is negative, dystopian. In it we hear not shouts of encouragement but cries of warning. As Berdiaeff, quoted by Huxley, puts it, our concern now is not how to attain but how to avoid Utopia. For the Utopia we are so busy preparing is, according to Huxley, Orwell [123], and dozens of other thoughtful writers, a hell of dehumanization.
Huxley's Brave New World projected six hundred years into the future, is populated by animais (still known as human beings) and their managers. The managed animais have been taught to love their servitude; they are happy, or, as we proudly say, adjusted. The Constitution of the state has but three arti- cles: Community, Identity, Stability. Religion as we know it, art, theoretical science, the family, emotions, individual striv- ings and differences—ali have vanished.
Not a good novel, Brave New World should be read as a prophetic fable, differing from other prophecies in that it is the product not of intuition but of cold intelligence. Its ideas (and ali its characters are ideas), first advanced more than sixty years ago, have proved prescient. Ali the gambits of then-current cocktail party conversation are prefigured in Brave New World—the conformist, the nonconformist, the relapse to primitivism, the new chartered sexuality, the organization man, the lonely crowd—they are here extended into a future that seems less remote today than it did in 1932.
I do not suggest that Brave New World be taken literally. It
is not a textbook of the future but a purposely exaggerated satirical vision, in the tradition of Gulliver [52]. Doubtless Huxley will rank below Swift. But not too far below. And what he has to say is perhaps more immediate, if less crushing, than Swift's total misanthropy.
C.F.
I 18
WILLIAM FAULKNER
1897-1962
The Sound and the Furtj, As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner has been hailed (except by a few uninfluen- tial dissenters) as the greatest American novelist of his genera- tion. Some critics rank him among the greatest of ali time. In 1949 the award of the Nobel Prize marked the official peak of an extraordinary career.
Most of his novйis and short stories are laid in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. This invented region has now become hallowed literary ground, like Hardy's Wessex [94]. The novйis' time span covers almost a century and a half, beginning in 1820. They form a connected series, something like Zola's Rougon-Macquart family chronicle or Balzac's more loosely linked "Human Comedy" [68]. Through accounts of the fortunes of a number of related families, Faulkner exposes, in a style of great complication and variety, the tragedy, and some of the comedy, of his violent, haunted, guilt-ridden Deep South. Mainly represented are three worlds: that of the black; that of the degenerate aristocracy, typified by the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury; and that of the even more degenerate emergent commercial class, whose emblem is the horrify- ing Lem Snopes.
The two novйis recommended above are considered by most critics among Faulkners finest; they are certainly among his most violent in theme and trail-blazing in technique. His champions also single out for high praise Light in August and Absalom, Бbsalom! as well as the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion). My own favorite is The Reivers.