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Becoming T.S. Eliot
The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in Inventions of the March Hare
Jayme Stayer
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021 Paperback. xiv + 344 pp. ISBN 978-1421441047. $34.95
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
Readers are not often granted the opportunity to look at a creator’s
laboratory, to discover how a genius slowly took shape. Great writers are
generally careful to suppress all the painstaking steps through which they
reached their mature self. Or at least, that is what they say, in order to
discourage any research into their archives. While T.S. Eliot liked to claim
that nothing had survived of his first attempts at writing poetry, he never
destroyed the actual evidence, which has recently allowed critics to study his
juvenilia and the works which immediately precede his first masterpieces. The
notebook where Eliot transcribed poems written between 1909 and 1915 was
secretly acquired by the New York Public Library in 1958, the purchase being
only announced three years after the writer’s death in 1965; the contents were edited
and published in 1996, by Christopher Ricks, under the title Inventions of the March Hare, and the
notebook poems were reproduced in the 2015 edition of Eliot’s Poems, co-edited by Ricks and Jim McCue. In Becoming T.S. Eliot, Jayme
Stayer scrutinises all the texts included in the notebook, reconstructing the
chronology of these forty poems, “teasing out the narratives of their making”
so as to show how Eliot went from “awkward apprentice” to “accomplished
craftsman” [2]. He studies how Eliot found not only his own poetic voice, but
also his audience, both the one who is directly addressed in the poem and the
“ideal reader” postulated by any writer. Stayer focuses on the rhetorical tools
used by a young man who was still in the process of assimilating conflicting
influences. The notebook, probably bought in the summer of 1910, was first used
to copy finished poems, and later as “a place to invent, revise, and edit” [8]. The first chapter is devoted to the
literary models in Eliot’s juvenilia. Stayer identifies a case of “audience
anxiety” in the teenager who was afraid of the reaction of the grown-ups,
“defensively pre-empting he hostility of a conservative public” [15]. What the
very young poet unwittingly reveals is mainly his unease with self-revelatory
writing. To overcome his difficulties, he would resort to the transgressive use
of slang and, above all, tap into the resources of French poetry. “Forging a
speaking identity and constructing an audience to whom he wishes to speak will
be the tasks of the notebook” [45]. For Eliot, French poetry then meant Jules Laforgue in particular, from
whom he learnt irony and informality, but Stayer insists on the persistent
influence of Baudelaire in the poems of November 1909. The two Frenchmen taught
him the opposite lessons of spleen and mockery. With Baudelaire, Eliot could
inspect the ugly and sordid aspects of modern cities; with Laforgue, he could
explore the boring, conventional aspects of social life. His sarcasm is aimed
at clichés, and his marionettes insult the audience, or rather anti-audience
posited in some of the poems. With the poems of early 1910, Eliot “clarifies his own voice and signals
for attention to a new kind of audience” [73]. The short lines and humorous
rhymes of ragtime songs inspire him with new experiments in metrics, and the
young poet is becoming a conscious artist observing verbal posturing, his own
and other people’s, staging his emotions and controlling the audience’s
reaction. This “cool scrutiny of rhetorical machinations” [87] is a sign of
increasing confidence. An ironic speaker describes the world with detached
anxiety, for an urbane reader who gets the joke. In the autumn, just before leaving America to spend a year in Paris,
Eliot starts deploying his voice in longer, more complex “sequence poems”
fragmented into sections. His disgust for the restraints of his social milieu
can be coded as flippancy, using the stock figures of popular entertainment, in
“an imaginative review of the meaning-making of his culture” [138]. The stay in
France is marked by apathy and solipsism, and the poet has to find “an adequate
imagery and form to express his alienation and strike a stance that will elicit
sympathy from his audience without crossing over into the maudlin” [148].
Misunderstandings between the speaker and the (very often female) audience in
the poem do not preclude sympathy for the addressee, and Eliot finally manages
to make a direct statement of pain, revealing himself to the reader with
greater intimacy. A chapter is devoted to Eliot’s bawdy poems, whose racism and scatology
have often been perceived as problematic. Stayer demonstrates that Eliot never
intended to have them published in Wyndham Lewis’ Blast, that he very early stopped writing any new ones, even if he
went on quoting them in letters to his friends. At a time when Eliot was still
a student at Harvard, the aim of those texts meant for a clubroom audience was
“to ratify his manliness as an aesthete and to enhance his credentials as a
hearty” [199]. The notebook includes a first landmark with “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”, started in 1910 and eventually published in 1915. Eliot had left
four empty pages in prevision for a middle section to be inserted between
“Prufrock among the Women” and the end beginning with “And the afternoon…” but
he only kept a few lines from “Prufrock’s Pervigilium” later added as a central
part. The poet now seems to move easily between different voices, representing
the fragmentation of the modern mind, but this may also be due to the fact
that, more than a fully achieved mature poem, “Prufrock” was initially an
accumulation of short pieces hastily sewn together. The last writings in the notebook, written between 1911 and 1915 (just before Eliot married and decided to become an exile in Britain), show him “attempting to launch new trajectories” [239]: a few more poems in the French style, the last ones to be influenced by Laforgue; a strong Gothic-visionary vein, in which the speaker seeks spiritual meaning, with a sadomasochistic attraction to martyrdom; prose poems; poems of intimacy and eros which contemplate possible relations between the speaker and lower-class women. Stayer concludes by summarising the poet’s progress over the years covered by the notebook: The genius of Eliot’s rhetoric is that it is a whisper, sometimes a horrified one, that creates the illusion of addressing no generic audience
but one reader who is already intimately known by the speaker [290].
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