Great man indeed. Saint? I don’t think the old banker would agree, not as one who mourned the hyacinth girl.

Far from repeating After Strange Gods, Eliot repeated its central theses in several different forms; the positive arguments about community he repeats in the two essays collected in “Christianity and Culture.” His discussion of blasphemy (with Lawrence, et al.) is repeated also, perhaps best in his introductory chapter to a book called “Revelation” (Faber and Faber, 1937). I don’t think he had anything to repudiate or retract with the *possible* exception of that phrase “free thinking Jews,” the intellectual emphasis being on “free thinking,” which means, of course, atheist, and the “Jews” being a rather significant flourish that answered well to English prejudice. Again, the consensus argument among Eliot Society scholars is that this phrase needs to be read as a critique of Unitarians and liberal Protestants.

As the author of a forthcoming book and several essays on Eliot’s writings, I doubt I fit the bill of someone who has not and does not subject Eliot to critical scrutiny. I just think he was a better man than most men; I trust the opinion of established good men like Russell Kirk, Tomlin, and Jacques Maritain more than I do the anecdotes of someone whose character I can hardly scrutinize.

I reread all five sections of “The Dry Salvages” with your comments in mind. I found the usual stew of ideas, sense perceptions et al, characteristic of Eliot’s longer poems. However bright Eliot might have been, he was not a disciplined writer. I found references to Krishna, continuing the author’s long interest in Eastern religion, and an invocation to the Virgin Mary as Lady of the Harbor, not substantially different from an argonaut’s prayer to Posidon. I don’t think the Incarnation at the end has the force you ascribe to it; it arrives softly like an afterthought. It is not the “animating spark,” as I call it, that gives the poem its weight and beauty, that makes it worth reading.

Eliot was not a pagan, per se, but one could make a good argument that in his poems he was something of a polytheist. You have to take the poet for what he wrote, not what you might wish for him. Also, certainly in part one of “Salvages,” I feel a touch of Whitman. The brown river might well have been the Mississippi, running alongside St. Louis, where Eliot grew up. It’s a very American poem with beautiful passages, an arc and flow to it.

I have always felt that Eliot’s anti-Semitism was of a literary variety. He blew smoke in the face of the Jew, nothing more. He is not claimed as a source of Nazism like Wagner, for example. He was basically a decent Christian gentleman. Still, he did stick out his WASP chest rather boldly during the period that Auden called “a low, dishonest decade.” Refusing to republish After Strange Gods does not exonerate him from writing it. Did he ever publically repudiate it? If he had been smarter and put his ear to the ground like William Shirer and others in Europe, he might have seen what was coming and kept quiet about his petty prejudices.

Never suppose that an author is so intelligent that he gets a free pass from critical scrutiny, that you feel compelled to worship him. Eliot was a complex man and deserves sympathy on some accounts. He did not speak with one mind. In his own way, he was a stoic fighting through nervous crises for years to arrive at personal happiness, which I would ascribe more to his second wife than to religious doctrine. I listen to plenty of desperate women on the subway who yell about how Jesus has changed their lives. You owe it to your students to give them the whole man, warts and all, and not a rose window view of him.

It’s good, also, to see you come by the porch regularly; welcome.

Now, as for “Dry Salvages,” the poem is a critique of paganism. You are right that its opening lines are pagan. That is their point. As with all the Quartets, the opening movement is the errant position from which the rest of the poem moves away and to which it provides correction. In that poem in particular, the temptation the first movement presents is the pagan understanding of gods as intra-historical natural forces, as mere giants within the scale of a nearly infinite, temporal history. By the end of the poem, we learn that gods are not God and that infinite time is nothing like eternity; thus the Incarnation of Christ serves as the our pathway of “escape,” as the means by which we ascend beyond the pagan gods of immanence and enter the eternal life where experience and meaning are one. You are the first person to get a taste of what my Reader’s Guide to Eliot’s Poems will sound like.

Eliot never espoused anything Nazi-like, in fact. He was one of the earliest and most penetrating critics of the modern nation state and political religions. The comments in “After Strange Gods” are embarrassing (hence he never reprinted them), but they are also almost certainly an instance where Eliot identifies what he calls “free thinking Jews” with, well, Unitarians. He was born and raised Unitarian. We have here an instance of self-critique.

As I’ll argue at Notre Dame next month, Eliot’s chief target of criticism was stoicism. The stoicism of Shakespeare, the stoicism of Unitarianism, the stoicism of anyone who denied the integral relation between the life of community and the law of God.

I’ve gone on enough, but let me finish by saying here what I say to students of mine who would write on Eliot. He’s the only modern author I have read who is always already smarter than us. Any criticism of his thought or character I have encountered I have found always to have been anticipated and thoroughly routed in his own writings; see especially his dissertation, where, as a twenty-something kid in Oxford he invented and critiqued phenomenology and grammatology a) before he could have heard of phenomenology and b) decades before Derrida started casting words on the wind.

Read E.W.F. Tomlin’s affecting memoir of Eliot, and see if you do not conclude Eliot’s was at the least a great man and very probably a saint!

There’s my gauntlet, God bless.

You could not imagine a more conservative looking person in life than Eliot in his banker’s suit. Ezra Pound wore flaming yellow trousers, by contrast. As a poet though, Eliot was the modernist tiger, while Pound stayed with his 19th Century diction. In essays, Eliot hammered out his ideas of the poet and society, and mounted a defense of his religion and class, going overboard with quasi-Nazi ideas in the 1930s. In his poems, the animating spark might well be pagan, as in these lines from The Dry Salvages:

‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god –
…

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.’

I met an old Irishman at a theater workshop in NYC in the 1980s, Michael Sayers, who was then in his 70s. He had worked with Eliot on the Criterion literary magazine in London. I asked Michael if Tom Eliot was the morose man in reality that he was depicted as in print. Michael said “yes” without hesitation. Eliot suffered greatly and eventually attained happiness and grace after his second marriage. His virtues were determination, forbearance (with himself), and humor. It is not entirely unfitting that what he is primarily remembered for today is his contribution to the musical Cats.

“One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition, is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Chesterton says early in his “Autobiography” that the two truths he advocated for during his whole life was the rediscovery and cherishing of the family and the foundation of gratitude for the mere fact of existence. Burke seems in every way a great antecedent on these two points.

The similarities may end there.

As to abstract stained glass..the most remarkable and almost hallucinogenic stained glass I ever had the stunning pleasure of seeing is the upper chapel of Saint Chappelle, built in the 13th century on the Isle de Cite. The ecstatic fluidity of the Rose Window is remarkable. Stare too long and it begins to move and the space begins to resonate and you begin to question your sanity and then the guide breaks the spell. Then again, upon closer inspection, the glass is not abstract, it simply looks that way in total. It is one of those places you wish you could spend a day from sun-up to sun down in…with a ladder and only a brief break to go out and get one of those tres fromage pannini at a sidewalk stand that are also swoon material.

Then there is Corbu’s Ronchamp and a massive, brutalist stained glass wall that whispers mystery and evokes starlight or a distant city flickering at night. Was he thinking of Augustine? I doubt it would be a child’s favorite place but the hushed mystery and robust forms engendered deep spiritual feelings in me.

There is also a form of narrative in religious expression as presented by that new museum of intelligent design where lifelike statues of children cavorting with large reptiles creates an entirely legible story of hilarious quack-brained excess. Narrative, to be worth a plug nickel must have something transcendent within it, a healthy dose of mystery and sometimes, to me, abstraction pulls this off better than the literal…and prosaic.

But as to Your Volume II;
A stirling essay !…the pejorative of mere eloquence and the preening superiority of the pragmatists and their armoring of Reason. To what perversion we have come down to with anti-intellectualism beating the dead mule of conservatism. This is one of your more illuminating pieces …thanks for it.
Not to mention ,
“…discovered the dry powder of conservatism tucked away in the base of the heaving windmill of modern liberal society”. Such romantic descriptive stage-setting….How downright unreasonable of you!
Romantic puffery worthy only of a derogatory tongue lashing by Ms. Wollstonecraft in her pseudo-peasant get-up. Limo liberals were once horse drawn. At least they were forced to reckon with horse pucky whilst in transit.

Now finish Part III and make it snappy …skippy. If you’d stop staring out that window at the fall foliage, you might have the discipline, clarity of mind and benevolent purpose to achieve the victorious logic of completion.

The Anglo-American conservative tradition begins with Burke, and runs through Wordsworth and Coleridge into the Oxford movement; that’s a simple but accurate historical geneaology. Naturally, we’re dealing with broad categories here — if we don’t accept that, then we are merely confusing things to think of a theological and ecclesiological movement as standing in any relation to the word “conservative.” Burke’s theory of society as organic, with his theory of the constitution as a community of prudential readers addressing, reinterprting, and developing custom in the light of present experience translates quite precisely into the theory of Tradition that the Oxford movement worked out. The constitution abides organically as a “possession” of the community it binds, for Burke; doctrine abides in the Church tradition, with the Church as the interpreting people of God, for Newman. Whether Newman’s ecclesiology varied from this after his conversion to Catholicism is another question, and one that I’m not equipped to answer (though I would like to).

In any case, any art that tries to short-circuit, conceal, or deny its dependence on narrative is art that may be of experimental value, in a sense, but is ultimately a limited or even a bad art — for the simple and true reasons you suggest. If Memory is mother of the muses, then surely we depend on the stories of memory for the making and perception of art.

Post Vatican II Liberal Catholic obsessions with “getting modern” in terms of architecture strike me as expressing a kind of self-love and self-possession neatly analogous to the homosexuality (the physical self-love of like-and-like) those same liberals call on us to “lighten up” about and which have, of course, bankrupted diocese after diocese.

Good art engenders, it reaches out to another, it communicates or speaks to us. Even difficult art does this, if it is any good, but why one would adorn churches with difficult art is beyond me. St. Ann’s Church in Somerville, MA has many stained glass windows, all but one of which depicts scenes of catechesis: parents, priests, and saints passing on the Faith to children. The prevalence of that trope speaks volumes about its importance to the people who built that church. What do abstract cubes of light tell us about the contemporary Church’s commitment to catechizing children as opposed to flattering the enlightened sensibility of our swinging age?

Nevertheless, you’re right to emphasize the importance of beauty and its truth. I’m learning this lesson slowly through the eyes of my sons. For example when we initially attended the Rosemont Villanova chapel, the stained glass and art was radically abstract, to which the children could not identify. But when we started going to Our Lady of Lourdes 6 miles up the 30, the beauty of the Church there truly acted as a catechism, one that the little child could understand. My three year old often comments on the stained glass mural of the Holy Family, with St. Joseph and Christ wielding hammers and chisels. He also laments those “bad Roman soldiers!” found in the stations of the cross.

It is through these experiences that I have found deeper meaning in Matthew 19:14: “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” The abstract modern Churches seem to be preventing the little ones from coming to Christ, which I think should play into the consideration of beauty which opens the door to the kingdom of heaven.