200
PARTISAN REVIEW
the First World War; it is just as significant that he should speak
of frrst reading Eliot's poems in Alexandria, Egypt, during that war,
and that he should conclude by saying that Eliot was one who had
looked into the abyss and refused henceforward to deny or forget
the fact.
We are given an early view of the international hero in the
quasi-autobiographical poem which Eliot entitles: "Melange Adultere
Du Tout." The title, borrowed from. a poem by Corbiere, is ironic,
but the adulterous mixture of practically everything, every time and
every place, is not ironic in the least: a teacher in America, the poem
goes, a journalist in England, a lecturer in Yorkshire, a literary
nihilist in Paris, overexcited by philosophy in Germany, a wanderer
from Omaha to Damascus, he has celebrated, he says, his birthday
at an African oasis, dressed in a giraffe's skin. Let us place next to
this
array another list of names and events as heterogeneous as a
circus or America itself: St. Louis, New England, Boston, Harvard,
England, Paris, the First World War, Oxford, London, the Russian
Revolution, the Church of England, the post-war period, the world
crisis and depression, the Munich Pact, and the Second World War.
If
this list seems far-fetched or forced, if it seems that such a list
might be made for any author, the answer is that these names and
events are
presences
in Eliot's work in a way which is not true of many
authors, good and bad, who have lived through the same years.
Philip Rahv has shown how the heroine of Henry James is best
understood as the heiress of all the ages. So, in a further sense, the
true protagonist of Eliot's poems is the heir of
all
the ages. He is
the descendant of the essential characters of James in that he is the
American who visits Europe with a Baedeker in his hand, just like
Isabel Archer. But the further sense in which he is the heir of all
the ages is illustrated when Eliot describes the seduction of a typist
in a London flat from the point of view of Tiresias, a character in
a play by Sophocles. To suppose that this is the mere exhibition of
learning or reading is a banal misunderstanding. The important point
is that the presence of Tiresias illuminates the seduction of the typist
just as much as a description of her room. Hence Eliot writes in his
notes to
The Waste Land
that "what Tiresias
sees
is the substance of
the poem." The illumination of the ages is available at any moment,
and when the typist's indifference and boredom in the act of love
r,1ust be represented, it is possible for Eliot to invoke and paraphrase
a lyric from a play by Oliver Goldsmith. Literary allusion has become
r.ot merely a Miltonic reference to Greek gods and Old Testament
geography, not merely the citation of parallels, but a powerful and
