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PARTISAN REVIEW
of poetic drama, but I doubt that such a play would ever reach Broad–
way, for it would demand an audience ready to accept a formal and
stylized theater; and years ago Eliot himself in his "Dialogue on
Dramatic Poetry" announced through one of the interlocutors that
the search for a poetic drama valid for our time must be carried
forward by small experimental theaters. But the question of the
audience aside, what we would like to recall is Eliot's own repeated em–
phasis in his earlier critical writings that poetic drama to be valid must
insist upon its convention, the form and stylization implicit in verse, and
that the error of William Archer and the realistic theater was to be–
lieve that only the convention of prose was valid.
The Cocktail Party
seems to parallel a tendency apparent in recent years in the production
of Shakespeare, where the passages of blank verse are made to sound
more "natural"-i.e., acceptable to the audience-by being spoken as if
they were prose, or at most some vaguely rhythmic free verse.
The present play demands comparison with
Sweeney Agonistes
on
other grounds, for both deal, though in different ways, with the sheer
overwhelming fact of human banality: in
Sweeney
the crudity of the
lower orders, here the tedious chatter of the middle classes. The open–
ing scenes attempt in fact to rework the same devices of repetition that
had been so successfully banal in the earlier work, but they do not do
so well here because they lack the formal definiteness, the bare strident
saxophone note, of
Sweeney.
One critic thought the opening scene
funnier than Noel Coward, but to my mind the garrulous old harpy
Julia Shuttlethwaite, who dominates the opening conversation and
whom Eliot wishes to depict as tedious, was nothing less than that.
To this general cocktail atmosphere Eliot adds some typically modern
ingredients: the strained marriage of the Chamberlaynes, the separate
affairs of husband and wife
(melange adultere de taus),
the running
away of the wife, and then the entrance of the modern tinker of
broken marriages, the psychiatrist. (All these carefully calculated ele–
ments show a cunning intelligence at work, and it is not generally a
deficiency of literary intelligence, but of creative vitality, that we
complain of in this play.) Against the background of these banal
furnishings Eliot wishes, of course, to develop his own Christian themes,
but right there the difficulties of incongruity begin, and we are asked,
among other things, to accept the astounding transformation in the
second act of the two fatuous cocktail figures, Julia and Alex, into
guardian angels with supernatural powers. Eliot has set himself a
formidable problem: How to make the possibility of the saint meaningful
against this background of cocktail chatter? The saint appears here in
