THE ATE R C H RON
I CL E
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the person of the young woman Celia Coplestone, who, when her
affair with Edward Chamberlayne breaks off, becomes a missionary and
is finally crucified by the natives of a remote island. "She will go far,
that one," the psychiatrist says of her as she sets off on her journey, but
there is little given us to back up this judgment and Celia hardly
stands out as very different from the other trivial people at the party.
In a certain sense all these difficulties of incongruity are concen–
trated in the character of Harcourt-Reilly, who as psychiatrist and priest
seems to be somehow functioning simultaneously on both the natural
and supernatural levels. As a psychiatrist he performs the quite un–
believable feat of bringing the estranged Chamberlaynes together by
explaining that they are perfectly suited to each other since the wife
is unlovable and the husband incapable of loving. Chamberlayne, when
he hears this, is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and it strikes me
that the only possible effect of these words would be to drive him off the
deep end. I was surprised that some of the critics found the thought of
the play difficult and obscure, when it is in fact simple and obvious:
we must, Eliot is saying, either make the best of a bad job-bear with
resignation the limitations and frustrations of daily life--or follow the
path of the saints; there are no other alternatives. One does not
quarrel with the alternatives but with the fact that the Chamberlaynes,
who are as boring and empty a couple as can be found only in the
most trivial stories of
The New Yorker,
should represent the fullness of
natural life in contrast to the life of sanctity. The psychiatrist hardly
improves things by explaining this "good life" of marriage:
(they)
"Maintain themselves by the common routine,
Learn to avoid excessive expectation,
Become tolerant of themselves and others,
Giving and taking,
in
the usual actions
What there is to give and take. They do not repine;
Are contented with the morning that separates
And with the evening that brings together
For casual talk before the fire
Two people who know they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them."
One can have a pretty vivid sense of the horrors of marriage, as well as
of the final isolation in which we are all imprisoned, but still one gags
at these lines as representing the ultimate possibilities for human love.
What comes to my mind immediately is that great poem of marriage,
James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake,
whieh knows all the disgust and anguish
