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PARTISAN REVIEW
of married life but also all its dear dirty joys. The question is not so
much that of "understanding" but of opening oneself in love to another
person; human kind, as Eliot puts it, may not be able to bear very
much reality, but even the Chamberlaynes of this world are capable of
more than he allows them. Here we must remember that Eliot, the
last great product of the Puritan mind, has never shown in his poetry
any real belief in the possibility of human love. The moment of love
is presented always as the moment of withdrawal and renunciation, the
awful daring of a moment's surrender, one of "the things that other
people have desired"; and consequently the beauty of the world is
never present in the fullness of joy, but always with that painful clutch
at the heart as at something taken away, lost, uncapturable. No doubt,
resignation is necessary to get through life at all, and Freud himself
stated that the aim of analytic therapy was to enable the neurotic to
bear the sufferings inevitable in human life; but this is only half the
picture, for the work of the analyst may also be to liberate the patient
for the positive joys that life can hold, even perhaps for the possibility
of love, and if the neurotic were told that he is to be resigned only for
resignation's sake, it is very unlikely that he would have the strength to
go on.
I was surprised to read that one critic found in the play the gaiety
that Stendhal recommends for all art, for it seems to me that at bottom
the world of
The Cocktail Party
is the same empty world of
Prufrock,
except that 37 years ago Eliot did not disguise his contempt for this emp–
tiness. So I feel at the heart of this play some immense
tricherie,
or at
least self-deception, for I can't believe that Eliot takes the Chamber–
laynes as seriously as he pretends to. Here again, comparison with
Sweeney Agonistes
becomes instructive, for in this earlier fragment
Eliot fully released all his hatred of human life and really enjoyed
himself in the raucous company of Doris, Sweeney, Klipstein, and
Krumpacker-in comparison with whose vulgar vitality the characters at
the cocktail party are genteel skeletons. As a writer Eliot has never
really given us God's plenty : the qualities of his genius are not
robustness and richness, but precision, terseness, and intensity; and
the shadow which haunts these qualities is a certain tendency to thin–
ness and brittleness that here in
The Cocktail Party
has at last caught
up with him.
The public reception of this play points toward the larger problem
(that we can only mention briefly here) arising from Eliot's present posi–
tion in the world of letters: the embarrassing and delicate situation of
the master at the height of his fame and influence at the very moment
