300
ROBERT LANGBAUM
ELIOT RETROSPECTIVE
TO CRITICIZE THE CRITIC AND OTHER WRITINGS. By T. S. Eliot.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.
I find this posthumous collection of T. S. Eliot's critical essays
disappointing-though I did praise his last general collection,
On
Poetry and Poets
(1957). To be sure, it did not have the bite and
dash, the splendidly arrogant militancy of the incomparable
Selected
Essays:
1917-1932; it gave us, instead, judicious studies written for the
ages rather than to fight the battles of the moment, battles for the kind
of poetry and criticism Eliot and his friends were trying to launch. It
was the appropriate book for a man who had by World War II won
all his battles.
Judiciousness characterizes the more recent essays in this
third
general collection,
To Criticize the Critic.
But there is a lack here of
intellectual energy and even of confidence, which might
be
attributable
to age were it not that most of the essays are contemporaneous with
the essays in
On Poetry and Poets.
In the title essay, however, which is
the most recent (1961), one detects an old man's quavering voice.
Whereas in the earlier volume Eliot revised old ideas to frame new
ones, he here indulges in the rather embarrassing repudiation of youthful
indiscretions without taking any new stands. He complains of being
haunted
by
his belligerent proclamation of 1927 that he was "a classicist
in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion."
Yet he is still, he admits, all these things; it is the tone of voice he
would change.
Eliot complains that critics do not take int.<> account
th~
dates of
his essays and therefore "the distance of time that separates the author
when he wrote it from the author as he is today." He is right of course;
the difficulty is that "the author as he is today" may be the author who
matters least. We see the living writer's resentment .of the strangely
formidable figure of himself that has already got fixed in literary history.
The real man calls out to us that he has gone on living and changing
and that he never was all that highfalutin anyway. Elsewhere in the
volume Eliot tells how he has been unsuccessfully trying to disentangle
himself from an undeserved reputation for erudition; and he apologizes
in this essay for his earlier arrogance, even professing no longer to
understand the meaning of certain early statements. Such modesty,
admirable in a Christian gentleman, is disturbing in the critic
qua
critic.
Actually, Eliot mixes with his apologies his old self-confident claim
that it is only poet-critics like Pound and himself who can write really
useful, here he says "pure," literary criticism. He has come
to
realize that
