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W. W.
ROBS ON
rather wearily, from a decade of immersion in the world of conflicting
ideologies and topical polemics.
Mr. Kojecky covers similar ground to Mr. Margolis. But his book
is different in that he is concerned to
defend
Eliot rather than merely
to clarify
and
expound him. "Eliot's reputation as a critic of society,"
he says, "is worse than his record." And after reading Mr. Kojecky's
book it would be difficult for any fair-minded person to persist in the
crude accusations of irresponsible escapism on the one hand, and politi–
cal reaction and profascism on the other, which are still often thrown
at Eliot. Mr. Kojecky is evidently in sympathy with Eliot's long and
lonely efforts to find a middle way between a shallow materialistic
utopianism and a despairing renunciation of the world; by overcoming
the latter, so obviously appealing as it must have been to one side of
Eliot's nature, he sought to achieve that
detachment
which is not to
be confused, as it was and is so often by hostile critics, with
indiffer–
ence.
And on the whole Mr. Kojecky makes a good case for Eliot as
something more than a merely negative and pessimistic social thinker.
His chief concession to the opposition is to admit that there is sometimes
a certain inhuman chilliness about Eliot's detachment. The reasons for
this may have lain as much in Eliot's temperament and personal life as
in his views considered abstractly. (People who condemn the Eliot
of this period as a doleful pomposity should ponder Pound's humane
remark, quoted in Mr. Kenner's book: "When a man has had to turn
his house for years into a private madhouse ... that is not conducive
to a sense of humor.") But Mr. Kojecky, like Mr. Margolis, exhibits a
pleasing tact of abstention here ; he does not seek to explore too deeply
the twilight region between the Eliot of the prose and the Eliot of the
poetry, between the bleak incisive voice of the
Selected Essays
and "the
place of solitude where three dreams cross"; still less does either of
them speculate on the personal sources of the poetry, the poignant par–
ticularities of the relation between " the man who suffers" and "the
mind which creates."
The late Robert Sencourt rushes in where Messrs. Kojecky and
Margolis fear to tread. His memoir has had a bad press in England, and
it must be said that it exhibits a vulgar knowingness - coupled, it would
seem, with a virtual absence of real knowledge - which surely would
have appalled its ultrafastidious and reticent subject. After looking
into Sencourt we can sympathize even more deeply with Eliot's ex–
pressed desire that no biography of him should
be
written. I am re–
minded of Hugo von HofIILanns thal's comment on a plan to publish
Rilke's literary remains: "My idea would be to cntft:lst d.J€l hardly ex–
plicable phenomenon that once existed here, R.M.R. or H.H., to death,
even to oblivion if need be (except in the hearts of a few loyal men
