BOOKS
303
I, roo, recall vividly that on first reading "Prufrock" one indeed had
the sense of entering a sort of word-world, a world whose internal rela–
tions and cadences, whose quality of diction (rather than its referents)
and incantatory music, were what one knew. 1 certainly did not know
what the poem was about-its meaning. How many of us, in our fresh–
man classrooms, could have said just what it meant to "wear the bot–
toms of Iyourl trousers rolled"? Or explained these lines: "I should have
been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floor of silent seas"? But this
was when one's education began. Donoghue shrewdly poses the question
of what "submitting" oneself
to
a writer entails. In encountering Eliot for
the first time you were so taken with the sensuous quality of this word–
world that it came as an unexpected moral dilemma
to
ask whether you
ought to submit
to
it, knowing that you could not hope
to
grasp the
poem if you didn't. So you immediately faced the odd prospect, which
Donoghue forefronts as a crucial aperture into Eliot's deeper purposes,
that understanding might not always be gained in the usual intellectual
ways, the ways of ratiocination. (It's the
music,
stupid, says Donoghue.)
It was, of course, not lIntilmuch later that it dawned on you how thor–
oughly that early, seductive reading experience-the experience of stum–
bling and chanting through "Prufrock"-foreshadowed Eliar's later,
developed, religious conviction that reality depends upon faith.
When I first read "Prufrock" I had never read a word of Dante. I had
nor read
Hamlet,
either-or Baudelaire, John Webster, Ovid, Verlaine,
Marvell, or froude. Whatever else, following Eliot's allusions was a
marvelous education in itself, even if you didn't follow each allusion
to
the whole work from which it was taken. Donoghue has exceptionally
sensible and level-headed things
to
say about Eliot's allusions, which
hardly seem to have given him any pause. But even for those of us who
were less formidable students than Donoghue, following Eliot
to
his
sources was also a marvelous education for two powerful reasons. First,
Eliot's allusions established a coherent anthology that served as a dialec–
tical reflection on the nature of civilization. Second, Eliot persuaded you
that he was in deadly earnest, and that therefore the dilemmas posed
through his anthology of allusions were themselves deadly serious.
Donoghue is very good at delineating the implications and quandaries
entailed by Eliot's reading, with its revealing glimpses of Eliot's religious
quest. I remember this as being fairly intimidating: if you were not your–
self on a religious quest, you felt, you were not a serious person.
Here, of course, is where the trouble starts. Donoghue'S excellent lit–
ric book, by beginning with music and by emphasizing Eliot's auditory
mode of composition, hopes the reader can be moved along by the sheer
