The Importance of being Tom

I never quite got T.S. Eliot – all that rock and water – but I had seen Robert Webb dancing in spandex (see below) and knew if anyone could help me to understand the poet it would be him. So I watched his My life in Verse on BBC 2. This year Big Brother and Davina will have to carry on without me.

It was a classroom encounter with The Love Life of J. Alfred Prufrock which awakened a life long passion in Robert. He was a troubled teenager having lost his beloved mother. He described the dream one has when one has lost a loved one and in the dream they are there and one is whole and complete. On awakening one realises they are gone and he likens this to Eliot’s poetry which makes him feel totally awake – and he felt ‘unlocked a door for him.’

Eliot’s modernism was a new way of talking about things although some thought he was deliberately obscure and Kingsley Amis described it as an exclusive club to which he didn’t belong. Robert discussed the difficulty of modern poetry with Clive James and they compared the best ‘pulling’ poems including some by E E Cummings which ‘couldn’t be read on air.’

Robert fell in love with his wife Abigail when she read him a poem she had written for him.

I enjoyed the film and found Robert to be a likeable, sensitive guide and it made me want to know more about Eliot the man. Luckily Arena has just done a programme on Tom so I could fill in the gaps. He was born in St Louis, Missouri but his forebears were from Somerset UK and as a young man he came to Britain.

In later life he said:

My poetry wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.

In 1915 aged 27 he married Vivienne and worked in a bank but she was mentally unstable and the marriage wasn’t happy. They separated and she ended her life in a mental home where he failed to visit her. He was by now a successful poet and a good hands-on publisher with Faber and Faber. It was here he met his second wife Valerie – 37 years his junior and his true love. They married in 1957 and had 8 happy years until his death in1965. He had always been a heavy smoker and although Valerie devoted her life to taking care of him his lungs eventually gave out.

The eternally running musical Cats was inspired by his poem McGonogle and Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row is said to be a re- writing of The Waste Land.

Ted Huges whose work was published by Eliot, when asked how he felt about him said it was like standing on a quay and seeing the Queen Mary coming towards you. He also worked with Tom Stoppard and W H Auden but rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm. Jeanette Winterson said he was a man who could hear the grass grow – such was his keen awareness of everything around him. He was said to be a brilliant poet and essayist but also a brilliant publisher.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature and he is commemorated in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Ezra Pound was one of the first to recognise his talent – was blown away by the Prufrock poem and insisted it should be published.

T S Eliot has sometimes been accused of anti Semitism but Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish, judged that Eliot was probably ‘slightly anti- semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely.’ This was the fifties. In 2003 a previously unknown cache of letters revealed that in the early 1940’s Eliot was actively helping Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and America.

I vaguely remember The Cocktail Party – one of his plays in the West End in the fifties, but as someone said in the Arena programme no-one could understand his plays on a first viewing. On his death his ashes were buried in East Coker, from whence his ancestors had set out for America. East Coker is one of his Quartet poems and coincidentally is where we used to stay when looking for a home in Somerset.

Here is just a verse of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an over whelming question…

Oh do not ask, ‘What is it?’

Let us go and make our visit.

It worked for Robert.

The URL for the video below is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtanRbYazR4