This week at Thales College, my students encountered T. S. Eliot’s broken epic of social, spiritual, and intellectual fragmentation, The Waste Land. I asked them to imagine the aftermath, in Europe, of that “war to end all wars,” which saw the destruction of forms of life across all of the social classes.
On what should be the aristocratic side, you have, for example, the seedy Mr. Eugenides — the Greek name suggests “well born” — from Smyrna, the ancient Greek city incorporated with the rest of Ionia into the nation of Turkey. He is a merchant who speaks vulgar French, the mercantile lingua franca for the Levant and north Africa and many a European port besides. He invites the narrator for dinner at the Cannon Street Hotel, followed by a “weekend at the Metropole,” in seaside Brighton. The irony is caustic all the way through: the Metropole represents no mother city in Hellas for Greek colonists in Sicily or southern Italy, in the days when Pythagoras was in Croton and Dionysius the tyrant in Syracuse. Here, it is just a somewhat down-at-heels fashionable place for a bit of Sodom on the English coast.
On what should be the vigorous British working-class side, you have the gossip in the pub at closing time, one woman chatting to another about the conversation she had with one Lil, about her bad teeth and her looks and husband Albert coming home after four years in the army. “It’s them pills I took to bring it off,” said Lil — she has evidently poisoned her system to kill her unborn child, what would have been her sixth. She gets no pity from the gossip, who warns her that if she doesn’t get a new set of teeth, and she can’t show Albert a good time, “there’s others will.” Infidelity, abortion, adultery; and all while we hear the repeated call of the bartender, coming like the trump of doom, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.”
And the middle class, those strapping sinews to bind the higher with the lower? Forget about it.
It is well represented by “the young clerk carbuncular,” self-assured without cause, driven by sexual desire but only in the way a taxi is driven by petrol. He mounts the stairs to the typist’s flat, where “exploring hands encounter no defense,” because she is quite indifferent, nor does his vanity demand anything more. And when he leaves, he must grope his way, “finding the stairs unlit.” She says she’s glad it’s over, and “puts a record on the gramophone.”
The wasteland, like the land ruled by the Fisher King in the legend of the Holy Grail, is dry, sterile, and under a curse. “Son of man,” says the angel to the prophet Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones, “shall these bones live?” They are the bones of Israel in exile. Eliot, alluding to that uncanny visionary scene, is asking the same question of England and of Europe in his time. “Shall these bones live?” Of their own power, they cannot and shall not. Not by bread alone doth man live. And a hundred years later, we may ask the same question, perhaps with more urgency.
Why do I say so? The poem itself testifies. Eliot knew that most readers would find The Waste Land difficult going — it is in part why he himself appended notes to it, though occasionally the notes are, I think, slightly ironical, askew. They in themselves then become a part of the poem to be interpreted. But he could suppose that his more literate readers would follow his clues. They would hear the Scriptural echoes. They would recognize the heading for the first part, “Burial of the Dead,” from the Book of Common Prayer. They would hear, in their minds, the words spoken at the gravesite: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.” They would hear the twice-given line from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, glancing at death and transformation: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” They might hear echoes of Dante, and be reminded of those multitudes of hollow souls in the vestibule of Hell, who gave themselves to neither good nor evil: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
How can you show people the ruins of Rome, when they do not know of anything in Rome to have been ruined?
Where are such readers to be found now? The Waste Land brings to bear upon the present time three millennia of human culture and history with all its glory and its shame. Who now is conversant with that? I am not speaking about the general public. What about professors of English literature themselves, and English teachers in our schools? “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” says the poet, but now even the fragments are unrecognized as such. The long-schooled are not highly or deeply educated.
Eliot was suspicious of the profit motive, what historian Thomas Carlyle called, with scorn, “the cash nexus.” Alone, it cannot build up a civilization. Indeed, it tears down many things as supposedly unprofitable. I am aware that many a white-wine Marxist is still instructed in such scorn, but the Marxist — if our elites can merit so nobly demonic a label — has merely substituted one form of profit for another. It is not money, now, that moves (or at least the elites do not want to own up to it), but political profit, ambition, and “making the world a better place.” Usually by destroying things the ambitious have no patience for, whose beauty, beyond their capacity to imitate or to understand, they wish to destroy. Andrew Carnegie made his millions and aspired to high culture. Our elites, whether they make millions or merely suck them from the national trough, have no such aspirations.
The churches in Eliot’s time had taken a beating from the cognoscenti, when positivism and empiricism were all the rage, and it appeared that the whole universe was going to be reduced to La Mettrie’s deterministic machine. But science itself took its vengeance on scientism: quantum mechanics; the staggering informational system embodied in a strand of DNA; the cell discovered not to be a mass of electro-charged jelly, but a living cooperation of mutually interacting organelles of tremendous complexity; the great theorem of Goedel which showed that every mathematical system with but the complexity of addition is radically incomplete; and archaeological discoveries that verified the reliability of Scripture. Yet the churches are worse off now than then. Why? The intellectual battles were won, and they still are. But perhaps the battle never really was about the intellect. It is not so now. It is and perhaps always was about the belly and the groin. Eliot saw that too.
This war against culture on behalf of the belly and the groin began with the elites, as it still does, with a bit of fancy gauze for intellectual dressing. Think of the fraud and pervert, Alfred Kinsey — a piker by comparison with the armies of elite blockheads who now cheer the mutilation of children and teenagers, having first infected them with confusion and disdain for their natural sex.
In any case, we can hardly rely upon teachers to admire great literature, when they know so little of it, and when they have been instructed to scorn what they do not understand. Poetry is quite lost on them, but so too, ironically but predictably, are the beauty of the sexes, male and female, and the subtleties, triumphs, confusions, and aberrances of political man, manifest throughout history. What is easier to talk about, sex (that is, the superficies thereof) or Andrew Marvell’s ironical seduction poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” which Eliot makes great use of? What is easier, to parade political slogans and gin up political passions, or to ponder the decay of European monarchies preceding and following the Great War, what was gained, but what also was lost to modern hubris? Which is easier, to shout or to think?
We need to Make America Literate Again. I have set my face like flint against the self-made illiteracy of our political, educational, and ecclesiastical institutions. Ultimately, we must triumph. We have Milton, Michelangelo, Bach, Tocqueville, Dostoyevsky, and Augustine: They have nothing. Nothing, that is, but an inborn longing, never quite smothered, for goodness, truth, and beauty, not to be satisfied by the cultural and intellectual equivalent of greasy sandwich wrappers and rotten teeth. America, shall these bones live?
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen:
Welfare? How About a Log Cabin?
Common Core Undermines the Search for Beauty
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