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In
September, 1922–a few weeks before the publication of
The Waste Land would make him the most famous Modernist
poet in the world–T. S. Eliot agreed to sell a small
notebook containing his early poems to his American patron,
John Quinn. Priced at $140, the notebook not only contained
early versions of poems that eventually went into Eliot's
first four collections. It also included dozens of unpublished
poems. Eliot's instructions to Quinn were unambiguous: "I
beg you fervently to keep them to yourself and see that they
never are printed."
The
contents of this notebook, which now rests in the Berg Collection
of the New York Public Library, have at last been published
in Inventions of the March Hare, skillfully edited
and abundantly annotated by Christopher Ricks. The most surprising
thing about this fascinating and informative volume is not
that it has finally been published. These days every surviving
scrap by a major writer eventually sees the light of print–no
matter what the author's instructions. The surprise is that
it took seventy-five years.
Inventions
of the March Hare is a singularly strange volume–really
three books in one. The first collects forty hitherto unpublished
poems (or substantially completed drafts) by the young Eliot.
It is hard to overstate the literary and scholarly importance
of this new work. Eliot published very little poetry. Inventions
of the March Hare nearly doubles the number of his early
poems available to readers. The new poems, however, could
easily have been published in less than fifty pages.
The
second "book" is even shorter. It consists of early versions
of nineteen poems that eventually appeared in Eliot's first
four volumes from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
to Poems (1920). These variant drafts are of mostly
scholarly interest. The one notable exception is the early
versions of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which include
a lengthy section titled "Prufrock's Pervigilium" ("Prufrock's
Vigil")–lines mostly cut from the published version of
Eliot's early masterpiece.
The
bulk of Inventions of the March Hare's 428 pages, however,
consist of the editor's copious annotations. No work of modern
literature has ever premiered with such voluminous scholarly
apparatus. The ratio of verse to prose commentary is positively
Nabokovian–pure Pale Fire. In over one thousand
individual notes and glosses, Ricks provides the reader with
a judicious, informed, but utterly disproportionate commentary.
Ricks's
notes are so unusual that they require comment. Although he
devotes several hundred pages to annotating Eliot's new poems,
he never explains, interprets, or judges them. He does not
even paraphrase them except for elucidating an occasional
phrase in isolation. Instead, Ricks limits his annotations
mainly to three areas. First, he dates the poems wherever
possible. Second, he defines particular words and phrases
as they might have been understood at the time of composition.
Third, Ricks exhaustively identifies all literary sources
that possibly influenced Eliot's composition. The editor carefully
notes that there is no evidence that Eliot actually used most
of these sources. Rather, Ricks tries only to present the
literary possibilities that existed in young Eliot's milieu.
This
editorial procedure creates many odd moments. Consider, for
example, the notes on Eliot's thirty-four line poem "Entretien
dans un parc." Ricks provides six packed pages of annotation
in tiny type. He spends a page and half discussing the title
alone–listing possible parallels in both painting and
literature–but he never bothers to translate the title.
(Ricks never translates any of the book's hundreds of French
passages–not even the poems Eliot himself wrote in French.)
Before Ricks moves on to the next poem, he has quoted possible
parallels in Verlaine, Sheridan, Browning, Pater, Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Milton, Symons, Ecclesiastes, Henry James,
Laforgue, St. Augustine, de Nerval, Isaiah, Shelley,
Marston, Thackeray, Blake, Proverbs, John Webster,
de Gourmont, Meredith, and, most frequently, Eliot himself.
Ricks's
scholarship is brilliant, but it does not always prove particularly
illuminating to the passages in question. Ultimately, his
annotations seem less effective as a textual commentary than
as a vastly detailed speculative essay on poetic influence.
While I fear that the notes will sometimes confuse unsophisticated
readers, I must also report that Ricks's annotations eventually
add up into one of the most interesting studies of Eliot's
poetry. It is not altogether inappropriate that this superb
study assumes the distinctively Modernist form of the collage.
But
what about the poems? No new masterpieces emerge in Inventions
of the March Hare–nothing, that is, on the level
of "Prufrock" or "La Figlia che Piange." Eliot's critical
acuity was not lost on his own verse. He published the best.
And yet, in strictly literary terms, the new work is not negligible.
Eliot's poetic skill is everywhere apparent. Although some
of the "new" poems are nearly a century old, their tone and
imagery seem strangely fresh and immediate.
One
reason the poems remain so effective is that they seem so
characteristically Eliotic. A chief pleasure of reading Inventions
of the March Hare is watching the author explore the same
landscapes, images, and attitudes that he presented in Prufrock,
and The Waste Land. The settings are mostly urban and
unsettling. The narrators are sophisticated, anxious, and
neurotically self-conscious. Several of the earliest poems
describing Boston read like dress rehearsals for the "Preludes."
Here is the opening of "Second Caprice in North Cambridge":
This
charm of vacant lots!
The helpless fields that lie
Sinister, sterile, and blind–
Entreat the eye and rack the mind,
Demand your pity.
With ashes and tins in piles,
Shattered bricks and tiles
And the débris of a city.
Begun
in 1909, when the twenty-one-year-old poet was still a senior
at Harvard, the notebooks continue until 1917 when Eliot,
now in London, caught in a difficult marriage and working
in Lloyd's Bank, prepared to publish his first book. During
those nine years Eliot's poems grew from interesting juvenilia
into the classics of Anglo-American Modernism. Until now the
exact course of his poetic growth has been difficult to track.
Inventions of the March Hare finally allows us to watch
the steady evolution of artistic genius.
From
the beginning Eliot's language displayed authority far beyond
his years. How many twenty-three-year-old graduate students
write with such dark and mature sonority?
I
saw their lives curl upward like a wave
And break. And after all it had not broken–
It might have broken even across the grave
Of tendencies unknown and questions never spoken.
The
volume's most curious contents are surely a small group of
obscene poems that Eliot excised from the notebook he sold
Quinn. Found years later among Ezra Pound's papers at Yale,
these grotesquely graphic verses give a glimpse at a side
of young Eliot rarely seen elsewhere. Long suppressed, they
appear now due to a decision by Eliot's widow to conceal nothing
from her husband's work.
The
longest of the scatological poems are the "Columbo and Bolo
verses"–a pornographic sea-chanty whose fragments run
for five pages. These verses recount the priapic exploits
of Columbus and his crew, who rape, plunder, and defecate
their way through both the New and Old Worlds. Since a Jewish
doctor appears briefly in one stanza, the poem has been declared
anti-Semitic in recent attacks on Eliot's character. It does
not seem to matter to the poet's detractors that the doctor
is the only moral character in a poem otherwise full
of scatology, murder, and violent sex of every description.
May I, as a writer of Italian and Hispanic heritage, point
out that Columbus, for example, is a syphilitic, exhibitionistic,
pederast and rapist who exhibits little control over either
his temper and his bowels?
No,
the truth of Eliot's dark side is to be explained by nothing
so focused and common as anti-Semitism. The Columbo and Bolo
poems are more explicitly anti-Italian, anti-Spanish, anti-Monarchist,
anti-imperialist, anti-woman, anti-Caribbean, anti-black,
and anti-sex than anti-Semitic. Reeking with repugnance at
sex and the body, these poems reveal the bitterly misanthropic
side of the young Eliot's imagination, the contemptus mundi
against which so much of his later work struggles.
Inventions
of the March Hare expands, deepens, and qualifies our
knowledge of the central figure in English-language Modernism.
For readers of Eliot, it is an indispensable book.
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