Out of joint

At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Time was literally out of joint, but Eliot’s mystico-religious reflections on the nature of the universe might leave me feeling bright and beatifically attuned. I began to read ‘Burnt Norton’, and waited for the visionary moment. It never arrived; instead I was struck by how pretentious the poetry was.

Craig Raine, in this pungent critical essay on Eliot, concedes that Four Quartets ‘has it faults’. Much of the verse indeed reads like proto-hippie noodling (‘Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children’). In pages of zingy exegesis, Raine concentrates instead on the great Prufrock poetry and, of course, The Waste Land, that work of high Modernist intent which changed the face of literature. The emotional unrest which led to composition of Eliot’s fractured, fear-ridden masterpiece was documented in the first volume of his letters, spanning the years 1898-1922, and edited by the poet’s widow Valerie.

We are fortunate that Eliot was not in the habit — as was W. H. Auden — of throwing away his letters. Yet how much of the correspondence was withheld by the fiercely protective Valerie? Raine dedicates this book ‘To Valerie Eliot, who brought great happiness to a great poet’, and partly in deference to her, I suspect, he goes on to swipe at ‘stupid’ academics and other ‘self-righteous cretins’ who have dared to finger Eliot as a predatory bisexual or anti-Semite. Raine loves the sound of his own opinionated voice; nevertheless, this is a fabulously stimulating book, which marries old-fashioned literary criticism to pleasingly off-beam cultural allusions ranging from Sid Vicious to Vladimir Nabokov.