The voice of this Calling: the enduring legacy of T.S. Eliot

Modern Age, Fall, 2003 by Clinton A. Brand

  High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is
  equated with obscurantism. The wall that divided serious high culture
  from the popular arts is breached; anything can count as "text."
  Knowledge--saturated in historical memory--is displaced by
  information, or memory without history: data.... For the modernists,
  the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever we are), there
  is no recollection of a center and nothing to miss, let alone
  mourn. (13)

But to pursue the implications of her words--that knowledge saturated in historical memory may point the way back to a real center beyond whirling blips of data, as Eliot understood--that would interrupt the cathartic euphoria of Ozick's revisionist iconoclasm. She gives us, instead, facile psychologizing and the summary judgment that Eliot was just another crypto-fascist. The meaning and shape of Eliot's life and writing, she informs us, are really much simpler than we had reckoned: brilliant young Tom ran off to Europe to escape his parents; he married Vivien Haigh-Wood, the poor woman went mad, and the experience produced The Waste Land; thereafter Eliot's soul shriveled, and he became a bitter, atavistic churchwarden, hiding in the sacristy, consumed by sin and guilt. Such is the fruit of Ozick's smug disillusionment; but some of us seek more substantial food.

That Eliot perceived through his sense of sin a larger vision of the universal human predicament, that he transmuted his personal suffering into something greater, that he approached through art the reality of a grace beyond the reach of art, that he did so through the enlarging perspective of tradition: all this Ozick refuses to consider. Instead, she chooses to dance on the grave of the slain god, wistful yet gloating: "the truth is we had the experience and were irradiated by the meaning ... it is now our unsparing obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot." (14) Were she not so blinded by the glow of her own self-righteousness, she could have read on in Eliot's poem just past the line her allusion willfully misconstrues and pondered, "the past experience revived in the meaning/ Is not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations." (15)

Though he retains more sympathetic and tougher-minded expositors--chief among them Denis Donoghue (16)--Ozick's depreciation of Eliot is typical of our current critical climate, and part of Eliot's value today is precisely that he models an alternative to such self-aggrandizing, pop post-modernism, with its ritualistic "slaying of the father"--not only a different idiom but a different disposition of mind and heart. (A further index of these parlous times is the fact that Cynthia Ozick is often accounted something of a "conservative," and not without reason.) (17) To find our way back from Ozick and her ilk to Eliot himself requires opening ourselves to tradition, to a particular attitude toward tradition, and to its disciplined practice.

It is not simply that Eliot understood the practical imperative of what Simone Weil called l'enracinement, the need for roots--he wrote an appreciative preface to the English translation of her book of that title--but he also had a vital sense of what we might call the metaphysics of tradition. The variety of his writings, in poetry, drama, literary criticism, and cultural theory, all attests that tradition, rightly conceived, offers neither a refuge of security nor mastery of time but rather constitutes, with and through language, the very medium of our participation in the shared human enterprise, the ground of genuine self-knowledge, the pre-condition for the perception of order and for the possibility of authentic development.