"Glowed into words": Vivien Eliot, Philomela, and the Poet's Tortured Corpse

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Shannon McRae

     So he devoted himself to God.
     Because he was in love with the penetrant arrows
     He danced on the hot sand
     Until the arrows came. (93)

Although religiously motivated, perhaps, the passions St. Sebastian and St. Narcissus suffer are thoroughly nonredemptive. Their goal is clearly not the cessation of tormenting desire, nor yet spiritual salvation. Rather, their torture intensifies their passion, releasable only in art, which is also death. Eliot chose to eliminate two overly telling lines from the poem: "We each have the sort of life we want, but his / life went straight to the death he wanted." All that remains of the dancer is a "dry and stained" corpse; the ghostly trace of his poem lingers only as a fainter stain, "the shadow in his mouth" (93).

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud describes the transformation of excessive, unexpressed, or inexpressible sexual desires as sublimation. In his reworking of Freud, Leo Bersani discusses sublimation as a mode of jouissance--erotic tension that increases beyond the capacity of the subject to contain or control it and remain self-coherent, a process he terms "self-shattering," and which, in his account, is innately masochistic (36). Art results from similar intensity, not merely as an end product of desire but actually comprised of it--a distillation of the artist's longing, experienced and frequently represented as a mode of artistic death.

Bersani's reworking of Freud specifically plays against the familiar narrative of ego formation as the evolution of a single, coherent, implicitly male self. But the script for attaining heterosexual male subjectivity was written long before Freud--the story is as old as the first heroic quest, the staple narrative of Western literature that finds its apotheosis in the various tales that comprise the medieval Grail legend, upon which Eliot loosely based The Waste Land. In Eliot's appropriation of the legend, however, the narrative of masculine attainment is rescripted as an initiation ritual. Initiation, and the gnosis that accompanies it, demand sacrifice. Attaining it requires that the quester surrender his manhood--know suffering as a woman knows it, and speak it from her position.

Whether the poem actually parallels the Grail quest has been the subject of debate since it was first published. The footnotes specifically establishing the connection and recommending that readers study Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance were added, after its first publication in the Criterion and the Dial, to the Boni and Liveright edition. Years later, however, in an essay published in 1957, Eliot apologized to his readers for the interpretive confusion that the addition supposedly caused: "It was just, no doubt, that I should pay my tribute to the work of Miss Jessie Weston, but I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail" ("Frontiers of Criticism" 110).

It is not surprising that, in retrospect, Eliot would regard the years of seemingly endless speculation on his poem with wry bemusement. But he also spent much of his later career disavowing the elements of his work that revealed the most painful aspects of his earlier life. His solution to the problem of Vivien's increasingly public displays of madness stands as a drastic act of disavowal. With the assistance of her brother Maurice and her physician, Eliot committed Vivien to Northumberland House in 1938. She died there in 1947; he never visited her. In 1957, the same year he issued his wry apology to The Waste Land's readers, Eliot remarried. From the new, more comfortable perspective of a happier marriage, a highly successful career, and advancing age, he may well have seen his earlier, anguished poems very differently. But the eradication from his life of all the disorder and difficulties that Vivien represented could not erase the traces of her from his earlier work.