If Eliot as a transplanted American in Europe seems to be a special case (a great poet, however, is always a special case, if one chooses to regard him in that light), the example of James Joyce should help to reinforce the somewhat complicated (because ubiquitous) thesis I am trying to elucidate. Joyce was an impoverished Irishman. As Eliot had to toil for some time in a bank while he tried to write poems, Joyce supported himself during the composition of Ulysses by teaching in a Berlitz school in Trieste during the first World War. The publication of Ulysses—an event which was described by a French critic as marking Ireland’s spectacular reentry into European literature — was sufficiently a success to make a rich Englishman provide Joyce with financial security almost until the end of his life. Two years before, Joyce had completed his last and probably his best work, the stupendous Finnegans Wake, a book which would in itself provide sufficient evidence and illustration of the vocation of the modern poet in modern life.1 All that has been observed in Eliot’s work is all the more true of Finnegans Wake — the attention to colloquial speech, the awareness of the variety of ways in which languages can be degraded and how that degradation can be the base for a new originality and exactitude, the sense of an involvement with the international scene and with all history. But more than that, the radio and even television play a part in this wonderful book, as indeed they played a part in the writing of it. Joyce had a shortwave radio with which he was able to hear London, Moscow, Dublin — and New York! In Finnegans Wake, I was perplexed for a time by echoes of American radio comedy and Yiddish humor until I learned about Joyce’s radio and about his daily reading of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune. The most important point of all, however, is that Finnegans Wake exhibits in the smallest detail and in the entire scope of the work the internationality of the modern poet, his involvement in all history, and his consciousness of the impingement of any foreign language from Hebrew to Esperanto upon the poet’s use of the English language.
It is foolish to speculate about the future of anything as precarious as the vocation of poetry — an eminent critic said some years ago that the technique of verse was a dying one, but Joyce may have persuaded him to change his mind — but to think of the future is as inevitable as it is dubious. Joyce’s last book suggests certain tentative formulations about the future of the writing of poetry. It suggests that there can be no turning back, unless civilization itself declines as it did when the Roman Empire fell. Yet it is also clear that poets cannot go forward in a straight line from the point at which Finnegans Wake concluded. What they can do is not evident in the least, apart from the fact that a literal imitation or extension of Joyce would be as mechanical as it is undesirable: too much in the very nature of his work depends upon personal and idiosyncratic traits of the author, his training as a Jesuit, his love of operatic music, the personal pride which was involved in his departure from Ireland and the infatuation with everything Irish which obsessed him in this as in his other books. There are other important elements in Joyce’s work and in his life which do lead, I think, to some tentative generalization about the future of poetry and the vocation of the poet. One of them was pointed out to me by Meyer Schapiro (who has influenced me in much of what I have said throughout): the question has been raised as to why Joyce, both in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, identified himself with Jews, with Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, and with the character of Shem in his last book (Shem is, among other of his very many kinships, a son of Noah, and he is compared with Jesus Christ, to the ironic denigration of both beings). The answer to the question of Joyce’s identification with Jews, Schapiro said, is that the Jew is at once alienated and indestructible, he is an exile from his own country and an exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history. In the unpredictable and fearful future that awaits civilization, the poet must be prepared to be alienated and indestructible. He must dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writes; and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being. In the modern world, poetry is alienated; it will remain indestructible as long as the faith and love of each poet in his vocation survives.
1. Joyce’s two best works, Ulysses and his last book, are not poems in the ordinary sense of the word; and he wrote several volumes of poetry, most of which consist of verses far inferior to anything in his major books. But any view of poetry which excludes Finnegans Wake as a poem and Joyce as a poet merely suggests the likelihood that Joyce transformed and extended the limits of poetry by the writing of his last book. If we freeze our categories and our definitions, (and this is especially true in literature) the result is that we disable and blind our minds.
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from T. S. ELIOT: A CRITICAL STUDY
Editor’s note
In the early 1940s, Delmore Schwartz signed a contract with James Laughlin — accompanied by the largest advance New Directions had yet paid — for a volume in Laughlin’s Masters of Modern Literature series of critical books devoted each to a single author. Schwartz chose T. S. Eliot as his subject. This was a busy and difficult time in Schwartz’s life, following the publication and resulting fame of his first book, when he was filled with ambition and energy, but he was also desperate for money, teaching uncertainly at Harvard, advising Laughlin on manuscripts for ND, and struggling with his marriage to Gertrude Buckman. Gertrude was working in an administrative capacity for New Directions, and the press’s offices were partially housed for a time in Schwartz’s Boston apartment.
In the correspondence between Schwartz and Laughlin, the Eliot book is mostly discussed in terms of money and the fulfillment of contractual obligations as Schwartz tried to goad Laughlin into freeing him to publish a novel with a bigger, more lucrative publisher — the abiding affection between the two men was often challenged by these kinds of exchanges, though they always, until near the end of Schwartz’s life, found a way back to friendship. The book became a low priority for Laughlin, and Schwartz’s energy and concentration eventually drifted elsewhere, mostly toward his sprawling and failed epic, Genesis.