Free Outside of a Dog by Rick Gekoski Page B

Peter Ackroyd published his, in 1984, the Eliot estate refused the author permission to quote from his works, ostensibly on the grounds that Eliot had not wished for a biography to
be written. (The book nevertheless won the Heinemann and Whitbread awards.)
    But the pattern of withholding permissions goes deeper than this, and it is a sanitized Eliot that we still read today. The Eliot estate, run by his still enraptured widow Valerie, has offered
us a version of the poet as saint, resisting publication of Eliot’s early King Bolo verses (which are charmingly obscene) and often refusing permission for quotation from his works. I
recently did a BBC Radio 4 programme about the Hogarth Press, and applied to the estate for permission to read the short poem ‘The Hippopotamus’. It was denied. I was cross and bemused,
and demanded that the BBC confront Mrs Eliot.
    ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ said my producer. ‘We need Mrs Eliot a lot more than we need you!’
    I didn’t know, reading The Waste Land in my freshman year, that the poet was a more amusing character than one might have supposed. A devotee of music hall, a lover of the Marx
brothers, and an inveterate practical joker, he was a constant source of amusement to his publishing colleagues at Faber’s. He was known to return from his morning visit to the Gents with
pieces of that old-fashioned, virtually grease-proof toilet paper, on which he had written something silly. Examples were distributed at board meetings: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot salutes the Directors
of Faber and Faber.’ (I owned one once, and sold it for £100.) At Christmas parties he would have a few drinks and regale his colleagues with a variety of English accents so
stupendously off key that people would sneak out of the room when they thought he wasn’t looking.
    It turns out he was rather fun, this Eliot, but you sure wouldn’t have known it in Introduction to English in 1962. Looking up from the page, bewildered, we begged for help.
‘Ah,’ our instructor told us archly (quoting Archibald Macleish’s dictum), ‘a poem should not mean, but be.’ That wasn’t much help. It wasn’t at all clear
what The Waste Land meant, we agreed on that. But what help was it to remind us that it was ? If it wasn’t, then we could get the hell out of there, but if it be’d ,
what kind of being did it have?
    We canvassed various opinions as to the essence of poetry. Housman reminded us that unless a poem made our skin prickle with delight, so that we cut ourselves while shaving, it lacked poetic
quality. (The girls rather objected to this.) And Wordsworth, evidencing the fatal attraction aesthetic theorists have for the verb to be, claimed that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings’. There was plenty of powerful feeling in The Waste Land , but not much evidence that it was spontaneous, or that it had overflowed. Indeed, much of it seemed crimped
and desperate.
    The ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, surely, is what you get when you find your neighbour in bed with your wife? Even if this emotion is later, as Wordsworth was hastily
to insist, ‘recollected in tranquillity’, it is hard to see how memory can inject the necessary poetic elements. Eliot is ruthless on the subject, observing that Wordsworth, like some
sloppy undergraduate, has got every thing wrong:
    ‘. . . emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity.
     It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences . . . These experiences are not ‘recollected’ and they finally unite
     in an atmosphere which is ‘tranquil’ only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
    That showed him. And Mr Eliot was prepared to help us as well. When the poem was first published in England in 1923, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s