The Sentimental Clown: The Idea of the Self in T. S. Eliot

Extract

One recurring premise in much criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is the dissoluteness of his dramatis personae. I say ‘dissoluteness’, because there is usually assumed to be some correlation between the imputed psychological state and a moral dereliction. Thus, Bernard Bergonzi’s recent study, speaking of the ‘deluded’ or ‘corrupt’ narrator of Portrait of a Lady, argues that ‘his consciousness is at all times on the verge of dissolution’. His drawing-room conversation is said to be disrupted by the ‘grotesque musical sounds going on inside his head. . . . He makes an effort literally to compose himself but his impressions remain as fragmentary and disjunctive as the items in a daily paper.’ Yet the lines Bergonzi cites to substantiate this suggest the opposite. In face of a multitude of other lives assembled, but also abstracted, reduced, made safe for him by the newspaper, the narrator maintains a casual equanimity, only mildly stirred by the sense of a problematic otherness:

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark

An English countess goes upon the stage.

A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?