T.S. Eliot - The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock - Poetry Supplement - Episode 1 - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

T.S. Eliot - The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock - Poetry Supplement - Episode 1

 

I’m Christy Shriver, and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

 

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  This week’s poetry supplement comes after my favorite series to date- our series on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby- what a tour de force as we talked nihilism, symbolism, murder, jazz, gangsters, wealth and ironically- no love story- which was what I thought we were getting at first- the whole book was a study in irony…which is my favorite.  It was a lot of fun…this week we are going back to that era, and we’ll still have fun, but it will be of a much darker nature- I don’t know what to think of ole’ TS Eliot- he is a very cryptic guy. 

 

Well, that’s true- but…if you like Irony- TS Eliot doesn’t disappoint- he, like everyone else in his age- really uses it quite a bit.  And you’re right about his work, TS Eliot is a complicated  person as well as writer..  That’s why we are actually going to extend this poetry supplement to TWO episodes.  I tried to get it into one, but it’s not possible.  So, hopefully, we can entice everyone to spend two weeks with us talking about this = as you described him- “ cryptic guy”.   

 

I stand by that description- even his citizenship is unusual.  He is a notable American writer, born in the US, but America really can’t claim him, and not just because he spent his adult life in Europe, lots of Americans did that.  He naturalized to become a British citizen, but not even just that- he became British among British- an authority on English, not American literature.  He appears in American literature anthologies, but often only this early piece.  His most notable works belong in the British Canon. That’s expertise in two very crowded fields.   

 

- and that is something I can’t imagine even attempting to do or be.  I know, I’m no TS Eliot, but I’m way more comfortable reading and lecturing on things from this side of the pond; I know the culture better; I better understand the thinking- and even though I have lived a large part of my life in Brazil, I don’t dare presume to be an expert on Brazilian literature or culture.  There is just a difference in living in a place and being of the place- at least for me- but TS Eliot became an expert in two cultures and was able to redirect the entire discussion of British literature- elevating writers that had been less appreciated like John Donne and dismissing commonly held icons like Tennyson.  He asserted himself  to be and was, in fact, a definitive expert of experts on the English canon- besides being a poet- he was an editor and publisher.  That was his day job. His influence cannot really be understated, but for our purposes for the next two weeks,  we want to focus on one poem.  Now let me just say up front, his writings are complex- and not in the Gatsby way where you can read them on one level and enjoy them even if you don’t get all the layers.  With Eliot, you’ll likely just be confused. The “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” is one of the easier ones- at least from my perspective- but even it is so difficult that when it was discovered by notable poet and co-founder really of the modernism poem, Ezra Pound said something to the gist of a- I’m not sure what it means, but I can tell it’s genius.   

 

Let me interrupt you right there, because as a non-literature person, I don’t get that?  Why do people want to write like that and why do people like it?  Why make something difficult to read and why is that considered good?  In other areas of study, if the writer is confusing, isn’t that considered poor communication, not better? 

 

Excellent question and something that specifically relates to modern poetry and worth stopping a minute to think about.  We could spend more than one podcast talking about modern poetry, and the more modern stuff you read the more sense it makes, honestly- but for starters think about a famous modern piece of art- my favorite is Guernica by Pablo Picasso, I’ve talked about it before because seeing it in Madrid really made an impression on me.  When I saw that painting, I had no idea what I was seeing.  I could no more explain the pictures than anything- but as I stood in silence with a room crammed for of other silent people, I felt the awe, the emotion, the pain of the Spanish Civil War.  That’s what modern poetry is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel the emotions of modern life-  the thingd we have done to ourselves through technology, progress, urban living- and lots of it is kind of dark-but another thing it tries to do is be psychological- Freud influenced this movement- what is going on in your head?  That also can be quite dark, but more than that- our minds are fragmented- lots of thoughts about a lot of different things all criss-crossing at the same time- your mind doesn’t tell a linear story- it bombards you with images- so when you try to write like that- we call it stream of conscious writing- it’s confusing..   

 

Just for clarification, I want to point out that when you say modern you’re not talking about today- because- ironically- the modern movement has come and gone- we’ve even gone past post-modern.  You’re referencing a specific period that went from about 1900-1950- give or take a few years.  And of course, what stands out as the overwhelming events that overshadowed everything else on planet earth during that time period were the two World Wars- WW1- WW2- that ended with an atomic bomb and of course- and if you made it through that- unfortunately depending on where you lived you were hit with the genocides that came with communism, fascism, military coups, and ultimately totalitarianism around the globe- this was directly affecting every continent except North America.   

 

True and when you put it like that, it’s not surprising that the poetry of that period is pretty dark, but actually the darkness we see in literature and even in this poem- comes even before the war years.  There is a lot of disillusionment and loneliness that people were struggling with regardless.  If you listened to our Kafka series you know what I mean.  Well, TS Eliot comes out of that- and the way he writes IS difficult because he’s not trying to clearly communicate a story- he’s trying to clearly communicate complicated emotion, a fragmented sense of the world- in the case of the poem we’re going to read today- feelings of isolation, under-confidence, loneliness, cowardice, pointlessness, tremendous anxiety.  And the truth of the matter is- he really doesn’t care if you understand what he’s saying as long as you understand what he’s feeling.   

 

And I see he focuses on all the fun feelings of the human experience… 

 

Hahaha- Exactly…it ain’t romanticism in that way- although they do connect- I’ll show you.  As an addition- one reason I think this poem or really a lot of modern poetry is especially relevant today- is because all the things they found wrong in the world we’ve decided to revv up on.  Think about Covid- and we can get a little personal here for a minute- we’ve watched over the last 15 monthsan entire generation of students suffer the extreme isolation imposed by all the Covid protocols and the insidious aggressiveness and social pressure of social media- the way a lot of kids and even adults are living in their heads are more like poor J. Alfred than even Eliot.   

 

When Eliot writes this poem, he’s 26 years old- very young for a poet, but he takes on the persona of a middle-aged man.  Later on in life when talking about the poem, he says the poem is partly a dramatic creation but also partly an expression of his own feelings.  So, in a sense, young Eliot may be worried he’s going to grow up to be middle-aged Prufrock- if he isn’t already. Prufrock is too much in his own head, and unfortunately he thinks of himself as a loser – he is too self-conscious about his physical appearance, he is bored with his circle of acquaintances = and because of his underconfidence he finds himself stuck- Prufrock has no energy, no courage, no confidence, no imagination and he’s paralyzed by all these things to not do a single thing about his own misery!!!  He just does the roll over and die move- which we know through the beginning allusion to hell. 

 

Ugh- that does sound like we can relate to every bit of that.  So much of the Covid epidemic especially has left people too much in their own virtual infernos, to use the Dante allusion that  Eliot selects. And Eliot didn’t even know about the paranoia we created with Instagram filters, Snap chat videos, the ability to smear anyone at anytime to millions of people for any reason real and imagined for anything you have ever done or said to anyone, even a close family member, for as long as you have ever been on earth.  What would Eliot have said about that? 

 

Exactly- it makes me wonder what he’d write now- what a great sequel- J Alfred Prufrock the Third would make.   

 

Of course, we know the end of Eliot’s love story or even his life in general- Eliot himself, although this may have been his fear at 26, was absolutely NOT paralzyed into permanent life paralysis-  

 

maybe he was writing his own cautionary tale 

 

- maybe so- 

  

those emotions he expresses are not abnormal- in fact they are natural, we all feel paralyzed with indecision at times- and we fear those  emotions.  

 

Of course- that’s what Eliot does- he speaks for modern man-But before we lert him, let’s get a little biographical and by that I mean a little gossipy (as you know I always enjoy doing)- because the austere looking TS Eliot had quite the little love drama going on over the course of his life. 

 

Well, this should be good- for starters- interestingly enough, Eliot and I have something in common- we’re both from the great state of Missouri- we’re Midwesterners by birth.  As I’ve said many times before, I’m originally from Kansas City, but TS Eliot is from the second best city in Missouri- St. Louis.   

 

Do most people agree, St. Louis is the second best city in Missouri? 

 

Well, most in Kansas City would, although some would rank it lower than the number 2 spot, but not higher.   

 

Oh- I see- Sorry St. Louis- he’s incorrigible and I’m pretty sure- this comes down to sports rivalries.. 

 

True, Go CHIEFS, Go ROYALS- but getting back to Eliot, his grandfather actually moved to St. Louis from Boston and Harvard Divinity School to establish the first Unitarian church in St. Louis and to found Washington University- which today, if you’re from this area we affectionately call WASH U- it’s an extremely prestigious university.  So, to use Fitzgerald’s terms- The Eliot’s are one of those East Egg type families- except from Boston, not New York.  His dad was president of a huge brick company.  Lots of money, lots of community prestige, and always very proud of their New England roots, again way more prestigious than flyover country roots- Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888. 

 

 (two days after Anna and F Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday  

 

True- but Thomas Stearns, sounds like a bank name doesn’t it--  is 8 years older than Fitzgerald and 110 years older than Anna.   He’s the seventh child in his family, attended all private schools and unsurprisingly went to Harvard. 

 

Wow- nothing to complain about there. 

 

You might think that, except apparently not entirely blissful- ironically- when I read J Alfred Prufrock, and see all the angst and self-inflicted misery- it’s interesting to think he wrote it in college, especially since the wierdo character J Alfred Prufrock is clearly middle-aged- I just assumed the author was as well.   

 

Yeah- he does claim that he wrote it in college, but I’m not sure he finished it during the Harvard years- in fact, I know he didn’t.   It wasn’t published until 1915 so- somehow- there is a lot that went on in his life in those five years and the poem itself had several big edits. 

 

And one of them being the start of a world war.   

 

True- so during the years from the time he wrote the poem and when it got published Eliot finished his undergrad degree in three years, started graduate school, took a year to go to the Sorbonne, in Paris, came back to Harvard to finish his phd, but changed courses right before the end and instead deciding to go back to Europe in 1914 to study in Germany. 

 

Well, that’s not exactly the best time or place to be in Europe if you are in the mood for touring.  Since July 1914 is when WW1 or the Great War as they called it, began.   

 

I’d say not the best time to do the summer abroad thing in Germany, either- which was literally his plan...oops   

 

True-  so he went for plan B, he went to Oxford,  

 

Well, that certainly sounds like landing on one’s feet.   

 

True, he attended school and that went well, but he did make a misstep-  

 

Yes- I think he does. 

 

 He got married to a girl he didn’t love- an English girl, Miss Vivienne Haighwood in 1915 and apparently that could not have been more disastrous.  Here’s how he described it- his words, ““To her the marriage brought no happiness . . . To me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”) 

  

 Which, if you don’t know that poem- it describes the entire devastation of world war- so no great marriage endorsement.  It was miserable for both of them, but- I want to go off topic sort of here for a minute- and and maybe it’s girl literature podcaster- if we want to go with gender-roles – usually when we get to the place in the author’s life where he writes the work- we quit talking about his bio- but in his case I want to make an exception. 

 

Of course you do- it’s too juicy not to! 

 

It is very ususual and  I’m very interested in people’s love lives in general, but I think it’s especially appropriate, especially if the person in question has a breakout poem  titled a  “Love Song” 

 

Especially when said love song is about a guy who has no love- which clearly he did not at the time he wrote this poem. 

 

Ewell, it’s not so clear actually. His perspective on love might be a little skewed by this bad marriage as well as WW1-  it made people jaded, I get that- 

 

Well, you think WW1 might have left people disillusioned- it was only  8.5 million combatant deaths as well as another 13 million civilian deaths on top of that- a complete expression of revenge and violence fully developed in the most technologically mechanized, inhuman and destructive form.   

 

Agreed- and I will say that Eliot speaks to that issue particulay with such power and emotion in works like the WasteLand.  It’s not a small part of why he won a Nobel prize.  But Prufrock isn’t about war.  Prurfrock is earlier.  It is a dramatic monologue- what that means is that it’s one person talking almost like a speech, but not really.  And  he calls it a love song- but it’s not a love song.  It certainly wouldn’t land you a kiss at the end of a date.  It’s strange, as is Eliot’s love drama.  So, I want to tell it to you.  

 

Okay.  Let’s do it.  

 

You mentioned TS Eliot went to France for a year and then came back to the US to Harvard to work on his phd.  Well, while at Harvard he reacquainted himself with  family friend, Emily Hale. Her dad  was a Unitarian minister, and he taught in the divinity school there at Harvard..  Anyway, here’s the strangeness of it all, it seems Eliot fell in love with Emily- let me quote Eliot here, ““I wish the statement by myself to be made public as soon as the letters to Miss Hale are made public … I fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912, when I was in the Harvard Graduate School. Before I left for Germany and England in 1914 I told her that I was in love with her.” That’s right before he married Vivienne.  It’s also around the time he was working on Prufrock. 

 

Can we assume she didn’t love him back?  When was this public love statement made or released?   

 

Again- so strange.  First of all to answer your first question, We have to assume something happened- but who knows what- we know he confessed his love to her, but we also know he didn’t propose to her.  Maybe he was just like Prufrock and never had the nerve to make a move- maybe he was going to but she gave him the vibe that she would flat out reject him-  I’m not sure.  What we know is what he did; he moved to Europe and  impulsively married someone he didn’t love and knew he didn’t for reasons that clearly fail the say out loud test.  And even after they got married, they knew it was all wrong.  She almost immediately had an affair with Bertrand Russell, but beyond that- in his words Vivienne was “nervous”- which sounds harmless enough, but it wasn’t harmless.   What we know today is that she likely suffered tremendously from mental illness.  She was bipolar as well as paranoid schizophrenic- and he condition was severe and worsens  until she dies in her fifties.  They do separate, although she believes he’s been kidnapped, but they never divorce.  So, that’s all sad, but here’s the crazy gossipy part that I want to tell you, then we can get into Prufrock’s love story-  

 

So, in 1930, 15 years into his marriage with Vivienne- Eliot begins to correspond with Emily again- she had been in London, they’d had tea and things rekindled.   

 

That sounds like a British romance in the making. 

 

Indeed- love over tea.  Over the course of the next 30 years he would write her over 1131 letters- very very personal and Emily kept all of them.  He claimed to be in love.  He said things like, “You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest lost and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.”  He said this, “I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead; at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age.”   He goes on like this for years-  Did I mention it was 30 to be exact- no small amount of time.  In his mind, he built her up into this Daisy-like ideal of perfection.  She was in love with him too, believing all these confessions.  He confessed  intimate things that he wasn’t telling anyone but now we can look back it was surfacing in his work.  She was giving him feedback.  She was an idol- in some sense it looks to me that he wa dependent emotionally on her- in some ways.  This went on All the way until his wife died.   Finally hey could finally be together, and Emily very much expected this would be this case.  This was in 1947.  After the year Vivienne died, Eliot would write Hale very little (only 180 letters during that last decade).  Then- to everyone’s shock- On January 10, 1957, he married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, who was 38 years younger.   This was a HUGE blow to Emily.  She never saw or met Valerie.  His last letter to her was written in February a month after the wedding.  Emily was crushed. 

 

So, no one in England saw it coming either? 

 

Not even in their office.  But that isn’t even the end of the craziness-Emily’s letters to Eliot have all been destroyed by Eliot, but Emily kept hers- they actually had a disagreement about that.  But he finally said and I quote, “As for my letters, they are your property, and their fate must be decided by you.”  So she donated all of them to the Princeton Library with the understanding that they were only to be opened fifty years after her death- which was in 1969.   

 

And this is the irony to me- the long-awaited opening of the letters happened on January 2, 2020. Which was last year.  So this drama is still not over.  What did we find out?  Did he confess to be Prufrock? 

 

Well, that’s the thing- apparently they’re awesome and reveal all kinds of good stuff.  HOWEVER, two months after the letters were opened, Covid hit and the library closed.  Hardly anybody got to read them and no one got to study them.  Those secrets are yet to be revealed!!!! 

 

The drama that never dies!!!  Well, before we get to Prufrock, the poem, let’s tell the end of the romantic drama?  Does the marriage with Valerie work out? 

 

Well, it seems it really does.  Apparently he wrote her a love poem every single week, and they were extraordinarily compatible and happy.  She managed his estate and managed it brilliantly during his life and after his death.   

 

What about Emily?   

 

Well, she was very gracious about the whole thing.  This is what she said, “The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always and I am grateful that this period brought some of his best writing, and an assured charming personality which perhaps I helped to stabilize.” 

 

Does he ever explain why he never married her? 

 

Well, not to my satisfaction, he gives her some strange explanation about how he wants to remain single and how some men want “a surrogate Virgin Mary” which he has had in her. 

 

Not exactly what most women want to hear. 

 

I’d say no.  Anyway, now to the poem.  Obviously we don’t have time to explicate it sentence by sentence- although that would be the right way to do it if you really want to get the whole sense of it, but that’s more than a single podcast of the length we try to do.  What I want to do, is give you a little set up so you can understand, admire and maybe enjoy the poem because I really do, and think it’s possible even without the line by line analysis.  So, let’s give it a read.  I’ll interrupt you from time to time as I watch your eyes glaze over in utter confusion. 

 

Well, you’ve made the reading process sound glamorous. 

 

I know- just be warned- it could get confusing fast- starting with the preface that isn’t even in English.  - -The poem begins with a quote from Dante’s The Divine Comedy  and it’s in Italian.  The speaker in the quote is a poor chap by the name of Guido de Montefeltro who is stuck in the deepest bottomless part of hell partly for dispensing terrible advice.  Guido speaks with a flame that quivers when he talks and he says he would never tell anyone anything about himself if he ever thought anyone would find out about it because it’s too embarrassing, but since no one ever gets out of hell, he’ll be honest with him.   

 

So, the parallel is that Prufrock is also speaking from his own personal hell and doesn’t think anybody will know his story because they can’t see his hell- except that Dantes does.  I can see the irony already. 

 

That’s it indeed.  This is a poem about a man who has created a personal hell he can’t get out of.  It’s about his isolation, his embarrassment, his lack of personal agency.  Notice also that we’re not even into the poem and there have been two allusions- one Classical and one Biblical- the flame of fire is to connect us to the Holy Spirit of God who gives voice to the Apostles in the New Testament to proclaim God’s words.  Eliot loves allusions.  There are many- he alludes to more than one Shakespeare play, to passages of the Bible, to likes like Andrew Marvell and Robert Browning-the more you know about the different things he alludes to- the more sense he makes, so I’ll pull out a few of them- but you really don’t need to to get the gist.   

 

I was going to bring up at some point the famous declaration Eliot made about himself- this was later in life after he’d naturalized as a British citizen.  He said of himself, I am “"classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."  

 

Exactly, so you can see right there that he respects longevity- all of those classics, the monarchy and the Catholic church are examples of things that have deep roots.  I will also say, that at the time Eliot wrote Prufrock he wasn’t a Christian really.  He’d been raised a Unitarian, but in a sense, he didn’t have an active faith.  As he went through the wars, read through lots of philosophy, specifically Eastern philosophy- Buddhism and Hinduism, he came around to the Catholic faith tradition.  These ideas come out in later works and also in a lot of his  literary criticism which I actually like better than I like his poetry- partly because I can actually understand it without getting a headache. Eliot really sees literature as a conversation- a back and forth discussion through time- and he’s talking to these ancient authors and talking to us about the ideas of these ancient writers in these text.  At least that’s how I see it.  The people of the past talk to us, and we can talk back.  So, with that allusion in our minds, let’s think about the title? 

 

 

Shall we start with that historical allusion that takes us back to Missouri? 

 

Might as well.  That is one reference, I wouldn’t have ever known. 

 

Well, most people wouldn’t.  The Prufrocks are not historical icons- in fact, today they  are completely unknown unless you walking around the Bellefountain Cemetery in St. Louis where Eliot grew up.  During Eliot’s growing up years, there was a local furniture store called William Prufrock Furniture Store.  The Harry Prufrock, the son who ran the store during  Eliot’s life was a master marketer and brander back before the internet blew up that field.  He would publish this giant full page ads in the local paper of the Prufrock family eating. Meal at a kitchen table or a working on a Prufrock desk.  They were local celebrities in that they personified middle-class life in St. Louis- and were always in the paper. 

 

Well, Eliot lifted the Prufrock name and memoriz 

Well, Eliot lifted the Prufrock name and memorialized in the most ironic way.  J Alfred Prufrock is definitely middle class- - the way he writes the name is designed to sound like he’s trying to be sophisticated, his first name is an initial.  He goes by TWO names- no nick names here. 

 

The last thing we’re going to talk about is the fact that this is called love song.  In real love songs like the kind Tim McGraw sings  Faith Hill talk about true love and we play them at weddings.  By calling this a love song  we’re supposed to  expect is rose, chocolate, romantic beaches, serenades and vows of life together in blissful harmony.  But that is NOT what is in the cards for poor J Alfred.  A love song for a middle-aged balding guy with a name like J Alfred Prufrock consists of  one-night cheap hotels and restaurants with saw dust on the floor.  It’s seedy, lonely maybe sexual, but NOT intimate or happy.  This is what we can expect from our love song! 

 

Is that an exciting promo for next week’s sequel to this poetry supplement? 

 

I can’t wait!!!!   

 

 

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