Eliot, Auden and the Enjoyment of Life
The 2024 T. S. Eliot Lecture
Thursday October 24th, Newnham College, Cambridge
In our own rather thin secular age it is interesting to reflect that 70 years or so ago the two most distinguished poets of the time were Christian believers. What is also interesting to note is that in at least one important respect their approach to the faith, at least as expressed in their poetry, was somewhat different. One of the purposes of this lecture is to explore that difference. To put it in technical terms, Eliot’s approach was that of the Via negative and Auden’s the Via positive, though I am interpreting those terms fairly widely. The negative way suggests that we can only know God through the way of denial, through letting go of the things of the world, and in the end even letting go of the images we use about God. Eliot’s classic expression of this, quoting St John of the Cross, is in section III of East Coker. The positive way, on the other hand, suggests that we can know God in and through the things of the world and our language about God, however limited, can say something that is true.
I want to begin by looking at the early period of the renewed relationship of Eliot with Emily Hale, to see what their correspondence reveals about him and his understanding of life.[1]
In their relationship a number of misunderstandings and difficulties arose. The major one was to do with Eliot’s refusal to consider a divorce from Vivienne. Another was the way Emily, though an unbaptised Unitarian decided to receive Communion in an Anglican church without first asking permission of the parish priest; and this, Eliot felt, was a sign her failure to understand the seriousness of his religious beliefs, not least when it precluded divorce. But underlying these differences was a fundamental difference of temperament leading to a different understanding of Christianity and what it entailed.
Every person is a mystery. But Eliot in particular does not fit into normal categories and is likely to elude us. Emily Hale recognised this from an early stage in their epistolary relationship, and told him, that there was something very unusual, out of the ordinary, about his personality. This is revealed I think first of all in his understanding of ordinary virtues.
For most of us virtues like kindness or generosity would be on a spectrum and being a Christian would involve trying to be kinder or more generous. Of course Eliot hoped that would be the case with him but he believed there was a fundamental divide between all such virtues and a higher standard to which he felt accountable. This is shown both in his attitude to his parents and to his chairman and close friend Geoffrey Faber. Eliot’s parents loved him, indeed indulged him, but he believed they simply lived out the values of their class and background, together with an inherited sense of Eliot superiority, without any sense that there was an ultimate standard before which they fell short. Similarly with Geoffrey Faber and his family. He knew them well, liked them very much and indeed spent his summer holidays with them in the 1930’s their country house Ty Glyn Aeron, in West Wales. He thought them gentle and good and the very backbone of England. But they had no religious strivings. He wished they could have more passion and as he put it, that would run down the street amok with eyes blazing. [2] He thought their virtues were mainly a result of their upbringing and a comfortable position in life. As he wrote:
People who remain through life ‘naturally’ good are merely people well brought up in good habits and conventions, whose lives have been so happily conducted that they have never experienced temptation-that is to say most of my relatives. I prefer a person who has committed almost any sin and had to gain virtue by suffering; and I think the Gospels confirm this.’[3]
He thought Unitarianism was for sheltered lives, but Catholicism gave more and asked more and had sustained him when he felt isolated in the midst of pagans. As he put it: ‘The people who mean most to be are not those who are naturally good but those who strive towards the good.’.[4]
The basis of this is outlined in an address he gave on the Sermon on the Mount, called the two masters. Eliot argued that it is essential for us to have an ideal. If we trim this down to fit the nicest people then we fall into complacency and self-conceit. We must have an ideal measured by saintliness before which we can only feel a sinner and be humble. ‘We must have an ideal so high that measured by it the purest and most devout feels that he is indistinguishable from the greatest sinner. Humility is the greatest virtue, humility, purity, charity.[5]
Eliot was acutely self-aware and this was accentuated by the high sense of duty instilled in him by his New England family. It meant that part of him was Calvinist or Puritan in outlook, or to put it in Catholic terms, Jansenist, which gave him a highly sensitive conscience. In theory he knew that Puritanism should have no place in his faith and he described it as a ‘negative and unsanctified thing to be rid of’[6]. But he recognised that it was part of him. As he wrote ‘I have also the NE conscience and I have been as much operated upon by the sense of guilt as anybody. From the day I married until certainly after my mother’s death nothing held me but the sense of guilt.’[7]
Behind the immaculate façade and the studied politeness, the courtesy and kindness, he knew there was a lot to feel bad about. He knew he could be bad tempered and difficult, moody and selfish. Few people saw this side of him-though later in life Mary Trevelyan certainly did.[8] Eliot was not exaggerating when he told Emily that this was indeed a side of him. As he put it: ‘I know I am a very twisted creature…you mustn’t expect me ever to be quite like other people.’[9] In short, behind the impersonal façade was what he called a raging beast.
There is a character in one of Conrad’s novels who always gives a cynical laugh when other people are mentioned. When asked about this he replied that he did not see why he should think more highly of other people than he was able to think of himself. This is a pointer to Eliot’s attitude to humanity. He knew that he himself was deeply flawed and this made him naturally cynical about other people. It was only the love of God, he said, that prevented him lapsing into total cynicism. As he wrote,
the love of God takes the place of the cynicism which otherwise is inevitable to every rational person; for one’s relations to one’s friends and lovers, apart from the love of God, always, in my experience, turn out a delusion and a cheat. Either they let you down, or you let them down, or both but no human relation is in itself, satisfactory’[10]
Eliot had a sense of horror about human life and called it a madness. It was only the Christian faith, he thought, that prevented him sinking into that view all the time. For him life was ‘horror, boredom, glory.’
In the light of this it is not surprising that Eliot was not a happy man. Indeed for much of his life, as a result of his first marriage, he was a deeply unhappy one.[11] He endured but did not enjoy life. But with his conversion to the Christian faith he found, he said, something higher than happiness. It was this which made him see life in a totally different light. As he wrote to his friend Paul Elmer More,
To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying that ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert.’[12]
“I know just enough-and no more-of ‘the peace of God’ to know that it is an extraordinarily painful blessing.” Again “faith is not a substitute for anything: it does not give the things life has refused, but something else; and in the ordinary sense it does not make one happier.”
Eliot’s renewed love for Emily, expressed mainly in their correspondence and their very few meetings brought a kind of extasy into his life. But because it was a relationship that could not find a normal fulfilment it was also intensely frustrating. It too demanded a kind of resignation. As he wrote to her: ‘I think I can face resignation fairly; for after all, I had for many years been resigned to having nothing; but of course the new life demands a new resignation.’
He went on to say that this did not mean deadening their emotions but feeling acutely all that they were missing and then dwelling on what they now had, seeing it as an opportunity for them to grow closer to one another.[13] It was not just a stoical bearing, a giving without thought of return. They would we be given, even if it was only in the grace to give more.[14]
Eliot is very wise and helpful I think when faced with this kind of situation and the difference a religious faith might make. He strongly rejects the idea that religion makes up for a lack of human fulfilment. As he wrote more than once. ‘For nothing is a substitute for anything else, that must be faced.’ Again, ‘Suffering does not automatically do people good.’ The majority of people are better off without the deeper forms of suffering. But one has to deal with it by becoming more conscious, trying to understand it ‘and see ones own pain in relation to the pain of the world as a whole and the mystery of pain; and one can make oneself a better person, more of a person, more of oneself, through whatever comes.’[15]
He told Emily they would have to face the pain, not pretend it was not there. The difference made by religious faith was the belief that some further or higher good could come out of this. It was not a substitute for human fulfilment but something of a different order. Most of the time he wrote to Emily, prayer and worship is just a boring habit but there came be moments of illumination-when you then live on two planes, and this makes you more compassionate ‘It is not until you see and feel and touch that something else is more real, that the other fades. This comes to me very rarely. Most of the time I am a beast raging in the jungle’ [16]
Emily Hale was we might say a more rounded normal person than Eliot, with an ordinary human desire for marriage and happiness. But he felt she was not always able to grasp the seriousness with which he took his religion or the nature of their relationship. We see this in their attitude to Burnt Norton. Emily wanted Eliot to write her a love poem. Eliot replied that he already had and in their correspondence he refers to Burnt Norton as ‘our poem’.[17] It was their poem, in that it arose out of their visit to the house of that name and reflected a mystical, magical moment they had there. That moment is not just one of human love but a fusion of divine and human love. It was a double surrender. ‘It is always to you and yet at the same time it is to something bigger than ‘me’ or ‘you’-to something that only you and I together can look at.[18] ‘Happiness in the ordinary sense is something I know nothing about’ he wrote and the mystical moment with her was ‘a very queer thing’. It was painful, involving awareness of all the negatives, of what was not possible but at the same time exalted.
What this part of the correspondence reveals then is that the simple enjoyment of life, to use the words of my title, was not remotely part of Eliot’s agenda. He was caught in the struggle between the ideal of sainthood and the reality of feeling a raging beast. At the same time he recognised that it was in and through the loss of the ordinary good things in life, like marriage and family life, that he had been touched by a higher power which had transformed his understanding of life. His was the way of dispossession.
Yet this was not of course the whole Eliot. To the outside world he presented his carved face. But behind the façade were a number of different Eliots and to carefully selected people those other Eliots were disclosed. Behind his desk at Faber he was the super conscientious publisher, reading Mss, encouraging young authors, corresponding with writers on the continent. And what comes across in his letters is indeed the care that he took, the meticulous professionalism. With his literary peers he could be the literary man and whilst a million miles away from most of them in terms of belief that did not prevent close supportive friendships, notably with the Woolfs. When Virginia committed suicide he said it was like the loss of one of his family. With his crippled flat mate John Hayward he could reveal devoted care. During the war Hayward was exiled to Cambridge, so Eliot wrote him clever gossipy letters of the kind he knew he would enjoy to keep up his spirits. Then there was his relationship with that excellent woman, to echo Barbara Pym, the formidable Mary Trevelyan with whom he spent evenings listening to music and drinking gin and who proposed to him three times. Then, especially there was the boyish, playful side which came out so strongly in his letters to his godchildren, his cat poems, his love of practical jokes, and his ironic humour which we see for example in:
Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth is open or shut).
There were others too who noted that when treated right he could respond with an ‘equally easy gaity’.[19] And he told Emily he could be more gay and frivolous with her than anyone else, because she was the one with whom he could be most serious.[20]
Not least it is important not to overlook Eliot’s genuine interest in the world and the enjoyment of some of its pleasures, not just music and literature but detective stories and jazz. He was once shown a dart board and he spent nearly a whole day practising how to throw a dart accurately. Especially he loved good food. He said he could name at least 50 cheeses, and he typed three pages, some 1000 words on how to make a simple lettuce salad. Restaurants where he dined would remember exactly how he liked his meat cut and he could remember in detail a number of good meals he had eaten many years before This does not quite add up to the enjoyment of life, but he was able to savour its sensory pleasures. I will return again to this theme and ask how far it was integrated into the serious, puritanical side of his nature but now I want to turn to Auden
Auden’s religious trajectory was very different from that of Eliot. So far as we can know he did not go through a great crisis of belief. Brought up in a devout Anglo-Catholic family at the age of 15, like many teenagers, he turned away from the faith, as he put it ‘to enjoy the pleasures of the world and the flesh’. He returned to the faith in 1940 when he was in America for a number of reasons, one of which was a powerful religious experience in which he realised the people he was with were of ‘infinite value’ simply as themselves.
Wordsworth once wrote to a friend to say ‘the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us’. This was the strong current in which Auden’s religion flowed. What gives it a particular interest is Auden’s own personality with his great zest for life and interest in everything that is going on. Auden was the most prodigiously talented of all 20th century poets, possessing a technical virtuosity bordering on wizadry. This was combined with an amazingly wide, often esoteric culture.
Auden’s father was a doctor who became Professor of Public Health in Birmingham and who was also a keen amateur archaeologist. Auden’s great love as a child were the rocks and landscapes of Yorkshire, with its disused lead mines. One of his brothers became a professional geologist. He himself originally went up to Oxford to read science with a view to becoming a mining engineer and only there switched to English. There was almost nothing that did not genuinely arouse his curiosity and interest. So as he wrote . “Let us hymn the small but journal wonders/ Of Nature and of households.[21]
One of his best known and loved poems is called “In praise of limestone” which does just that, relating the landscape with its different features to the human condition, and ending up
When I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.[22]
This desire to praise the most familiar things found fine expression in his poem Thanksgiving for a habitat, which consists of 12 substantial poems each about a different room in the house including the cellar and the lavatory. There is very little in life Auden feels unable to praise, and he even has a nice paragraph on the spiritual importance of gossip.
This willingness to praise did not come through avoiding the hard, painful facts of life. It was neither evasion nor sentimentality. For Auden too knew pain. He loved Chester Kallman and for much of the time they shared a life together, but Kallman was promiscuous. At a time of great personal pain Auden wrote
O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You must love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.[23]
Then, in a poem called “Precious five”, celebrating the five senses he wrote
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?[24]
Then, in ‘A Lullaby; he wrote ‘Let your last thinks all be thanks’
For Auden then, faith took the form of a sensitive alertness to the world about him, in all its aspects, a deep appreciation of it expressed in gratitude and praise. Despite his suffering he wanted to bless what there is for being. As he put it in an early poem after his return to faith
‘O wear your tribulation like a rose.’
On the fundamentals of Christian faith and in what true happiness consists Eliot and Auden would not have disagreed. As Auden put it:
Happiness consists in a loving and trusting relationship to God; accordingly we are to take one thing and one thing only seriously, our eternal duty to be happy, and to that all considerations of pleasure and pain are subordinate. Thou shalt love God and thy neighbour and Thou shall be happy mean the same thing.[25]
The difference between Eliot and Auden in their approach to the enjoyment of life is a subtle one. Both were Anglo-Catholics, and therefore both had a sacramental view of life, that is, one in which the material world can make known the spiritual one. This is what Auden wrote about the dining area in Thanksgiving for a habitat. Entitled “Tonight at seven-thirty”, after describing many details of the ideal party it ends
… men
and women who enjoy the cloop of corks, appreciate
dapatical fare, yet can see in swallowing (Daps,- feast like)
a sign act of reverence,
in speech a work of re-presenting
the true olamic silence. [26] (everlasting)
This is a truly sacramental view of existence in which the outward and visible can be a sign of the inward and spiritual, so swallowing is “a sign act of reverence”, and the table talk a touch of the eternal. Other Christian poets, notably Thomas Traherne and Gerard Manley Hopkins have celebrated the via positive, but none, I think, have done it in such a bold, inclusive and, well, utterly worldly way, as W.H.Auden.
Eliot too was sacramental, but with a big qualification. Geoffry Faber once wrote to him to chide him for having a too negative view of the good things in life. Eliot wrote an important letter back in which he argues first of all that we cannot distinguish sharply intellectual pleasures from sensual ones. They are often bound up.
My pleasures in dining have been pretty complex; it is not a simple matter to remember the pleasure of the canard aux oranges and distinguish it pleasure from the pleasure of ‘the Chambertin with the yellow seal on’ as Thackery would say.
Then he goes on to say that if one has dispossessed oneself of all craving for created things, of all desire for pleasure, then one comes back to them with an enhanced sense of enjoyment. ‘after this one returns ( I do anyway) to the canard aux oranges or the moules marinières or whatever it be with a keener pleasure…..If we are rightly directed, a good dinner can lead us towards God, and God can help us enjoy a good dinner.[27]
This is indeed a sacramental view of existence, it is truly to enjoy life, but Eliot’s qualification is crucial, the way of dispossession has to come first.
Although in terms of personal practice we can say that they both had a sacramental understanding of everyday pleasures, what they expressed in their poetry was different.
From a religious point of view they reveal two different approaches. Auden seeks to celebrate what is there. Eliot sees in what exists a hint of something beyond what is there. Suppose Auden for example had been writing about the Mississippi of Dry Salvages, or the magical winter landscape at the beginning of Little Gidding, we can imagine the kind of witty exultation of praise which would come forth. But for Eliot as we know both landscapes are haunted by something else and the images point beyond themselves.
Eliot believed that there was an ultimate happiness which lay beyond this present world but which could occasionally be glimpsed even now. For him those glimpses came in and through suffering. He wrote to Emily to say that his great delight was Beethoven’s A Minor quartet and he thought that Beethoven’s later music had a supernatural gaiety about it, an angelic frivolity as of someone who had been through all human suffering and come out into another country ‘which I would give my life to be able to translate into poetry.’[28] That of course is what he tried to do in the Four Quartets.
Strictly speaking the via negative concerns language and prayer. We go into a kind of darkness in which we can only say what God is not. Eliot however widens the idea out to stress that life in all its aspects goes into this darkness. In East Coker it is first of all the life of the village that ends in ‘Dung and death’, then all our attempts to put our experience into words fails and every human status and reputation is reduced to nothing: but this is the darkness of God. At this point the poem turns explicitly to the experience of prayer and the words of St John of the Cross about dispossession. At this point the darkness becomes light
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy.
This sense of haunting delight begins earlier, in Burnt Norton where it occurs whilst looking into a pool in a rose-garden. The moment was fleeting. ‘Then a cloud passed and the pool was empty’ . ‘The black cloud carries the sun away’. The dominant image for this experience is light. Although the pool was empty it was filled with sunlight. ‘The surface glittered out of heart of light’. Later, the flash of a kingfisher’s wing brings it to mind for it answered ‘light to light’
The experience is tantalising. It cannot be grasped but it speaks of some ultimate ecstasy ‘the leaves were full of children,/hidden excitedly, containing laughter . In section V in a shaft of sunlight hidden laughter rises from children hidden in the foliage.
In East Coker III , there is again laughter in the garden but this time with associated images of running streams, winter lightening, wild thyme unseen and wild strawberry. However the difficulty of the journey is never forgotten. The further union, the deeper communion comes
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
In The Dry Salvages these moments are described as hints and guesses. There again sunlight, thyme and winter lightening appear but music and a waterfall are now included in the list. Finally in the climax to Little Gidding the list is reduced to two, the voice of the hidden waterfall and children in the apple-tree.
Whilst Eliot in his personal life, like Auden, sought to make sensual pleasures sacramental, outward manifestations of spiritual realities, and in this sense found enjoyment in life, his prime purpose in Four Quartets is to see how some sensual pleasures can be echoes of an ultimate and lasting enjoyment -the excited laughter of Children in the apple trees, the sound of a hidden waterfall, the smell of thyme.
So we can think of Auden with his innate curiosity and zest for life exulting in every aspect of creation, in his inimitable witty way. And we can think of Eliot also enjoying the pleasures of life, especially good food, but only after he had first detached himself from any desire for them, only when he had gone the way of dispossession. But in his poetry we are taken beyond the pleasures of this life into a mystery that can only be hinted at. As he wrote in The Dry Salvages II
The moments of happiness-not the sense of well being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination-
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the experience restores the meaning
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.
But that is too high a note on which to close. In the end Eliot did find real enjoyment in life, genuine happiness at the age of 68 with Valerie. For eight years , always on the brink of death with emphysema and heart problems the raging beast was tamed into tenderness, and the fastidious mind united with his senses to produce amongst other things a touching erotic poem to his beloved. We will leave them to continue to enjoy their communion at the heavenly banquet. We here below can follow Auden with the cloop of corks and Eliot with the Chambertin, or whatever the Society has in store for us. Auden encouraging us simply to relish and give thanks for what is set before us, Eliot reminding us that true enjoyment comes only if we have first detached ourselves from the desire for all sensual pleasures.
[1] For this relationship see Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, Virago 2022 and Sara Fitzgerald, The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot and the Rose of a Lifetime, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024
[2] 12 March 1931
[3] 14 Feb 33. Unless otherwise stated all dates are references are to letters in the digital edition of the Eliot-Hale letters freely available on the internet.
[4] 30 April 33
[5] Address to association of Unitarian Ministers, 3rd April 1933, 1 April 33
[6] 6 Aug 34
[7] 20 Aug 34
[8] See Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner, Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story, Faber 2022.
[9] 19 Oct 34
[10] The Letters of T. S. Eliot ,vol 3:1926-1927, Ed Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Faber 2012, p710-12
[11] On that marriage from Vivien Eliot’s point of view see Ann Pasternak Slater, The Fall of a Sparrow, Vivien Eliot’s Life and Writings, Faber 2020
[12] Letters, vol 5, 2 June 1930, p.210
[13] 16 Feb 1931
[14] 25 March 35
[15] 5 March 36
[16] 14 Feb 33
[17] 13 Jan and 16 Jan 36
[18] 4 April 36
[19] 30 May 36
[20] 26 May 1931
[21] “ Epistle to a Godson”, CP.p.624
[22] “In Praise of Limestone”CP. p.414
[23] “As I walked out one evneing”.CP p.114
[24] “Precious Five”, CP, p.447
[25] “The things which are Caesar’s”, Prose Vol III, p. 203
[26] “Tonight at Seven-thirty”, CP, p.533. Olam comes from the Hebrew, and combines that which is hidden with a vast period of time, so perhaps everlasting.
[27] Letters, vol 3, p711-13
[28] 16 March 1931
