372 Making It New: 1900–1945“Burnt Norton” (1935), the first of the Four Quartets, for example, there are these
lines: “Go said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly,
containing laughter.” As one critic has put it, “this ... symbol of the laughter ... of
children heard playing was not only a symbol of the happiness that the childless
Eliot was never to know, but a memory of childish loneliness, hearing the ‘others’ ...
and longing to be ‘one of them.’ ”
When Eliot was just 9 his father built a summer home for the family by the sea at
Gloucester, Massachusetts; and here the boy was to spend his summer vacations. So
another source of vivid imagery and mythic allusion was initiated. Memories of the
sea pervade his poetry. In Ash Wednesday (1936), for instance, the reader is offered a
glimpse “from the wide window toward the granite shore” of “The white sails” that
“still fly seaward, seaward flying / Unbroken wings”; while Eliot’s expertise at sailing,
acquired during these summer visits, is invoked in the brief, memorable reference,
towards the end of The Waste Land (1920), to the boat that “responded / Gaily, to the
hand expert with sail and oar.” Mingled imagery of fog and water was, in any case,
something that Eliot could associate with his childhood homeplace for the spring,
autumn, and winter months. St. Louis itself, with its mists and “the sunsets and the
dooryards and the sprinkled streets,” seems to be the setting for “The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). And Eliot’s recollections of the “strong brown god” of the
Mississippi River, which flows by the city, were to be captured in the third of the Four
Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” (1942). “I think I was fortunate to have been born
here,” Eliot declared of St. Louis, “rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.”
Certainly, his birthplace added to the sense of the complexity of his fate, the mixed
nature of his background, particularly since he himself tended to see St. Louis, not
so much as a Midwestern, but as a Southern town. “Some day I want to write an
essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American,” he said in
1928, “and who ... felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more
an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the USA up to a hundred years
ago was a family extension.”
Southerner, Northerner – and, surely, Midwesterner – by birth and background,
Eliot transmogrified himself into “a Frenchman” and “an Englishman” by a subtle
and yet strenuous act of will. After a thorough reading of poets like Jules Laforgue,
Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine, and a year studying at the Sorbonne, he
succeeded in assimilating the achievements of French symbolism into English-
language poetry. “Prufrock,” for example, his first major poem, employs the Laforgian
dramatic monologue, unfolding the fragmentary consciousness of its narrator
(whose name, it turns out, is borrowed from a firm of furniture wholesalers in
St. Louis) in a way that locates him as a name plus a voice rather than a character.
Like so many poems derived from the Symbolist experience, the poem offers us not
a verifiable description of the world, nor the depiction of a “real” character, but a
zone of consciousness which each of us, as readers, has to pass through for himself
or herself. The scene is, perhaps, initially American but it, and the narrator who dis-
solves into it, are presented in those radically disintegrative, dream-like terms that
characterize many of the best French poets of the late nineteenth century. The nameGGray_c04.indd 372ray_c 04 .indd 372 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM