nants.”^18 And Christopher R ick s remark s, “The consciousness in ‘Gerontion,’
is not offered as healthy, sane and wise; who would wish to be he, and what
endorsement then is being asked for the thoughts of his dry brain in its dry
season?” And Ricks adds, “Some of the queasy resentful feelings are bent
upon a different Jew who may indeed be the owner, Christ.”^19
The argument for Gerontion as ¤ctional persona is never quite convinc-
ing. For one thing, as in the case of “Prufrock,” Gerontion is too percep-
tive, too aphoristic and de¤nitive in his judgments to be dismissed as some
sort of mental case. In the course of the poem, moreover, Gerontion asks
questions—“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” “What will the spider
do, / Suspend its operations... ?”—or makes revelatory statements—“I that
was near your heart was removed therefrom,” “I have lost my passion”—that
look straight ahead to related passages in The Waste Land, a poem of mul-
tiple, often contradictory voices.
But if the portrait of the squatting Jew is not just a projection of Geron-
tion’s diseased mind, how then are we to take it? Perhaps a brief biographical
excursus will be helpful here. After the war Eliot knew that he would not be
returning to the United States to live. In England his poetry had at least
found some acclaim, he had a foothold in the literary press, and he could eke
out a living and take care of Vivien, with the help of her family and their
friends. Yet he was by no means reconciled to British life. On 2 July 1919 he
wrote to his brother Henry:
Don’t think that I ¤nd it easy to live over here. It is damned hard
work to live with a foreign nation and cope with them—one is always
coming up against differences of feeling that make one feel humili-
ated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner.... It is like being
always on dress parade—one can never relax. It is a great strain....
People are more aware of you, more critical, and they have no pity for
one’s mistakes or stupidities.... They seek your company because they
expect something particular from you, and if they don’t get it, they
drop you. They are always intriguing and caballing; one must be very
alert.... London is something one has to ¤ght very hard in, in order to
survive.^20This was written just a week before Eliot wrote John Rodker that he had com-
pleted “the new poem I spoke of—about seventy-¤ve lines” (Letters 312),
which was “Gerontion.” And a day or two later he remarked to Mary Hutch-
inson: “But remember that I am a metic—a foreigner” (318).
Remaining “always a foreigner” was especially painful in view of Eliot’s
circumstances in 1919. In May 1915 he had lost the man he may have loved
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 29