Fame & Folly (37 page)

Gratefully, Tom Eliot returned to Boston in high glee. And within two weeks he had fished out of his mailbox the apotheosis of his tender years: the earliest known publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It is a melancholy truth that nowadays every company president can recite the slovenly unedited opening of this justly famous item—

—but these loose and wordy lines were not always so familiar, or so easily accessible. Time and fate have not been kind to Tom Eliot (who did, by the way, one day cease being painfully young): for some reason the slovenly unedited version has made its way in the world more successfully during the last eighty years than Barmuenster’s conscientious efforts at perfection. Yet the great Firkin Barmuenster, that post-fin-de-siècle editor renowned for meticulous concision and passionate precision, for launching many a new literary career, and for the improvement of many a flaccid and redundant writing style, was—though the fact has so far not yet reached the larger reading public—T. S. Eliot’s earliest supporter and discoverer.

For the use of bibliographers and, above all, for the delectation of poetry lovers, the complete text of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as it appeared in
The New Shoelace
of April 17, 1911, follows:

On a high-humidity evening in October, shortly after a rainfall, a certain nervous gentleman undertakes a visit, passing through a bad section of town. Arriving at his destination, the unhappy man overhears ladies discussing an artist well-known in history (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564, Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet). Our friend contemplates his personal diffidence, his baldness, his suit and tie, and the fact that he is rather underweight. He notes with some dissatisfaction that he is usually addressed in conventional phrases. He cannot make a decision. He believes his life has not been well-spent; indeed, he feels himself to be no better than a mere arthropod (of the shelled aquatic class, which includes lobsters, shrimps, crabs, barnacles, and wood lice). He has been subjected to many social hours timidly drinking tea, for, though he secretly wishes to impress others, he does not know how to do so. He realizes he is an insignificant individual, with a small part to play in the world. He is distressed that he will soon be eligible for an old age home, and considers the advisability of a fruit diet and of permitting himself a greater relaxation in dress, as well as perhaps covering his bald spot. Thus, in low spirits, in a markedly irrational frame of mind, he imagines he is encountering certain mythological females, and in his own words he makes it clear that he is doubtless in need of the aid of a reliable friend or kindly minister. (As are, it goes without saying, all of us.)

AGAINST MODERNITY
 

A
CENTURY
, like any entrenched institution, runs on inertia and is inherently laggard. Even when commanded by the calendar, it will not easily give up the ghost. The turn of the century, as the wistful phrase has it, hardly signifies the brisk swing of a gate on its hinge: a century turns, rather, like a rivulet—a silky, lazy, unwitting flow around a silent bend. Whatever the twenty-first century (seemingly only minutes away) may bring, we, entering it, will go on being what we are: creatures born into, and molded and muddied by, the twentieth.

And the twentieth, too, did not properly begin with the demise of the nineteenth. When the fabled Armory Show introduced modern art to New York in 1913, the American cultural establishment (to use a term typically ours, not theirs) was in the governing hands of men born before the Civil War—men who were marked by what Santayana, as early as 1911, had already condemned as “the genteel tradition.” Apart from the unjust condescensions of hindsight, and viewed in the not-so-easily-scorned light of its own standards, what
was
the genteel tradition? Its adherents,
after all, did not know themselves to be pre-modernist; they did not know that a volcanic alteration of taste and expression was about to consume the century; they did not know that irony and pastiche and parody and a conscious fever of innovation-through-rupture would overcome notions of nobility, spirituality, continuity, harmony, uncomplicated patriotism, romanticized classicism. It did not occur to them that the old patterns were threadbare, or could be repudiated on grounds of exhaustion.

To be able to say what the men of the genteel tradition (its constituents were nearly all men) did know, and what they saw themselves as, and what they in fact were, would lead us directly to the sublimely conceived fellowship they established to embody their ideals—a kind of latterday temple to the Muses. And the word “temple” is apt: it calls up an alabaster palace on a hill; an elite priesthood; ceremonial devotions pursued in a serious though lyrical frame of mind—a resolute thoughtfulness saturated in notions of beauty and virtue, and turned from the trivial, the frivolous, the ephemeral. The name these aspirants gave to their visionary society—a working organization, finally, with a flesh-and-blood membership and headquarters in New York—was the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The cornerstone of what was to become the Academy’s permanent home, a resplendent Venetian Renaissance edifice just off Riverside Drive on West 155th Street, was laid on November 19, 1921, by Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France. The commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the First World War, Foch was summoned to wield a ritual trowel not only as the hero of the recent victory over the Kaiser, but—more gloriously still—as an emissary of French cultural prestige. The nimbus of power that followed him from Paris to this plot of freshly broken ground along the remote northern margins of Manhattan was kindled as much by his membership in the French Academy as by his battlefield triumphs.

The venerable French Academy, founded by Cardinal Richelieu to maintain the purity of the French language, and limited to forty “Immortals,” had preceded its New World counterpart (or would-be counterpart) by some two and a half centuries. Though this august company of scholars and men of letters was to serve as
inspiration and aristocratic model, American democratic principles demanded a wider roster based on a bicameral system: hence membership in the American Academy was open to as many as fifty, and these fifty were selected by ballot from the two hundred and fifty distinguished authors, painters, sculptors, architects, and composers of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the lower (and older) body. And while the “chairs” of the French Academy were phantom chairs—metaphoric, platonic—American pragmatism (and one Mrs. Cochran Bowen, who donated the requisite five thousand dollars) supplied
real
chairs, with arms and backs of dark polished wood, each with a plaque for its occupant’s name.

The homegrown Richelieu of this grand structure of mind and marble was Robert Underwood Johnson, a powerful magazine editor and tireless poet who, though not precisely the organization’s founder, was present at the Academy’s earliest meetings, and as Permanent Secretary was its dominating spirit for the first three decades. In 1920 he disappeared, temporarily, having been appointed United States Ambassador to Italy. A 1922 newspaper photograph of Johnson—occasioned by a dispute with the Internal Revenue Department over unpaid taxes on ambassadorial meals and lodgings—shows a determined elderly gentleman with a steady yet relentless eye and a rather fierce pince-nez, the ribbon of which flows down over a full white beard and high collar. Unfortunately, no mouth is visible; it would be instructive to see the lips that so often speechified at Academy events, or adorned the hour with original verse. In still another portrait—a wood engraving by Timothy Cole, artist and Academy member—the Johnsonian mouth is again concealed under a cloud of furry whiskers, but the stiff cravat, scimitar nose, straight spine, and erect head are eloquent enough. They declare a fine facsimile of a Roman bust, attentive to what is noble and what is not—the face and figure of a man of established importance, a man who knows his worth: editor of
The Century
, Ambassador to Italy, Director of the Hall of Fame, Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Above all it is the face and figure of the nineteenth century, when the ideal of the publicly Noble could still stir the Western world. Together with the Harmonious, the Noble spoke in lofty
statuary, in the balanced configurations of painting and music, in the white pilasters of heirloom architecture—but nowhere more melodiously than in the poetry that descended (though somewhat frayed by overhandling) from Keats.

The cornerstone affixed by Marshal Foch—in high-laced boots and full uniform—on that rainy November afternoon in 1921 was a hollow repository. In it Brander Matthews, Chancellor of the Academy and a professor of literature at Columbia University, placed numerous historic articles and documents—congratulatory messages from the President of the United States, from the Governor of New York, from the Academies of Belgium, Rome, Spain, and Brazil; papers recording the Special Symposium on Diction; “Utterances by Members of the Academy Concerning the War of 1914–1918,” bound in purple; replicas and photographs of medals, including one presented to Marshal Foch by the American Numismatic Society (located next door); minutes of meetings; commemorative addresses; and a holographic copy of a dedicatory poem by Robert Underwood Johnson:

And there it was: the echoing legacy of Keats. But Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness had long since passed into fog and desiccation; the Romantic exhalations of the last century—a century more than twenty years gone—could not be kept going
by pumping up a useless bellows that had run out of breath. The cornerstone may have received the pious mimicry of “The Temple” as its chief treasure, but modernism (one of its names was Ezra Pound) was pounding at the Temple’s gates, shattering the sage Past and slighting the old forms of Beauty.

The Temple was not unaware of these shocking new vibrations: it derided and dismissed them. In 1925, in an address before the Academy-Institute (as the two closely allied bodies came to be called), three years after the publication of
The Waste Land
, Robert Underwood Johnson pointed to T. S. Eliot as one of the “prominent apostles” of “this so-called modern American poetry,” and scolded him for prosiness and lack of taste and humor, while praising “the dignity and beauty of Landor’s invocation to an English brook.” (Walter Savage Landor, it might be noted, was born in 1775 and died in 1864, when Johnson was eleven years old.) Quoting lines from Marianne Moore, Johnson asked, “What is the remedy for this disease?” “The Academy’s chief influence,” he concluded, “will come from what and whom it recognizes, what and whom it praises, and what and whom it puts forth.”