"I Love a Tall Girl"

I never "got" T. S. Eliot. When I first became serious about poetry and "intellectual" stuff, in the 50s, Eliot was the presiding grand khan of English literature. Because Eliot liked Donne, my teachers liked Donne. Because Eliot was down on Milton, my teachers were down on Milton. Eliot had pronounced that "a dissociation of thought and feeling" occurred in the later seventeenth century, and we all tried to interpret literature in the light of that putative, imaginary divorce. Eliot discovered that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a failure because it lacked an 'objective correlative." We were enjoined to wonder exactly where that OC had gone. Nevertheless, I thought Hamlet was an exciting success and still do. So do many discerning readers.

To me, Eliot's criticism was mysterious and his poetry was incomprehensible, unmusical and occasionally repellent. "The Waste Land," his masterpiece, was to me obscurantist, pretentious, show-offy and shallow. And yet I was unquestionably an outlier. I studied the "Four Quartets" for weeks under the able direction of a serious teacher and scholar, Arthur Mizener, but in the end there was nothing there for me. My own insufficiency?  Perhaps.

I could not get around Eliot's public positions ("I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics"). To me, these views were fringe, absurd, reactionary, borderline fascist. Eliot was puritanical about sex, looked down his Brahmin nose at people not of his class (see the Sweeney poems) and couldn't abide Jews.    

When I taught a course called "History of Poetry in English," which I did for many years, I would skip from the undeniably great poets of the World War I generation (Brooke, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Thomas, Owen, Graves, Hardy) right to Yeats and Frost, leaving Eliot in the deep lurch, possibly to the consternation of my more sophisticated students.

So it gives me great pleasure to say that I've finally found a poem by the old pretender that tickles me. It celebrates his second wife, whom he married in 1957 when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty, and remained unpublished until it just now appeared in the second volume of the new Johns Hopkins edition. It's not exactly juicy, but it seems to be honest and forthright:

I love a tall girl.

When we lie in bed

She on her back and I stretched upon her,

And our middle parts are busy with each other,

My toes play with her toes and my tongue with her tongue,

And all the parts are happy.

Because she is a tall girl.

To me, this brief lyric is worth forty Quartets.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

More on Eliot's anti-semitism: Anthony Julius, who is one of the lawyers who defended Deborah Lipstadt in the nazi-loving, Holocaust-denying David Irving case, wrote a book entitled "T. S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism and Literary Form." Julius writes: "Eliot's anti-Semitic poems demand literary analysis...informed by outrage. Indifference to the offense given by these poems...is a failure of interpretation. They insult Jews. To ignore these insults is to misread the poems."

[Don Z. Block]

I can't get Eliot's racy poem out of my mind. When he wrote it, did he forget that one of his quartets deals with the death of meaningful love? Had he not discovered tall women by then? Did he not tell his editor, whose name was Ezra, I believe, that he liked tall women and that long legs made love meaningful?

Another beef I have with Eliot is that when he is not obscure, he does not seem to be worth reading or listening to. His plays, for example, seem to be heavily didactic, and the playwright drives home his message clumsily by having one god-like character in each of his plays be the one everyone looks up to and accepts truths from. Usually, this character will have a title and an impressive name like Mountstuart Jenkinson. Eliot the playwright doesn't dramatize; he preaches.

And of course there is always the undercurrent of anti-semitism. No Eliot hero will ever have a name like Sammy Goldstein. Every Burbank will have a Baedeker, and every Bleistein a cigar.

[Don Z. Block]

No, it's not possible. Eliot writing about his tongue touching someone else's? Eliot loving anything other than a cat? Even the position he describes will probably not work.

Eliot's anti-Semitism ("Rachel nee Rabinowitz" and "the Jew" squatting on the window sill")is unfortunately not obscure at all. He is a poet I would have loved to pound, no pun intended.

He once wrote that only poets could understand his poetry and that he was writing to be understood only by poets. If so, why did he bother to publish? Didn't he realize that some of his stuff might get into the hands of non-poets?