The Ghosts of T. S.

Eliot

As a poet, Eliot consorted with ghosts—the illustrious dead who

formed a constellation within which his own individual talent
could find its place. In his literary practice, with its intensive use
of echoes from dead writers, he is constantly calling up ghosts.
Dante and Donne were living spirits for him, whereas he seeks to
exorcize other figures from the past as a dead weight. There are
good ghosts and bad, and such a figure as Milton, whose influence
insidiously infiltrates English poetic diction, played the role of
bad ghost for the early Eliot, though he allows himself to be
haunted by him in his later verse.
Eliot was also the composer of poetic rituals meant to induce
encounter with the spiritual realm, often embodied in ghostly
figures. The rituals are sometimes close to standard Christian,
Anglican ones, as in “Ash Wednesday”, The Rock, and the
Christian lyrics in Four Quartets. Dante offers a panoply of
suggestions for independent ritual compositions, such as those in
the ghost scenes in “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding”. As a
Christian, Eliot strongly believed in the Communion of Saints,
but the presence of actual ghosts in his work has little to do with
this doctrine. The good ghosts are guides for the spiritual quester,
comparable to the “bright angels” (ex-Furies) of The Family
Reunion or the officious, human “Guardians” of The Cocktail
Party. To communicate with a secular society, Eliot developed a
quasi-pagan spirituality, not far from spiritualism, expressed in
the ritual scenes of these two plays, a kind of mumbo-jumbo that
has much more room for ghosts than any orthodox Christian ritual
would. When Eliot wants to get in touch with the world of ghosts,
he does so by means of ritual dance. The suggestions of
occultism, of a cultic secret society in the behaviour and speech of
the Guardians in The Cocktail Party might recall The Magic
Flute, where there is a distinction between lofty and mundane
vocations, Tamino and Papageno, comparable to the distinction
between the saints (Celia) and the common lot (Edward, Lavinia)
in Eliot’s play. The combination of farce and spiritual striving in
both Mozart and Eliot, and the resemblance between the actions
of Zarastro and Reilly, might even suggest a direct influence of
The Magic Flute.
   The ritualization of life, the imposition of pattern, is a technique
for bringing out this depth-dimension. Gerontion and the
characters in The Waste Land are bereft of this “ritualist
sensibility” as Stephen Spender calls it. But the poet imposes
ritual forms, for instance in making the fragmentary recollections
of three prostitutes into a Song of the Thames-Maidens, with the
stately progress of Elizabeth and Leicester on a barge in the
background. All the evocations of modern chaos in Four Quartets
are cast as ritual movements, a series of danses macabres.
 

The Ghostly Realm of What Might Have Been

 
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation. (“Burnt Norton” I)
 
These words sound like dry-as-dust logic chopping; but if one
reads the opening lines of Four Quartets as dramatic monologue
or interior monologue they take on a precise and poignant human
meaning. The entire opening section was originally intended for
Murder in the Cathedral, where it rejects the temptation to go
back to the past and take up a worldly career one had broken off.
Bad ghosts from the past keep up a frenetic dance with
ludicrously unreal effect, notably in the “what might have been”
presented by the first three Tempters in this play.
    Eliot was an admirer of Browning and several of his poems
belong to the genre of dramatic monologue (“The Love-Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady”, “Gerontion”, “Journey of
the Magi”, “A Song for Simeon”). A dramatic monologue allows
its speaker to express his personality fully and to review his life,
usually in discussion with a hearer. The last aspect is retained in
Eliot in the “you and I” of the first line of “Prufrock,” and in the
troubled questions of the speakers: “And would it have been
worth it after all…?”; “And should I have the right to smile?”;
“were we led all that way for/Birth or Death?”. However, these
monologues are more accurately christened “interior
monologues” since the speaker is predominantly addressing
himself: the “you” is a spectral figure—often associated with the
reader, especially in the case of the “you” who is lectured at in
Four Quartets. At one point in “Gerontion” the “you” could even
be Christ: “I that was near your heart was removed therefrom”.
Four Quartets contains passages of standard dramatic monologue
in which the poet presents his persona to the readers, beginning
with the frame-breaking “That was a way of putting it—not very
satisfactory” in “East Coker” II, and continuing in the third and
fifth sections and in “The Dry Salvages” II, III and V and “Little
Gidding” III.
   The speaker in “Burnt Norton” I is a lonely middle-aged man,
brooding, like the protagonist of Henry James’s “The Beast in the
Jungle”, on a person he might have loved, and like the protagonist
of another ghostly Jamesian tale, “The Jolly Corner”, brooding on
the self he might have become. That the present is full of
possibilities is a thought that offers only limited encouragement to
an aged man. What preys on his mind is the thought of lost
possibilities—the path not taken; the person not loved. James’s
ghostly tales turn on this theme. Spencer Brydon in “The Jolly
Corner” by dint of brooding on the life he might have lived had
he remained in America comes face to face with his own ghost. In
“The Beast in the Jungle” the mourner who gazes at John
Marcher embodies what Marcher might have been had he chosen
to love May Bartram. Eliot, as a faux Englishman, must have felt
the twinges that James is said to have expressed in 1906, toward
the close of his prodigious career. “I would steep myself in
America. I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful
side. The mixture of Europe and America which you see in me
has proved disastrous”. Gomez in The Elder Statesman expresses
the acute nature of expatriate loneliness: “It is only when you
come to see that you have lost yourself/ That you are quite alone”.
   We may even give the regrets a biographical anchorage, seeing
them as addressed to Emily Hale, with whom he visited Burnt
Norton and its strange garden in 1934. She, certainly, brooded
much on what might have been if the poet had married her,
instead of putting up a barrier against her five times: by his exile,
his first marriage, his refusal to divorce, his refusal to marry after
his wife’s death, and—unkindest cut of all—his second marriage
to a woman 38 years his junior. But Eliot had firmly placed Emily
in the register of “what might have been”. Agatha says in The
Family Reunion: “We do not pass twice through the same door/Or
return to the door through which we did not pass”, as if Eliot were
putting firmly to rest any false expectations raised by the
rapturous lines in “Burnt Norton”. Eliot cast Emily in the role of
Muse and spiritual friend; to add to it that of wife would be to
imprison himself in the world of his own loftiest verse.
    “What might have been” or “the road not taken” is a great
literary theme. Milton’s Samson broods on it, and it takes up the
first half of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot rues
her rejection of Captain Wentworth. This is set right in the second
half, when like Samson she has a second chance, better late than
never. Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale is steeped in regret for
what might have been, as is Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Poets
brood on what might have been in the spirit of nostalgia,
ungratefully failing to celebrate their good fortune in escaping
what might have been had they been born in poverty, injured in an
accident, incapacitated by illness. Rilke thought that a poet can
create his own childhood, in a kind of self-therapy, providing
himself in verse with the happy childhood he did not have in
reality. The artist seeks to make his life right, by creating another
self. Proust’s Le temps retrouvé reinvents the unlived life in art.
His “involuntary memory” of paradisal Combray probably has
little to do with the real experiences of the child in drab, poky
Illiers. Poetry is born out of the ache of unfulfilment, not as a
celebration of happy childhoods or marriages. The childhood
evoked in “Burnt Norton” is thus a ghostly one, composed of
bookish recollections, a touch of Lewis Carroll, and of Kipling’s
“They”, a tale of ghost-children. The rose-garden that Eliot
constructed as a kind of shrine in his imagination can degenerate
into a tired emblem, the ghost of a ghost. The tyranny of linear
time mocks at impossible recreations of what might have been
and leaves at best the hope of using well the brief days remaining.
But the poet aims to give a different value to the accumulated
past, so that it becomes a treasure: “History may be servitude.
History may be liberation” Not just “all will be well” but “all will
have been well”.
    “Success is relative:/It is what we can make of the mess we
have made of things” declares Agatha in The Family Reunion (II,
3). That is a prosaic version of how to “redeem the time, redeem
the dream” (“Ash Wednesday” IV). More sublime is the thought
that both what we have been and what we might have been – the
buried, ghostly possibilities that are the objects of regret and
longing go up to make that essence of our destiny that opens in
eschatological expectation.
   Handling “what might have been” can also be a matter of facing
up to the past, its ghosts, and exorcizing them, as Harry does at
Wishwood and as Lord Claverton does in Eliot’s last play, The
Elder Statesman, his version of Oedipus at Colonus. The antics of
Federico Gomez and Mrs Carghill, formerly a comedienne called
Maisie Montjoy, show them trapped in their dance-act, but to the
spiritual hero Lord Claverton they represent only the unreal world
of what might have been:
 
 Because they are not real, Charles. They are merely ghosts:
Spectres from my past. They’ve always been with me
Though it was not till lately that I found the living persons
Whose ghosts tormented me, to be only human beings,
Malicious, petty, and I see myself emerging
From my spectral existence into something like reality.
 
…she knows that the ghost of the man I was
Still clings to the ghost of the woman who was Maisie.
We should have been poor, we should certainly have
quarreled,
We should have been unhappy, might have come to divorce.

Ghosts as Gracious Guests

After the austere opening of “Burnt Norton”, which produces

the effect of empty fifths in a Beethoven quartet, comes a
transitional passage of seductive lyrical warmth:
 
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                 But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
 
The hearer of the dramatic monologue (“in your mind”) is the
rose-garden companion but also the reader. If Eliot’s rose garden
sometimes seems an abstract emblem, it is because it is a garden
he never entered, a figure of wishful regret rather than fulfilled
love.
 
                  Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?

The “deception” could mean scepticism about the possibility of

finding paradise, or a consciousness that the imagination to which
the poet yields takes him to the world of ideals rather than
actually lived reality.
The poem now turns to ritual, as if this was necessary to conjure
up the ghostly presences:
 
There they were, dignified, invisible, 
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery…
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern…  

The ghosts are guests in Eliot, they are “there” only for the
spiritually sensitive person who opens himself to their presence,
or who is opened to them by shattering experiences of guilt or
anxiety. Gerontion’s plaint “I have no ghosts” perhaps confesses
the lack of such sensitivity; it may mean: “I am only the sum of
what has happened to me, the sordid data of my past and present.
There is no penumbra of memory and imagination to awaken me
to a sense of the significance of my life.” The statement might
also mean, “I have no tradition”—no gracious community of
ancestors who sustain my individual life and make of it a
meaningful quest. In The Family Reunion Agatha conducts Harry
through a ritual of acceptance of the family ghosts, an acceptance
that brings reconciliation with the traumas of childhood and
unhappy marriage.
The ritual culminates in a vision that brings not just the
happiness of “time regained” but a religious vision of reality,
expressed in the conjunction of the Buddhist lotus and the
Christian rose:
 
And the lotos rose quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

The repetition of
 
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
 
carries a new, positive sense. As in the posthumous triangulation
effected in Virginia Woolf’s elegiac novel, To the Lighthouse, the
dead come into perspective at a distance in time, the picture is
completed, and its shape is made up not only of what has been but
of the shadows added by what might have been.
    The stately “they” in this ghost scene represent parental figures
from the past; the “children in the foliage” (“Burnt Norton” V)
represent the future; thus we are “Where past and future are
gathered” (“Burnt Norton” II), and where the patterning of both
allows access to a moment out of time:
 
         Only by the form, the pattern,
 Can words or music reach
The stillness… (“Burnt Norton” V)
 
   We have another ritual dance in the first section of the second
Quartet, “East Coker”, a poem in which ethereal considerations
on time and eternity are replaced by the earthly world of
generational time. It begins with ghostly old houses exposed to
change and destruction that “shake the tattered arras woven with a
silent motto”. Then in the “open field” the poet indulges a ghostly
vision:
 
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire…
 
Again the scene is one of ritual dance. The ghostly effect is
deepened as the language harks back to the sixteenth century:
 
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde.
 
What is the significance of this rustic dance and the “Mirth of
those long since under earth”? It is hardly celebrated, and ends in
“Dung and death”. “It seems to me unmistakable—yet many
readers want to have it otherwise—that Eliot’s treatment of living
and of generation, of both the human and the primordial energies
of nature, orders them into a dance of death” (Moody, 208-9). The
ghostly elements here are far less impressive than in the first and
fourth of the Quartets, the personal involvement far less intense. It
is almost as if the dead villagers are putting on a folk-dancing
performance for the American tourist.
 
Ghostly Wisdom

    Although Eliot could not stand Yeats’s conversation, which

turned on spiritualism, he must have appreciated the power of the
ghostly scenes in Yeats’s poems and plays, the latter strongly
influenced by Noh. In “Little Gidding”, the encounter with a
ghost who resembles Yeats more than any other of its models is
one of the most convincing scenes of this kind in literature. Eliot
uses a verse form that evokes Dante’s terza rima but without
trying to imitate it strictly, as Shelley attempted in his ghostly
poem “The Triumph of Life”. One might call it a ghost of terza
rima, giving the section the air of a lost canto from the
Purgatorio. Shakespeare joins Dante as another patron of this
ghostly performance, thanks to two allusions. The closing line, “It
faded on the blowing of the horn” echoes Hamlet I, i: “It faded on
the crowing of the cock”. The phrase “familiar compound ghost”
recalls the account of the “rival poet” in Sonnet 86, who is “by
spirits taught to write/Above a mortal pitch”, by “that affable
familiar ghost/Which nightly gulls him with intelligence”. It is the
spirits of Dante and Shakespeare who teach Eliot to write above
mortal pitch in this passage.
 
 
            In the uncertain hour before the morning
               Near the ending of interminable night
               At the recurrent end of the unending
            After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
               Had passed below the horizon of his homing
               While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
            Over the asphalt where no other sound was
               Between three districts whence the smoke arose
               I met one walking, loitering and hurried
            As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
               Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
 
The run-on character of these lines, which move us along just as
the dawn wind sweeps the dead leaves, the smoke and the ghostly
figure, matches in a way the propulsive effect of Dante’s rhyme-
scheme. But Eliot seems to be aiming for an effect of movement
that is stalled or erased; the ghost is both “loitering” and
“hurried”. The passage is in the same key as the Dantean line in
The Waste Land: “I had not thought death had undone so many”.
Eliot is conjuring up the realm of the ghostly by deliberately
writing a dead kind of verse that moves forward evenly using
alternating vowel lengths rather than accents. To deliberately
make his lines bloodless was a dangerous strategy, for the
evocation of emptiness can become merely empty, in lines such as
“Over the asphalt where no other sound was”. It is only when the
ghost launches into a Yeatsian tirade about old age that the verse
comes to life. The lines could be taken as another form of ritual
dance, its rhythms stilling the mind to prepare it for perception of
the supernatural.
    The hallucination known as autoscopie provides a
psychological base for tales of encounter with one’s “double”.
Shelley saw his own image on one or two occasions, and wrote
beautiful lines on the subject in Prometheus Unbound:
 
       Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more.
 
These lines are discussed five times in Charles William’s novel
Descent into Hell, published (in 1937) and republished (in 1965)
by Eliot’s firm, Faber and Faber, and they are quoted in Act III of
The Cocktail Party. They lie in the background of lines such as
“Between two worlds become much like each other” here.
 
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: “What! are you here?”
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming…
 
Their encounter has elements of ritual dance: “We trod the
pavement in a dead patrol.” Is the scene another instance of
autoscopie? Is Eliot communing with his projected ideal self as
Poet? Poets may form a creative brotherhood across the ages, but
there is rivalry between them as well, even fear, or what Harold
Bloom dubbed “the anxiety of influence”. The greeting, “What,
are you here?” is brittle, uneasy, recalling a similar encounter in a
Dantean London gloom (this time of fog not twilight) in The
Waste Land: “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying:
‘Stetson!/You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/That
corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to
sprout?’”Both scenes are modelled on Dante’s encounter with
Brunetto Latini (his guardian and mentor, but also a rival poet) in
Inferno XV. To hear Dante’s “Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?” behind
“What, are you here?” clarifies the respectful tone of the latter
question (since Dante calls his old master voi not tu) and produces
the ghostly effect of intertextuality of which Eliot, like Joyce and
Beckett, is a past master.
   The ghost does not want to be a dead weight, he kicks the pail
of past theory away, very much in the spirit of Yeats, leaving the
younger poet to find his uncharted way:
 
             Last season’s fruit is eaten
            And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
            For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
 
He lectures instead on what Eliot saw as the quintessential
Yeatsian theme, “old age”, echoing Yeats’s idea that the soul
“dreams back” over its life after death, but transferring that notion
to the this-worldly realm of old age, which the younger poet, his
creative task accomplished, must now face:
      
            Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
               To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
               First, the cold friction of expiring sense…
            Second, the conscious impotence of rage
               At human folly, and the laceration
               Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
            And last, the rending pain of re-enactmet
              Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
              Of motives late revealed...
            From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
               Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
               Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.
 
Yeats, whose body, at the time Eliot was writing, lay in
Roquebrune, France, buried there in January 1939. Eliot paid
glowing tribute to him in the first annual Yeats lecture at the
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in June 1940. The body was brought back
to Ireland only in September 1948, long after “Little Gidding”.
   Unlike Gerontion, Eliot has found a guiding ghost who provides
his mind with “aftersight and foresight” as he faces into old age.
He poet has already declared that “Old men ought to be
explorers” (“East Coker V”), taking up a dictum of Beethoven,
the patron saint of all writers of Quartets. Old age, for all its
disillusion and debility, will be a further stage in the lifelong
quest. Old age is evoked just as chillingly here as in
“Gerontion” (“I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and
touch”) but its agonies are a “gift” in more than an ironic sense.
The triple agony of physical decay, impotent “rage at human
folly” and “shame at motives late revealed”, can itself become the
“refining fire” in which the “exasperated spirit” learns to move
graciously, “like a dancer”. The ghost’s message transforms the
worst aspects of old age into gifts. This is good news, not sour
disillusionment. The phrase “refining fire” translates Dante’s “Poi
s’ascose nel foco che li affina” (Purgatorio XXVI), quoted at the
end of The Waste Land and in the accompanying note. Fire is the
dominant motif of “Little Gidding”, the word occurring fifteen
times—physical fire or sunlight (six references), Pentecostal
tongues of fire (two), purgatorial fire (three) that releases us from
the fire of passions (two) and that becomes the heavenly fire of
charity (two).
  
 
Adapted from Renaissance Bulletin 38 (2012):27-45. (The
Renaissance Institute, Tokyo.)