THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the religious-historical associations of the chapel at Little Gidding were given a particular urgency by the threat of
wartime dissolution and destruction. The houses in East Coker, ‘rise and fall, crumble, are extended, | Are removed,
destroyed, restored’. In ‘Little Gidding’, where in an epiphanic moment history seems to be ‘now and England’, the
idea of change and decay is reinforced by veiled references to the Blitzkrieg. From the uneasy, smoky silence after a
London air raid, ‘after the dark dove with the flickering tongue | Had passed below the horizon of his homing’ there
emerges the ‘familiar compound ghost’ of a poet. The ghost is both Dantean and Yeatsian, historical and ahistorical,
an individual voice and the compounding of many voices. His voice speaks of ‘the rending pain of re-enactment’, a
pain which also informs the references to the divisions of seventeenth-century politics, religion, and literature which
Eliot associates with the disruption of Nicholas Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding. This inherited pain of human
sinfulness, the poem proclaims, is assuaged only by a redemption from time and by a renewal and transfiguration of
history ‘in another pattern’.
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The mystical longing to be free from time and the perception of eternity in moments of vision which run
thematically through Four Quartets also characterizes the experience of Archbishop Becket in the hieratic drama,
Murder in the Cathedral (1935). It is the most successful, if the least experimental, of Eliot’s six verse-dramas largely
because of the ritual formality of its structure and the set-piece neo-classical confrontations between Becket, his
tempters, and his murderers. Its forerunner, the church pageant The Rock (1934), is, by comparison, arch in its verse,
lifeless in its dialogue, and embarrassingly clumsy in its presentation of society. Both plays stemmed from Eliot’s
long-held ambition to renew poetic drama by exploring what he recognized as ‘a kind of doubleness in the action, as
if it took place on two planes at once’. When in The Family Reunion (1939) he attempted to inject the modern middleclass,
‘well-made’ West End play with a portentous dose of Aeschylean doom, the effect was verbally dense rather
than theatrically exhilarating. The verse ‘comedies’, The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and
The Elder Statesman (1959), were politely received in their time but, largely due to their somewhat laboured attempts
to interfuse Greek myths with modern types and conditions, have met with only limited success on the stage since. All
of them lack the jerky energy and effervescence which gives the unfinished Sweeney Agonistes its individuality. This
fragment of ‘an Aristophanic Melodrama’, toyed with from the mid-1920s and published unperformed in 1932, to
some extent parallels Yeats’s contemporary experiments with ritual, masks, dance, and music (though Eliot consulted
Arnold Bennett with reference to its potential dramatic impact). It is shot through with the syncopated rhythms of jazz
and the bravura skittishness of the English music-hall (which Eliot so admired), and combines incantatory choruses
with witty but nervous dialogue. It is an ambiguous, restless, death-haunted attempt to create a new drama appropriate
to a broken and essentially iconoclastic age. Its inventiveness was not fully appreciated until a new age of theatrical
experiment began in the late 1950s.
The dissonant clash of avant-garde applause and conservative disapproval which greeted the work of T. S. Eliot
and James Joyce in the 1920s was to some degree symptomatic of an age that was acutely uncertain of its cultural
bearings. Although their writings are essentially more frivolous in style and intent, the novels of Ronald Firbank
(1886-1926) and the early poetry of Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) also typify the often simply naughty ‘Modernist’
interplay of tradition and individual talent. Both writers set out to provoke tight bourgeois literary conventions and to
explore the creative potential of the impressionistic verbal mosaic. Firbank’s last five completed novels — Valmouth
(1919), Santal (1921), The Flower beneath the Foot (1923), Sorrow in Sunlight (known as Prancing Nigger in
America) (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) — share a cosmopolitan brevity, a
poised wit, and a camply decorative prose style. Each has a contrived surface which serves both to conceal and to
reveal perfumed waves of eroticism. In Valmouth the residents of an ostensibly prim English watering-place are
manipulated, both physically and
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mentally, by a black masseuse, Mrs Yajnavalkya (who first appears ‘wreathed in smiles ... a sheeny handkerchief
rolled round and round her head, a loud-dyed petticoat and a tartan shawl’). In Cardinal Pirelli a Spanish prelate,
accused of unmentionable vices and unbecoming peccadilloes (including making the sign of the cross with his left
foot at meals) is forced by official disapproval into a far from chaste exile from his diocese. Firbank’s effects depend
upon an almost baroque play with lush adjectives, metaphors, and a provocative incongruity.
Edith Sitwell’s poems for the musical entertainment Façade (1922) struck the audiences at its first public
performances in 1923 as equally provocative and inordinately flippant. Her enterprise in planning Façade with the
composer William Walton was actively abetted by her younger brothers Osbert (1892-1969) and Sacheverell (b.
1897), the former a future poet, librettist, and novelist of some flair, the latter an innovative art-historian, essayist,
and travel-writer. Osbert Sitwell records in Laughter in the Next Room (1949), the fourth volume of his