ONE of the penalties of greatness as a writer is that, sooner or later, every which is not physically destroyed every intemperate letter, every diary entry, dirty poem or juvenile draft will turn up in an impressive volume with full scholarly paraphernalia. We can't know if Eliot assumed when, in 1922, he gave John Quinn a leather bound notebook containing early poems, that he was submitting it for posthumous publication. We do know that when Quinn died in 1924 and the notebook apparently went astray, its loss didn't much pain Eliot since he thought the poems in it "unpublishable". With the notebook were a number of loose leaves containing bawdy verses and a number of poems which were later published. Christopher Ricks gathers and presents this material with meticulous scholarship which adds much to our understanding of Eliot's methods.
To read the textual annotations and commentaries which form the greater hulk of the book is to be plunged into the tradition as Eliot encountered, absorbed and plundered it, and to realise, again, how consciously he applied himself to his influences, "the influences," he says in a passage reproduced here, "which first introduce one to oneself". The notes for the first four lines alone of "First Caprice in North Cambridge", for instance, refer us to Henry James, Verlaine, Arthur Symons, John Davidson, Tennyson and Milton.
In the famous formulation, good poets steal rather than borrow, but the targets of the theft are as important as the act itself. As he introduced himself to himself', Eliot sought his influences in poets remote in time or language. Chief among the early influences, and constantly hovering beneath the notebook poems, is Jules Laforgue, from whom Eliot learned "the poetic possibilities of my own speech. The main lesson Laforgue taught him was "that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic".
In the "caprices" set in North Cambridge and Montparnasse, or in pieces such as "Interlude in London", "Silence", or "Easter Sensations of April", Eliot resolutely cultivates the unpoetic depersonalised cityscapes not so much realised as gestured at, all alleys, gutters and indifferent wind. In all of the poems humans tend to be perceived from a great distance as they perform acts of ritualised meaningless. "The ladies who are interested it Assyrian art/Gather in the hall of the British museum" "The lately of the porcelain department/Smiles at the world through a set of False teeth" "The little negro girl who lives across the alley/Brings back a red geranium from church/She repeats her little formulae of God."
Poem after poem toys with Lalorguean clowns, marionettes, poses and attitudes, and sighs out a youthful jadedness. "The departs with a jeeble smile/Into the indifferent" leaving the poet feeling "like the ghost of youth/At the undertakers' ball". Chilly, provisional, self conscious, the poems may not add much to our estimate of Eliot, but they show clearly what a consistent, deliberate and neurotic poet he was from the start. The characteristic images, the remote, ironic stratagems, the sexual anxiety above all, the characteristic mannered and mandarin tone, are all deployed, patiently awaiting their occasion.
His letters of the period show that Eliot himself was perfectly aware that he was marking time, slowly putting in place the framework of dramatic detachment and poised uncertainty the later work would build on. One of the letters Ricks quotes, to Conrad Aiken, shows a shrewd self awareness. "The stuff I sent you is not good, is very forced in execution, though the idea was right, I think". One of the most remarkable pieces is "The Love Song of St Sebastian", which reinvents the saint and gay icon as a heterosexual lover revelling in erotic masochism. "I would flog myself until I bled/And hour after hour of prayer/And torture and delight/Until my blood should ring the lamp/And glisten in the light." Eliot worried about its morbidity, wondering "whether he had better knock it off for a while".
Suppressed sexual desire pervades these poems, as it does "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", the one achieved poem in the notebook. "Prufrock" gives a character, a situation and an urgency to the props Eliot juggles with in the others, and one advantage of the notebook is that it allows us to eavesdrop on its development. Eliot paused after seventy lines and produced "Prufrock's Pervigilium", a forty line poem from which just the opening three lines ("Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets/And seen the smoke which rises from the pipes/Of lonely' men it? shirtsleeves leaning out of windows") and the two lines from near the end ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas . .
survive in the final version. What Eliot jettisoned were lines in which Prufrock too explicitly, and too personally, answers his own questions. The final version rescues Prufrock from the analysts couch and propels him outward into the just about exteriorised world where Eliot's magnificently strange poems take place.