Hey, people! If you have some free time, go to this awesome and kind of hilarious obituary of T.S. Eliot in the New York Times! (I was minding my own business, surfing the web, when I saw a link to this article. I was really confused at first because I didn't read the date of the obituary. Be not confused; it is merely an article they transferred to their online database.)
I took two sections in particular to be quite amusing. First, the one on tea:
"In that sojourn he lived in an undergraduate house near the Charles River and entertained students at least once a week at teas. The tea was always brewed and he poured with great delicacy, his long and tabescent fingers clasping the handle of the silver teapot. The quality of his tea, the excellence of the college-provided petit fours and the rippling flow of his conversation drew overflow crowds of students who sat on chairs, on the floor and on windowsills."As well as the one on Shakespeare:
"He had a strong dislike for most teaching of poetry, and he once recalled that he had been turned against Shakespeare in his youth by didactical instructors. "I took a dislike to 'Julius Caesar' which lasted, I am sorry to say, until I saw the film of Marlon Brando and John Gielgud, and a dislike to 'The Merchant of Venice' which persists to this day.'"
All humor aside, I thought this obituary was fascinating. I think it lends even further to our ideas of who Eliot was, and more so, how people saw him at the time of his death. Is he overly idealized? Is he misconstrued? I don't know; probably, at least from Doug's perspective. However, I do think that reading this obituary made Eliot seem more like a person than anything else I've read about him.
Thoughts? Opinions? Favorite part of the obituary? Least favorite?
I think the important thing to think about Eliot's self-understanding is that he, for the early part of his life, is really anti-establishment. Then as he grows in influence so does he attach himself to tradition. That doesn't mean there aren't hold-overs. I think that's what you're getting at and I totally agree, He makes himself really at home in academia, but there's still the young intellectual version of himself that he was interested in being or at least portraying throughout his life.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt he was a real person w/ real tastes, likes and dislikes. And, how we read his work certainly affects what sort of person we think he was. Treat him as another text.
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