20th century AD

Many of the works of the Ancients have become fragments; many works of the Moderns are so in their inception.

- Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum, Fragment 24

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

- T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"(1)

It has seemed natural to find a wide gulf separating the poet of The Waste Land from that defender of aristocracy who later described his views as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."(2) As many studies have shown, however, Eliot's writings exhibit a substantial continuity of conservative and reactionary beliefs from about 1914.(3) The aesthetics of the jagged and the juxtaposed that Pound and Eliot had adapted from T. E. Hulme also form part of this continuity.(4) Though its formal innovations appear "revolutionary," The Waste Land's aesthetics are of a piece with modernism's reactionary character and reflect the cultural politics of the British conservatism Eliot had adopted. The de-encrypting, digging up, and decoding of the poem's fragments and allusions - its dry rock and intertextual archaeology - also lead to familiar ground: Eliot's gravitation to the British empire as "home." Finally, The Waste Land may be seen as part of a British literary tradition of "reading the wreckage" that goes back at least to Edward Volney's Ruins (1791).

Eliot's and Pound's use of fragmentation is qualitatively different from that of Joyce, Woolf, and H.D. I do not argue that fragmentation is an inherently reactionary aesthetic technique. Indeed it was associated with a liberal politics for Volney and Shelley. However, Eliot's and Pound's techniques of interruption and layering take on an opposite political coloration when their primary effect is to block access by the uninitiated, and when the initiation process must actually precede the aesthetic experience of a "modern" consciousness of complexity and contradictoriness. To put it another way, the aesthetic goal of Eliot's and Pound's major works becomes didactic, whereas the goal of Joyce, Woolf, and H.D. appears to be more truly "experimental," in the sense that they try - successfully, in my estimation - to evoke and explore a modern human consciousness through an aesthetics of disruption. Some political ideology inheres in all aesthetic practice, and "modernism" contradicts itself here, as in many of its other aspects. But since Eliot's 1922 poem has been so often taken to typify modernist aesthetics, it is important that we notice the consistency between his politics and his chosen form, even if that form has other possible implications.

There is little doubt that Eliot's identification with right-wing Anglo-European culture matured long before The Waste Land was published. He had been attracted to reactionary politics when he encountered Charles Maurras's work in the aftermath of his temporary "conversion" to Bergsonism. Maurras had amplified French fears of racial degeneration through the Action Francaise, and his political agenda was later implemented by the Vichy government, leading to his eventual imprisonment for life as a traitor. As Peter Ackroyd points out, the Nouvelle Revue Francaise of March 1913, a publication Eliot would likely have read, described Maurras as "classique, catholique, monarchique," the trio Eliot would employ in his Oxford syllabus of winter 1916 and then later to describe himself (Ackroyd 41; cu. Schuchard). I agree with Kenneth Asher that "[T]he Maurrasien inheritance provided Eliot with a dominant intellectual framework that he retained throughout his life" and that Eliot's essay on Machiavelli in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) was actually a covert defense of Maurras (Asher 8, 54). Like Maurras, Eliot was drawn to the idea of a blooded aristocracy rather than an aristocracy of ability or wealth. Unlike Maurras, he came to understand that, in order to promote his cultural politics, he must veil his deepest beliefs and even present himself as consciously nonpolitical (see Asher 84 ff., 133).

Eliot was clearly thinking about how to gain acceptance in the British aristocracy from at least the time of his marriage in June 1915. In March of that year, he writes his cousin, Eleanor Hinkley, "Do tell Aunt Susie that the Miss Rhyss' are the most charming persons I have met in Oxford - certainly the most aristocratic," and in a chatty tone he goes on to lament that "a cultivated aristocracy is sadly to seek even in England, but God knows it is far better here than in our Slater-ised society." Samuel Slater was the (English-born) founder of the American cotton manufacturing industry. The desire to escape identification with such mercantile Americans and be accepted in an aristocratic realm even a debased one - seems to motivate Eliot's differentiation, in this same letter, of various Oxford and Cambridge acquaintances. He says he has met two Irishmen, who "rather raised my opinion of the race," and several Indians, whom he prefers to the English, though he reports that "Bertie" (Bertrand Russell) "says [Indians] give him the creeps." He ranks himself above the overserious Cambridge and Oxford students, the best of whom he compares to "the clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard; wide but disorderly reading, intense but confused thinking, and utter absence of background and balance and proportion. I should expect it to be accompanied by a philistine aristocracy" (Letters 91-92).