James Wood on what Tolstoy teaches us about war

If no one can understand war, then simply to fear for one’s brother, and to be horrified, is precisely to understand what can be understood of war.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" T.S. Eliot

Prufrock has troubled (and delighted) readers since its publication in 1915. At once, a beginning and a high point of modernist poetry, the poem has puzzled readers in its interpretative difficulty, evading narrative, history, and metaphor.
The poem is a stream of consciousness, verse-libre monologue, in its allusions situating itself in a tradition that goes back through Browning, Marvel and Milton, all the way back to Shakespearean and Chaucerian soliloquies.

The couplet in the poem that works as a key, unlocking the reading of the poem, is this:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas. This is perfect metonymy: the claws standing in for, and creating in the mind of the reader, the whole crab (or other sea creature). This couplet enacts in microcosm the method of the whole poem.
The poem works as an extended exercise in metonymy, in which the whole (Prufrock’s life and consciousness) is carefully built up piece by piece. There is no narrative, there is no metaphor: Prufrock does not mean anything in that sense. In the whole poem of 131 lines (not counting the epigraph), there are only three similes: the patient etherised upon a table (at once highlighting and demolishing Edwardian notions of appropriate poetic simile); streets like a tedious argument; and the magic lantern, all images of modernity (and medicine), which are embedded, perhaps uneasily, among the old world, high European tone. Apart from these three, metaphor and simile, the stock weaponry in the poetic armoury, are absent. This is perhaps the most significant way in which Eliot signals his departure from the Georgians, and announces a modernist presence in English verse.

Although the poem appears to ramble aimlessly, it is in fact highly structured.
After the two opening stanzas, we have two stanzas which begin, And indeed there will be time… the two introductory stanzas and the two time stanzas are knitted together by the couplet: In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo. Then follow three stanzas describing, with a rather world-weary air (which seems to be assumed and quite hollow) Prufrock’s experiences with women, focusing again on the metonymic eyes and arms. These three stanzas all have the refrain: And/So how should I presume? The so and and variation is a common device in the poem (and in Eliot generally): subtle aural variations on a theme, syntactical echoes: To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

Then in the centre of the poem, is the key to its reading: the stanza about Prufrock’s rambles through the streets and the couplet about the claws. (In this central section, originally there was a 38 line section entitled Prufrock’s Pervigilium, in which Prufrock describes his insomnia in nightmare terms, incorporating images and devices from surrealism and nightmare. However, this section was excised by Eliot.)
Then follows two stanzas of highly repetitious material: would it have been worth it after all? in which key words and phrases echo each other, often inverted or with subtle variations. The poem finally dissolves into fragments describing Prufrock’s fear of ageing and images of the sea, perhaps the only real metaphor in the poem: chthonic chaos from which all things originated and into which we all return.

The poem is full of mnemonic devices borrowed from Homer: repetitions, inversions: That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it, at all. followed in the next stanza by That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all, and palindromes or mirror structures: at times indeed almost ridiculous/Almost at times the Fool.

What does the poem tell us then about Prufrock? The metonymy delineates two fields of knowledge: things Prufrock tells us about himself, either wittingly or unwittingly; and things we can infer about him from reading between the lines.

What does Prufrock tell us about himself?

He doesn’t use his first name.
He is self-consciously balding.
He is aware of encroaching old age.
He dresses carefully and formally, and is acutely aware of the social meanings invested in costume.
He is rather repressed.
He is aware of how others might see him, and this perhaps prevents him from more spontaneity.
He is well educated, and his mind is littered with the detritus of his reading; Marvell, Hesiod, Dante, Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Donne; this literary flotsam, in the words of Susan Sonntag, expands his consciousness, mediating his feelings about the world, informing the rhythm and pace of his syntax and choice of vocabulary.
He is slightly obsessive, and cannot ‘let things go’, especially words.
He has a metaphysical turn of mind, not just in his reading, but also in his speculations.
He has a sweet tooth.
He knows that he is terribly indecisive.
He is modest to the extent of timidity, avoiding the limelight, an umbratile creature.
He is highly sensitive to the impression he makes on others, and often fears that he cuts a ridiculous figure, especially with the servants. Nonetheless, he has a highly developed sense of amour propre.
He is capable of a sudden flare of deep, internal, hidden, bitter sarcasm, ostensibly directed at how others fit him into their stereotypes, but really more directed at how he so easily falls into them.
He has not had much success with women, perhaps because of his timidity.
He is haunted by a specific incident of miscommunication with a woman.
He is a man who feels more at home among the appurtenances of the drawing room.
He lives, most likely alone, in a big city.
He is a flaneur.
He has an ‘imaginary friend.’

What can we infer about Prufrock?

He is composing a poem, trying out possible lines with subtle variations to test their effect: the yellow fog that rubs its back. upon the window panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle upon the window panes.
He is on his way to a brothel, but his natural timidity may perhaps prevent him from entering it, as it has prevented him from entering it before, even at the last moment: time to turn back and descend the stair…
His sexuality is rather Victorian; he is excited by the banal parts of the body: arms, hair, perfume.
His sexual experience appears to be largely limited to prostitutes, some of whom he picks up on streets and takes to the poorer areas of town, treating them to dinner in sawdust restaurants and taking them to one night cheap hotels, others he meets in high class brothels, where the women are educated and talk entertainingly about culture. in the room... However, he is highly evasive about this.
He likes cats, and (tritely?) sees nature in terms of animals.
True love and companionship, especially with a woman, has largely avoided him: I have heard the mermaids singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me.

He perhaps aspires to be a Des Essientes, a Von Aschenbach or a Proust, but his one Americanism, a slip of the tongue, gives the game away, that he is really a Henry James, or a Henry Adams, or indeed, a T.S. Eliot.

"Underworld" Don DeLillo

This enormous sprawling book is the depository of the American century: cold war paranoia, the bomb, drugs, the counter culture, the FBI, portraits of American cities no less realistic or detailed or atmospheric than Joyce’s Dublin: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York. Lenny Bruce, jello, the Zaprusker tape, softball memorabilia. There are many memorable characters, both major and minor, whose connections with each other all gradually are made clear, and many memorable historical events: the Democratic convention riots in 1968, the North east blackout in the early 60s (reading which puts me in mind of descriptions of the chaos on the streets during the attack on the World Trade Center). Two themes underpin its structure: garbage and softball.
The opening section about the famous softball game -which also coincided with the testing of the Russian bomb- is minutely described and extraordinarily fascinating. The stolen softball makes its reappearance again and again throughout the book as a linking device. (Proust’s little phrase, Homer’s epithets). The theme of garbage runs throughout the book: it is the profession of the main character, and the nuclear waste issue is also highlighted.
The language of the novel is lucid, clear and DeLillo has a habit of repeating mundane phrases or sentences to show how the mind treads water in the quotidian. However, this does sometimes have the effect of padding, and the book is rather too long.
The impression of reading it, however, is one of coldness. This is a cold book, compared with say the warmth of other American giants: Bellow, Pynchon, Gaddis. Two reasons for this I think: one is that DeLillo is not a comic writer. Bellow and Pynchon especially achieve their humanity and warmth through a profoundly ludic vision of life, whereas I have a sneaking suspicion from reading Underworld that DeLillo takes himself and his American century rather too seriously.
Second, for a book that aims to capture the entirety of the American experience, there is a curious omission: the literature of the century. Bellow, by comparison, gets his depth by his reverence for and passionate commitment and enthusiasm for the literature of the past, whether he includes it in his work, refers to it in passing or merely echoes it, as does Pynchon. This book however, seems to exist in the vacuum of popular culture: Lenny Bruce is the closest we get to a cultural artifact, or the artist Sax, who deals in conceptual or visual art. The word here is stripped of its high cultural associations and becomes an ahistorical democratic object, equally useful for dealing with waste or describing sport. DeLillo’s attempts at a beauty of prose (he likes to close chapters with sentences that have a momentarily arresting rhetorical echo to them) seem a bit perfunctory, and on close examination come across as inauthentic.
There is no doubt though, that it is the Americans who have written the great carpet-bag novels of the 20th century. The Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy of our time are not British, or even Indian, but American: Bellow, DeLillo, Pynchon and Gaddis. Beside these giants, contemporary British novelists read like lukewarm tea.

Fragment 309

Barthes writes: the alphabet is euphoric: no more anguish of schema, no more rhetoric of development, no more twisted logic, no more dissertations!
In poetry, the alphabet often acts as a subterranean ordering principle. The alphabet creates order precisely in that place in the verse where the other schema of versification (those which usually come into play at the beginnings or ends of lines): rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, image and meaning, may not reach; when the sequence of key words within a line threatens to become arbitrary.

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
In this line from Prufrock, decisions comes before revisions, because d comes before r, not for any more ostensible reason based on rhyme or similarity of rhythm or internal logic of meaning.

Wild men, who caught and sang the sun in flight (from Dylan Thomas’s villanelle)
caught comes first because c comes before s.

This ‘temptation’ of the alphabet is a perfect mnemonic tool, euphoric because it releases the memory from the schema of versification, replacing them with the utter simplicity of letters in a sequence.

Durrell on the poets

How shall we go about it? Keats the word drunk searched for resonance among vowel sounds which might give him an echo of his inner self. He sounded the empty coffin of his early death with patient knuckles, listening to the dull resonances given off by his certain immortality. Byron was offhand with English, treating it as a master to servant; but the language, being no lackey, grew up like tropic lianas between the cracks of his verse, almost strangling the man. He really lived, his life was truly imaginary; under the figment of the passional self, there is a mage, though he himself was not aware of the fact. Donne stopped upon the exposed nerve, jangling the whole cranium. Truth should make one wince, he thought. He hurts us, fearing his own facility; despite the pain of the stopping, his verse must be chewed to rags. Shakespeare makes all nature hang its head. Pope in an anguish of method, like a constipated child, sandpapers his surfaces to make them slippery for our feet. Great stylists are those who are least certain of their effects. The secret lack in their matter haunts them without knowing it! Eliot puts a cool chloroform pad upon the spirit too tightly braced by the information it has gathered. His honesty of measure and resolute bravery to return to the headsman’s axe is a challenge to us all: but where is the smile? He induces awkward sprains when we are trying to dance! He has choosen greyness rather than light, and he shares his portion with Rembrandt. Blake and Whitman are awkward brown paper parcels full of vessels borrowed from the temple which tumble all over the place when the string breaks. Longfellow heralds the age of invention, for he first thought out the mechanical piano, you pedal, it recites. Lawrence was a limb of the genuine oak-tree, with the needed girth and span. Why did he show them that it mattered, and so make himself vulnerable to their arrows? Auden also always talks. He has manumitted the colloquial…