Shifty High Church Pamphleteer
On T.S. Eliot, "royalism" and Philip Larkin
While I was taking some time off in August, my contributor’s copy of the book above arrived, like a chunky postcard. The cover shows T.S. Eliot in holiday mood — on the beach, growing old, trousers rolled, and possibly cocking an ear to mermaids singing. My chapter, however, was very much not written in holiday mood. It’s called “T.S. Eliot as Public Intellectual”, and it looks at his career as a conservative cultural commentator. As someone who enjoys writing about poets and poems, but not so much conservative cultural commentators, I must admit I took the job on as a professional challenge. I spent 2020 as an online head of department, running a large academic school during lockdown while also overseeing a small home school, often taking place on the other side of my laptop. By 2021, I genuinely wondered if I could remember how to do research. So I jumped in at the deep end — otherwise known as the eight volumes of Eliot’s Complete Prose — and began to follow certain words. One was “intellectual”, a term he actively disliked (he preferred the old-fashioned “man of letters”). Another was “royalism”, which is the focus of the edited extract below. As you’ll see, I didn’t actually manage to make it through the whole essay without discussing at least one poem in passing…
This Anglo-Catholic classicist-royalist stuff you import from English and want to call sociology
Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (1975)
In the years after The Waste Land (1922) was published, T.S. Eliot began to chafe at his reputation as a revolutionary aesthete, and to develop a sense of himself as an “old-fashioned Tory”. In 1928, as his influential first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), was reissued, Eliot felt that a status update was needed. Stung by the suggestion from his old Harvard tutor, Irving Babbitt, that he was being too secretive — a private intellectual — about his recent conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, he resolved, as Babbitt advised, to “come out into the open”. The result was the notorious preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928), in which he tried to “disassociate myself from certain conclusions which have been drawn from […] The Sacred Wood” with the statement that his “general point of view” was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Declining to define these terms, Eliot instead pointed to “the small volumes which I have in preparation: The School of Donne; The Outline of Royalism; and The Principles of Modern Heresy”. Readers of the Complete Prose looking for The School of Donne will find a first draft in Eliot’s 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, posthumously published as The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993); After Strange Gods (1934), meanwhile, with its subtitle “A Primer of Modern Heresy,” was the closest Eliot came to making good — or, in light of his subsequent decision to suppress it, bad — on the third title promised. Where, though, is the political wing of the trilogy, The Outline of Royalism?
As a political position in England in 1928, royalism, Eliot conceded, was “at present without definition”. It never acquires one in the Complete Prose. But fishing for kings in these volumes is one way of tracing what Denis Donoghue calls the “essentially mythical” principle that informed Eliot’s vision of social unity as a matter of symbol and ritual, just as it informed the “mythical method” of The Waste Land, which mapped modernity onto anthropological theories of Arthurian legend.
[…]
At the heart of T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is a tactical accommodation of a liberal idea Eliot had long deprecated in Matthew Arnold: “that Culture […] is something more comprehensive than religion”. In a famous passage, Eliot’s essay in social criticism inverts Arnold’s proposition to argue instead that culture is “lived religion” and includes “all the characteristic activities and interests of a people”: his illustrative list runs from “Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August” via football, pubs, cheese, cabbage, and beetroot to nineteenth-century churches and “the music of Elgar”.
The first four are all British sporting fixtures associated with the Royal Family, while Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” from his Coronation Ode (1902), became a permanent part of the Last Night of the Proms when it was broadcast on BBC television for the first time in 1947. Like the post-war British monarchy itself — which consciously presented itself as a homely, outdoorsy family — Eliot’s egalitarian, cabbages-and-kings list naturalizes royalism within the ritual framing of annual national life, having moved over two decades from a reactionary to a quietist position. As he wrote in the preface to the 1962 edition, “I should not now, for instance, call myself a ‘royalist’ tout court, as I once did: I would say that I am in favour of retaining the monarchy in every country in which a monarchy still exists”.
Philip Larkin once quoted Eliot’s evocative mélange of British (or rather, English) life in an essay on John Betjeman, suggesting that the “cultural inclusiveness” of Betjeman’s popular poetic Englishness had more in common with Eliot than literary critics might believe. The same might be said of Larkin’s own poetry. In 1954, he wrote “Church Going”, a poem which expresses an atheist’s nostalgia for the community that empty church buildings once symbolized. The verbal parallels between the argument of the poem and Eliot’s little-known pamphlet “The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England Today” (1952) are striking:
There are, I am sure, people outside of the Church who would gladly see them preserved simply as ancient monuments of historical and artistic interest with turnstiles and admission charges (Eliot)
… wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show (Larkin)
The increasingly popular midnight corporate communion at Christmas (Eliot)
Some Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh (Larkin)
… as far as people do come, the cathedral has the responsibility of satisfying the best taste, correcting the imperfect, and educating that which is unformed (Eliot)
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in (Larkin)
Was Eliot’s ephemeral talk to the Friends of Chichester Cathedral in June 1951 an inspiration for “Church Going”? As a university librarian, as well as a regular visitor to English cathedrals, Larkin was well placed to be aware of its publication. The resemblance, however, more generally suggests how the pragmatic concerns of Eliot’s cultural criticism — caricatured in 1956 by Bernard Bergonzi as those of a “shifty High Church pamphleteer” — informed a dominant tone of intellectual realism about the rituals of national life in post-war English literature. As A.S. Byatt wrote in her novel The Virgin in the Garden (1978), describing the “cultural ecstasy” induced in one character by the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II:
Eliot had said, and she remembered, that the “English unbeliever conformed to the practices of Christianity on the occasions of birth, death, and the first venture into matrimony…” Now a whole Nation was conforming to an ancient national Christian rite.
NOTES
You can browse the full Table of Contents for Eliot Now here:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eliot-now-9781350173927/
The one book featuring T.S. Eliot that I did read on my holidays was Robert Archambeau’s Alice B. Toklas is Missing (2023), a delightfully light and witty mystery novel set in modernist Paris, with some beautiful period detail. “Tom Eliot” carries a large wheel of French cheese around for much of the action:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toklas-Missing-Robert-Archambeau-author/dp/164603385X