T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets to take cities seriously. By the time Eliot published his first collection of poetry in 1917 he was living in London, and it is often London that provides the focus for his poetic eye. Eliot was from St Louis, USA, and he had studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne, before going to finish his PhD at Oxford in 1914. He hated Oxford though, deeming it provincial and the university faculty to be dully predictable and tasteless. He soon came to spend as much time in London as possible and the city filled his imagination.
For Eliot, London was not simply a city; it was the city. It contained multitudes: symbolising both the heart of the literary world in which he desperately wanted to belong (and soon would) and the decadent state of a Western civilization. In Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), it was the latter, envisaged as an ‘Unreal City’, barely holding together the fragmented and moribund lives of its post-war and apparently post-religious populace. However, in the mellowed imagination of Eliot’s later children’s poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), London’s leafy, genteel streets are a playground for Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, Bustopher Jones, and Cat Morgan.
When I think of Eliot’s London though, I think of the young Eliot – he was just 26 when he moved to London — wandering the streets as a stranger uncertain of his future. The first poem in his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), is titled ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and it focuses on one such wanderer. Prufrock walks the ‘half-deserted’ backstreets of the city at night in an ecstasy of unrequited love. He is a flaneur – a wanderer in the city who watches its people and takes in the atmosphere — drawn to the dark underside of the city which contrasts starkly with the bourgeois interiors in which he is more at home. To be precise, Eliot’s poem focuses on a flaneur but it is not a poem about being a flaneur. Rather, it is a poem, at least in part, about a flaneur who is not walking the city streets. The poem begins with these lines:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit. (1-12)
Eliot’s repetition of the arrested entreaty (‘Let us go’) along with the jarring metaphor (‘etherised’ – meaning to be artificially rendered unconscious) in Line 3 indicate Prufrock’s inability to go out with gay abandon into the streets that so compel him with another person: ‘Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere’ to borrow a line from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Sharing his night time walks through the city is a fantasy that Prufrock can never realise. We know that Prufrock is a flaneur when alone because Eliot offers a tantilising glimpse at this side of his life, as Prufrock imagines how he might address his beloved:
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?… (70-2)
Perhaps to experience the tawdry and erotic sights of London’s night time backstreets with his would-be lover would simply be too intimate or perhaps he wants to put her on a pedestal above such scenes as Soho has to offer. Either way, Prufrock takes refuge instead in the mannered meetings with her ‘over the taking of a toast and tea’, never daring to tell her about the scenes of narrow streets at dusk that haunt his imagination. In Eliot’s companion poem to ‘Prufrock’, ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, the title character also fantasises about initiating a new freedom with her unnamed lover out in the streets:
— Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments,
Discuss the late events,
Correct out watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks. (36-40)
Stifled both by awkward English tea ceremonies and her illness, such an adventure is rendered as unrealisable in ‘Portrait’ as it is ‘Prufrock’. Whilst the streets offer the longed-for possibility of sexual liberation and intimacy, the poetic eye is held inside the apartment, in stasis.
In unpublished sections of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Eliot’s narrative does trace Prufrock’s wanderings alone in the streets of London:
In the fan of light spread out by the drugstore on the corner
Then I have gone at night through narrow streets,
Where evil houses leaning all together
Pointed a ribald finger at me in the darkness.
Whispering all together, chuckled at me in the darkness. (13-17)
These lines, from a deleted section titled ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, imbue the street with a menacing life of its own. Here, personification – typical of Eliot’s evocations of the London streets — reflects Prufrock’s lascivious guilt: he is scolded by the ‘ribald finger’ for his fascination with these houses of prostitution. Perhaps this section was excised by Eliot to distance himself from the Decadent verses of those such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, which often focused on the flaneur’s impressions of the city streets. But perhaps Eliot’s primary desire was to remove his readers’ means of escape from the poem’s claustrophobic interior spaces. We, like Prufrock and the eponymous lady of ‘Portrait of a Lady’, desperately want to escape the formalities and patterns of life inside to go out into the streets, to become a flaneur in a city which is teeming with possibilities for liberation from convention and decorum.