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Orpheus in the Counting House: The Confidential Clerk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert A. Colby
Robert A. Colby*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1957 , pp. 791 - 802
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 12 Feb. 1954, p. 22. In all fairness it should be pointed out that the performances of the leading roles, with the exception of Ina Claire's radiant Lady Elizabeth, did not help the fortunes of the New York production. The only drama critic who approached the play with any insight, to my knowledge, was Richard Hayes in Commonweal, 19 March 1954, p. 599.

2 I refer to the Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture of 21 Nov. 1950, This was subsequently published as Poetry and Drama (Harvard Univ. Press, 1951). See also “The Music of Poetry,” Partisan Rev., ix (Nov.-Dec. 1942), 463.

3 Since this essay was written, several articles have appeared which glance at The Con fidential Clerk incidentally to treating special aspects of Eliot's dramas as a whole. William Arrowsmith in his “The Comedy of T. S. Eliot,” Eng. Inst. Essays, 1954, pp. 159–171, concerns himself with the “secular conversion of Christianity” represented in the plays. He is primarily concerned here with demonstrating Eliot's inferiority to Euripides in the dramatic presentation of dual reality. D. W. Harding in his “Progression of Theme in Eliot's Modem Plays,” Kenyon Rev., xviii (Summer 1956), pp. 337–360, discusses The Confidential Clerk briefly as the latest development in Eliot's dramatic preoccupation with “the experiences of separation and loneliness endured by the person who accepts a vocation.” Francis Fergusson's stimulating essay “Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder and Eliot,” Sewanee Rev., lxiv (Autumn 1956), 544–573, seems to me to conceive the allegory of The Confidential Clerk too narrowly. The chapter on the play in Grover Smith's The Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956) is disappointingly superficial.

4 All quotations from The Confidential Clerk are from the first American ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954).

5 “The Three Senses of ‘Culture’ ” (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) Ch. i, pp. 24–25.

6 Choruses from The Rock, II, in Collected Poems, 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 188.

7 Poetry and Drama, pp. 43–44.

8 See the beautiful commentary of Hilda Doolittle in her translation of Passages from Euripides' Ion (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1937).

9 “The Music of Poetry,” p. 465.

10 Poetry and Drama, p. 44.

11 “For the business of a poet is to express the culture in which he lives, and to which he belongs, not to express aspiration towards one which is not yet incarnate” (“The Social Function of Poetry,” Adelphi, xxi, July–Sept. 1945, 154). Eliot illustrates with Virgil, Lucretius, and Dante.

12 The Family Reunion, Pt. I, Scene ii, Pt. It, Scene ii. One reason for the relatively static nature of this drama as compared with the later ones is that here we get only the “after” without the “before.”

13 Poetry and Drama, p. 44.