Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006
pages 32-34 | 4652 words
Hyacinth Boy
Mark Ford
- T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet by James E. Miller
Pennsylvania State, 468 pp, £29.95, August 2005, ISBN 0 271 02681 2
- The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey
Yale, 270 pp, $35.00, April 2005, ISBN 0 300 09743 3
- Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ by Lawrence Rainey
Yale, 203 pp, £22.50, May 2005, ISBN 0 300 10707 2
Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like Hart had the delusion that Eliot was homosexual.’
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[*] 1216 pp., £19.99, March 2005, 0 631 20449 0.
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Letters
Vol. 28 No. 20 · 19 October 2006
From Evert Sprinchorn
T.S. Eliot’s ‘hyacinth girl’, mentioned by Mark Ford (LRB, 21 September), brings to mind the hyacinth girl in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata (1907), where she stands for death and desire as she does in Eliot. In The Waste Land, when the narrator sees her, he was ‘neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence.’ In The Ghost Sonata, when the hyacinth girl dies, ‘pure white light pours into the room.’ In both works, Christian and Buddhist elements are mingled; and, like The Waste Land, Strindberg’s play is a melange of allusions to other works – Goethe, Heine, Wagner, nursery rhyme etc. Strindberg called it the ‘mosaic technique’, and he seems to have invented it.
Did Eliot read Strindberg? He was in Germany in 1914 and 1915, when Strindberg was the most discussed dramatist. The younger generation regarded him as the incarnation of the modern conscience. In 1949, on the occasion of Strindberg’s centenary, Eliot sent a letter to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, in which he said that he had got to know some of Strindberg’s plays when he was young and impressionable.
Evert Sprinchorn
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
