T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive

Abstract

T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive Nicholas Smart The final section of T. S. Eliot's early series "Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)" has been read as the student poet packing away mementoes from his summer vacation before embarking on his year abroad in Paris: Among the débris of the yearOf which the autumn takes its toll: –Old letters, programmes, unpaid billsPhotographs, tennis shoes, and more,Ties, postal cards, the mass that fillsThe limbo of a bureau drawer –Of which October takes its tollAmong the débris of the yearI find this headed "Bacarolle." (iv, 1–9)1 In his recent study of the poems in the Inventions of the March Hare notebook, Jayme Stayer observes a key moment of personal transition at work here: "While the speaker sifts the contents of a bureau drawer, the poem registers a more existential cleaning out."2 The poem's phrasing catches us off guard; these are not items "on which the autumn takes its toll," as the idiom might lead us to assume, but "of which." The preposition strikes us as curious, working to complicate our understanding of these objects which now appear as a form of payment, facilitating the speaker's progression beyond "October" and into the next stage of life. In Charles Baudelaire's "Spleen," which Christopher Ricks offers as a precursor to this passage, the débris represents concealed information; the drawer "cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau."3 But Eliot makes it more ambiguous. In "Goldfish," the "limbo" is associated not only with the potential revelation of secrets, but with the uncertain ontological status of the objects themselves. The bureau drawer encompasses different frames of time; some items belong to the past, "Old letters, programmes," "photographs," and "postal cards," some may have future use, "unpaid bills," "tennis shoes," "ties," [End Page 851] and yet their collected presence in the drawer also situates them in a subjunctive space. As long as the drawer remains closed, the objects are positioned out of time, waiting for the opportunity to emerge from their transactional "limbo." The "limbo of the bureau drawer" is, for Eliot, a theoretical space, but for those who collected his "débris" it was a highly practical term. Informing Donald Gallup that he had acquired two letters from his brother in which he and Pound discussed whether to prefix The Waste Land with "Gerontion," Henry Eliot conceded that "EP's letter is so peppered with obscene phrases that it won't do for general exhibition."4 In his role as curator of the Eliot Collection then at Eliot House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Henry looked for a way around: "TSE prohibited its inclusion in the Collection; but I think some kind of limbo might be instituted for such items."5 Since Eliot's death, many of his archives have been plagued by this kind of limbo, with scholars forced to wait out decades-long embargoes and restrictions imposed on access and quotation. In the initial gifting of copies and drafts of his work, however, Eliot proved comparatively amenable. When Henry Eliot began his Collection in 1936, he did so with the primary aim "of making available to students everything that his brother had written."6 The scope of its contents was intended to astound even the poet himself: "When you see this collection," Henry wrote in June 1938, "you will behold your whole past rising up before you. Diligent scholars will be able to confound you with things that you do not remember ever having written."7 As for Eliot himself, he conveyed skepticism concerning his brother's enterprise. He wrote to Gallup in December 1942: "I don't really take any interest in my own early editions and indeed I never even want to read anything I have written six months after publication."8 Privately, however, Eliot was more contemptuous. He referred to Gallup as a "pathetic young man," whose archival "fetish" gave him "the creeps."9 Henry's interest, meanwhile, was less puzzling, and more pitiful. "The thought of that collection," Eliot told Emily Hale, "and Henry's loving pains over it, has always been a distress...