Cats -- How did a guy like TS Eliot write "Practical Cats?" Episode 16 (Cats 2 of 8)

TS Eliot is the author of Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats.  That’s a book of poems that will get transformed into one of the greatest broadway musicals of all time.  In fact, it might be the Broadway musical – it so shaped what a Broadway musical is that it’s changed the way the world thinks about musicals at all.

But that wasn’t the poetry that put TS Eliot on the map.  In fact, TS Eliot himself would have smash hits on Broadway during his lifetime…but none of them had anything to do with the poems or cats or anything other than his own, distant observations of his own failed marriage and his strange connection to very conservative religious beliefs.

And in the middle of all that, somehow, improbably, this guy has to write a children’s book about Cats.  

How did that happen?  What made TS Eliot tick, why did that result in a frightening move to the ugly right, and why was all that necessary for him to write Old Possum’s Practical Cats?  We’ll curl up on a couch and find a nice, comfortable beam of sunlight as we share this saga in this episode of THM.

Transcript

TS Eliot is the author of Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats.  That’s a book of poems that will get transformed into one of the greatest broadway musicals of all time.  In fact, it might be the Broadway musical – it so shaped what a Broadway musical is that it’s changed the way the world thinks about musicals at all.

But that wasn’t the poetry that put TS Eliot on the map.  In fact, TS Eliot himself would have smash hits on Broadway during his lifetime…but none of them had anything to do with the poems or cats or anything other than his own, distant observations of his own failed marriage and his strange connection to very conservative religious beliefs.

And in the middle of all that, somehow, improbably, this guy has to write a children’s book about Cats.  

How did that happen?  What made TS Eliot tick, why did that result in a frightening move to the ugly right, and why was all that necessary for him to write Old Possum’s Practical Cats?  We’ll curl up on a couch and find a nice, comfortable beam of sunlight as we share this saga in this episode of THM.

[Intro]

              Here’s what we’ve learned about TS Eliot in the last episode.  He was born in St. Louis and had a heckuva education – prep schools at Smith and Milton, 2 degrees from Harvard, a year in France, and a couple of years where he’s supposed to be at Oxford but he mostly hangs out at the London Library reading room.

              But he showed early signs of both humor and a desire to write and edit – while at Smith he wrote his own newsletter with jokes and adventure stories, and during his college years and after he met with and wrote a pornographic thing called King Bolo, which was pretty much gross male undergrad humor.  Think penis jokes as the more tasteful content.  There are reviewers who have seen the stuff, and they seem embarrassed by it.

              In England, he meets up with fellow American Ezra Pound and, with Pound promoting both him and his work, he proceeds to take the literary world by storm.  He publishes one poem called the Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock and another called the Wasteland.  They are both successful, but the Wasteland becomes THE archetypical example of modernist poetry, and Eliot is modernisms poster child.

              Professionally, he’s really at an apex between about 1917 to 1925.  He’s writing good stuff.  He’s got a day job working as a banker for Lloyd’s of London that he actually likes, and he’s able to spend time editing journals, writing literary criticism, maybe fooling around with a play or two, and writing more poetry.  He’s a central figure in Virginia Woolf’s publishing house.

But, he is a sexually anxious guy and it shows up in his poetry.  He’s in a disastrous marriage with a woman named Vivenne Haigh-Wood.  Both Eliot and Vivienne have got significant health problems.  According to a biographer named Russell Murphy, Vivienne’s ongoing health issues and their hateful marriage is taking a toll.  Eliot isn’t much more hearty than Vivienne and he has his own breakdowns.  Here’s a quote: “Eliot took to wearing a very pale green face powder in public.  Virginia Woolfe even reported seeing him wearing red lipstick, and among mutual friends, the poet Siegried Sassoon took to calling him the undertaker.”  Haven’t we all?

According to another biographer Peter Acryod, who starts his book with a quote by Eliot saying that Eliot had only been happy before and after his marriage to Vivienne, Eliot is kind of incapable of empathy.  Eliot’s view of poetry is that it isn’t about self-expression but abstraction and objectivity and maybe coldness.  That is, you don’t write a love poem to say you love someone.  You fall in love, abstract what the experience means, then write a dispassionate piece of wordsmithing about the abstraction in an objective way.  You know, dropping in the occasional Egyptian script or untranslated Ancient Greek, which is how the wasteland is written.

For Acroyd, this is also part of his personality.  He can be totally polite to you, even joking and telling stories, but is always looking at you like a scientist looks at a lab rat, studying you with an objective eye to observing your behavior to make some theoretical conclusion.  Some of his poetry is like that; he frequently slums it and walks around the poorer parts of town, and has some poems called Preludes that are about lower society.  But they are definitely in the tone that Acroyd describes; very analytic, not really sympathetic, almost like he’s really just trying to get an accurate description of someone else’s mental state.

Burton Raffel, another biographer,  says that Eliot always had a sense of humor, but that his critics always treated his poems as if they were deadly serious.  Of course, you can both have a sense of humor and be a bit of a jerk.  This leaves an impression of Eliot as someone who is the paragon of enormously serious, morbid, and depressing poetry but also a guy who wrote profane schoolboy jokes in King Bolo and enjoyed a good laugh.  

Famously, and as an expression of his very private and withdrawn personality, he did not want a biography written.  He’s quoted by Raffel as saying he did not, “wish my executors to facilitate or countenance the writing of any biography.”  He was withdrawn, some used words like sardonic, and above all intensely private.  There’s a part of Eliot that likes humor, there’s a bigger part of him that is appalled and terrified by modernity and searching for meaning, and the haunted part of him is consuming most of his waking hours.  Like I said, the guy is successful but not happy.

In 1925 he left Lloyd’s to work for Faber & Gwyer publishers, which alienated Virginia Woolf and her publishing house.  Now he’s not a banker and an author, he’s just the most prominent figure in the literary modernist movement.

Modernism is a new literary movement, and this makes Eliot a theoretical and literary radical.  He’s doing things differently than others, ruffling the feathers of those who think everything should basically copy Shakespear and Lord Byron, making him a literary revolutionary.  But that’s only in literature.  I mentioned earlier that at the end of World War 1 a world that had been gripped by centuries of ruling monarchies was now seeing many new political possibilities out there.  What was the world to do now that royal monarchies were all but dead?  Karl Marx, sitting in the same London Reading Room as Eliot, thought Marxism might work.  Two other possible options were fascism and democracy.  

Neither TS Eliot, nor his patron and buddy Ezra Pound, would choose democracy.  Pound would go all the way off the deep end, but for all his literary rebellion Eliot would be a political and religious conservative.  Here’s a quote from the start of Ackroyd’s sixth chapter, talking about a letter Eliot wrote to friend Richard Aldington in the year Wasteland was published: “Eliot despised democracy, he explained to Aldington in the same letter, and he described in vivid terms the feelings of loathing and repugnance which the contemporary situation indicted in him.”  And Pound…Pound we’ll get to later.

In 1927 Eliot has a religious conversion and becomes a member of the Anglican church.  Others have described his beliefs as Anglico-Catholic.  Anyway, Eliot’s flavor of Anglicism is old-school Christianity and it’s a rejection of new-wave Unitarianism, the religion in which he was raised.  He also becomes a British citizen.  He describes his political orientation as a royalist.  He just likes structure and discipline.  Some say he’s not mean-spirited, he just doesn’t think that modern life can hold any real meaning, but ritual and religious structure can.  Others think he’s just a jerk.  Let’s just say that while others embrace the roaring 20s, and in Berlin they’re dancing their socks off at the KitKat club, and tearing their clothes off in wild sexual orgies, Eliot is prayerfully offering his confessions.

In 1931 he’s working for the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer, and here we get the first inkling that Eliot might write about cats.  Faber made Eliot the godson to his children.  According to Jai Tolentino, and award-winning New Yorker staff writer, Eliot wrote an illustrated letter to his pre-kinder aged godson about his cat, named Jellyorum.  That’s a blip.

In 1932 and 1933 he hits another turning point.  He’s going on a reasonably lucrative tour of America, and as he leaves England, he leaves his lawyers with instructions to divorce Viven in his absence.  All the biographers recognize this as kind of dick move.  Murphy says he divorced her “like a thief in the night.”  He’s not a total jerk about all of it; although their early years were rocky he was attentive to Vivienne’s medical needs, and Murphy would report that he was distraught at her death in 1947.  But divorcing your very ailing spouse in absentia is not an act of courage.  He wasn’t the best at personal relationships but this was a pretty low move, even for him.

For Eliot’s part, it ends a very unhappy burden and he spends his time on the tour hanging out with an old sweetheart named Emily Hale.  For Vivien’s part, she just keeps acting like they’re still married.  This could be part of her ongoing mental illness, or her way of objecting, but her bad physical and mental health only get worse, she spends most of the rest of her life in and out of institutions and mostly in them, tended to by her family.

Consider this really creepy description of their last meeting.  This is from Louis Menand, a pulizter-prize winning journalist, writing in the New Yorker:

“In 1935, Vivienne managed to track her husband down at a book fair, where she had learned that he was scheduled to give a talk. She wore her Fascist uniform and carried, in her arms, three of Eliot's books and their terrier, Polly. As the audience was getting seated, she turned and saw that Eliot was right behind her, on his way to the lectern. She recorded the moment in her diary:

I turned a face to him of such joy that no-one in that great crowd could have had one moment's doubt. I just said, Oh Tom, & he seized my hand, & said how do you do, in quite a loud voice. He walked straight on to the platform then & gave a most remarkably clever, well thought out lecture. . . . I stood the whole time, holding Polly up high in my arms. Polly was very excited & wild. I kept my eyes on Tom's face the whole time, & I kept nodding my head at him, & making encouraging signs. He looked a little older, more mature & smart, much thinner & not well or robust or rumbustious at all. No sign of a woman's care about him. No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones I should say.

After the lecture, she went onstage and stood next to him while he signed copies of his books. "I said quietly, Will you come back with me?" "I cannot talk to you now," Eliot replied. He signed the books she had brought with her, and then he left. She never saw him again.”

Around the same time as this depressing incident he returns, naturally, to Cats.  He writes to an adult friend named Polly Tandy explaining that there are 4 types of cats which he calls Practical, Porpentine, big bravo, and Gumbie.  This is still in private correspondence, but this is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about cats.  He has a lot of cats, and he does give them names like the aforementioned Jellyorum, but also George Pushdragon, Pettipaws, and Wiscus.  On the dog-cat pet spectrum, he’s all cat.

In 1934 he writes his first play, it’s called the Rock – without a single reference to Dwyane Johnson! – and it’s about the building of a church.  It sold 1,500 tickets, which was pretty respectable, and it marked Eliot’s entrance into performance instead of just literature.   In 1935 he has another play produced, this one called Murder in the Cathedral.  

In 1936 he now writes to Polly Tandy’s daughter a complete poem about a Gumbie cat, and signs it “your faithful possum.”  The publishing house starts teasing that their literary celebrity TS Eliot is going to release a book of cat poems.

In 1939 he releases Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  This – is not a big deal.  This warrants ½ of sentence in Murphy’s biography.  Douglas Adams would have called it mostly harmless.  In Murphy’s longer treatment of every single one of Eliot’s works Cats get 3 pages.  Peter Acryod gives it 2 paragraphs in his 396-page biography.  Raffel says “The 14 nonsense poems collected in the little volume are pleasant, inoffensive, and unremarkable.”  Raffel then draws a direct line between King Bolo and Cats.  Both Raffel and Acroyd make some fleeting nods to what the book might mean, but the general feeling is that the book shows that he did have a sense of humor or that they mean nothing at all.  As proof that Eliot had a sense of humor, Murphy points out that Eliot had a picture of Groucho Marx in his office.

There are some fun tidbits.  Acryod says that the man in white spats is John Hayward, who we’ll meet in a second.  McCavity is derived from Moriarity of Sherlock Holmes fame.  Eliot himself drew the cover illustrations.

The other thing to discuss – which Tolentino does at length – is the name “Old Possum.”  It was given to Eliot by Ezra Pound, and it comes from a character the Uncle Remus book.  That is the book that Disney based their movie Song of the South on and has such flagrant and offensive stereotypes of black culture that they have done what they can to remove it from their catalogue.  But Pound and Eliot used the dialect in letters they exchanged in the same way to 2 white frat boys might communicate using rap lyrics, in a sarcastic way to try to prove they were cool but mostly to mock the language of people of color.  They drop a bunch of n-bombs.

Tolentino finds this puts a strain of racism on Cats from the start.  Tolentino cites Michael North and writes: “Eliot’s fondness for doggerel and light verse, in particular, was intertwined with a racist notion of blackness as a gateway to cultural disruption and linguistic play. “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” required an authorial persona that facilitated outright foolishness for Eliot, and though explicit racism largely vanishes within the actual text, it does jump out occasionally, most of all in “Growltiger’s Last Stand,” in which Eliot, describing Growltiger, a grisly pirate cat, writes, “But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed; / To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.” The“Chinks” swarm Growltiger’s vessel, and his lady cat screeches, “badly skeered.””  That’s all cringy.  There’s some indication that Eliot was fond of the old black minstrel shows he used to see in St. Louis, but if Eliot wasn’t openly racist, Pound sure was, and there is an uncomfortable influence.

And now, I guess, is as good a time as any to talk about Eliot’s antisemitic and racist views.  Murphy dedicates 3 pages to the topic and writes “There are definitely elements of antisemitism in Eliot’s poetry and prose.”  I’m not going to give detail to these because they are uncomfortable for me to repeat, but there’s no doubt that they are in the poems openly and unambiguously.  Murphy cites an 1995 study by Anthony Julius titled TS Eliot, Antisemitism, and literary form which concludes that “expressions that can be expressed as anti Semitic in Eliot’s poetry and in his prose certainly legitimize antisemitism.”  And, there are other articles that point out attempts to be an apologist for the antisemitism in Eliot don’t really work.  Dude was antisemitic, and not really in an excusable way. 

This is the dark side of Eliot’s conservatism, and Murphy links his malicious treatment of Jewish people to the excesses of conservative Christian dogma.  Let’s not forget that the Catholic church created the first ghetto for Jews, persecuted them during their passion plays, tortured them during the inquisitions, and probably condoned much of what Hitler was doing in WW2.

How much this creeps into the musical I’ll take up later, but one thing that Eliot can never escape is his association with Ezra Pound, and their race-baiting jokes are right there in the title of Cats.  If ya love the musical I don’t want to take anything away from you, but I’m not ready to fully separate the artist from the art, and there are parts of TS Eliot that are disturbing.

Turning the page a bit, at this time he’s publishing a bunch of other poetry as well, nothing as serious and famous as Prufrock or the Wasteland, but at this point everything he publishes is a big deal because he’s TS Eliot.  It’s like catching Steven Spielberg’s next movie.

During most of World War 2 he’s writing about Catholicism and culture.  In 1946 he has written some essays on Christianity and culture, and delivers three of them in a radio address to the German people, in German.  He’s nothing if not smart, and he’d spent some earlier time in Germany and was fluent.

In 1945 he moved back to London and got an apartment with John Hayward, and they lived together for 11 years.  Hayward was a literary critics and eventually took charge of Eliot’s literary estate; he also had muscular dystrophy.  For those who think Eliot was homosexual, this relationship adds more fuel the fire.  That article by Louis Menand reviewed Eliot’s sexuality…that’s not super-relevant to what we’re doing here and I’ll just say that if you thought Eliot was repressing something, there’s a lot of evidence on your side.  If you think you know what that thing is, well, you might as well be writing speculative ghost stories based on fragments of half-confirmed facts.

The end of that room-mate ship was not happy; eventually Eliot would remarry and shift the literary estate duties to his new wife.  Some would liken Eliot’s leaving Hayward to the way he left Vivienne.

One more footnote to that relationship; according to Raffel, John Hayward is the “Man in White Spats” who, of course, appears in the book and the musical.

While TS Eliot is getting on in London, Ezra Pound is now melting down.  I’m just going to crib his Wikipedia entry here, because a few bare facts are astounding enough.  During World War 2 he openly expressed support for Hitler and Mussolini.  He actually lmet Mussolini and they traded a few jokes about Jews.  He moved to Italy and recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the fascist state.  He blamed, probably correctly, World War 1 on finance capitalism, and blamed, certainly incorrectly, all of that on the Jews.  He supported eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy, and encouraged the US GIs to throw down their arms and surrender.  When Italy lost the war the Italian Resistance turned him over to the US government who put him in a military detention camp including 3 weeks in an outdoor steel cage.  He was indicted for treason, ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, and then locked up at a psychiatric hospital called St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, DC for 12 years, earning a diagnosis as a narcissist and psychopath.

Here’s a direct quote from the Wikipedia entry: “Pound's antisemitism can be traced to at least 1910, when he wrote in Patria Mia, his essays for the New Age: "The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions." The sentence was removed from the 1950 edition.[86] In 1922 he apparently disliked that so many Jews were contributing to The Dial,[253] and in 1939, when he read his poetry at Harvard, he was said to have included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews in the audience.[254][v]”

He did not quite get the end he deserved.  I’m again going to directly quote the Wikipedia entry: “While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeth's in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called the United States "an insane asylum".”  He finally died in 1972.

So, great all around guy who maybe is the poster child for “too smart for his own good.”  There is more that could be said about Ezra Pound, but we’re here to talk about TS Eliot.  Let’s just say that at this point Pound is not a stabilizing influence, and if there is racism and antisemitism in the work of Eliot -- which Pound heavily edited -- Ezra Pound was not gonna be the guy to take it out.

In 1947 Vivienne finally dies.  As mentioned earlier, Eliot is distraught.  But he hasn’t seen her since the 1935 book signing and family dog incident.  It is a tortured relationship through and through.

In 1948 Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1954 he publishes a play called The Cocktail Party, which is about a failed marriage gone wrong because both parties are too self-centered, and it’s a huge hit in New York.  He’s already a celebrity, but there’s a question of whether the guy gone British can write something for an American audience, and the success in New York seals that deal.  A show called Confidential Clerk is a follow-up and also a success.

Since his separation from John Hayward he’s had a literary secretary named Valerie Fletcher and in 1957 she’s served in that role for 8 years.  She and Eliot get married, she being 40 years his junior.  He’s happier; his health improves; his poetry gets a little happier.

His last play is called Elder Statesman and it’s a flop.  In 1963 the dissertation he sent to Harvard in 1916 is finally published; in 1964 he dies.  If you yourself hold a PhD you probably appreciate the irony of feeling like giving up on life after your dissertation is completed and finally published.  It probably also had something to do with all the really strong French cigarettes he couldn’t stop smoking.

His ashes are placed in East Coker, where is 7-generations back great-grandfather to the power of 7 Andrew Eliot had immigrated from.  There’s a plaque to him in Westminster.  He had reclaimed England, and England had reclaimed him.  The Midwesterner born in St. Louis who loved structure and order died more an Englishman than an American.

So we have hit a save point.  That’s the basic life of TS Eliot – Boston connections, moved to England, totally toxic first marriage, literary celebrity and key figure in the modernist movement, tortured personality, deeply private and very sexually non-expressive.  Not happy guy, and people who describe him including himself keep using the word “demons,” literary radical and political conservative.  His politics turn downright ugly and there are legitimate and not really contested elements of racism and antisemitism.  He owes much of his career to Ezra Pound, and that guy sucks.  

And right in the middle of all that he writes a delightful children’s book about Cats.

We still need to get from here to the Broadway production!  That is going to be much less depressing and after that lies…our accounting of the demons, of TS Eliot and the occult.  

How, exactly, do you take a bunch of nonsense children’s poems, roll with that total lack of a plot, and turn it into a runaway Broadway musical hit?  How do you take the work of the most sexually repressed guy in England and turn it into an open sexuality that swoons audiences?  In the words of Kolton Kraus, better known as TumbleBrutus, “I think you either love it or hate it.  There’s really no in-between.  I’ve never heard anybody go, ‘I kind of liked Cats.’”  Do you love it or hate it?  We’ll have much more for you to embrace or despise on the next episode.