T S Eliot Lives and Legacies Series First

Edition Craig Raine download

https://ebookname.com/product/t-s-eliot-lives-and-legacies-
series-first-edition-craig-raine/

Get the full ebook with Bonus Features for a Better Reading Experience on ebookname.com
Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

T S Eliot Hamlet and His Problems An Analysis First

Edition S. Sulochana Rengachari

https://ebookname.com/product/t-s-eliot-hamlet-and-his-problems-
an-analysis-first-edition-s-sulochana-rengachari/

Eliot and his age T S Eliot s moral imagination in the

twentieth century 2nd Edition Eliot

https://ebookname.com/product/eliot-and-his-age-t-s-eliot-s-
moral-imagination-in-the-twentieth-century-2nd-edition-eliot/

T S Eliot and the failure to connect satire on modern

misunderstandings First Edition Atkins

https://ebookname.com/product/t-s-eliot-and-the-failure-to-
connect-satire-on-modern-misunderstandings-first-edition-atkins/

The Hidden Web A Sourcebook 1st Edition William O.

Scheeren

https://ebookname.com/product/the-hidden-web-a-sourcebook-1st-
edition-william-o-scheeren/
Mayo Clinic Guide to Your Baby s First Year From
Doctors Who Are Parents Too 1st Edition The Baby
Experts At Mayo Clinic

https://ebookname.com/product/mayo-clinic-guide-to-your-baby-s-
first-year-from-doctors-who-are-parents-too-1st-edition-the-baby-
experts-at-mayo-clinic/

Psychologie der Hygiene 1st Edition Bergler

https://ebookname.com/product/psychologie-der-hygiene-1st-
edition-bergler/

Practical high performance liquid chromatography 4th ed

Edition Veronika R. Meyer

https://ebookname.com/product/practical-high-performance-liquid-
chromatography-4th-ed-edition-veronika-r-meyer/

Gynaecological Oncology for the MRCOG and Beyond 2nd

Edition Nigel Acheson

https://ebookname.com/product/gynaecological-oncology-for-the-
mrcog-and-beyond-2nd-edition-nigel-acheson/

Epidemic Modelling An Introduction 1st Edition D. J.

Daley

https://ebookname.com/product/epidemic-modelling-an-
introduction-1st-edition-d-j-daley/
The History of the World Sixth Revised Edition J. M.
Roberts

https://ebookname.com/product/the-history-of-the-world-sixth-
revised-edition-j-m-roberts/
T. S . E L I O T
 LIVES AND LEGACIES

Larzer Ziff
M A R K T WA I N

David S. Reynolds
W A LT W H I T M A N

Edwin S. Gaustad
ROGER WILLIAMS
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Gale E. Christianson
ISAAC NEWTON

Paul Addison
WINSTON CHURCHILL

G. Edward White
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

Craig Raine
T. S . E L I O T
T. S . E L I O T

Craig Raine

2006
 OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that
further Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 2006 by Craig Raine
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raine, Craig.
T. S. Eliot / Craig Raine.
p. cm. — (Lives and legacies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530993-5
ISBN-10: 0-19-530993-6
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965.
2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography.
3. Critics—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
II. Series.
PS3509.L43Z8173 2006
821'.912—dc22
2006009856

135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 To Valerie Eliot
who brought great happiness to a great poet
with love
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
P R E FA C E xi

Introduction
ELIOT AND THE BURIED LIFE xix

One
THE FAILURE TO LIVE 1

Two
ELIOT AS CLASSICIST:
THE ENQUIRY INTO FEELINGS 41

Three
THE WASTE LAND 75

Four
F OU R Q UA RT ETS 95

vii
 Five
THE DRAMA 115

Six
THE CRITICISM 127

Appendix 1
ELIOT AND ANTI-SEMITISM 149

Appendix 2
T WO F R E E T R A N S L AT I O N S BY CRAIG RAINE
OF ‘LUNE DE MIEL’ AND

‘ D A N S L E R E S TA U R A N T ’ 179

Appendix 3
AN ELIOT CHRONOLOGY 182

NOTES 190
INDEX 197

viii CONTENTS
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SEVERAL PEOPLE, all of them more intelligent and learned than

me, have read this short book and made shrewd suggestions,
which I have acted on. I am very grateful to Mark Griffith, Adam
Thirlwell, A. D. Nuttall, Julie Maxwell, Nina Raine, and my wife,
Ann Pasternak Slater.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
 P R E FA C E

T. S. ELIOT WAS BORN IN ST LOUIS, MISSOURI, on 26 Septem-

ber 1888. He died in London aged seventy-seven. By then, he
was the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the
same year, the recipient of the Order of Merit, England’s most
distinguished honour, in the personal gift of the reigning mon-
arch. He was the most influential and authoritative literary arbiter
of the twentieth century and a publisher of great distinction at
Faber and Faber, where he published W. H. Auden, Louis
MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. As the editor of the influential
magazine The Criterion, from 1922 until 1939, he published
Proust, Gide and Thomas Mann—an indication of his cultural pan-
Europeanism as well as his access to the literary firmament. He
was a world figure. Late in his career, he was a surprisingly suc-
cessful poetic dramatist. He was the century’s most famous poet—
oddly, because his prestige was founded on poetry notorious for
its difficulty. In 6 March 1950, he was on the cover of Time

xi
 magazine. On 30 April 1956, Eliot lectured to fourteen thousand
people at the baseball stadium in Minneapolis on ‘The Frontiers
of Criticism’. In Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye
(1953), when Amos, the African-American chauffeur of Mrs.
Loring, refuses a dollar tip, Philip Marlowe mildly twits his fas-
tidiousness by offering to buy him the poems of T. S. Eliot; ‘He
said he already had them.’ A hundred pages on, Marlowe and Amos
have a plausible discussion—Amos is a graduate of Howard Uni-
versity—about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. (They agree
‘that the guy didn’t know very much about women’.)
Eliot’s detractors often insinuate that this eminence was
achieved by feline caution, literary politicking, calculation, a
shrewd assessment of the literary marketplace, a quiet but inexo-
rable campaign of ruthless self-advancement. I think it is a matter
of literary merit rather than manipulation of opinion. In fact, Imagi-
nation of the Heart, Theresa Whistler’s biography of Walter de la
Mare, demonstrates that 1922, the agreed date for the conclusive
advent of modernism—with the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses,
Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium—
seemed much less conclusive to de la Mare, J. C. Squire, and
other tenacious neo-Georgians, ‘also-rans’ who had their own plat-
forms including The London Mercury and the Weekly Westminster,
to which the young Graham Greene contributed. It wasn’t a ques-
tion of capturing the sole radio station. The strategic battles were
still being ‘fought’ in the 1950s. Walter de la Mare thought the
selection of Eliot as the only twentieth-century English poet at
the Festival of Britain in 1953 was invidious—and wrote to Eliot
asking him to withdraw.
Despite this latter-day celebrity, for much of his life, Eliot’s fame
was restricted to literature. He was a private person. In his news-

xii P R E FA C E
paper column, Gilbert Harding, a once-famous, now forgotten,
British broadcasting celebrity, recounted his embarrassment at
being pointed out on the London underground while Eliot, ‘the
greatest poet of the century’, was ignored, unrecognised in the
corner of the same compartment.
Eliot’s life, like the lives of many writers who spend their time
at their desks, was apparently uneventful compared to, say, Ernest
Hemingway’s blood-boltered, flashbulb-tormented exploits. In
‘To Criticise the Critic’ (1961), he described himself as ‘the mild-
mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter’. And it
is a theme of this study that the Buried Life, the idea of a life not
fully lived, is the central, animating idea of Eliot’s poetry.
However, Eliot’s own life is full of quiet drama, even of reck-
lessness.
On the one hand, there is the assiduous man of letters, inde-
fatigably reviewing, editing, and giving lectures. On the other hand,
there is the poet who renounced a promising career as a philoso-
pher in American academe for an uncertain literary life in a for-
eign country, the poet who married, within weeks of meeting her,
Vivien Haigh-Wood. Though initially Vivien was a valued, even
essential literary confrere and a loved wife—‘I have felt happier,
these few days, than ever in my life’, Eliot writes to Bertrand Russell
on 14 January 1916—the marriage was not a success. On 10 Janu-
ary 1916, Eliot writes to Conrad Aiken that financial worries and
concern over Vivien’s poor health had stopped him writing: Yet,
‘I am having a wonderful time nevertheless. I have lived through
material for a score of long poems in the last six months. An en-
tirely different life from that I looked forward to two years ago.
Cambridge [Mass.] seems to me a dull nightmare now . . . ’. Vivien
committed adultery with Bertrand Russell, Eliot’s ex-teacher and

P R E FA C E xiii
 mentor. Eliot was legally separated from her in 1933. Gradually,
she went mad and in 1938 was committed by her brother Maurice.
She died in a private mental hospital in Finsbury Park, London,
on 23 January 1947.
In June 1927, Eliot was received into the Church of England,
and in November became a naturalised British citizen. Virginia
Woolf writes of Eliot ‘in his four piece suit’—repressed, reserved,
buttoned-up. If we concentrate too much on the Lloyds banker in
his pin-striped trousers, the London publisher with his bowler
hat and rolled umbrella, and Eliot’s own ironic self-portrait as
the circumspect pedant—‘Restricted to What Precisely / And If
and Perhaps and But’—we are likely to overlook the man whose
religious conversion first announced itself in the Vatican when
Eliot fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà to the amaze-
ment of his brother Henry Ware Eliot. Eliot isn’t the dry stick of
his self-caricature. This is Robert Lowell describing Eliot danc-
ing with Valerie, his new bride and second wife, forty years younger
than himself, and married in secret at the age of sixty-nine: ‘they
danced so dashingly at the Charles River boatclub brawl that he
was called “Elbows Eliot”.’
Given that the main events of Eliot’s life are so sensational, even
lurid, it may seem odd that the central focus of his oeuvre should
concentrate on the life not fully lived, ‘buried’, avoided, side-
stepped. It is conceivable, though, that these dramatic decisions
in Eliot’s life were provoked by the very fear of not living fully—of
opting for insurance rather than risk. The theme itself comes from
literature, not ‘life’—from Henry James in the first instance, but
fed by the main current of nineteenth-century literature. We writ-
ers frequently inherit our themes from our most admired prede-

xiv P R E FA C E
cessors. It is they who set the agenda. It is we who continue it,
who develop it. It is important to realize that, for writers, the fully
lived life also means the interior life, the mental life. Grey matter
acting on reading matter is a matter of passion, too.
This contradiction—between the risks Eliot took in his own
life and his dominant theme of debilitating caution—makes it dif-
ficult to equate biographical events with the poetry. Unlike Sylvia
Plath—whose poetry cannot be understood without the prior
knowledge that her marriage to Ted Hughes failed and that she
was a suicide risk—Eliot’s poetry is committed to impersonality.
The life hardly helps us at all as readers. In ‘The Frontiers of Criti-
cism’ (1961), Eliot lays out this position:

For myself, I can only say that a knowledge of the springs that
released a poem is not necessarily a help towards understanding
the poem: too much information about the origins of the poem
may even break my contact with it. I feel no need for any light
upon [Wordsworth’s] Lucy poems beyond the radiance shed by
the poems themselves.

It is possible to see this as evasive. Many recent commentators

have done so. They prefer a guilty poet trying to deny responsi-
bility for a mad wife; a bisexual philanderer; an ambitious, reptil-
ian anti-Semite who was prepared to pimp his wife to other men
in order to advance his literary career. There is no evidence that
Eliot was either a fornicator or a homosexual. These are the flimsy
insinuations of the unscrupulous and unscholarly biographer.
Eliot never repudiated his first wife. Until she was committed by
her brother, Eliot made sure she was watched over by mutual
friends. He could not live with her, however. In the light of her

P R E FA C E xv
 extraordinary behavior, his decision is reasonable—route marches
through London in full Fascist uniform looking for him, well-and-
widely-attested paranoia, pushing chocolate through the Faber
letter-box. The idea that Eliot pimped Vivien to Russell is pure
malicious supposition. If anything, the evidence suggests that Eliot,
like many another cuckold, found out much later. Nor is his al-
leged anti-Semitism a simple matter of record—as I hope to show.
The usual links between the life and the art are problematic in
Eliot’s case because he held a theory about the impersonality of
great art—outlined in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Tal-
ent’ (1919). I discuss this in chapter 6, but let me anticipate a little
here. Essentially, the author of Ash-Wednesday (‘Because I do not
hope . . .’) can hardly have meant to rule out the personal. Eliot’s
‘impersonality’ addresses and describes the artistic process, the
artistic treatment of the personal.
Eliot’s essay was classicist, an aesthetic whose thrust was es-
sentially negative, defined in opposition to romanticism. The ro-
mantic position values strong emotions, makes them central to
the achievement of art. It was a mistake Eliot was determined to
overturn: in art, he wrote, ‘it is not the “greatness”, the intensity,
of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic
process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes
place, that counts.’ Instead, he argued for the impersonality of great
art. By ‘impersonality’ Eliot meant objectivity, impartiality, disin-
terestedness, distance—the control of accidentals, of subjectivity,
of mere contingencies. Hence the idea of the objective correlative
and its implied contract between writer and reader—that the im-
penetrably private is inadmissible as art.
But this does not mean, could not mean, that art should be
purged of anything personal—as many have wrongly believed. On

xvi P R E FA C E
the contrary, Eliot maintains the emotions are what we make art
from. Look at that quotation again: ‘it is not the “greatness”, the
intensity, of the emotions, the components [my italics] . . .’ The
emotions are ‘the components’, but they have to be made into
something. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is, though, a de-
nunciation of unreconstructed subjectivity in art. Strong feelings
cannot make you a poet. Otherwise, every sentimental drunk, ev-
ery football fan, every religious bigot would qualify. Creativity
means creating something.
Nevertheless, aesthetic distance means that it is dangerous and
difficult to translate the poetry, to ‘money-change’ the poetry, back
into personal experience. For instance, I was once asked on a tele-
vision film if Eliot was Prufrock in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’. I explained that Eliot was cultured, whereas Prufrock
was intimidated by the idea of talking about Michelangelo; that
Eliot came from good family and was unlikely to be thrown so-
cially by the presence of a footman. I argued that, whereas Eliot
was the palpably passionate author of the line ‘blood shaking my
heart / The awful daring of a moment’s surrender’, the character
Prufrock was as ‘uptight as a rolled umbrella’—a sound bite which
was followed in the film’s final edit by a photograph of Eliot out-
side the doors of Faber and Gwyer, leaning on a rolled umbrella.
Rhetorical editing of perverse genius that was a thousand miles
from my intention—or the truth about Eliot, who married Vivien
without first telling his parents.
There aren’t any easy equations. Gerontion is a character in a
dramatic monologue, not a transparent disguise for the poet.
In the end, we are left with the poetry. It speaks to any attentive
reader. An accountant I know read The Waste Land and picked
out two words from the passage in which the neurotic woman

P R E FA C E xvii
 brushes her hair: ‘her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed
into words, then would be savagely still [my italics]’. The un-
usual, counterintuitive combination of savagery and stillness
impressed him. He was right to be impressed, to feel a frisson of
repressed rage in the tense paradox. It is for these verbal gifts
that we read Eliot’s poetry. This is the light, the radiance cast by
the poetry itself.

xviii P R E FA C E
 Introduction

ELIOT AND THE

BURIED LIFE

IN HIS ESSAY ‘JOHN FORD’, Eliot says that ‘the whole of Shakespeare’s
work is one poem’. He continues, ‘and it is the poetry of it in this
sense, not the poetry of isolated lines and passages or the poetry
of single figures which he created, that matters most.’ Eliot main-
tains that it is this ‘one significant, consistent and developing per-
sonality’, that makes Shakespeare ‘a great poet’. And yet, though
he identifies the presence of this ‘personality’, he does not analyse
its constituents. In this study of Eliot, I have attempted to
characterise his ‘significant, consistent and developing personal-
ity’. I want, in the words of Matthew Arnold, to see his achieve-
ment ‘steadily and see it whole’. But I have also tried to do local
justice to Eliot’s genius at the level of the word, the phrase, and
the passage. I am interested in the ‘one poem’, but it would be
philistine to slight the detail of individual poems.
Eliot’s lifelong themes, despite the manifest and exemplary vari-
ety of the poems, are consistent. One major theme is the failure to

P R E FA C E xix
 live fully. Eliot inherits this theme, the theme of the ‘buried life’,
from his awkward critical and poetic father figure, Matthew
Arnold. Arnold formulated the idea of the ‘buried life’. For
Arnold, the buried life describes our failure to realise our emo-
tional potential—essentially because the business of living sup-
plants the cultivation of the inner life. (Oscar Wilde, Arnold’s
unlikely disciple, was to advocate the intensive cultivation of indi-
viduality in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’.) But Arnold adds
the refinement that the problem is not simply one of frustration:
ignorance of what we really feel, lack of true self-awareness, means
that we are mysteries to ourselves, and therefore find fulfilment
difficult or impossible.
At the same time, Eliot is also a modernist, with a commitment
to a classicist position. He is, therefore, sceptical about emotion,
about strong emotion, as an obvious good in itself. His poetry is
a scrupulous record of human emotions, sifting what we feel from
what we think we ought to feel. Eliot has an eye and an ear for
the fake.
Potentially, there is a conflict between these two fundamental
impulses—one of which wishes to maximise emotion, the other
of which is sceptical of emotion and scathing about sentimental-
ity. My first two chapters analyse each impulse in turn before rec-
onciling them at the end of chapter 2.
Almost a motif in this book, the idea of the buried life is one
that underlies much of Eliot’s work in many different ways—it
is inherited, then explored and mined by Eliot in ways that ex-
pand Arnold’s original analysis. To the rationed heart and to
self-ignorance, Eliot adds other occluded selves—our hidden
motives; our previous incarnations; our nonrational, unconscious
mystical experiences; the previous lives of literature and of words

xx INTRODUCTION
themselves; the continuing life within us of dead ancestors; and
the power of the irrational.
The buried life in Eliot has a headstone with many names, dif-
ferent names for a familiar compound ghost.

INTRODUCTION xxi
This page intentionally left blank
 One

THE FAILURE TO LIVE

‘But most people are only very little alive’

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods

WHEN ELIOT MARRIED VIVIEN HAIGH-WOOD, he wrote to his

brother, Henry Ware Eliot, on 2 July 1915: ‘I feel more alive than
I ever have before’. I think that contradicts Bertrand Russell, who
said of his former pupil’s marriage: ‘he is exquisite and listless;
she says she married him in order to stimulate him, but finds she
can’t do it’. On the other hand, ‘more alive’ is comparative. The
phrase does not necessarily mean that Eliot was ‘breathing fire
and ozone’—merely that he was more alive than formerly.
It was Ezra Pound, in a letter to Harriet Monroe, the editor of
Poetry, dated 31 January 1915, who said of Prufrock, the protago-
nist of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (June 1915): ‘a por-
trait satire on futility can’t end by turning that quintessence of
futility, Mr P into a reformed character breathing out fire and
ozone’. It would be foolish to identify Eliot with his creations, but

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 1
 Prufrock’s failure to seize the day, his resolve to remain repressed,
avoiding the element of risk that is part of truly living, is some-
thing Eliot was to return to—obsessively but covertly.
Ten years after ‘Prufrock’, in The Waste Land, Eliot again
touches on this idea: ‘Are you alive, or not?’ asks the hysterical
woman of ‘A Game of Chess’. I don’t mean to identify her with
Vivien. I want merely to suggest that the failure to live fully is a
central, recurring theme of Eliot’s poetry.
It is the figure in his carpet.
In 1929, it is the subject of the Ariel poem, ‘Animula’1. Here,
Eliot depicts a psychically damaged, confined soul corroded by its
own caution, a life disfigured and distorted, rusty with reluctance.
‘Animula’ isn’t a much-noted poem, but it is quietly central and
you can clearly see how it is related to an earlier, greater poem,
The Waste Land (1922). Both poems share a topos—of death as
accumulated documentation, the paper detritus we leave behind.
Their poetic economies overlap. The Waste Land’s ‘blood shak-
ing my heart’ in ‘Animula’ becomes ‘the importunity of the blood’.
And The Waste Land’s ‘lean solicitor’ breaking the seals on docu-
ments becomes ‘Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room’.
“Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul”: the poem be-
gins with a line concocted from Dante’s Purgatorio (XVI) that
describes Marco Lombardo and is quoted in Eliot’s essay on
Dante. In Eliot’s poem, however, the subject, the ‘little soul’ of the
title, is appropriately nameless because the individual has in ef-
fect refused to encounter the forces that shape us as individuals—
and yet has inevitably been uniquely misshapen. Eliot reprises
and varies his opening line from Dante:

Issues from the hand of time the simple soul

Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,

2 T. S . E L I O T
 Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood

Eliot, brilliantly, is careful not to overstate the case. The subject is

no Dorian Gray, outwardly beautiful but actually hideously dis-
figured by his immoral life. Eliot eschews melodrama. Nothing
actively evil has taken place. The subject is ‘selfish’, an adjective
whose modesty is genius—not a grandiose sin like cruelty or mur-
der or even fornication. An opportunity has been missed—the
opportunity to live fully.
The poignancy of this failure—its human poverty—is under-
lined by Eliot’s rich, detailed evocation of childhood. Of course,
he cannot match the bravura of Joyce: ‘When you wet the bed
first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet.
That had a queer smell.’ But in its own way, ‘Animula’ reproduces
childhood’s typically olfactory vividness: ‘the fragrant [my ital-
ics] brilliance of the Christmas tree’. And he is true to its occlu-
sions and surprises, its innocence shading into naivety: ‘Content
with . . . What the fairies do and what the servants say.’ The initial
childish confidence plausibly coexists with childish wariness. It
takes a good poet to suggest both a recurrent action and a calcu-
lating, cautious temperament in the verb ‘studies’—‘Studies the
sunlit pattern on the floor / And running stags around a silver
tray’. Everyone’s early life is lived in close-up and curiosity, so
these details are both particular and generic. But the verb ‘stud-
ies’, is at once typical and inflected. It is the ailing seed of the
future. It goes with the child who curls up with the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
This quietly rich notation is marred briefly by one line of me-
chanical verbal oppositions: ‘To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 3
 or warm’. (The mechanical chiasmus of ‘Perplexes and offends
more, day by day; / Week by week, offends and perplexes more’ is
another local failure.)
Eliot’s fine, bold strategy in ‘Animula’ is to take his reader from
this minutely informed beginning to the moment of death. En-
tirely and appropriately omitting the life—an excluded middle that
hasn’t been lived:

Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;

Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

The viaticum is the Eucharist given to persons in danger of

death. There is something Beckettian here—something reminis-
cent of Krapp’s perpetual postponement of life for the arid em-
brace of art. There is bitter pathos in the realisation that intense
life should be brought into being only by the knowledge of its
imminent extinction—‘Living first . . . ’.
Then Eliot evokes incautious, adventurous figures who have
lived, and lived dangerously: Guiterriez ‘avid of speed and power’,
‘Boudin, blown to pieces’, ‘Floret, by the boarhound slain’.
Whereas, the ‘simple soul’ was effectively dead and only began to
live in the brief interlude before death—‘in the silence after the
viaticum’. Significantly, though Guiterriez, Boudin, and (the some-
how fifteenth-century) Floret are invented figures, they are given
names and identities, in contrast to the nameless subject with his
fragile ontology.
Effectively, Eliot inverts the expectations of the traditional de-
bate between the active and the contemplative life—where the bias
is in favour of the contemplative life, as, for instance, in Marvell’s
‘The Garden’. Eliot subverts the cliché—not for the last time. It
may seem perverse of him to promote the reckless—Boudin,

4 T. S . E L I O T
Guiterriez—and demote the prudent, but Eliot believed it was ‘bet-
ter to do evil . . . than to do nothing’, as he paradoxically avowed
in his 1930 essay on Baudelaire.
Just as the end of ‘Animula’ summons the reckless spirits of
Guiterriez and Boudin, the beginning of ‘Gerontion’—another
poem about the failure to live—invokes the idea of Thermopylae:
‘I was neither at the hot gates’, the hot gates where Leonidas and
his small band of Spartans held back an army.
And Eliot’s purpose is the same—to contrast the brave with
the psychically torpid. (The contrast is repeated for a third time
in The Hollow Men, where the ‘lost, violent souls’ are set against
the flimsy, spectral hollow men—becoming an Eliotean argumen-
tative trope.) The syntax of the opening of ‘Gerontion’ deliber-
ately calls up the epic with its pastiche Latinate syntax, which
postpones the last main verb to the end:

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.

Of course, in these lines we are made party to what is being read—

as it might be, Herodotus—by the boy to the little old man who is
the speaker. The lines have the force of occultatio—the figure of
speech which, by denying something actually draws attention to
it. For a series of non-events, the lines are action packed—we ex-
pect ‘cold rain’, but ‘warm rain’ avoids the anticipated contrast
with ‘hot gates’ and drenches the reader in particularity. The same
is true of the specifics of the salt marsh. Nevertheless, plunged in

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 5
 the moment though we are, Eliot carefully preserves the linguistic
awkwardness, the deferred main verb ‘fought’ that tells us the events
are written—and at a remove, therefore, from real experience.2
‘Bitten by flies, fought’. Not for the last time, Eliot subtly mixes
his messages. He leads us through difficult terrain—that ‘salt
marsh’—only to rescind the illusion of action conclusively with
that bookishly placed final verb. It is a procedure perfect for Eliot’s
purpose—the portrayal of a psychic wallflower, a noncombatant,
an over-conscientious objector, a constitutional abstainer.
In contrast to Leonidas and the Hoplites at Thermopylae, these
are the sensational tabloid headlines of Gerontion’s actual exist-
ence: ‘The goat coughs at night in the field overhead’; ‘The woman
. . . sneezes at evening’. It’s not even a flu epidemic. Waiting for
Godot was famously described as a play in which nothing hap-
pens—twice. ‘Gerontion’ is a poem spoken by a voluptuary of in-
action with an extensive collection of alibis. It is about the failure
to live, spiritually or physically. Eliot was always interested in self-
justification, our refusal to think badly of ourselves: ‘nothing dies
harder than the desire to think well of oneself ’, he writes in
‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927). As Nietzsche
ruefully notes in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘“I have done that,” says
my memory. “I cannot have done that”—says my pride, and re-
mains adamant. At last—memory yields.’ It is no accident that Eliot
cites Nietzsche three times in this essay, crediting him with the
culmination of a Senecan tendency—an acute awareness of self-
dramatisation. This isn’t particular to Eliot, his own secret flaw. It
is common to every one of us.
Gerontion’s excuse is life’s inherent inconsequentiality, the dis-
junction between cause and effect; if a, then not necessarily b. This
first alibi can be summarised by quoting Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’:

6 T. S . E L I O T
‘(But our beginnings never know our ends!).’ ‘Gerontion’ goes on
to ‘analyse’ this discontinuity in broad terms but begins with a
specific example. Those who want a sign, an omen, are presented
with the infant Christ—a sign that is taken for a wonder although
the child is swaddled and ‘unable to speak a word’. The sign, then,
is opaque, enigmatic, and, in Gerontion’s version, wrong. The
expected result of the infant Christ—an infancy associated, rea-
sonably enough, with innocence and gentleness—is overridden,
superseded. ‘In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the ti-
ger’. The tiger is, I take it, a figure for the appalling collateral, the
fallout of religion—martyrs, crusades, schism, Inquisition, dis-
embowelling, branding, beheading, and torture.
Gerontion’s major justification for doing nothing is the famous
passage beginning ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’(ll
33–47) whose sinuous argument personifies History as perverse
and contrarian. In the second of his Meditations on First Philoso-
phy, Descartes proposes the hypothesis that the universe is ruled
by an Arch-Deceiver, whose purpose is to mislead mankind at
every turn. Gerontion’s female History is very similar. She kindles
the wrong motives—ambition and vanity. She realises our ambi-
tions when our attention is elsewhere and has moved on. Or when
we no longer want the thing we once wanted. We achieve our aims
too soon, too late, confusingly, in ways which so exceed the initial
desire that we are sated. Our best motives produce the worst out-
comes. Crimes are the cause of virtue. In this account, History
isn’t a lottery. It is consistently perverse.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 7
 Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

It is a superb paragraph. Arranged very clearly around the re-

peated imperative, ‘Think now’, it ends with two symmetrical
paradoxes—‘Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism. Vir-
tues / Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes’. Despite the
illusion of clarity in the arrangement of those imperatives, the ex-
position as a whole brilliantly enacts the ‘supple confusions’ it
attributes to History. Smoke, mirrors, backlighting, with the aim
not of enlightening the reader, but bamboozling him—and acquit-
ting the speaker of cowardice by supplying a maze of motives. The
slippery heart of the paragraph is difficult to paraphrase accurately
as it qualifies its qualifications: ‘[History] Gives too late / What’s
not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered
passion.’ Not impossible to understand, it’s true; unlike ‘Gives
too soon / Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
/ Till the refusal propagates a fear.’ Eh? We need to know what’s
what in ‘what’s thought can be dispensed with’ or the sentence is
opaque. And the ‘what’ is withheld.

8 T. S . E L I O T
 The statement is clarified only if we introduce an extra verb:
‘Gives too soon / Into weak hands, [gives] what’s thought can be
dispensed with / Till the refusal propagates a fear.’ Instead of one
enigmatic pronouncement, we now have two clearer statements.
In the midst of these carefully abstract propositions advanced
by Gerontion to explain his failure to live, we can hear two words
that suggest he is skirting more personal matter—‘craving’, ‘pas-
sion’. ‘That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late / What’s
not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered
passion’ [my italics]. And so it proves: ‘I that was near your heart
was removed therefrom.’ The pedantry of ‘therefrom’—its tiny
cough in ink—is a perfect touch of characterisation.
Who is Gerontion addressing? Whose heart was he once near?
She is unnamed, in a poem that otherwise uses proper names bril-
liantly. No writer, not Marlowe, not even Milton, has used names
to better effect than Eliot in ‘Gerontion’—Hakagawa, Madame de
Tornquist, Mr. Silvero, Mrs. Cammel, Fräulein von Kulp—poised
between the exotic and the utterly particular, perfectly judged.
People whose individuality and presence is all in their names.
Whose dark biographies are there in a gesture—‘shifting the
candles’, ‘one hand on the door’, or Hakagawa apparently bow-
ing in homage, but actually bending to read the museum labels.
These figures are conducting a séance, taking part in a parodic
communion: ‘flowering judas, / To be eaten, to be divided, to be
drunk / Among whispers.’ Gerontion, though, has ‘no ghosts’. He
is neither spiritual, nor a Spiritualist.
‘I that was near your heart was removed therefrom / To lose
beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.’ The second line is baf-
fling. Let us quickly eliminate one difficulty—the Inquisition. We

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 9
 associate the Inquisition with terror, whereas here it appears to
be an antidote to terror. Conceivably, the greater terror consumes
the lesser terror. But, in fact, the Inquisition is irrelevant.3 The
sense of the line is this: I lost your beauty because I was terrified
by it, and afterwards this terror evaporated as I questioned my-
self endlessly about it. In other words, the timorous Gerontion
was terrified (‘terror’) and then fertile with mental scruples (‘in-
quisition’) so the original impulse was talked to death. I am re-
minded of A. H. Clough’s ‘Dipsychus’. Clough, the friend of
Matthew Arnold, is often misrepresented as a poet of comparably
high Victorian seriousness, but he has a grave levity, a modest irony
that is modernist avant la lettre. Dipsychus, the shilly-shallier,
puts love to death with an overdose of meticulously punctuated
qualifications:

But love, the large repose

Restorative, not to mere outside needs
Skin-deep, but thoroughly to the total man,
Exists, I will believe, but so, so rare,
So doubtful, so exceptional, hard to guess;
When guessed, so often counterfeit; in brief,
A thing not possibly to be conceived
An item in the reckonings of the wise.

In tone and attack, this is not unlike Eliot’s ‘After such knowl-
edge’ passage—fussier, shorn of eloquence, but reminiscent.
‘When guessed, so often counterfeit.’
Why is Gerontion telling us his tale of unsuccessful love? Be-
cause the woman he once failed to love is dead: ‘I have lost my
sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: / How should I use them for
your closer contact?’ And if he can summon her dead presence, it

10 T. S . E L I O T
isn’t by means of a séance: ‘it is not by any concitation [distur-
bance, agitation, excitement, rousing, conjuring] / Of the back-
ward devils.’ Their ‘relationship’, such as it is, such as it was,
continues after her death, and, Gerontion imagines, after his own
death: ‘Think at last / We have not reached conclusion, when I /
Stiffen in a rented house.’ It is not, I think, because Gerontion
believes in life after death. After all, De Bailhache, Fresca, and
Mrs. Cammel are so many ‘fractured atoms’, ‘whirled / Beyond
the circuit of the shuddering Bear’.4 It is because Gerontion’s view
of extinction is, like the ‘proof ’ of Zeno’s Paradox, one of infinite
gradualism, ‘a thousand small deliberations’. Like the old joke
about the death of the Master of Magdalen: ‘How can you tell?’
And that is all we know about this un-couple, who are like
Crusoe’s ‘two shoes that were not fellows’—unless we accept the
allusion to Henry James’s short story, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, in
the line: ‘The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.’5
The James story is about John Marcher, a man who feels marked
out by destiny, ‘the sense of being kept for something rare and
strange, possibly prodigious and terrible’—which will thus dis-
tinguish him from everyone else. His image for this event, what-
ever it impends, is a beast in the jungle, waiting to spring. He
confides his sense of destiny to May Bartram, who shares his sus-
pense. He discounts the possibility of marrying: ‘a man of feeling
didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt’.
A year after May Bartram dies, Marcher finally realises that the
unique thing that is to happen to him is that nothing is to happen
to him. It is a classic Jamesian ironic inversion. Whereupon
Marcher realises that, in his egotism and self-regard, he has failed
to see what May should have meant to him: ‘The escape would
have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 11
 lived—who could say now with what passion?—since she had
loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah,
how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and
the light of her use.’
Marcher’s chill egotism and Gerontion’s disabling terror are
not an exact match, but they share the failure to live with ‘Animula’:
‘then he would have lived.’ And in this regret, Eliot and James are
part of a tradition—the familiar romantic idea that life is to be lived
to the full. It is most passionately and intelligently put in Lambert
Strether’s instruction to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors: ‘Live,
live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.’
But the idea is a staple of nineteenth-century fiction, where it is
both ironised and advocated—an ambivalence shared by Eliot.
On the one hand, there is Pater’s advocacy, his sense that life is ‘a
short day of frost and sun’ and that success in life is therefore to
burn with a ‘hard gemlike flame’.6
On the other hand, you could regard this counselled intensity
as merely the glamorised version of a nebulous, sentimental dis-
content with the unexciting realities of life. Emma Bovary, trapped
in mediocrity, is like Marcher: ‘And all the time, deep within her,
she was waiting for something to happen.’ Like Gerontion watch-
ing the woman ‘poking the peevish gutter’, Emma’s life has atro-
phied: ‘So she sat there holding the tongs in the fire or watching
the rain fall.’ But she is ironised by Flaubert for demanding more
from life than it can offer—for attending to the unreasonable im-
peratives of romantic fiction.
Chekhov’s stories, too, are thronged with ironised romantics
whose cry is ‘I want to live’—a desire identically expressed by
Kleopatra in ‘My Life’, by the consumptive narrator of ‘An Anony-
mous Story’, by Anna Sergeyevna in ‘The Lady with the Little

12 T. S . E L I O T
Dog’. These, and many others, are sick with the suspicion that
life has more intense emotion to offer than they are experiencing.
So, too, in opera—the famous aria in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette,
‘Ah! Je veux vivre!’
Those too timid, or too frigid (like Joyce’s Mr. Duffy), to par-
take of ‘life’s feast’, to live, are roundly mocked in ‘Whispers of
Immortality’. This poem in quatrains was first published in Sep-
tember 1918 in the Little Review. It turns on the contrast between
the Elizabethans and Eliot’s contemporaries, between the fraught
and the merely febrile. It is about facing up to mortality, the only
end of flesh, and the modern sexual fear of flesh. On the one hand,
Eliot presents us with Webster and Donne. Both are genuinely
haunted by death. Flesh, even when desirable, is a reminder to
both of mortality. The two differ, however. Webster uses bodily
corruption for sexual arousal: ‘[Webster] knew that thought clings
round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and luxuries.’ Donne’s
sex is devoid of tenderness, even the merest inflection: ‘To seize
and clutch and penetrate.’ The verbs are unqualified, desolate.
(And there is a bleak, concealed irony in the apparent tautology
of ‘seize’ and ‘clutch’. As we differentiate, we see from the sequence
that ‘clutch’ is intended as a brutish approximation of ‘embrace’
or ‘stroke’.)
Eliot’s contrast is between the Elizabethan writers and mod-
ern man, who is intimidated by flesh, too—but for a different rea-
son. In the second half of ‘Whispers of Immortality’, Eliot
introduces a Russian female, Grishkin, whose magnificent ani-
mality, whose powerful physical presence, is vital—and therefore
intimidating. Yet her sex appeal is without calculation, without
consciousness. It is unaware, simple, shorn of complication—and
a million miles from serving as a reminder of mortality. Some

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 13
 critics have seen evidence of misogyny in Eliot’s catalogue of
Grishkin’s physical attributes—particularly the references to her
bodily odours: ‘so rank a feline smell.’ But she isn’t the predatory
man-eater of popular cliché. I think these critics are deaf to the
gentle accumulation of comic attributes in Eliot’s portrait. It be-
gins by stressing Grishkin’s undesigning innocence: ‘Grishkin is
nice.’ This is a property that coexists with her powerful sexuality
and her other property, the ‘maisonnette’ she lives in. Eliot’s
method is affectionate zeugma, juxtaposing the carnal and the in-
nocently inconsequential.
Finally, her concrete force is such that abstract ideas take eva-
sive action: they ‘circumambulate her charm’. But the joke is not
on Grishkin. The real joke is on the timid men, ‘our lot’7—as op-
posed to Webster and Donne. For us, death—bones, the ‘dry
ribs’—is a cosy refuge from discomfiting Grishkin.
The locus classicus of timidity in Eliot’s poetry is The Hollow
Men (1925), the first (radically different) thing Eliot wrote after
The Waste Land. It is spoken by men without substance—without
guts, without integrity—men who are spiritually gelded. But for
this poem we need a different word. ‘Timidity’ isn’t sufficiently
grave. Eliot is here considering spiritual evasiveness—the torpid
version of renunciation. His epigraph refers us to Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness and Mr. Kurtz. And hollowness features in Conrad’s
novella: ‘I let him [the brickmaker of the Central Station] run on,
this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I
tried I could poke my fore-finger through him, and would find
nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.’ But The Hollow Men
is a poem almost buried alive under the weight of commentary.
Commonly we are invited to read it through the spectacles of books

14 T. S . E L I O T
and history—Heart of Darkness, Julius Caesar, all three parts of
Dante’s Divine Comedy and Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and the
Gunpowder Plot. None of these suggestions is stupid. But The
Hollow Men, approached more directly, is a simple poem. Its sim-
plicity, its broad clarity, seems to have baffled commentators geared
up to read Eliot’s poetry as if they were code crackers at Bletchley
Park faced by Enigma.
The Hollow Men is set in Limbo, ‘death’s dream kingdom’, ‘the
twilight kingdom’. It is spoken in the first person plural by men
whose lives on Earth have been void, put to death by prudence—
and whose after-existence, neither damned nor saved, is not an
afterlife, but rather a contemptibly prolonged disengagement with
the ‘dangers’ of human contact.
In the induction to Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady, a Boy
addresses the audience: ‘a good play is like a skein of silk; which if
you take by the right end, you may wind off at pleasure, on the
bottom or card of your discourse, in a tale or so; how you will: but
if you light on the wrong end, you will pull all into a knot or elf-
lock; which nothing but the shear, or a candle, will undo or sepa-
rate.’ So far, criticism of The Hollow Men has produced a tangle
like a tarantula.
The ‘right end’, the one literary reference we need to know, is to
Dante’s Inferno canto 3 and its description of Limbo. Without it,
the poem doesn’t make sense. That is why Eliot takes unprecedented
pains to lodge it in our minds in his essay ‘What Dante Means to
Me’ (1950). He had already alluded to Inferno canto 3 in The Waste
Land. For all his wry disclaimers about the notorious Waste Land
notes, particularly in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956), Eliot
singles out this reference to Dante for special attention:

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 15
 Readers of my Waste Land will perhaps remember that the vi-
sion of my city clerks trooping over London Bridge from the rail-
way station to their offices evoked the reflection ‘I had not thought
death had undone so many’; and that in another place I deliber-
ately modified a line of Dante by altering it—‘sighs, short and
infrequent, were exhaled’. And I gave the references in my notes,
in order to make the reader who recognised the allusion, know
that I meant him to recognise it, and know that he would have
missed the point if he did not recognise it. [my italics]

The references are to Inferno canto III, lines 55–57 and to canto
IV, lines 25–27. These two cantos describe not Hell proper, but
the anteroom to Hell—which is Limbo. Many inhabitants of Limbo
are beside Eliot’s point—the virtuous but unbaptised, the great
pagan poets (Homer, Lucan, Horace, and, of course, Dante’s
guide, Virgil), the great pagan philosophers (Zeno, Thales,
Anaxagoras) and a Who’s Who of pagan grandees, heroes, and
heroines, including Caesar and Electra. These categories do not
concern us.
Limbo also contains ‘Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi’—
in Laurence Binyon’s translation, ‘These paltry, who never were
alive [my italics]’.
This category does concern us—since the failure to live is a cen-
tral Eliotean concern. These ‘paltry’ are rejected by Heaven and
Hell alike—‘a Dio spiacenti ed a’ nemici sui.’ [Odious to God and
to his enemies.] 8 This group has ‘spent / Life without infamy and
without praise’. (They intermingle with the cowardly angels who
fought neither for God nor Satan.) And it is this group which is
described by Eliot’s line, ‘I had not thought death had undone so
many’. Applied to the clerks in The Waste Land, the line doesn’t

16 T. S . E L I O T
mean that the living are actually dead. It means—a crucial, subtle
shift of emphasis—that they are not fully alive.
The Hollow Men is set in Dante’s Limbo and the Hollow Men
are those who are rejected alike by heaven and hell because they
have neither sinned nor been actively virtuous. They have ab-
stained. They have failed to live. They are depleted, unvital: ‘Shape
without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture
without motion.’ In contrast, there are the ‘lost / Violent souls’,
sinners who have gone to Hell proper, ‘death’s other Kingdom’.
They could include the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, but Eliot
doesn’t actually limit his broad category. (It could include
Guiterriez, Boudin and Floret—sinners for whom Eliot asks us to
pray at the end of ‘Animula’.) The opening invokes the Guy Fawkes
dummy—a thing without substance, stuffed with straw. This is
the guy you burn on bonfires every 5 November—an effigy, not
the real thing; a pseudo-Hell for a pseudo-person. This is a bold,
even obvious symbol, much like Eliot’s use of the waste land to
adumbrate an arid spiritual condition.
At the end of the second section of his 1930 essay on Baudelaire,
Eliot formulates an idea of the human that has shocked many lib-
eral readers, but which throws light on The Hollow Men and which
is explained in its turn by Eliot’s poem: ‘So far as we are human,
what we do must either be evil or good; so far as we do evil or
good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do
evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.’
It is that penultimate clause we find unacceptable: how can it
be true that it is better to do evil than do nothing? We immedi-
ately introduce incontrovertible examples. Is it better to kill a child
than to ignore that child? Obviously not. Equally obviously, there-
fore, this cannot be what Eliot means—unless he has suffered a

T H E FA I LU R E T O L I V E 17
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 LE DI Un grande successo di pubblico ha salutato la quarta
edizione della manifestazione romana dedicata ai fumetti e ai giochi
MCmicrocomputer a EXPO CARTOON Ancora Doom al centro degli
eventi di MC con un interessante gioco cooperativo ed un corso
interattivo di progettazione e costruzione di scenari aggiuntivi di
Corrado Giustozzi Dal 16 al 19 novembre Roma è diventata la
capitale del fumetto, dell'animazione e del gioco. Si è infatti svolta,
nei locali della Fiera di Roma, la quarta edizione di Expo Cartoon, la
mostra-mercato che ormai si avvia a diventare un evento di rilevanza
internazionale. La precedente edizione, svoltasi nello scorso mese di
maggio, era stata visitata da 42.000 persone ed aveva visto la
presenza di ben 240 stand e 15 mostre espositive. Assai numerose e
qualificate le presenze anche di quest'edizione, che ha visto ad
esempio la partecipazione in prima persona della Walt Disney Italia
con un intero padiglione di 2000 metri quadri dedicato per la
maggior parte al 'compleanno' di Paperino. Moltissime ovviamente le
mostre, fra cui spiccava quella dedicata a Nathan Never ed
organizzata su uno spazio di 800 metri quadri; e numerose anche le
conferenze e le proiezioni Ampio spazio, come al solito, è stato
dedicato al collezionismo ed alla vendita di 'gadget' legati al mondo
del fantastico e della fantascienza. Presenti ovviamente i giochi,
grazie ad una ludoteca particolarmente attrezzata che ha ospitato tra
l'altro la finale del Campionato Italiano di Dungeons & Dragons.
Durante la mostra si è inoltre tenuta la premiazione del Gioco
dell'Anno 1995 MCmicrocomputer ha partecipato ad Expo Cartoon
nell’ambito della ludoteca elettronica con due iniziative legate a
Doom, il gioco della Id Software che è oramai diventato un vero e
proprio oggetto di culto. Dopo aver per primi introdotto come
attrazione il gioco in rete, sin dalle prime manifestazioni ludiche degli
scorsi anni a Gradare. Marina di Carrara ed Urbino, in questa
occasione abbiamo pensato di presentare agli appassionati qualcosa
di più e qualcosa di nuovo, che non fosse ancora reperibile nelle
varie sale giochi che ormai si stanno attrezzando con Doom Ecco
quml'utilizzo di uno scenario di gioco cooperativo, con filosofia e
finalità differenti dal solito, e per la prima volta l'organizzazione di un
' corso di progettazione e realizzazione di scenari' per Doom e
Doom2 DeathTag Il DeathTag è un modo nuovo e diverso di giocare
in rete a Doom, inventato dagli americani Talon e Aikman e
migliorato su suggerimento dello stesso Romero della Id Software. Si
tratta di un gioco cooperativo. nel quale i quattro giocatori sono
suddivisi in due squadre, una "rossa" ed una 'blu', che si affrontano
su un terreno Due immagini dello stand di MCmicrocomputer, la cui
principale attrazione era il DeathTag Si notano te quattro postazioni
di gioco, alternate per le due squadre 150 MCmicrocomputer n. 157
- dicembre 1995
 REPORTAGE Due momenti del corso di progettatone di
scenari di Doom. gentilmente ospitato nell'aula didattica della Di Piu
comune Al contrario del solito deathmatch, tuttavia, uccidere gli
avversari non è il fine del gioco ma solo un mezzo, lo scopo è invece
segnare punti, cosa che si fa andando a premere un determinato
pulsante, evitando nel contempo che la squadra avversaria faccia
altrettanto. La prima squadra a segnare cinque punti vince la partita.
Il gioco è fortemente cooperativo, tanto che per una squadra non è
possibile segnare punti se i suoi componenti non sono estremamente
affiatati e coordinati Per questo motivo i giocatori erano collegati tra
loro a coppie mediante un apposito interfono con cuffia-microfono,
che permetteva ai due elementi di ciascuna squadra di scambiarsi le
informazioni necessarie a coordinare le rispettive azioni, senza che
gli avversari potessero udirli. Il gioco, gratuito, si è svolto presso lo
stand di MCmicrocomputer in sessioni di mezz'ora che
comprendevano anche un 'briefing' iniziale nel quale ai giocatori
venivano spiegati lo scopo e le modalità del gioco. Ogni postazione
era comunque dotata di cartelli con un breve riassunto delle regole e
con la mappa dello scenario. Per consentire un ordinato svolgimento
dei turni, e minimizzare gli affollamenti. le sessioni di gioco
andavano prenotate in anticipo. Ciò nonostante lo stand e stato
preso d'assalto da gruppi organizzati di giocatori incalliti di Doom i
quali, dopo un breve disorientamento iniziale dato dalla totale
inversione di prospettiva rispetto al gioco tradizionale, subito si sono
appassionati al nuovo gioco tanto da tornare in qualche caso nelle
giornate successive della fiera per poter giocare nuovamente! Corso
di creazione di scenari di Doom Ogni giocatore assiduo di Doom ha
desiderato prima o poi di poter realizzare un proprio scenario per
giocare in deathmatch con gli amici o per farli giocare in "singolare’
contro il computer. Esistono ormai diversi software, quasi tutti di
pubblico dominio, che permettono di fare ciò; ma solo i più esperti
sono in grado di usarli perché il processo sottostante è piuttosto
complesso da comprendere e laborioso da realizzare. Per ottenere
uno scenario valido, inoltre, occorrono anche delle conoscenze
tecniche sul funzionamento interno del "motore" di Doom, ed è
inoltre necessario avere alcune nozioni di "stile" per evitare di
realizzare scenari troppo sbilanciati o troppo difficili, o anche
semplicemente "brutti" dal punto di vista puramente estetico Ecco
quindi l'idea di organizzare un vero e proprio corso, della durata di
due ore, allo scopo di spiegare la teoria e la pratica della buona
progettazione di scenari per Doom. L'impostazione è stata quella di
un seminano per quanto possibile interattivo: dopo un primo esame
degli elementi tecnici che compongono gli scenari, si passava subito
alla pratica con l'esame ravvicinato di uno scenario esistente (il
primo livello di Doom I, sicuramente noto a tutti) per terminare con
la realizzazione di un pur semplice scenario originale Al corso, tenuto
dal sottoscritto, è stata abbinata la vendita di un dischetto che
conteneva il necessario alla costruzione di scenari di Doom, cosi che
chiunque, tornando a casa, potesse utilizzare immediatamente e al
meglio il software. In particolare l'editor scelto è il famoso DEU di
Raphael Quinet, un prodotto freeware di cui sono gratuitamente
disponibili anche i sorgenti, che consente di creare scenari per Doom
I, Doom II ed Heretic. Nel dischetto, oltre a DEU per DOS e DEU per
Windows, erano compresi anche lo scenario per il DeathTag e gli
scenari originali realizzati dal sottoscritto per il primo Campionato
Italiano di Doom tenutosi ad Urbino nel 1994 e per la scorsa
edizione del MCmicrocomputer Show. La schermata di apertura del
DeathTag, il nuovo modo cooperativo di giocare a Doom
MCmicrocomputer n. 157 - dicembre 1995 151
 Ora che l'hai visto, come chiameresti questo rivoluzionario
"COSO " della nuova gamma di PC Multimediali Packard Bell.7
Pensato per entrare in ogni famiglia, a servizio di ogni esigenza o
"desiderio" di utilizzo, secondo la filosofia vincente che ha portato
Packard Bell ad essere il primo produttore al mondo di PC
Multimediali, è di installazione immediata, ambien tabi le in
qualunque angolo di casa vostra grazie anche ad un design unico. Si
' ' . aziona con il nuovissimo “ FastMedia' ”, il telecomando-mouse
che governa in modo elementare tutte le funzioni della macchina, è
dotato di microprocessore PENTIUM, risponde al telefono, possiede il
vivavoce e la segreteria telefonica , funziona come un TVCOLOR, si
sintonizza \come una Radio FM e si sente M Packard Bell come uno
stereo , invia fax e documenti , è muni-dJtew lo di lettore CD R0M Vi
cone. ga con il resto del mondo. E' ancora più ' facile da usare grazie
alla nuova versione dell'esclusivo NAVIGATOR che ha trasformato i
PC Packard Bell in comodi appartamenti nei quali muoversi in modo
intuitivo e avvincente. Forniscono all' utente finale la più completa
gamma di servizi post-vendita: numero verde per assistenza on-line,
assistenza gratuita a domicilio per un anno, possibilità di pagamento
rateizzato, ricchissima dotazione software preinstallata e su CD con
un vedo- > re di oltre 2 Milioni e molto altro ancora. ° Scusateci, ma
continuiamo a non essere sicuri di doverli cltia^ mare solo PC. ♦V*
DISTRIBUTORE AUTORIZZATO PACKARD BELL: Idilli eader srl Yi«i l.
Si Immilli J/\ • JilJi lari I i»l. < HI » »** (/< 73 M - 1 .iv. « M)/ > >M
Il i Iced Sistemi Foggia tei. 0881/725235 Eurolab Srl San Severo (FG)
tei. 0882/342092 Sei Software Sas Cerignola (FG) tei. 0885/426123
Puntoufficio Bari tei. 080/5536992 Sin Data Snc Barletta (BA) tei.
0883/572540 Fimes Srl Molfetta (BA) tei. 080/8889083 Milella Rosa
Bari Systhema Snc Molfetta (BA) Compuservice Taranto tei.
080/5215218 080/9971332 tei. 080/8832003 Partipilo Vito Bari S.A.I.
Modugno (BA) Echo Sistemi Manduria (TA) tei. 080/5424727 tei.
080/5057808 tei. 099/8791065 Elettronica Trends Bari Cyber System
Altamura (BA) Data Computers Policoro (MT) tei. tei. 080/5573976
tei. 080/8717231 0835/971787
 Il database relazionale per ambiente client/server con
compilatore integrato. Realizzare nuovo potenti applicazioni in
ambiente Client/Server o migrare senza alcun problema verso
Windows 95 è facile con i nuovi Visual dBASE Borland. Visual dBASE
5.5 è l'unico prodotto Xbasc objeet oriented ili seconda generazione
presente sul mercato e con funzioni di BAI) (Kapid Application
Devclop- mcnt) e che consente di creare oggetti senza scrivere una
singola riga di codice. Visual dBASE 5.5 introduce l'innovativa
funzionalità — Two Ways Tool» che permette di operare in modalità
visuale o scrivendo direttamente il codice consentendo ad ogni
sviluppatore di lavorare nel modo a lui più congeniale. Con Visual
dBASE elicnt/scrver è possibile accedere con facilità a database locali
o remoti utilizzando sempre la stessa interfaccia applicativa mediante
semplici comandi SQL. V isualdB ASE Compiici' consente la
realizzazione di applicazioni eseguibili e di distribuire senza il
pagamento rnyalty. Ancora una volta Borland è il partner ideale nello
sviluppo software. DISTRIBUTORI NON PERDERE IL COMPETITIVE
OIS Trm INI COMPUTER 2000 02/52578.1 INGRAM MICRO
02/95796.1 LIFEBOAT 02/96701592 DELTA 0332/803111 JSOFT
OLIVETTI 039/6899811 02/4836.1 Borland AGENZIA ESCLUSIVAPKK
L'ITALIA liitemalional Software Services - ISS Srl Via Vaierà, 31/16 -
20020 ARESE (MI) Tel. 39.2.93582260 r.a. - Fax 39.2.93582280
 RACCOLTA INTEGRATA DI ARTIO Digital Imaging m likiuiw
1 SELEZIONI l TRATTAMENTO DEL COLOIE • 1 1 ir l* 1 1 KODAK I M
FOTOGRAFIA DIGITALE MC-digest è un nuovo bimestrale
Technimedia contenente una raccolta integrata di articoli tratti dai
fascicoli di MCmicrocomputer. Il primo numero è dedicato
all'argomento " Digital Imaging ", con 128 pagine di articoli di
attualità/ prove di prodotti , reportage di mostre e articoli teorici e
pratici sulle tecniche di elaborazione digitale delle immagini. Il CD-
ROM allegato contiene non solo i testi e le immagini degli articoli, ma
anche le foto in alta risoluzione sulle quali il lettore potrà intervenire
personalmente per provare le tecniche descritte, grazie anche alla
presenza delle versioni dimostrative di Adobe Photoshop e lllustrator.
 wmm CD-ROM multipiattaforma: per Macintosh e per
Windows! Il CD ROM allegato al primo numero di MC-digest DIGITAL
IMAGING contiene anche le versioni demo (tryout) di Adobe
Photoshop 3.0 per Windows e Macintosh e Adobe lllustrator per
Macintosh. Il CD-ROM allegato a MC-digest Ne 1 permette dì ^
ricercare , visualizzare , stampare gli articoli di £ fotografia digitale
pubblicati su MCmicrocomputer. f Cliccando sull'icona Adobe è
possibile installare le versioni dimostrative (tryout) di Adobe
Photoshop e Adobe lllustrator. COME ACQUISTARE MC-digest "Digitai
I macino" MC-digest, in edicola a ottobre, è acquistabile anche
compilando e inviando il tagliando a: Technimedia srl - Ufficio
Diffusione - Via Carlo Perrier, 9 - 00157 Roma - Tel.: 06/418921 -
Fax: 06/41732169. Il presente tagliando annulla e sostituisce il
consueto modulo pubblicato nelle ultime pagine della rivista. Vogliate
spedire al seguente indirizzo: Cognome e Nome Indirizzo CAP Città
Prov. Telefono J MC-digest " Digital Imaging" comprensivo del CD-
ROM contenente le immagini ad alta risoluzione relative agli articoli e
le versioni demo (tryout) dei software Adobe Photoshop 3.0 per
Macintosh/Windows e Adobe lllustrator per Macintosh. Pagherò L.
25.000 nella modalità di seguito indicata _l Allego fotocopia del
versamento sul c/c postale n. 14414007 Intestato a: Technimedia srl
- Via Carlo Perrier. 9 - 00157 Roma J Allego versamento a mezzo
vaglia postale intestato a: Technimedia srl - Via Carlo Perrier, 9 -
00157 Roma □ Allego assegno intestato a Technimedia srl J Pagherò
con Carta di Credito □ CartaSi J Diners J American Express N“ Scad.
intestata a: Indirizzo CAP Città Prov. Firma
 Paradox per Windows di Alan Simpson Apogeo - Editrice di
Informatica - Via Voghera. 1 1/A - 20144 Milano - Tel 02/89404722.
89408423 ISBN 88-7303-037-8 807 pagine - Lire 85 000 La mia
esperienza è stata abbastanza frustrante quando, qualche tempo fa,
ho avviato la ricerca di un libro su Paradox per Windows
regolarmente m'imbattevo in Paradox per DOS, ma sulla versione
Windows, mente, almeno sino a quando ho trovato questo libro,
dopo avere cercato in diverse e importanti librerie di Roma Ironia
della sorte, due giorni dopo in redazione ne arrivava una copia per la
recensione. Non mi sono tuttavia pentito dell'acquisto Ecco perché.
Tutti gli addetti ai lavori sanno che la versione corrente di Paradox
per Windows è la 5.0. Non tutti sanno perché questa versione non e
nata da un lento progredire della prima, come accade normalmente
nel mondo dell’informatica (da 1.0 a 1 1, poi a 2.0, eccetera):
Paradox per Windows è passato direttamente dalla versione 1 0 alla
5 0! Non mi sorprende il fatto che questo libro sia dedicato alla
prima versione e non all'ultimissima Ma non ha importanza, l'ho
potuto constatare di persona questo libro l'ho utilizzato a fondo
proprio per cercare di acquisire una conoscenza abbastanza
profonda del programma nella sua ultima versione ed ho potuto
verificare che le differenze non sono sostanziali, quindi la validità del
libro rimane intera Non possiamo dimenticare chi è l'autore Alan
Simpson scrive da anni dei best-seller di settore II suo approccio è
molto pratico e molto americano non parte mai dalla presunzione
che un certo argomento sia scontato, spiega sempre tutto in modo
esauriente e completo, per mettere l'utente in grado di capire e
impadronirsi delle tecniche d'uso dei programmi. Con Paradox per
Windows, che e un database relazionale, il compito di trasmettere i
concetti non è sempre facilissimo Ma è proprio per questo che chi ha
il problema di affrontare questo complesso e affascinante
programma, constaterà che Alan Simpson può rivelarsi un partner
prezioso Vi sono quasi 900 pagine da leggere: questo fatto la dice
lunga sull'ampiezza della trattazione, anche in considerazione del
fatto che ObiectPAL è trattato solo superficialmente. Insomma chi
usa Paradox per Windows e ritiene di avere bisogno di aiuto può
trovarlo in questo libro. Dino Joris «Non c'è nulla di più facile che
scrivere codice HTML: si tratta di puro testo con qualche modesta
indicazione che è racchiusa tra i segni di maggiore e minore, come
ad esempio

». Chi concorda con questa

analisi messa tra virgolette
per ben chiarire che si tratta
di una citazione, non ha certo
bisogno di leggere questo
libro, invece chi come me non
ritiene che per diventare
«accattiemmellisti» sia
sufficiente scopiazzare i codici
disponibili sul Web, potrà
farne buon uso Il libro
affronta i temi della
costruzione grafica e stilistica
delle pagine Web. offrendo
anche indicazioni sulla
gestione dalla parte del
server, che sono preziose per
indicare all'aspirante creatore
di pagine Web che vi sono
delle cose (le ricerche su basi
di dati, ad esempio) che
possono essere implementate
solo sulla base di «motori»
esistenti sul server. Il libro
viene accompagnato da un
dischetto contenente dei file
htm, che spiegano con esempi
pratici come implementare
certi comandi e che possono
evidentemente essere usati
come «template» per i lavori
dell'utente Sono inclusi degli
efficaci esempi di tabelle,
moduli, mappe sensibili,
eccetera Un ottimo «primer»,
ma anche un aiuto per chi si
occupa professionalmente di
questo mondo in evoluzione
Dino Joris HTML: creare
pagine WWW con stile di
Roberto Boschin Apogeo -
Editrice di Informatica - Via
Voghera. 1 1/A -20144 Milano
- Tel. 02/89404722 89408423
ISBN 88-7303-132-3 256
pagine - Lire 28 000 156
MCmicrocomputer n. 157 -
dicembre 1995
 VI presentiamo Microsoft® Visual Basic® 4.0. Non è solo
l’ambiente di sviluppo ad alta produttività che già conoscete, ma
anche un potente strumento di lavoro di gruppo per realizzare
soluzioni client-server (a 16 e 32-bit) scalabili e multilivello. Ora, con
la tecnologia Remote Automation di Visual Basic Enterprise Editlon, il
vostro gruppo di sviluppo può creare velocemente applicazioni
scalabili, facilmente mantenibili e distribuite, usando uno strumento
già conosciuto. veloce e facile s’incontra con grande e complesso
Grazie al supporto dei sistemi operativi Windows'' 95, Windows NT™
e Windows 3.1, i nuovi Visual Basic 4.0 Enterprise e Professional
Editions vi permetteranno di passare al 32-bit gradualmente,
sfruttando gli investimenti fatti in precedenza su programmi,
competenze e tecnologia.** La cosa più bella, poi. è che potrete
creare le vostre componenti OLE aperte e riutilizzabili, come per
esempio DLL OLE e OLE automation server. Così le vostre
applicazioni non saranno solo più veloci, ma anche più "intelligenti’:
Per ottenere maggiori informazioni su Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 e gli
altri strumenti di sviluppo della famiglia Microsoft, visitate il nostro
nodo web http:// www. microsott.com/oevonivi o l'Area Sviluppatori
su The Microsoft Network. Soluzioni client-server multilivello e
distribuite? Applicazioni distribuite In rete? Accesso remoto al dati ad
alte prestazioni? Supporto di team di sviluppo anche di grandi
dimensioni. Codice a 32-blt con II supporto Integrato per 16 -bit.
Creazione di componenti OLE riutilizzabili e aperti. Ambiente di
sviluppo Integrato aperto e programmabile. Nuovi controlli OLE per
l'accesso al dati. Potete contattarci anche al numero 02/7039.8398.
attivo dal lunedì al venerdì dalle ore 9.00 alle ore 18.00, orario
continuato. 'Caratteristiche presenti esclusivamente nelf’Enterpnse
Edition • *Lo sviluppo a 32bit richiede un sistema operativo a 32-bit
O Microsoft. Visual Basic, Windows. Windows NT. Dove vuol ondare
ogni?, sono marchi registrati di Microsoft Corp.
 RECENSIONI Internet Per le Aziende di Jill H. Ellsworth &
Matthew V. E IIsworth Apogeo - Editrice di informatica - Via Voghera.
1 1/A - 20144 Milano - Tel.: 02/89404722. 89408423 ISBN 88-7303-
120-X 510 pagine - Lire 48.000 «Ho sentito dire che...» - cosi si
comincia a parlare di argomenti non completamente familiari e di cui
vogliamo capire di piu. Particolarmente difficile è capire Internet e
assorbirne i contenuti, siano essi tecnici o politici, sociologici o
culturali, eccetera. Internet è una realtà di cui non è facile stabilire
dimensioni e confini. Su Internet si stanno scrivendo miliardi di
parole. Poi, grazie al cielo, c'è anche chi scrive più semplicemente
qualche decina di migliaia di parole e le mette su carta per offrirci
una panoramica pratica ed esauriente su come si affronta Internet
da un punto di vista pratico. Questo libro spiega come accedere a
Internet, come crearvi una presenza aziendale e come renderla
visibile ed efficace, come evitare possibili «colli di bottiglia», come
utilizzare le grandi risorse a disposizione, come preparare documenti
Web usando il linguaggio HTML. Il libro è evidentemente frutto di
una ricerca molto approfondita e si occupa di un gran numero di
settori specifici, mettendo in grado gli utenti di risolvere i dubbi e di
prendere la strada giusta, sia per percorsi di sola ricerca che per
quelli di partecipazione attiva (inserimento delle proprie pagine
Web). Gli aspetti tecnici principali sono trattati in modo completo ed
esauriente e il lettore ha quindi la possibilità di capire cosa
significhino termini come. FTP, Gopher, Veronica (scoprendo che
anche questo termine è un acronimo, probabilmente uno dei più
lunghi mal inventati), WWW, GUI, HTML, URL. Nella prima parte il
lettore trova delle indicazioni sui fornitori di «connettività» e di
«servizi». In altre parole, se volete esplorare la possibilità di
impiantare un vostro «server» o, più semplicemente, di avere
qualche vostra pagina Web su Internet, troverete le indicazioni
necessarie e sufficienti per cominciare il lavoro di ricerca del fornitore
giusto. Ma anche dopo averlo trovato, il lettore potrà poi ricevere
indicazioni utilissime su come rendere efficaci le proprie pagine Web,
su come renderle effettivamente visibili e quindi utili da un punto di
vista di marketing. In appendice vi sono anche delle indicazioni utili
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookname.com