Warrenpoint, the memoir Denis Donoghue wrote a decade ago, dealt only with his youth, and later it occurred to him - as well it might to a man of his years with many books and many adventures behind him - to write another, this time about his early years in Dublin. But it couldn't, it seems, be done so simply. In those Dublin days, his life was that of an obscure though dedicated reader, and the memoir would have been not about Donoghue as a young man-about-Dublin, but about his passion for Yeats and Joyce, and especially T.S. Eliot. And now we have the book and, sure enough, it is about Eliot, though it is also about Donoghue, now a literary critic of the first rank, rightly exulting in his mature powers.
Words Alone faces more directly and more resourcefully than any other commentary known to me a critical problem peculiar to Eliot's verse. "It is not," says Donoghue, "a question of difficulty. Most of the cruxes in Eliot's poems have been elucidated, the allusions explained. But his ways with language remain as bizarre as Mallarme's." And he quotes the passage in "The Hollow Men" beginning: "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams /In death's dream kingdom /These do not appear", remarking that although the authority of the lines is unquestionable, "commentary seems defeated". Yes, and such opacities have usually been shirked; but Donoghue doesn't shirk them, and devotes to the actual language of the poems an attention that makes one think of close musical analysis, being devoted to words rather than to the more general meanings we usually impose on poems in order to make their discussion easier.
"`Thoughts' is a word of poor repute in Eliot", we are told. As a critic, Eliot struggled to come to terms with Swinburne, in whom "the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning", but the struggle is evidence that his own genius is closer to Swinburne's than he wanted it to be. He could not quite abjure "meaning" but his poems are often hallucinatory, resembling variations on an unstated theme, or the subplot of a play of which the main plot is lost. They aspire, like the mind of Henry James as Eliot admiringly described it, to be divinely void of ideas. So, in reading The Waste Land, "we respond to the words and phrases with a sense of their exposure: they are at once memorable and void. . . they are Sibylline because of the darkness between them".
It is as a Sibylline, and as a Christian poet (one who walked "in daily terror of eternity") that Eliot has kept Donoghue's allegiance. He "ascribes to the Word of God, and to that alone, what the entire tradition of Romantic poetry has ascribed to the imagination." Poets who ignore that Christian ascription, even Wallace Stevens, whom Donoghue has long loved, are here severely chastised. A whole chapter is devoted to the correction of Stevens's heresies, not least those given such gorgeous expression in "Sunday Morning". The Waste Land by contrast, is religious; its movement "is such as to make an act of penance possible". And in "Ash Wednesday", where "the bird sang down / Redeem the time, redeem the dream", the tone "corresponds to absolution".
Donoghue's minute attention to Eliot's poetic language turns out to have, as its motive force, a conviction that the poet so sternly opposed the easy fallacies of freethinking. A whole chapter is devoted to Eliot's unpopular essay The Idea of a Christian Society, for the critic agrees with the poet that "the main conflict" in our world is "between those who think that the ultimate questions are religious and those who think the religious questions have been set aside by the combined force of politics, sociology, psychology and economics." Donoghue is even willing to defend the allegedly anti-Semitic passage in After Strange Gods, where Eliot declares that "reasons of race and religion make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" in a Christian society. Part of the defence is that Eliot thought any large number of free-thinking persons of any description would be undesirable, the Jews being merely one sample; his point was that without religion there cannot be culture, and the presence of freethinkers of whatever race might create the illusion that there could be.
It was bold of Donoghue to take on the enemy at this point, but he makes his own position absolutely clear. His lifelong and minute devotion to Eliot has behind it a firm, indeed what the poet himself called a "fiercely exclusive", religious conviction. This book is the apologia of a Catholic intellectual as well as a profound and conscientious commentary on the "words alone" of Eliot's poems.
Frank Kermode's most recent book, Shakespeare's Language,was published earlier this year