In this view of skyscraper modernity, urbanites were imagined as contemporary "Cliff Dwellers," a metaphor that drew upon the turn-of-the-century fascination with the Anasazi peoples who had built eyrie-like dwellings high on the mesas of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah at some unknown time in the distant past (later determined to be between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries). In the late 1880s, anthropologists and mountaineers had begun to explore, photograph, and write about these remarkable places, emphasizing the architectural acumen, tactical ingenuity, and sheer nerve of those who built and lived in them. 13 In early accounts these spaces conveyed a strong sense of the uncanny, which was not due merely to their extreme spatial inaccessibility. Commentators were also fascinated by the Cliff Dwellers' unknown origins, and by their seemingly sudden and unmotivated disappearance from places that seemed tactically impregnable even by much later standards. 14 Adding further to the mystery surrounding them was the belief that the Cliff Dwellers' remains showed a puzzling mixture of physiognomies, and their artifacts a marked eclecticism of style and sophistication, both of which implied a greater degree of interchange with the outside world than their hermetic living spaces seemed to admit. 15
In 1893, the Cliff Dwellers were brought vividly into the consciousness of hundreds of thousands of machine-age urbanites through an exhibit at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, featuring a massive composite simulation of a cliff, painted to resemble rock, into which were cut tiny apertures approximating their living spaces, along with relics and "portions of the real houses" taken from a dig in Colorado. 16 ( 2) The use of the Cliff Dwellers to describe the new spaces being created in the skyscraper metropolis was already in the Chicago air even before this exhibit went on public view. Also in 1893, the Chicago novelist Henry Blake Fuller published his novel The Cliff Dwellers , which cemented the metaphor's applicability to modern urbanites. Fuller's novel is one of the earliest attempts to integrate the skyscraper setting into the genre of social-realist fiction. His most original stroke was a mock-ethnographic introduction presenting the book's narrative as an analysis of the site of a new culture that needed to be named and understood:
Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm . . . . Each of these cañons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. 17
Fuller's facetious archaeology of the Chicago Loop centers on the Clifton Building, a fictional eighteen-story skyscraper housing "four thousand souls," and featuring wonderful elevating devices that "ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time" (TCD, 4). His narrative captures vividly the skyscraper's paradoxical combination of variety and insularity, spatial openness and hermetic inaccessibility. The Clifton's "tribe" is notably fluid and "heterogeneous," containing all walks of life from bankers to janitors, all of whom seem to be recent arrivals from elsewhere (TCD, 4-5, 12). Of course the building enables state-of-the-art accessibility to distant places, so that "the warriors" of commerce may "communicate their messages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote" (TCD, 5). Yet in gathering its vast variety of functions and resources into a single space, the Clifton aims above all "to be complete in itself," to make it "unnecessary" for its inhabitants, their archaeologist, or his readers to "go afield either far or frequently" (TCD, 5). 18
A great deal of writing on skyscrapers between 1890 and 1915 emphasized this incongruous mixture of hypertechnologized urban space with the unknowable, uncanny, and hermetic landscape of the western desert. A writer in Munsey's in 1898 noted that many streets "are already darkened by the huge cliffs of masonry that rise above them"; in Collier's C. P. Cushing objected to the "cheerless cañonlike streets" created by the skyscrapers. 19 C. F. Carter, writing in The Technical World, a venue we might expect to embrace the skyscraper, remarked on the menace to health and life from "the crowded warrens of the cliff dwellers towering . . . three hundred feet into the air on either side of the narrow slits called streets." 20 In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbes synthesized these images and anxieties into a powerful vision of the future skyscraper city as "a collection of towns and villages under separate roofs," each "complete unto itself," its elevators like "street railways running perpendicularly." The surrounding streets will be "canyons of a depth varying from 200 to 400 feet, through which the wind will sweep like gales," and "the sky will be practically blotted out" from this "city of electric lights on the brightest days," which is inhabited by businessmen who seldom glimpse the sky at all. 21 These are but a few of dozens of similar references to cliff and canyon (usually spelled cañon), which became consensual metaphors for the urban spaces, at once rational and mysterious, that were being remade by the rise of skyscrapers. ( 3) Mildred Stapley noted that the "cañon streets" of lower Manhattan were the consequence of intractably contradictory requirements: economic efficiency dictated that builders maximize rentable space right up to the property line, yet code forbade any part of a building to extend into air space that was not over part of its lot. 22 The inevitable result was the "sheer vertical wall deviating neither outward nor inward." 23 Eaton best captured the paradoxical character of this imagery with this 1915 remark: "Through the cañons he has made, Man hustles and bustles, creating more perplexities than he can solve" (NY, 4).
The practical strictures of skyscraper-building may have perplexed and darkened the streets of lower Manhattan, but they also helped beget new aesthetic styles and notions of beauty. Eaton's 1915 account of his evolving attachment to the skyscraper city reveals an important link between its sheer lines, massive forms, and constantly changing state, and an emerging aesthetic of modernism. At first perceiving the city as "miles and miles of ugly dwellings, cave dwellings where people lived in layers" (NY, 5), Eaton comes to love the "mortared Himalayas" of Manhattan's streets, and credits skyscrapers and the spaces they create ("great crags in the walls of a man-made cañon") for providing him with an aesthetic of beauty appropriate to the twentieth century, modernist in all but name, that repudiates "symmetry" and "conformity" (NY, 10), and instead embraces ceaseless variety (NY, 6), "stirring challenge" (NY, 9), "endless surprises" (NY, 7), "sudden revelation. . . amid apparent ugliness" (NY, 9), and anything that "rouses the eye to keener attention" (NY, 10). These are the very qualities that drew the eyes, brushes, and cameras of modernist visual artists to skyscrapers and cityscapes. Indeed, the artist Robert MacCameron concluded in 1913 that the modern city's new lines and forms augured a twentieth-century aesthetic that would emerge across many genres, as the skyscraper's "freshening of the vision" was sure to catalyze "fresh problems and solutions in other forms of art." 24
American poets of the 1910s and early 1920s would perceive that same allure, and explore those new notions of beauty, as they used cityscape verse to work toward a vigorous modernist aesthetic capable of negotiating, even embracing, the paradoxical conditions of modernity. In their poems, skyscrapers carry a wide range of emotional meanings, and function within a range of political discourses from capitalist intimidation to revolutionary praxis. In short, they exhibit the depth, variety, and complexity that the most resonant symbols of a cultural moment possess. Some verses read the skyscraper city as an image of bleakly depersonalized modernity, others as a locus of utopian possibility. Most bear the traces of both these responses at once, experiencing the skyscraper city as contradiction, instability, and challenge. Perceiving the metropolitan grid as an arresting abstract pattern of lights and lines that rivals the creations of nature, they ponder how to balance this detached aesthetic perspective with empathetic connection with others. As they feel the skyscraper city hurtling them into a future of unimaginable marvels, they question whether the constantly mutating metropolis would allow any meaningful relationship with the past. As skyscrapers inspire them to new metaphors for conceptualizing mass society, they worry that a society defined by its masses might prove wholly inaccessible to the powers of poetry. As they perceive the skyscraper's transformative power, promising access to new levels of experience and understanding, they wonder whether it will take them places human beings would want to go.
The young American poets who began to write about the modern metropolis in the early 1910s had grown up while skyscrapers were rising in the nation's cities. Since 1905 they had witnessed a breathtaking increase in the height of the tallest structures, the culmination of thirty years of skyscraper development. In the last decades of the century, the economic imperative for taller buildings, which one early commentator called "the capitalization of the air," had become enormous in the densest and most desirable commercial areas such as lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, as rents had become "prohibitive," and the purchase of land "impossible." 25 For many years, the tallest structure in Manhattan had been the spire of Trinity Church on lower Broadway at 284 feet, asserting, as Thomas van Leeuwen notes, the longstanding "material claim of the church on the territory between Earth and Heaven"; but by 1880 Trinity had begun to function as a "mere yardstick for any new skyscraper that was thought fit to carry the name." 26 Through the 1880s, steel-frame technology, which theoretically eliminated height restrictions upon architects' imaginations, were rendered practical possibilities by the continuing refinement of the high-speed electric elevator, and the falling cost and better quality control of steel. The success of the nine-story Home Life Insurance Company in Chicago (William LeBaron Jenney, 1884), the ten-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis (Louis Sullivan, 1890-91), and other experiments indicated that the steel-clad tower could look good, inspire public wonderment, and make its owners money. Even so, various factors, including residual skepticism that buildings several hundred feet high could be physically stable, retarded great increases in height for some years after the principles of steel-frame construction were established. By 1900 the world's tallest building was the Park Row Building in lower Manhattan (R. H. Robertson, 1899), which rose 383 feet (thirty stories). The most distinctive modern structure in the artistic and cultural landscape of New York City before 1905, the Fuller Building, better known as the Flatiron (D. H. Burnham Co., 1902), was, at twenty-one stories, still under 300 feet high. 27 Still, the drive to the skies had begun in earnest, and the visual scale of Manhattan life was being altered from street level to hundreds of feet in the air. In 1890, only six buildings in New York City rose as high as ten stories: by 1908 there were 538 such buildings, and by the end of 1912 this number had doubled again, to 1048. 28
In the decade after 1905, the emergence of the twentieth-century skyscraper would culminate in three lower Manhattan behemoths, each in succession the tallest building in the world, which became magnetic icons of the city for modernist writers, painters, and photographers: the Singer Tower (612 feet, Ernest Flagg; completed 1908, demolished 1967), the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet, Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 1909), and the Woolworth Building (792 feet, Cass Gilbert, 1913). The heaven-storming years that produced these three skyscrapers can hardly be overestimated as a defining moment of urban modernity. Because of the more height-restrictive zoning laws of the mid-1910s, and the more conservative business climate produced by the Great War, these towers stood as the three tallest in the world until after 1920, and the 700-foot barrier was not eclipsed again until 1930. 29
Virtually everyone who approached Manhattan from the south or west during the last thirty-five years of the twentieth century remembers, now painfully, seeing the bland yet unmistakable twin towers of the World Trade Center as the first visible signs of the city. Before 1930, the very tallest buildings were even more prominent signifiers of the metropolis. The Singer, Metropolitan, and Woolworth towers dwarfed almost every other building in the city by hundreds of feet, and were not obscured by a forest of surrounding skyscrapers until the 1950s. They could be seen from virtually every prospect in greater New York City. 30 An early booklet for the observation deck on the 50th floor of the Metropolitan Tower claimed plausibly that from there one could see "the homes of over one-sixteenth of the entire population of the United States" (MLIC, 45-46). The reverse must also have been true: certainly millions of people would have seen the Metropolitan, Singer, and Woolworth buildings, virtually every day of their lives.
Commanding this level of visual prominence and novelty, the tallest skyscrapers became a form of spectacular popular culture, providing symbolic currency in an era in which points of common understanding were generally perceived to be disappearing. For better or worse, they were the modern urban analogues of the small-town churches and schoolhouses around which most American lives had once revolved: instantly recognizable structures whose distinctive architectural features carried vivid, complex cultural meanings, as compass-needles, gathering places, repositories of civic and national pride—as sites of virtually every type of social interaction, from ruthlessly commercial to frivolously recreational. 31 As such, they laid a forceful claim on anyone interested in representing the defining features of urban modernity: painters, photographers, commercial artists; manufacturers of postcards, souvenirs, toys, almost every imaginable genre of material culture; and poets.
The opening ceremonies of the 792-foot Woolworth Building in 1913 evoked the skyscraper's complex significance in the cultural landscape of twentieth-century modernity. On the evening of 24 April, hundreds of feet off the ground, a distinguished group of 800 guests gathered including, as well as the expected industrialists and bankers, a member of the Wilson cabinet, various foreign diplomats, three lieutenant governors, and nearly twenty percent of the U. S. Congress from 28 states. 32 When everyone was seated, all the building's exterior and interior lights were extinguished, and exactly at 7:30 PM, President Wilson at the White House pressed a button, igniting all of its 80,000 lights, "enough to illuminate the entire 40-mile waterfront of Manhattan," no doubt as stunning an effect to the crowds watching for miles around as to the dignitaries inside (SQMP, 89-90). This dramatic event conjoined a variety of political, commercial, technological, and aesthetic meanings into a thoroughly ambiguous spectacle. On the one hand, it demonstrated that a single skyscraper's reach extended not only throughout the metropolitan area but to the seat of national government. The fact that such a building so confidently, competently worked evoked a modernity of complex interconnected elements that promised to be manageable through the unending advance of industrial technologies and organizational skills. On the other hand, mystifying an enormously laborious effort of construction and wiring into a single magical instant of illumination, it asked observers to accommodate another possible modernity, this one so massive in scale and hermetic in character as to defy individual comprehension.
Not surprisingly given the association of skyscrapers with such monumental spectacle, one group of poetic responses represented them as looming ominously over the more humanly-scaled structures of the city, monstrous in their sheer height and bulk, symbols of modern capital at its most unaccountable and self-congratulatory. In his prize-winning poem for the 1912 anthology The Lyric Year, "Second Avenue," Orrick Johns indicts the ever-expanding array of skyscrapers as a "jagged line of mist-enshrouded masonry" that "you, my people, reared and built/ To be a temple and a shrine/ For gods of iron and gilt." 33 In "Lines to the Woolworth Building" , the anarchist poet and sculptor Adolf Wolff admits that the Woolworth, completed only that year, "awes my soul," but quickly goes on to condemn it as a "monstrous sacrilege" because never "has thing so big been made for end so small." 34 Wolff is playing here with the specific incongruity of a five-and-ten-cent store housing itself in the world's tallest building; his more general point, of course, is that the Woolworth as an achievement is vitiated because it commemorates only "the priests of lucre" ("LTTWB," 29). 35 Appropriate, therefore, that the building's "pallor" was "like in color to the tint of bones," its "slender, upright lines" "so much like children's bones" ("LTTWB," 29). Wolff ended with a fervent but conceptually banal condemnation of the building to the dust: like the pyramids, "tyrants' tombs, built by a million slaves," "ere long/ Thou'lt be the relic of an age gone by" ("LTTWB," 29). Drawing from late genteel poetry's fusty reservoir of antiquarian imagery, such castigations of the idolatrous skyscraper espoused the conventional sentiments that poets had been expected to produce for decades. But they were not typical of American verse of the 1910s, which more often acknowledged both the intimidating potential of these great buildings, and also their allure as creations peculiarly expressive of modernity.
Many other poems, especially those in the radical orbit of The Masses and The Liberator, tended to read the skyscraper as an emblem of modernity defined by the limitless possibilities of communal effort. The octave of John Reed's sonnet "Foundations of a Skyscraper" (1910s) evokes the "ghastly" aspects of the construction process ("Thunder of drills, stiff spurting plumes of steam,-/ Shouts and the dip of cranes, the stench of earth"), but also treats this as a site of human possibility, since out of an inferno of exploitative labor, "men give a vision birth,/ Crawling and dim, men build a dreamer's dream." 36 The poem maintains a valuable balance between the utopian vision of "A phantom of fairtowers in the sky" and the grittier assertion that the true "foundation" of the skyscraper is human labor ("FOAS," 38). The sestet reinforces this convergence with a striking image of the building in the strenuous posture of the workman who built it: "Naked, a giant's back, tight-muscled, stark,/ Glimpse of mighty shoulder, etched in steel" ("FOAS," 38).
Reed's reference to "the clamor of unknown tongues" ("FOAS," 38) in the skyscraper's construction site evokes the heterogeneous ethnic makeup of its workforce, and the class-consciousness that such an enterprise might promote, no doubt in spite of its developer's desires. Pursuing this line of thought further, two poems published in The Liberator celebrate great buildings as empowering icons of radical consciousness, foreshadowing in verbal terms the representational strategies that Lewis Hine would use a few years later to photograph the workers constructing the Empire State Building in Men at Work . Like Hine's photos, Raymond Corder's "The Skyscraper" and Stirling Bowen's "Skyscraper" convert the modern capitalist tower into an emblem of the utopian possibilities of collaborative human effort. 37 Corder's poem begins, "All that steel frame-work bristling in the sun/ Is something we have done" ("TS," 21). The physical labor of construction ("We sweated, we plugged, and built it, span by span") has enabled the workers to think of themselves as the building's "creators," and therefore, its rightful owners: "And every rusty beam that skyward towers/ Is ours—we built it—It is ours!" ("TS," 21). The poem's distinctive proletarian voice uses a high-spirited slang to acknowledge the obligations of doctrine ("Sure, buddy, sure, I know/ The boss has got it now-he'll have to go" ["TS," 21]), but prefers to admire the building a bit longer as an object of beauty and a source of pride, a central constituent in a materialist-modernist aesthetic that valorizes collective human achievement above natural verities:
But, say, boy, watch them clouds,
They seem to stand still while that eye-beam strouds
Across the sky.-She's pretty, ain't she, son?
That piece of work we've done. ("TS," 21)
As many of Hine's photos feature iconic human res who echo the shape of buildings or extend the implied motion of machines, Bowen's sonnet "Skyscraper" suggests how heavy machinery exponentially magnifies the power of the ordinary worker: "One man mops his brow/ And, spitting, scoops two tons of dirt up now/ In one iron fist.—plain Mike or Tom or Pete" ("S," 13). Extending the individual human frame, with "fist" and "great arms," the crane incarnates the growing strength of the proletariat as a collective body ("S," 13). Bowen flatly refuses to interpret the building's massive scale as a parable of hubris, and instead appropriates the imagery of pagan idolatry for the "clear godless" nature of this human enterprise: "No god can muddle anything we try!" ("S," 13) The building is indeed "Babel's modern tower," since it has drawn together a multiethnic workforce who "confuse the Yankee tongue," but this is a source of affirmation as well, as the skyscraper becomes the magnificent result of their growing class consciousness ("S," 13).
The skyscraper's contradictory ability to embody both the depersonalizing mystifications of corporate capitalism, and the limitless possibilities of collective labor, is acutely articulated by Arturo Giovannitti's "The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th," published in The Masses for August 1916, in an oppressive atmosphere of patriotic rhetoric and preparedness parades. 38 Giovannitti introduces in the first line a "hawk-faced youth with rapacious eyes, standing on a shaky chair" who exhorts an alienated and scattered crowd, "idle, yawning, many-hungered, beggarly," to embrace the cause of radical labor ("TDOW," 283). Studded with images of bellicosity, this young man embodies the hard line of The Masses' revolutionary persona, as "his red tie flows tempestuously in the wind, the unfurled banner of his heart amidst the musketry of his young words" ("TDOW," 283). But he also has a human communicativeness and vulnerability otherwise lacking from the clamorous physical textures of the urban street. Giovannitti places him at the heart of the capitalist skyscraper city, "in the roar of the crossways, under the tower that challenges the skies, terrible like a brandished sword" ("TDOW," 283). The humanity and sincerity of this warlike youth contrast to the other version of war that erupts upon the street, which is all the more intimidating for being disjointed and depersonalized: "the blast of a trumpet, its notes ramming like bullets against the white tower./ The soldiers march up the Avenue. The crowd breaks, scatters, and runs away, and only six listeners remain" ("TDOW," 283). Though we get nothing more than this fragmentary glimpse of the military parade, it breaks the spell of the boy's rhetoric, dissipates the "island of silence" his voice had created amidst the "roar" of the city, and sends most of his audience scurrying aimlessly away ("TDOW," 283). As the last listeners drift off one by one (even the poet's alter ego, whom he calls "the stranger I know"), until only a single young woman is left, Giovannitti acknowledges the difficulty of resistance to a capitalist modernity that enforces conformism by isolating people from one another ("TDOW," 283).
However, this story is not over: as Giovannitti repeats four times in the second half of the poem, "But he speaks on" ("TDOW," 283). The boy's persistence marks his cause as indomitable, as does the girl who remains transfixed, "her upturned face glowing before the brazier of his soul," proving that his words need not inevitably fall on deaf ears, and can produce tangible results in the world ("TDOW," 283). At the end he, she, and the tower "are the only three things that stand straight and rigid and inexpugnable/ Amidst the red omens of war" ("TDOW," 283). Though Giovannitti never names this building, he certainly has in mind the Metropolitan Life Tower, sited on the southeast corner of Madison Square, at 700 feet the area's tallest building by far, and containing on its white walls the largest clock in the world. ( 4) At the beginning of the poem, the tower may seem just another depersonalized and alienating element of the modern capitalist city. Yet even at that point the building is associated with the speaking boy just beneath, as he mimics its height by standing on a chair. When he exhorts the crowd, "his shadow is heavy and hard upon their faces," as the tower's must also be ("TDOW," 283). At the poem's end, only the girl remains, one resolute listener to match the boy's indomitable speech, and the tower's great clock strikes twelve: "one by one drop at his feet the twelve tolls of the clock that marks time, the time that knows and flows on until his day comes" ("TDOW," 283). By associating the timekeeping tower with the young radicals, Giovannitti proposes a Marxian reading of capitalist modernity as an era that has generated both greater levels of inhumane exploitation, and also the class consciousness necessary for radical change, whose time is inexorably approaching. For him and other leftist poets of the era, the skyscraper tower signifies not just alienating and inhumane modernity, but the human race's ability to create things. Its great strength, its inexpugnability, even its shape that rebels against supposedly eternal verities ("challenges the skies")—all these qualities make the skyscraper central to an iconography of revolutionary modernism.
In modernist poems the skyscraper tower often represents rocklike strength, for obvious reasons; yet as a symbol it is remarkably tensile, allowing Giovannitti to reshape a monument to corporate capitalism into a harbinger of Marxist revolution. This malleability of symbolic function is congruent with another of the skyscraper's paradoxical signifying powers: the ability to transform temporal and spatial principles previously perceived as immutable. A host of early modernist writers explored great buildings as liminal spaces, thresholds to new dimensions of consciousness or experience, windows into the future or the past, or harbingers of radical, even apocalyptic change. Harriet Monroe, the poet of her generation most deeply engaged with urban modernity, noted that in many climatic circumstances skyscrapers extended past the limits of visual perception to create a sublime vertigo that confused terrestrial and celestial: "The many-windowed walls uprear so high/ They dim and quiver and float away in mist/ Tangling the earth and sky." 39 Walter Pritchard Eaton likewise perceived the skyscraper's vastness outstripping identifiable climatic zones, in effect transcending weather itself: "On foggy days the Singer Building and its sister peaks go up out of sight into the vapors. Again, on days of heavy atmosphere and lowering rain . . . I have seen the lower portions of the buildings obliterated, and only their summits reared on nothing into the gray air, a dream city, unbelievable, ethereal, immense" (NY, 21-22). Images of crossing and transformation re frequently in commentaries upon these buildings that made people feel themselves "on the abyss of eternity." 40 One of the most imaginative of these was by Ray Stannard Baker, who described the steel-frame skyscraper as "more a bridge than a building" ("TMS," 48). In Baker's vision of a horizontal structure somehow also becoming vertical, the supporting steel girders are "big bridges," and elevators the vehicles conveying us into some unknown region in the heavens ("TMS," 56, 48). Eaton too imagined skyscrapers at night as vertical thoroughfares rising into the air, proposing that the "upward rows of lights" give lower Manhattan "exactly the aspect of a town of many streets running up a great dome-like hill, each little house by the roadside imagined from its square of light" (NY, 22). The skyscraper's ability to blur fundamental spatial distinctions between vertical and horizontal, between earth and heavens, gave it an uncanny liminal force.
As it made people feel they were teetering on the very edges of space and time, the liminal skyscraper catalyzed some poets into hallucinatory visions of nightmare modernity. Armond Carroll's "From a City Street" offers a surreal portrait of "harpies of our modern time," who perch on the "crags which high uplift/ Their steel-knit skeletons" above "the surfs that surge and shift." 41 The trope of people surging and ebbing among the enormous buildings like a restless "surf" can also be read as a punning reference to their serfdom to the forces of modernity tossing them about. Far above the street, these harpies both "mock the futile restless waves/ That surge in great affair below," and ironically "hail to wide oblivious graves/ The victims of the undertow." 42 The simultaneous mocking and hailing implies that a society gets the imaginative icons it deserves; these harpies, however murky and unsatisfying, are faithful emblems of the chaotic and depredatory culture that constructed the crags they inhabit. Their mocking is thus appropriate commemoration for that culture's victims. The apocalyptic resonance of the heaven-storming tower, implicit in Carroll's skyscraper-Gothic, comes to the fore in Horace Holley's "Skyscrapers" , which compares the skyline to "a forest of strange palms" apparently not subject to natural laws: they don't sway in wind, "nor nod sleepy at evening," nor offer to "nestling birds/ A warm and comfortable mossy bough." 43 Unnerved at these contraventions of the natural order, the speaker hurls at the skyscrapers the apocalyptic prediction that nature must ultimately reassert its dominion through "a furious tempest" that will "tear your earth-devouring roots" and rain down "terrible fruit" of stone upon "a shore deserted." 44
The American poem that most fully explores the skyscraper as such a liminal space comes from a writer few would even associate with urban modernity, Sara Teasdale, whose work has been unjustifiably miniaturized by high modernism's interlocking preconceptions about gender and genre. Teasdale's "From the Woolworth Tower," published in the 1915 volume Rivers to the Sea but eventually dropped from her collected works, consists of seventy-four lines divided into short beginning and ending sections framing a longer central meditation. The first section describes a couple enjoying each other's company in the city of modern amusements, arriving "vivid with love, eager for greater beauty," into the "brilliant and warm" corridors of the Woolworth Building ("FTWT," 12). The elevator's "sharp unswerving flight" up to the observation deck transports them from the everyday world into a sublime realm of unseen and uncanny forces ("FTWT," 12). As they "shoot" through "swirling and angry" air that "howls like a hundred devils," the speaker is highly "Conscious of the chasm under us" ("FTWT," 12). She has entered an unstable liminal zone in which the division between air above and earth below can no longer be taken for granted. 45 The skyscraper's liminal force intensifies when they reach the top, pass through "a door leading onto the ledge—," and find themselves perched "over the edge of eternity," accompanied only by "wind, night and space!" ("FTWT," 12-13). Alarmed at the "terrible height," the speaker still realizes with some wonder that they have actively chosen to experience it ("Why have we sought you?") ["FTWT," 13]. She speaks here not as a bohemian seeking esoteric urban thrills, but as an American participating fully in the popular culture of her times: until its closing in 1941 due to wartime precautions, the Woolworth's observation deck attracted 250,000 visitors annually (SQMP, 136). (. 5, 6)
The poem's second section, describing the view from the tower, negotiates most of the key themes of cityscape poetry: the perception of the city as abstract patterns of lights and forms that rival or displace the creations of nature; the desire to balance this detached perspective with empathy for others; the anxiety that the scale and impersonality of skyscraper modernity may overwhelm the poet's communicative powers; and the uneasy attempt to situate the modern metropolis into a meaningful relationship with past and future. Regaining her perceptual and emotional bearings, the speaker perceives the abstract visual drama of the city's lights ("A thousand times more numerous than the stars") outlining its dark shapes: "Oh lines and loops of light in unwound chains/ That mark for miles and miles/ The vast black mazy cobweb of the streets" ("FTWT," 13). As in much cityscape verse, the modernist visual arts provide a point of reference for the poetic imagination: "Near us clusters and splashes of living gold/ That change far off to bluish steel" ("FTWT," 13). This painterly abstraction evokes the poet's sense of being transported into a liminal city in which the familiar "strident noises" of the street float up to them, now "hallowed into whispers" ("FTWT," 13-14). The stridency has been hallowed out of them, but questions remain. Does the poet's [Begin Page 113] liminal sensitivity make these "whispers" comprehensible as human utterances? Or have they simply been distanced and aestheticized into the spectacle of the nocturnal cityscape?
The anxiety created by these questions becomes primary in the next verse paragraph, which turns toward the human element of the city conspicuously absent so far. But the results of this turn are immediately discouraging:
We feel the millions of humanity beneath us,-
The warm millions, moving under the roofs,
Consumed by their own desires;
Preparing food,
Sobbing alone in a garret,
With burning eyes bending over a needle,
Aimlessly reading the evening paper. . . ("FTWT," 14)
Assailed by fleeting perceptions of "the sorrow, the torpor, the bitterness, the frail joy" of human life that "come up to us" as the whispers had done, but now feel "like a cold fog wrapping us round," the speaker can muster none of Whitman's belief in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that human connection might transcend the distance between the present moment and other ages. 46 She also feels unmoved by the tower as a symbol of future human progress, concluding that in a hundred years "the anguish, the torpor, the toil/ Will have passed to other millions/ Consumed by the same desires," and eventually "darkness will blot the lights/ And the tower will be laid on the earth," with only sea and stars remaining "unchanging" and "unconcerned" ("FTWT," 15). For Teasdale, the illuminating liminality the tower brings turns out to be bitterly ironic. As a vehicle for abstracting oneself from the moment-to-moment perceptual plenitude of street life for a more meditative perspective, as a threshold to deeper understanding, it has yielded the appalling conclusion that modernity is merely the clockwork acting-out of petty melodrama, followed by implacable apocalypse.
Instead of, say, a sober descent from the building to contrast the exhilarating ascent, the brief final section retreats from these anguished realizations, and announces that despite the "sorrow, futility, defeat" all around, love "has crowned us/ For a moment/ Victors" ("FTWT," 15). Here Teasdale attempts to complete the theme of liminality, implying that because the building has allowed the lovers to abstract themselves from the strident and chaotic textures of the city, to exist "on the abyss of eternity," they have understood the power and the value of their love more deeply than they could have done below ("FTWT," 15). But this wishful affirmation pales next to the disillusioning force of her earlier realizations, and whatever fleeting victory she feels is bittersweet at best. Teasdale's eventual rejection of "From the Woolworth Tower" is understandable given its problematic ending, but is also unfortunate, because the poem is her most ambitious attempt to integrate the idiom of the rhapsodic love lyric with urban modernity, a project deserving of serious reconsideration by current historicist criticism. The alienated futility she describes here is indeed one aspect of the modernist response to modernity, though not the primary, much less the only one, as ideologies of high modernism often assert. The poem remains illuminating as an emotionally raw and ambivalent instance of literary modernism's horror at depersonalized modern mass society, before this was styled into seductive elegance by Eliot and the Fugitives, and then elevated to high-culture dogma after World War II.
Teasdale's vision of tall buildings collapsing upon the shore in the face of an apocalyptic storm evokes the "falling towers" of The Waste Land , which are seldom considered in relation to the modern skyscraper. 47 In the beginning of "What the Thunder Said," when Eliot describes "mountains of rock without water" amongst which "one cannot stop or think," he refers most directly to the quasi-biblical desert landscape that has framed the entire poem and lent it a title (TWL, 334, 336). But a few dozen lines later, we approach an arid "city over the mountains" that "cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air," which leads directly to a litany of human history as a succession of "falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal" (TWL, 372-77). This associative sequence links the waste land's sterile mountains of rock to the "unreal" cities of modernity, a linkage reinforced by the adjective "violet," which Eliot had previously used to evoke the machine-age city at dusk ("the violet hour, when the eyes and back/ Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting" [TWL, 215-17]). Indeed, despite its studied timelessness that draws upon biblical parables and ancient vegetation rituals, the desert landscape has possessed attributes of the modern city all along. Most notably, existence in the waste land is typified, as in the city, not by true solitude ("There is not even solitude in the mountains"), but by an alienation from others that is exacerbated by there being so many of them, so many "red sullen faces" sneering and snarling "from doors of mudcracked houses" that "one can neither stand nor lie nor sit" (TWL, 343, 344-45, 340). These "hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth" (TWL, 369-70) can be seen as analogues of the contemporary crowd surging over London Bridge, eyes fixed before feet, to arrive at offices "on the final stroke of nine" (TWL, 68).
The last lines of The Waste Land memorably synthesize urban and desert settings, as the speaker sits "upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind" him, his great buildings crumbling, his finely styled phrases disintegrating into fragmented collage (which begins "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down") (TWL, 424-25, 427). Eliot prophesies a cataclysmic, if entropic, denouement to the accelerating human expansion into the sky. The approaching storm at the poem's end can be interpreted equally as the harbinger of some cleansing spiritual rejuvenation, or as the cosmic coup de grace upon a self-annihilating culture. Eliot's ambivalence toward modernity, his obvious fascination with the industrial city even as he is repulsed by it, is perhaps the most precious element of his mixed legacy to modernism, but this largely vanishes from his work after his conversion to Christianity. Still gripped by it in The Waste Land, he articulates as forcefully as anyone the wonder and anguish of experiencing everything that is solid, even and especially our most massive bulwarks against instability, cracking, reforming, and bursting in the viole(n)t air of modernity.
The building in the Manhattan skyline most significant to American poets before 1930 was the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Tower, located at 1 Madison Avenue on the southeast corner of Madison Square (just across from the Flatiron, the structure that meant the most to visual artists). The Metropolitan Tower, an instantly recognizable structure with several unique visual features, was integral to several poems of the 1910s and 1920s that consider the role of poetry in modern urban experience. The white tower that dominates Giovannitti's cityscape of revolutionary modernity, "The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th," is the Metropolitan in all but name. It also initiates the mystical singing of William Rose Benét's "The Singing Skyscrapers." In the opening lines of her exquisite lyric "Parting Gift" , Elinor Wylie, gently teasing her partner Benét for his fascination with these great structures, uses the Metropolitan as a shorthand reference for worldly grandeur, presuming it to be a characteristic object of desire for the modern urban subject:
I cannot give you the Metropolitan Tower.
I cannot give you heaven;
Nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum;
Nor happiness, even. 48
Several of these poems contain glancing references to the Metropolitan's appearance and lighting effects that may strike current readers as murky or private. But this is our lack, not the poems', since the tower's nocturnal spectacle, visible from virtually everywhere in the city, must have been known to almost every Manhattanite of the early twentieth century. Indeed, this imagery is obscure to us precisely because it was so familiar to the era's poets and readers, who needed no contextual introduction. At any rate, these poems use the lights and other attributes of the Metropolitan Tower to articulate a wide range of emotional states: love, disappointment, yearning for stability, alienation, skepticism, commitment to social change. This range of possible significations invites us to see the building as an exemplary symbol in a poetic modernism deeply engaged with modernity. 49
The first poet to explore the resonance of this exemplary great building was again Sara Teasdale, whose lyric "The Metropolitan Tower" begins an unofficial sequence of six poems that conclude the "Love Songs" section of Helen of Troy and Other Poems . 50 All six feature titles of geographically specific settings in greater New York City (Gramercy Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Coney Island, Union Square, and Central Park); collectively they trace the unhappy progress of a modern love relationship. "The Metropolitan Tower" initiates the sequence by recounting "Love's birth" in the speaker's heart during an hour spent walking with a companion at dusk around the then brand-new skyscraper ("TMT," 29). The first two of its three stanzas use the tower's visual sequences and timekeeping function to measure the speaker's emotionally heightened time:
We walked together in the dusk
To watch the tower grow dimly white,
And saw it lift against the sky
Its flower of amber light.
You talked of half a hundred things,
I kept each hurried word you said,
And when at last the hour was full,
I saw the light turn red. ("TMT," 29)
The speaker's evolving commitment to her companion is precisely articulated through the tower's sequence of lighting effects. 51 ( 7) The first phase of her experience corresponds to the "amber light" that flowers on the building's clock as dusk approaches, which here suggests the sense of infinite emotional possibility one perceives upon first feeling love ("TMT, 29). These feelings swell as the building's illumination brightens minute by minute, to be culminated by the flashes of the lantern as the "hour" reaches its end, an event the speaker anticipates as eagerly ("at last") and feels as intensely as she might the "full" consummation of her love ("TMT," 29).
But all the while, her oblivious paramour flits from one trivial observation to another, leading us to suspect that he must eventually disappoint her. The final stanza of "The Metropolitan Tower" foreshadows the sequence's bleak ending, wistfully reaffirming her love despite his unresponsive self-absorption:
You did not know the time had come,
You did not see the sudden flower,
Nor know that in my heart Love's birth
Was reckoned from that hour. ("TMT," 29)
The syntactic and rhythmic parallels of the phrases "the light turn red" and "the time had come" create a strong sense of rhetorical momentum and culmination, pulling us forward much as the speaker is being pulled into deep emotional attachment, even as we note that red lights conventionally signify impending danger ("TMT," 29). And yet, in the midst of all this modern inconstancy, the tower signifies not impersonality or alienation: indeed, it is the only constant in the unstable emotional milieu the speaker has entered, and only through its steadfast presence and knowable visual sequences can she chart her own emotional durée.
To the corporate owners of the Metropolitan Tower, this constancy was central to its meaning and value. In 1943 the company's historian proudly described the tower's clock, chimes, and lighting beacon, which "flashed for miles over New York City and the neighboring towns." This beacon advertised the dependability of Metropolitan Life, and became the basis of one of the company's self-defining slogans, "The Light That Never Fails." 52 Another early modernist poem, Lola Ridge's "Time-Stone," examines the Metropolitan Tower as a modern measuring device, literally marking the passage of time, but also serving as a symbolic locus of enumeration and evaluation. 53 Ridge is as fascinated with the tower as Teasdale, but is certainly more skeptical of its beneficence than its corporate biographer. She develops an extraordinarily compressed and resonant critique of the tower's entanglement in ideologies of patriarchal capitalism. Here is the poem in full:
HALLO, Metropolitan—
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
This midnight the moon,
Playing virgin after all her encounters,
Will break another date with you.

But I'd rather . . . like the cats in the alley . . . count time
By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
Than all your tally of the sunsets,
Metropolitan, ticking among stars. ("TSS," 51)
The title portrays the tower as a device of temporal measurement, a sort of gigantic sundial, monumental and timeless in its association with ancient products of human ingenuity. This particular time-stone, however, also possesses a specifically modern character, signified first of all by its panoptical capabilities ("Ubiquitous windows staring all ways"), and by its function as enormous searchlight and beacon ("Red eye notching the darkness"). The metaphor of notching—marking a surface with a cut, for the purpose of measuring, counting, or keeping a record—has both temporal and spatial functions in the poem. The red flashes of the tower's lights notch the night temporally, into a finite number of fifteen-minute segments; and spatially, darting outward to illuminate and arrange the otherwise incoherent space of "the darkness" into finite and discrete units. The illumination and arrangement of the night is no mean feat, signifying here, as would the "emblazoned zones and fiery poles" of Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West," the human power to create, reshape, and organize. 54
But Ridge has already begun to scrutinize the value of the tower's rationalizing capacity through her use of "staring," which implies looking without comprehension, judgment, or emotion. The building's authority is challenged further through the "slip of a moon" that "at midnight," the moment of the tower's greatest aggrandizement, when even the hands of its clock point straight upward, will "break another date" ("TSS," 51). Even as the tower "breaks" (as in making publicly known) another date in the passage of human time by recording the advent of midnight, it is confounded by this timekeeper of a premodern era, which it can only "ogle" fruitlessly. Ridge here begins a mischievous pursuit of the phallic implications of the tall thin tower—ever erect yet never satisfactorily coupled—revealing the anxieties of the patriarchal imagination and the powermongering that emerges from them.
As if overcompensating for its inability to get satisfaction from the moon, the tower embraces and proclaims its own business, in two senses of the word. The skyscraper is all about doing business, of course; but the "fuss" and clutter Ridge associates with it undermine its ostensible rationalist precision. The ever-multiplying "ant-black res" also do double duty, as both the dark-suited professionals working in the building, rendered nearly microscopic by its enormity; and as the numbers in the ledger books that record the business these workers do. Calling the building a "flight of ledger books" ingeniously mirrors its arrayed material components—such as flights of stairs, banks of elevators, rows of desks and files—with the columns of res, human and financial, that inhabit it. ( 8) That these flights are "overrun" by the ant-black res again emphasizes the hectic and uncontrolled—ultimately irrational—character of the building's business, a critique given further force by Ridge's imagery of dancing. The tower's "can-can" insistently asserts the can-do rationalism that creates such buildings, but this frenetic dance ultimately succeeds mostly in revealing the inadequacies of that ideology. The ant-black human res are set dancing by their compulsive need to conduct business, to make the res in their ledgers leap, expand, and multiply. But the interminability of the dance implies that it becomes its own end, with no goal or reward outside itself. The fact that the res, both human and numerical, are "dancing on spindle legs," offers little assurance of their ability to sustain their hectic routine. The spindle is yet another intriguing image in this rich passage. "Spindle legs" evoke the malnourishment, certainly spiritual but possibly physical as well, of the tower's human population.  This is a suggestive shape indeed in a poem about a very tall, very thin tower with a pointed top. But while the tower may remind us of a huge spindle, the main impact of this signification is to complete the ironic inversion of its phallic power, since the function of a spindle would be to impale forcibly the paper res kept within the tower, and by extension, its human res as well. These images convey us to a vision, at once sinister and whimsical, of the spindle-tower, striving obsessively upward but failing to achieve any cosmic intercourse with the moon, succeeding instead only in skewering its human creators, who may imagine themselves as partaking in its power to penetrate, but who actually are penetrated by it. Already reduced to the stature of insects in their "ant-black," these movers and shakers become the moved and shaken, subtler versions of Eliot's image in "Prufrock" of modern-subject-as-insect, "pinned and wriggling on the wall." 56
The office spindle is a tool, rather an elemental one, for assembling, organizing, and recording information; thus the image can also be linked to the poem's controlling metaphor of the tower as a measuring and recording device. It is to this conceit that Ridge turns again in the final five lines, unfavorably evaluating the tower in contrast to the more appealing if less exact method of counting time by the moonbeams that filter between the walls of her building. Embracing the nonpatriarchal and marginal values represented by the moon, the alley cats, and the horizontal curves of her "stoop-shouldered walls," the poet playfully presents the tower as grotesque in its enormity, rigid in its stability, obsessive in its precision, ridiculous as it ticks mechanically away among its celestial neighbors: ultimately, the emblem of a narrow capitalist patriarchy whose only response to sunsets is to "tally" them ("TSS," 51). The tally, like the notch and the spindle, is a rich term here, again implying both spatial shape and temporal activity. A tally is a stick on which notches are made to keep a record or count of something, particularly a debt or payment. The tower, therefore, not only keeps a tally but is itself a tally, attempting to notch the night and the sunset, but instead mainly recording the interminable, empty business of its own ledgers.
In exploring the confluence among assertions of patriarchal power,
anxieties of male sexual potency, and ideologies of capitalist aspiration,
Ridge has thoroughly ironized the skyscraper's symbolic function. Yet
the exuberance and wit of this critique suggests that in spite of her
critical gaze, she appreciates the tower for challenging and energizing
her creative powers. "Time-Stone" epitomizes a modernist poetics that
eschews a world elsewhere to participate wholeheartedly in the world of
urban-industrial modernity. More broadly, the fact that poets as divergent
in style and politics as Giovannitti, Teasdale, the Benéts, Wylie,
and Ridge were all drawn to write about the Metropolitan Tower testifies
to the depth and complexity of the skyscraper's imaginative power,
its capacity to signify the varied elements of modern experience. More
broadly still, these skyscraper poems demonstrate something too often
overlooked: the American modernist poet's rich and complex engagement
with the defining symbolic forms of twentieth-century modernity. Many of
the texts I mention here, such as Teasdale's "From the Woolworth Tower"
and William Rose Benét's "The Singing Skyscrapers," belong to an
important category of poems often dismissed as conventional because they
lack the referential opacity and emotional reserve that high-modernist
canons demanded. These poems combine a fascination with urban modernity,
and a willingness to explore innovative modes of verbal representation,
with the rhapsodic tonalities of nineteenth-century Romanticism. On the
other hand, of the neglected poems I discuss, the most conventionally
modernist in style, Ridge's "Time-Stone," seems as witty, opaque, ironic
as any New Critic might wish. Yet because it emerged out of a forceful
leftist engagement with modernity, it could not be accommodated within
the interpretive and ideological paradigms of New Criticism. I propose
that poetic modernism is, or should be, sufficiently capacious to take
all these poems as seriously as the works of Pound, Eliot, Stevens,
or Moore. From seventy years of formalist criticism we have inherited
impressive interpretive tools for modernist poetry. Now, in a postmodern
academic climate that relishes contradiction and eclecticism, suspects
moroseness, resists master-narratives, and yet demands some degree of
sociohistorical engagement, we need to adapt these tools to recovering
the many ways American poets articulated the complex, often contradictory
experiences that made modernity what it was, and is.
John Timberman Newcomb teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has published Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons (University Press of Mississippi, 1992) and articles on Stevens, Millay, Yeats, MacLeish, and literary canons. His forthcoming book is entitled Would Poetry Disappear?: American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity.
1. In the past few years, the field of modernist studies has been revivified by scholarship that combines formalist and historicist techniques to resituate modernist texts into the conditions of cultural modernity. Miles Orvell's The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Martha Banta's Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Bill Brown's The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Michael Brooks's Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) are but a few of the excellent contributions to this campaign. But so far only a few pioneering studies have begun to apply historicist methods to modern American poetry, and to show that verse texts, both canonical and unknown, can offer powerful new insights when we put the modernism back into modernity, and vice versa. See Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), Alan Golding's From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), Michael Davidson's Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Mark van Wienen's Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Michael Thurston's Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Joseph Harrington's Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U. S. Poetries (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
2. Ferris Greenslet, "A Propaganda for Poetry," Poet-Lore 11 : 52. See also my forthcoming book Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity for an account of this anxious and yet productive era of transition in the nation's poetry between 1890 and 1910.
3. For a discussion of modernist cityscape poems, see my forthcoming article "American City Poetry and the Rise of Modernism."
4. A short list of the visual artists who took skyscrapers as subjects between 1900 and 1930 reads as a who's-who of the most important American modernists: among photographers, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White; among painters, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, George Bellows, Joseph Stella, John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and Sheeler again. For a valuable discussion of the skyscraper's role in the modernist visual arts, see Merrill Schleier's The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890-1931 (New York: DaCapo, 1986).
5. Munsey's , quoted in Eric P. Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 5.
6. Ray Stannard Baker, "The Modern Skyscraper," Munsey's 22 : 52; henceforth abbreviated as "TMS." In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbes noted this combination of enormity and intricacy as "the most marvelous thing about a tall building": "that it has been made in millions of pieces in different parts of the world and yet, when the pieces are brought together, they all fit!" See Edgar Allen Forbes, "The Skyscraper," World's Work 22 : 14395.
7. Montgomery Schuyler, "The Towers of Manhattan, and Notes on the Woolworth Building," Architectual Record 33 (February 1913): 111.
8. Walter Pritchard Eaton, New York (New York: Grolier Club, 1915), 4. Henceforth abbreviated as NY.
9. Arthur Goodrich, "The Biography of an Office Building," World's Work 5 (1902-1903): 2955; henceforth abbreviated as "BOAOB."
10. See The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Co., 1914; henceforth abbreviated as MLIC), 52 and H. Addington Bruce, Above the Clouds and Old New York (privately printed, Woolworth Building Visitors' Brochure, 1913), 28-30.
11. Eaton's response upon first seeing the skyscraper city was to perceive his own microscopic insignificance: "The very mass of it bore down upon me like a weight. Who was I amid these millions?" (NY, 6).
12. Baker, "TMS," 58. The skyscraper's distinctive combination of endless variety and hermetic self-containment was also captured in this 1903 comment: "From the time these men enter their offices in the morning until they go at night, many of them need not leave the building.  By telegraph, cable, and telephone, they can talk with London, San Francisco, or Fiftieth Street, as they wish.  It is a complete community in itself" (Goodrich, "BOAOB," 2968).
13. Though some discussion of the ruins of the Anasazi Cliff Dwellers had appeared in obscure publications in the mid-1870s, it was not until 1888 that the largest settlements were discovered by the archaeological community (see Watson Smith, "Introduction," in Gustav Nördenskïold, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, transl. D. Lloyd Morgan (New York: AMS Press, 1893; 1973), xi. The first widely-circulated print accounts came just as the building of steel-frame skyscrapers accelerated. As well as Nordenskiöld's ethnographic study, see Frederick Chapin's book The Land of the Cliff Dwellers (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club / W. B. Clarke, 1892).
14. Some accounts of the Cliff Dwellers used ethnocentric or openly racist premises to account for their technological aptitude, refusing to believe they could be the ancestors of the agrarian Pueblo peoples who lived in the plains below, insisting that they must instead have been a "lost fragment of Egyptian civilization," or even a "white people" of "a prehistoric age" (see Joseph Munk, Arizona Sketches [New York: Grafton Press, 1905], 171).
15. Munk, Arizona Sketches, 171-75.
16. Anonymous, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World's Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publishing Co, 1893), unpaginated.
17. Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff Dwellers (New York: Harper Brothers, 1893), 1-2. Henceforth abbreviated as TCD.
18. This model of the skyscraper as an insular microcosm combining futuristic and ancient elements descends from the Cliff Dwellers metaphor down into postmodern science-fiction, most vividly in Ridley Scott's dystopian Blade Runner, where both the panoptical headquarters of the monolithic Tyrell Corporation and the protagonist's fortresslike apartment block feature design motifs reminiscent of Egyptian or Amerindian cultures.
19. Anonymous, "The Tall Buildings of New York," Munsey's 18 : 848; Charles Phelps Cushing, "Restraining the Overambitious Skyscraper," Collier's 52 (10 January 1914): 13.
20. C. F. Carter, "New Problems of Great Cities," The Technical World Magazine 8 : 568.
21. Forbes, "The Skyscraper," 14397.
22. Mildred Stapley, "The City of Towers," Harper's 123 : 706.
23. Stapley, "The City of Towers," 706. The sheer vertical wall, extending to the property line and rising straight up, was the architectural principle that made lower Manhattan's cañon streets so dark and cheerless. Almost two decades of debate culminated in furor over the notoriously monolithic Equitable Building, which was originally conceived to rise 909 feet straight up. When completed in 1915 it had been reduced to 542 feet, but still occupied virtually its entire one-acre lot all the way to the top, "casting a noonday shadow four blocks long and six times its own size" (see Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl Condit, The Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865-1913 [New Haven: Yale University Press], 394; henceforth abbreviated to RNYS). In 1916, New York enacted zoning restrictions that restricted such sheer vertical walls in tall buildings and mandated setback designs. Though the setback debate was often framed in aesthetic, moral, and even medical terms, the driving force behind these restrictions was economic, as by 1910 it was clear that buildings like the Equitable could have catastrophic effects on the value of properties in their perpetual shadows, since few wanted to rent space that offered no direct sunlight and little fresh air.
24. Robert MacCameron, "Artistic Aspects of the Skyscraper," Current Opinion 54 : 321.
25. Burton J. Hendrick, "Limitations to the Production of Skyscrapers," Atlantic 90 : 487; Anonymous, "The Tall Buildings of New York," 837. Though the skyscraper could not have arisen without these economic incentives, they do not fully explain the race into the skies, which bespoke a deep psychic need for physical signs of the United States' supremacy as a modernized nation. In pursuing this argument, Ann Douglas ingeniously situates the skyscraper's "commodification of the air as a marketable product" within the larger modernist category of "airmindedness," which includes plane flight and broadcasting (see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s [New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995], 434).
26. Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought: the Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7.
27. The Eiffel Tower , almost a thousand feet high, was by far the world's tallest structure throughout the period, but was not a building in the same sense, designed to house large numbers of people living and working that far off the ground.
28. See Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers, 5 and Landau and Condit, RNYS, 394.
29. In 1930, the Bank of the Manhattan Company Building (now called 40 Wall Street, H. Craig Severance and Yasuo Matsui, 927 feet), and the Chrysler Building (William Van Alen, 1048 feet) became the first of another group of modern icons, including of course the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, 1931, 1250 feet).
30. The Woolworth Building's custodians claimed that a clear view from the top extended for twenty-five miles in every direction, and that the building itself could be seen by mariners forty miles out in the open sea (Anonymous, Cathedral of Commerce: Woolworth Building, New York, [privately printed, Woolworth Building Visitors' Brochure, 1918], 8; henceforth abbreviated as COC).
31. The authors of the architectural compendium New York 1960 note that the Singer Tower's "opulent double-height, marble-clad lobby. . . had served several generations as a favorite meeting place," and call its demolition in 1967 a loss not only to the city's architecture but to the quality of its social intercourse (see Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial [New York: Monacelli Press, 1995], 1126).
32. John Nichols, Skyline Queen and the Merchant Prince: The Woolworth Story (New York: Trident Press, 1973), 89. Henceforth abbreviated as SQMP.
33. Orrick Johns, "Second Avenue," in The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems, ed. Ferdinand Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 134.
34. Adolf Wolff, "Lines to the Woolworth Building," The Glebe 1.1 : 29. Henceforth abbreviated as "LTTWB."
35. The building's interior designer (no doubt unintentionally) invited this sort of response from the skeptical with a grotesque corbel in the southeast corner of the lobby that depicted the highest priest of low lucre, F. W. Woolworth himself, counting nickels and dimes. Wolff's condemnation of this monument to filthy lucre was particularly ironic given that, almost uniquely among early skyscrapers, the Woolworth was built and paid for in cash with no mortgage. Thomas van Leeuwen remarks of this, "The building was conceived . . . as a memorial to the means by which its owner had assembled his fortune, namely nickels and dimes, the 'atomic elements' of capitalism. But it also represented Woolworth's preparations for the hereafter: the money was being returned to the public in the form of a building that was without the sin of usury" (van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought, 67-68). Clearly, Wolff was not impressed with this stratagem.
36. John Reed, "Foundations of a Skyscraper," in Collected Poems, ed. Corliss Lamont (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985), 37. Henceforth abbreviated as "FOAS."
37. Raymond Corder, "The Skyscraper," The Liberator 4.10 (October 1921): 21, henceforth abbreviated as "TS"; Stirling Bowen, "Skyscraper," The Liberator 5.11 (November 1924): 13, henceforth "S."
38. Arturo Giovannitti, "The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th," in Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917, ed. William L. O'Neill (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 283. Henceforth abbreviated as "DOW."
39. Harriet Monroe, "Night in State Street," in You and I (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 8.
40. Sara Teasdale, "From the Woolworth Tower," in Rivers to the Sea (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 15. Henceforth abbreviated as "FTWT."
41. Armond Carroll, "From a City Street," in The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems, ed. Ferdinand Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 41.
42. Carroll, "From a City Street," 41.
43. Horace Holley, "Skyscraper," in Creation: Post-Impressionist Poems (London: A. C. Fifield, 1914), 22. As we know, skyscrapers often sway in wind, but their relative stability was one of the features of the new buildings that most astonished people in the 1900s and 1910s. It was claimed that the Woolworth Building was capable of withstanding hypothetical winds of 200 M.P.H. without structural damage (see COC, 27); in January 1913, three months before its dedication, it did withstand gusts of 90 miles an hour with no damage (see Landau and Condit, RNYS, 359). Of course, Holley is wrong too about the skyscraper's inability to house birds.
44. Holley, "Skyscraper," 22. William Rose Benét's "The Singing Skyscrapers" also offers a hallucinatory response to the contemporary skyscraper, though Benét's apocalypse results in a vision of celestial splendor. Half-awake, half-dreaming, the speaker invokes by name the city's "tall titanic towers"— Metropolitan, Flatiron, Singer, Woolworth—and imagines them "Singing in the air" (see William Rose Benét, "The Singing Skyscraper," in The Burglar of the Zodiac, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918], 1). These state-of-the-art modern buildings sing of vanished cities of the past, which live on "Spectrally" in the human collective unconscious (as "Majestic phantom cities that move above our slumber/Hung aloft in air" [2]), and manifest themselves in the drive to build new cities, new towers. The poet concludes that all such towers, from Nineveh to New York, are attempts to put into material form a vision of a "Celestial City/ Blinding in the sky!" (Benét, "The Singing Skyscraper," 5). "The Singing Skyscrapers" is a fascinating, if uneven, attempt to update a key mode of Romantic poetry, the rhapsodic spiritual epiphany, into an ultramodern urban setting.
45. To New Yorkers of the 1910s, the Woolworth Building's twenty-eight state-of-the-art elevators were objects of intense fascination: the system was monitored from the lobby by an electric dispatcher mechanism, while each car contained a phone capable of contacting any location in the country, and enough safety cushions that a 7000 pound cargo was once test-dropped in free-fall from the 45th floor to the bottom without spilling a full glass of water in the car (COC, 14-15, 19). These reassuring facts notwithstanding, Teasdale is mesmerized by the aura of sublimity that the elevator achieves through its gravity-defying rate of speed. In the 1910s, the two elevators going from the ground to the observation deck in the Woolworth Building were the fastest in the world, routinely running at 700 feet per minute (COC, 14).
46. Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 307-13.
47. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 374. Henceforth abbreviated as TWL; numbers refer to lines rather than pages.
48. Elinor Wylie, "Parting Gift," in Black Armour (New York: George H. Doran, 1923), 68.
49. In addition to the three poems mentioned above and the two discussed in detail below, the Metropolitan Tower is a central element in Stephen Vincent Benét's 1920 love lyric "Chanson at Madison Square" (in Stephen Vincent Benét, Heavens and Earth [New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1920], 46). And although Robert Frost's small masterpiece of modern alienation "Acquainted With the Night" refers to no specific buildings by name, I propose that many early urbanite readers would almost certainly have thought of the Metropolitan Tower upon encountering the poem's culminating image, "One luminary clock against the sky" at an "unearthly height" (The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [New York: Henry Holt, 1969], 255-56). The Metropolitan's famous electric-powered clock, its illuminated faces three stories tall on all four sides of the building, its minute hands weighing 1000 pounds each, was the largest in the world. At more than 350 feet up, it was certainly the "unearthliest" of all clocks of the era, visible from almost anywhere in the city. Some have taken Frost's luminary clock as a clock, others as the moon. To me it seems clear that both readings are fully available; clock and moon merge in a modern cityscape so alienating that traditional natural and modern technological measures of value are equally dysfunctional, proclaiming only their own lack of meaning, and rendering time itself "neither wrong nor right" (Frost, "Acquainted with the Night," 256).
50. Sara Teasdale, "The Metropolitan Tower," in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 31. Henceforth abbreviated as "TMT."
51. A 1914 guidebook describes the illumination of the building's clock and tower most fully: "As the evening darkness draws near, at any predetermined hour for which the mechanism may be adjusted, hundreds of electric lights appear back of the dial numerals, all of which are brilliantly illuminated with splendid effect—a feature never produced by any other clock in the world. Simultaneously with the illumination of the hands and dials, an automatically actuated switch lights up a great electric octagonal lantern, eight feet in diameter, located at the top of the tower, from which powerful electric flash-lights, marking the hours in the evening, may be seen for a great distance, far beyond any possible transmission of sound, the time being signalled therefrom as follows: Each of the quarter-hours is flashed in red and the hours in white light—one red flash for the quarter, two red flashes for the half, three red flashes for three-quarters, and four red flashes for the even hour—these latter flashes followed by a number of white flashes marking the hour" (MLIC, 48). As of the spring of 2001, the refurbished Metropolitan Tower was again offering a nightly light show; but the current effects, which involve a continuous series of gradual color changes on the top levels of the building, do not create a flashlight effect, nor do they measure time as the original ones did. The tower's great illuminated clock still runs.
52. Louis J. Dublin, A Family of Thirty Million: The Story of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1943), 236.
53. Lola Ridge, "Time-Stone," in Sun-Up (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 51. Henceforth abbreviated as "TSS."
54. Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West" in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), 130.
55. For a leftist poet such as Ridge, this image of topheavy spindle-legged res unable to support the weight being placed upon them applies to the numbers as well, an instability that would be dramatized within a few years by the market crash that nearly brought down the entire capitalist edifice.
56. T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 5.
The name Anthony Julius is nowhere mentioned in Ronald Schuchard's richly informative essay, but clearly the author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995, second edition forthcoming) was on Schuchard's mind as he assembled his brief in defense of the poet against the charge of anti-Semitism—a charge not original with Julius, of course, but made most forcefully by him. In countering the Julius line, Schuchard mounts two arguments. The first, on pages 7-11, carefully contextualizes the "offensive" poems of the late 1910s—e.g.,"Burbank with a Baedeker," "Sweeney among the Nightingales," and "Gerontion"—so as to show that the "dominant motive" of these poems was not to "exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism" but to dramatize the sense of despair and failure of Eliot's war years—a phantasmagoria in which the poet's own consciousness is at one with that of his characters. The second argument (11-21) concerns, not Eliot the youthful poet, but Eliot the Public Man and Social-Cultural Presence of the post-conversion years, especially on his now frequent visits to the United States.
Here, I shall not take up Schuchard's first argument since I have myself recently countered Julius along somewhat similar lines. In my T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture (September 2002), I suggest that the notorious passage in "Gerontion" ("the jew squats on the window sill, the owner. . ."), obviously anti-Semitic as it appears when taken out of context, must be understood within the frame of the entire poem, which expresses, in the most moving and terrifying terms possible, the crisis ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") Eliot underwent in the years following the death of his beloved Jean Verdenal, mort aux Dardanelles in 1915, his miserable marriage to Vivien, coupled with his knowledge of and complicity in her sordid affair with Bertrand Russell, and the sudden death in 1919 of his father, with whom he had not had a chance to reconcile and who was never to know that his son was to become a distinguished poet. 1 Schuchard establishes a careful factual context for "Burbank with a Baedeker," and although I disagree with some of his particulars—I think, for example, that Eliot's alleged concern for post-war Vienna was hardly, as Schuchard thinks , a case of empathy for the displaced Eastern Jews pouring into that city but, on the contrary, a concern that the great imperial capital would be mongrelized and its vibrant culture destroyed—I am sympathetic to the argument for context that Schuchard makes.
But the second half of the essay is more troubling. Here, the focus is on Eliot's relationship with the Jewish social philosopher, Zionist, and New School of Social Research professor Horace N. Kallen, an intellectual whom Eliot first met at Harvard in 1906, and whose (hitherto unknown) correspondence with the poet has now surfaced at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. This cache of letters—they extend from 1927 to 1960 and, as Schuchard points out, more and earlier letters may well surface since the two men had been close friends at Harvard from 1906 to 1911—does indeed, in Schuchard's words "restore a missing chapter of American cultural history" . The question is what that missing chapter tells us.
From 1927 on, when his "friendly correspondence" with Eliot resumed, Kallen was evidently making "repeated efforts to bring [the poet] to the [New School] to lecture and read, an arrangement that finally materialized in the spring of 1933 when Eliot was Norton Professor at Harvard" . Kallen was a fervent admirer of the Great Poet and was hence honored to entertain him. At the dinner party he hosted for Eliot at a New York restaurant, one of the guests was the Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Eliot was apparently much impressed with Cardozo, writing to his producer Henry Sherek that the Justice was "singularly distinguished amongst all the guests," and that "I have always been attracted by Sephardim" .
Schuchard takes such anecdotes—and he gives a number of them—as evidence of Eliot's cordial feeling toward Jews. But why shouldn't Eliot have been pleased to meet someone as distinguished and famous as Cardozo? And even then, he cannot seem to take Cardozo's accomplishments at face value: they must be related to the Chief Justice's Sephardic origins. As for Horace Kallen himself, why wouldn't Eliot be pleased and flattered by the fuss Kallen, obviously a man of independent means, made about him whenever he visited New York? Kallen, after all, was not just any Jew but a well-situated Harvard Jew who had demonstrated his intellectual distinction. A Jew, moreover, who despite friendly debates with Eliot on issues of religion and culture, seems never to have voiced the slightest objection to the poet's words or actions.
The delightful visit with Kallen, in any case, coincided with the preparation and delivery of the Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in April-May 1933 and published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods. It is here, of course, that Eliot made his notorious statement that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." "This unfortunate statement," writes Schuchard, "one of the most quoted and disdained in modern literary and cultural studies, has pained many readers of Eliot, including myself, and my purpose in bringing it forward again is not to excuse it but to reconstruct a context that shows that it is not, regardless of its appearance, an anti-Semitic statement; it is an anti free-thinking statement" . Here, Schuchard follows Cleanth Brooks, who declared in 1985 that "free-thinking [not Jews] is the key phrase. Thus, even the ultra-conservative Old South got along with its God-fearing Jews very well. There was perhaps less anti-Jewish feeling in the Old South than anywhere else in the United States" (25, n.50).
As a "free-thinking" Jew married to a free-thinking Jew brought up in the Old South (New Orleans) I have always found Brooks's statement offensive. Who is Eliot, who is Brooks, to tell Jews that they should or should not be "free-thinking"? That as long as they were "God-fearing" they were acceptable in the Old South? For one thing, it isn't true: Jews in New Orleans, for example, whether secular or religious, were (and still are) excluded from all Mardi Gras activities which were, in Brooks's day, at the very heart of the social and commercial life of the city. But even if this were not the case, Brooks's remark, which Schuchard endorses, is irritatingly patronizing, as if to say, we really like those darkies down here as long as they know their place. Who, after all, was telling the Christian majority in the Old South what they should or should not believe?
Eliot's statement evidently cost him a number of friendships, including that of the (Jewish) philosopher Franz Boas, who, Eliot told Kallen, had been his closest friend in graduate school , and it produced a rift between the poet and his later friend Isaiah Berlin. In response to Eliot's remark about not wanting free-thinking Jews about, Boas evidently wrote him, "I can at least rid you of the company of one" (25, n.53). There is no record of a reply, but to Berlin, Eliot wrote in 1951 that "the sentence of which you complain (with justice) would of course never have appeared at all at that time if I had been aware of what was going to happen, indeed had already begun, in Germany" (16, my emphasis).
Schuchard takes this disclaimer at face value, noting that Eliot may well have had in mind the "free-thinking humanism" of his friend Kallen (whom he admired despite the aberration of his secularism), and he adds, "though Kallen and Eliot never discuss the episode in their letters, Kallen would certainly have understood Eliot's intention in relation to their own dialogue on the relation of culture, humanism, and religion; it certainly had no effect on their friendship" . But the fact is that Kallen should have objected. For Eliot's claim that he had been unaware "of what was going to happen, indeed had already begun, in Germany," strikes me as quite disingenuous. Here a few dates and facts may help clarify the situation.
Hitler came to power in January 1933, at the very time Eliot was beginning work on his Page-Barbour Lectures, which were delivered in April of that year. Within weeks, all Jewish civil servants were dismissed as were all Jewish university professors and school teachers. The number of Jewish students at German schools and universities was rigidly curtailed. Jews were quickly dismissed from the press, the broadcasting industry, and the arts. By 1 April, a large-scale state boycott of Jewish stores and businesses was introduced; armed SS guards made an example of particular Jewish shops to insure compliance with the ban. On 10 May, 1933, a public burning of Jewish and anti-Nazi books took place throughout Germany, anticipating theKristallnacht of 1938. By July 1933, Germany had passed a law for forced sterilization of those with "genetic" defects and all East European Jewish immigrants were stripped of their German citizenship. By August, Jewish lawyers were forbidden to practice law and Jewish doctors were allowed to treat only Jewish patients.
All this was done quite openly and was reported by the newspapers throughout Europe and the U.S. In Mein Kampf , for that matter, Hitler had made no bones about his intentions so far as the Jews were concerned, and the minute he came to power, he began to carry them out—in the form of public edicts and laws. Indeed, in the United States, protest on the part of American Jews was quick to come: in the spring of 1933, anti-Nazi rallies took place at Madison Square Garden, demanding a boycott of trade with Germany.
What then does Eliot mean when he says he didn't know what was happening in Germany? If he read the newspapers at all, he did "know." And even if he didn't "know" in the spring of 1933, what about the interval between delivery of the lectures and their publication by Faber & Faber in 1934? Eliot could easily have expunged the offending sentence from After Strange Gods. Or could he? Here is the whole paragraph in which it is embedded:
You are hardly likely to develop tradition except where the bulk of the population is relatively so well off where it is that it has no incentive or pressure to move about. The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated. 2
In the context of what was already happening in Germany, the demand for cultural and religious homogeneity and the caution against tolerance put the notorious sentence about "free-thinking Jews" in an especially negative light. Eliot, who later confided to various friends that the word he especially regretted in the passage was race,never reprinted After Strange Gods. In the years that followed, no doubt feeling somewhat guilty, he worked with Kallen to help Jewish refugee professors—for example Karl Mannheim and Adolph Löwe—obtain jobs in the U.S. and he participated in a group called Moot, organized in 1938 to discuss social and political issues and, later, to plan for national reconstruction . But are such activities different in kind from the help Ezra Pound offered to Louis Zukofsky over the years? Indeed, in many ways Pound was more generous than Eliot: strapped for funds himself, he paid Zukofsky's way when the latter came to visit him in Rapallo in the mid-twenties. Pound could forgive Jewishness in poets whose work he admired just as Eliot could forgive it in highly cultured educated men. Both cases are no more than variants on "Some of my best friends are Jews."
There is no indication that the basic views formulated in After Strange Gods ever changed. Schuchard cites a commentary Eliot wrote for the Christian News-Letter in 1941, protesting the Vichy government's anti-Semitic policies, as evidence of the poet's firm objection to anti-Semitism. But this protest is at best equivocal. "Anti-Semitism," writes Eliot, "there has always been among the parties of the extreme Right: but it was a very different thing, as a symptom of the disorder of French society and politics for the last hundred and fifty years, from what it is when it takes its place as a principle of reconstruction." . The implication of this statement is that anti-Semitism is natural, perhaps even inevitable, when government is not sufficiently in control, as was the case in France throughout the twenties and thirties, but that when it is codified as law, it goes too far. Eliot does not seem to understand that the second step follows logically from the first.
However warmly Eliot may have felt about this or that Jewish friend or acquaintance, Schuchard's researches reveal that for the poet, Jews remain Jews first, individuals later. In 1947, for example, Eliot protested to the poet Edward Field, who had accused him of being anti-Semitic, "I am no more anti-semitic [sic] than I am anti-Welsh or anti-Eskimo" . This is, of course, the ultimate put-down since Eliot hardly numbered many Eskimos among his acquaintance or among those cultivated Western Christians he admired. Like the wild Welsh and the exotic Eskimos, Jews remain outsiders for Eliot—people one tolerates (and sometimes even befriends) but whom one can't quite accommodate into The Idea of a Christian Society . And there the matter stood even if Eliot admired the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg or the social philosophy of his friend Horace Kallen.
Indeed, Eliot's later cultural pronouncements provide an interesting gloss on his earlier poetry. I would myself argue that the overtly nasty slurs on Jews in Poems 1920 are much less offensive than the "humane" position adopted by Eliot the sixty-year old smiling public man. For that younger poet was much less given to holding "views" than to putting his feelings into his poetry. From "Prufrock" to The Waste Land, Eliot's poetry is nasty, cruel, painful—and utterly charismatic, no doubt because the poet is just as hard on himself as he is on those hated others, "Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London." It is the poet as Gerontion, after all, who "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." The verb "fought" in that last line is almost spit out in a moment of self-disgust.
"Gerontion" and The Waste Land will always attract readers because of their sheer verbal and conceptual brilliance. The poetic fabric, in these cases, has absorbed the ideological residue. Ironically, it is not the fiery, nasty younger Eliot but the genteel and understanding Public Poet of the later years that is the problem—the poet who writes those self-deprecating lines in "East Coker" about "Twenty years largely wasted," since his every poetic attempt has been "a different kind of failure," even as he declares that an "ideal Christian culture "can" accommodate Jewish religion and culture"—provided, of course, that, as Eliot wrote the Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz, Jews be "devout and practicing" .
"At the end of the culture war," Schuchard concludes, "Eliot, tired of
conducting conflicts with secular humanists in no man's land, warmly
welcomed followers of the Jewish religion into his idea of a Christian
society" . Provided, of course, they followedthe religion. For
many of us, there is nothing "warm" about this exclusionary gesture.
*In the following responses, page numbers given in brackets will refer to Ronald Schuchard's essay.
1. Marjorie Perloff, "Cunning Passages and Contrived Corridors: Rereading 'Gerontion,'" forthcoming.
2. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 19-20.
T. S. Eliot arrived in London by mischance in August 1914, forced here by the German declaration of war, just as he had begun his study of German philosophy at the University of Marburg. He would have preferred a landing in Paris, where he had spent an earlier academic year at the Sorbonne; he was being trained in the mind of Europe at Harvard, and his previous travels, especially in Italy, had further shaped his European sensibility. In the growing cultural chaos, however, an uncertain route to England became his one, fortuitous avenue of escape. He took refuge in Merton College and began reading philosophy to fulfill the spirit of his travelling fellowship. At the end of the year, he took the first step of self-imposed exile—his unannounced marriage to Vivien Haigh Wood—and briefly returned alone to the family summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to inform his parents that he was abandoning a career in philosophy at Harvard for a literary career in London. After suffering a withering rebuke, he agreed that the precipitous cancellation of his fellowship was one of his "blunders" and duly promised to complete his doctoral dissertation. 1 Upon his safe and permanent return to London, where Vivien had been left in the care and company of Bertrand Russell, Eliot began to unpack the intellectual baggage that he brought to England from America: a few respected authors (Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James), his masters at Harvard (Josiah Royce and Irving Babbitt), those he needed to set himself up as a practicing poet and literary critic and to exercise an almost intact vision of culture and its relation to humanism and religion. Others have examined the importance of Eliot's American luggage in England, but much has remained lost in the attic. So I want to spend an hour rummaging in Eliot's attic, tracing his definition and defense of culture in relation to some American intellectuals with opposing ideas of culture. In the process, I feel obliged to address the widespread presumption that his writings are anti-Semitic, first by reconstructing the lost contexts of "Burbank with a Baedeker" and "Dirge" and After Strange Gods, and then by bringing out of the attic a fugitive intellectual whose relationship to Eliot may radically reform our perception of Eliot as a critic of Judaeo-Christian culture in Europe.
The first re that Eliot removed from his steamer trunk was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist philosopher, champion of the democratic spirit, and hero of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Eliot's grandfather, the Unitarian preacher William Greenleaf Eliot, had met Emerson; his mother and members of his extended St. Louis and Boston families revered him; but to Eliot he was the romantic embodiment of everything he wanted to exile himself from in America—religious liberalism, individualism, optimism, sentimentalism. In Eliot's view, the Emersonian-Unitarian philosophy had infected his family and the whole of New England, particularly Boston, and especially Harvard University; it had led to "the Boston doubt," a scepticism, he wrote "which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it. This scepticism is a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism; it is not destructive, but it is dissolvent." 2 Emerson's Unitarian virus, working on a weakened strain of New England Puritanism, had transformed itself into Transcendentalism, and a young Eliot found the blanched, dissolvent morality abhorrent. "In the Puritan morality that I remember," he wrote, "it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and 'successful' life. Failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares." 3
The new London resident and bridegroom was equally concerned that Emerson's philosophy had worked its corrosive effects on the cultural and social theories of English writers—Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and others. "I was brought up in an environment of that intellectual and puritanical rationalism which is found in the novels of George Eliot," he wrote scornfully. "Herbert Spencer's generalized theory of evolution was in my childhood environment regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe." 4 Arnold, who had praised Emerson for his "holding fast to happiness and hope," was in Eliot's eyes the English Emerson, so in the late summer of 1915, when he began to amuse himself with poems satirical of Boston culture and its "modern" ideas, he could not resist the temptation to train his scathing satirical eye on the bookshelves of Cousin Nancy's sitting room: 5 "Upon the glazen shelves kept watch/ Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,/ The army of unalterable law." 6 Already we see a severe cultural critic and caricaturist at work in his poems; in time, he would learn how to bring a more ferocious English humor to his caricature of cultural antagonists.
It should not be surprising, then, to discover that when Eliot began teaching his three-year Extension course for the University of London he regularly discussed three of his Victorian subjects, Arnold, Carlyle, and Ruskin, in relation to Emerson, comparing them as moralists and social reformers, contrasting their attitudes toward Christianity, and assigning Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, Ruskin's Stones of Venice, Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. 7 He also had his students read J. M. Robertson's Modern Humanists: Sociological Studies of Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin and Spencer,for the theme of Eliot's course was that of Robertson: these were false prophets of religion and culture. 8 So central had Emerson become to Eliot's discussions of cultural theories that when he resumed the course for the second year he placed Emerson first on the syllabus, apprising his students of the religious and philosophical environment of New England, taking them through the tenets of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, and extending the comparison with English social philosophers, who now included William Morris and Walter Pater. He had them read Emerson's Essays, Nature, and The Conduct of Life, further directing them to Emerson's ten-volume Journal "to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the man" (EDA, 41, 43). Emerson had confusedly attempted to make man as much the measure of all things as God, so when Eliot came to draw his post-erectile portrait of Sweeney in "Sweeney Erect," he delighted in holding up Emerson's philosophy for a touch of comic ridicule: "(The lengthened shadow of a man/ Is history, said Emerson/ Who had not seen the silhouette/ Of Sweeney straddled in the sun)" (CPP, 26). Emerson's cohorts, such as Edward Tyrrell Channing, the Boylston Professor at Harvard, were also fair game for poetry, so when he wrote his priapic portrait of Bertrand Russell in "Mr. Apollinax," he included in the Boston tea party, in animal caricature, Professor and Mrs. "Channing-Cheetah" (CPP, 18). Comic and biting satire aside, the gravity of what Eliot was telling his students is evident in his review of a history of American literature in 1919: "Neither Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of the moral life." 9
The American philosophers who stood behind Eliot's criticism of modern culture were Irving Babbitt and Josiah Royce, both of whom formed the necessary antipode to Unitarianism and Jamesian pragmatism at Harvard. Babbitt's anti-Rousseauistic, anti-humanitarian analysis of the disintegration of western culture since the Renaissance, and Royce's application of his absolute idealism to the problems of Christianity in the modern world, had an intellectual impact on Eliot that even now has not been fully estimated. With Babbitt he had followed literary and intellectual traditions in France; it was Babbitt who sent him to the Sorbonne, who taught him how to diagnose and attack the foundations of secularism. With Royce he had explored philosophies of the absolute; it was Royce who directed him to F. H. Bradley and who subsequently judged his dissertation on Bradley's philosophy "the work of an expert" (L, 142). Though an examination of their ideas of cultural degeneration and reconstruction is beyond the scope of this essay, the tenets and effects of their teaching are evident in Eliot's use of Emerson, Arnold, and others as cultural straw men after he arrived in London. In their shadows, Eliot had begun his rout of free-thinking humanists in his new country. Toward his own reconstructive ends, the American exile began moving as deliberately as possible, through the Egoist, the Athenaeum, and eventually the Criterion, to station himself at the center of English culture.
If Arnold's substitution of poetry for religion as a cultural stay had become anathema to the young critic, he nonetheless kept at heart the guiding concern of Arnold's Culture and Anarchy—the necessary conjunction of Hebraic and Hellenic traditions in modern culture. Indeed, as he formulated his idea of tradition and the "historical sense" under the influence of Babbitt and Royce, he worked with a sharp awareness of the major compounds of European history—Graeco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, Old-New Testament—and, as his poetry shows, he had learned to read the map of Europe as a palimpsest of cultural and religious change. Thus, his most exciting literary discovery for representing cultural history in art came from his reading of the Ireland-Israel odyssey of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, as chapters of Joyce's Ulysses began to appear in the Little Review in the spring and summer of 1918. Not only the techniques and motifs, but the crudity—"justified by exploitation to the point of greatness" Eliot wrote—had an immediate impact on his own poetry. 10 At the end of the summer, the Little Review published, together with the "Hades" chapter of Ulysses, four strikingly new poems by Eliot: "Dans Le Restaurant," where we suddenly encounter the striking image of a drowned Phoenician, the Semitic Phlebas; "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" and "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service," where we meet a crude new protagonist, Sweeney, moving from a menacing brothel scene to a Bloom-like contemplation in a bathtub of "the masters of the subtle schools"; and "Whispers of Immortality," where the horrific sexual visions and dry-rib metaphysics of Webster and Donne are set against the sexual allurement and bosomy bliss promised by an exotic if not erotic Grishken. In succeeding months these poems would be followed by "Burbank with a Baedeker," "Sweeney Erect," and "Gerontion," poems in which a procession of European and American gentiles and Jews are paraded into a searing poetic light. To comprehend the dramatic change and new cast of characters we must look beyond Joyce to some devastating developments in Eliot's life: the discovery of Vivien's adultery with Russell at their shared cottage in Marlow and the mounting effects of the war.
Eliot had heard horrifying stories of the war from his nineteen-year-old brother-in-law Maurice, who returned from the front in France to describe the necessity of shooting rats in the trenches at night. "What he tells about rats and vermin is incredible," Eliot reported to his mother, "Northern France is swarming, and the rats are big as cats" (L, 121). When Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken in January 1916 about the death of his Paris friend Jean Jules Verdenal in the Dardanelles, he and Vivien had become "very blue about the war" (L, 125), and as Eliot suffered further shocks and losses the effect on his sensibility intensified.  In March 1917, he wrote to his brother: "The world seems a complete nightmare at times, nothing that could happen would be surprising. I wonder if there will ever come a time when we shall look back and find that the period we are living through seems quite unreal in retrospect" (L, 172). "I have been living in one of Dostoevsky's novels," he wrote to his cousin. "If I have not seen the battle field, I have seen other strange things . . . it all seems like a dream" (L, 189). By the spring of 1918, the unreality of his betrayed marriage had intensified his nightmare and fuelled his failed attempt to get a commission in Army or Navy Intelligence. "I feel very old at present," he told his brother, "and mentally quite exhausted" (L, 250), as if he were writing out of the persona of "Gerontion," then in composition. In the midst of his psychological exhaustion, Eliot suddenly began to transform the nightmare of his life into an extended phantasmagoria in his art. Phlebas, Sweeney, Rachel neéRabinovitch, the yet-to-be-named Mrs. Porter, and Grishken were followed by a European gallery of ethnic highbrows and lowlifes—Mr. Silvero, Madame de Tornquist, Hakagawa, Fräulein von Kulp, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, Doris, Burbank, Bleistein, Princess Volupine, and all the rest. Several characters begin to move freely from poem to poem as though we the readers must know them intimately: Phlebas, Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Fresca and Bleistein reappear in The Waste Land or its canceled drafts, with Sweeney and Mrs. Porter casually displacing Acteon and Diana as mythical counterparts in the Unreal City. By then Eliot could draw on the phantasmal world of Joyce's "Circe" for the original opening of the poem, and he extended the unreality to Sweeney Agonistes, to the twilight kingdom of The Hollow Men, and to the disconnected fragments of "Doris's Dream Songs." 11 On an early draft of Sweeney Agonistes he appended from the letters of Junius an epigraph meant to characterize the fictional companions through whom he expressed his convictions about the world: "These are the companions of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration." 12
Meanwhile, in the real world at Lloyds Bank, under the pavement of Lombard Street, Eliot's convictions were being trampled by the former Professor/President of Princeton, now President Woodrow Wilson, who was directing the peace process toward the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. He had approved of Wilson's policies during the war and hoped that the Democratic party would survive long enough "to see the satisfaction of the peace negotiations along Wilson lines" (L, 264). But as he worked on "Sweeney Erect," "Burbank," and "Gerontion," Eliot became utterly dismayed by the peace negotiations and believed that the European powers took advantage of Wilson. It was "a bad peace," he told his mother. "And I believe that Wilson made a grave mistake in coming to Europe" (L, 337). The Treaty became for Eliot a terribly discouraging symbolic moment in the continuing dissolution of European unity, in which he had invested life's blood. He was horrified by what he saw happening to ethnic groups as territorial boundaries were redrawn by the Treaty. Wilson's whole conception of a new world society governed by the "self-determination of the peoples," was characterized, Eliot believed, by Rousseauistic humanitarianism, Emersonian self-reliance, American sentimentalism of the most naive kind. To Eliot, Wilson's idea of peace was an idea which disregarded the unity of European culture, an idea that foisted the excesses of religious liberalism and American idealism on the nation-states of Europe. So strong was his criticism of Wilson that he used him as an analogue in his sardonic literary criticism of Vachel Lindsay, writing in his "London Letter" to the Dial that Lindsay's "Y.M.C.A. morality represents something more remote than a massacre in Armenia," and that though his verses have appeared in an English periodical "I cannot believe that he is treated with more respect than that with which Clemenceau and Lloyd George bonified President Wilson." 13
In August, desperate to get out of London, he broke away from the bank in a state of emotional extremity to meet Pound in southern France for a walking tour of the Dordogne, carrying with him the manuscript of "Gerontion," whose persona is a haunted, Tiresias-like re who has witnessed but not fought in all the wars, an exhausted persona lost in the labyrinthine corridors of history, waiting for a redemptive sign. The manuscript still carried a dropped epigraph from Dante's Inferno, where Friar Albergio reveals that his soul is dead and damned even though his body is alive on earth. When asked, "Are you already dead?" he replies, "Just how my body is in the world above, I have no way of knowing" (XXXIII, 122-23). As he gazed at the wave pattern carved into a stone wall at the castle in Excidueil, Eliot cried out in Pound's hearing, "I am afraid of the life after death," and in La Cathédral Saint-Front in Périgueux he suffered the second vastation since learning of the infidelity in Marlow. 14 "This sense of dispossession by the dead I have known twice," he later remarked of his state of mind, "at Marlow and at Périgueux." 15 After his return to the bank he immersed himself in John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace , in which Keynes, too, saw Wilson's temperament in Versailles as more that of a Presbyterian theocrat than that of a statesman—an "important book" Eliot told his mother (L, 353), as he began dealing with the war reparations dictated by the Treaty of Versailles. The consequences of the Treaty continued to prey upon his mind. "I hope it will not prevent America from helping in Central Europe," he wrote to her, especially mindful of the plight of thousands of Hasidic Jews who had migrated to Vienna to join the Jewish population there when Galicia and Bukovina were taken over by Russia and Rumania during the German surrender; "the destitution, especially the starvation in Vienna, appears to be unspeakable. I suppose Americans realise now what a fiasco the reorganisation of nationalities has been: the 'Balkanisation' of Europe" (L, 351). The revenge-seeking Succession States of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had severely restricted food shipments to the once-imperial city. A fortnight later he wrote to her again: "The American professors must be having a very bad time. I wonder if America realises how terrible the condition of central Europe is. I can never quite put Vienna out of my mind. And I have seen people who have been in Germany and they are most pessimistic about the future, not only of Germany, but of the world. They say that there is no hope unless the treaty is revised" (L, 353). 16
In worsening health, Eliot turned his disturbed poetic faculties to The Waste Landand his nightmare vision of the "Falling towers" of European civilization: "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal" (CPP, 48). When E. M. Foster astutely reviewed the poem as one of extraordinary horror brought on by the war, Eliot wrote to him with a Gerontion-like guilt over his non-participation: "You are right about the 'horror' . . . I only think that you exaggerate the importance of the War in this context. The War crippled me as it did everyone else; but me chiefly because it was something I was neither honestly in nor honestly out of, but the Waste Land might have been just the same without the War." 17 What Forster had not seen was that the poem was also driven by the "cauldron of unholy loves" (CPP, 53) that had fired his poems since 1918.
So I return to the heart of Eliot's phantasma in 1919, the worst year of his life, though in May he took some pleasure in Leonard Woolf's publication of the Little Review poemsat the Hogarth Press. Eliot had read the poems to the Woolfs the previous autumn before sending copies for consideration. To Virginia, the meaning of the difficult poems had to be dragged up from "the depths of silence." 18 Since its initial appearance in the Little Review, "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" had been given a new, short-lived epigraph ("Why should I speak of the nightingale?/ The nightingale sings of adulterous wrong"). 19 He had placed two new poems,"Burbank with a Baedeker" and "Sweeney Erect," with Sidney Schiff, literary editor of Art and Letters, and he was making arrangements with his friend John Rodker, who had succeeded Pound as literary editor of the Little Review, to bring out a collection of his poems at Rodker's Ovid Press. Toward that prospect, he sent Rodker "Burbank," "Sweeney Erect," and "Ode," for his commentary. Let us remember who these men were as we move around Eliot's attic. Both Rodker and Schiff were members of an Anglo-Jewish community of writers and artists that included Jacob Isaacs, Mark Gertler, Ada Leverson, and others in East London and Bloomsbury circles, and the Eliots moved in their company. Isaacs, an admiring critic of Eliot's work and his companion at the music halls, wrote that "if I have done nothing else for literature, I did at least take Mr. Eliot to see Mr. Ernie Lotinga at the Islington Empire." 20 Both Rodker and Schiff had introduced Eliot to the poems of Isaac Rosenberg, who had fallen at the Somme the previous April. When Rodker announced the death of the twenty-seven-year old poet in the Little Review,he described it as "a greater loss to poetry in this country than any death during the war." 21 Schiff would feature Rosenberg and Eliot together in the summer issue of Art and Letters, publishing five of Rosenberg's poems, a drawing, and his sister's obituary on the pages preceding Eliot's "Burbank" and "Sweeney Erect," and Eliot was ever after a champion of Rosenberg's poems. 22 Eliot then sent drafts of "Gerontion" to Rodker and Schiff, asking for their candid opinions. "I am appreciative of your careful study of 'Gerontion,'" Eliot wrote in reply to Schiff, thanking him for his commentary, "and shall be glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it" (L, 324). "'Bleistein,'" he told Mary Hutchinson, "(like 'S[weeney] among the Nightingales') is meant to be veryserious!"(L, 311), an emphasis he reiterated to his brother when Rodker published the poems in Ara Vos Prec: "Some of the new poems, the Sweeney ones, especially 'Among the Nightingales' and 'Burbank' are intensely serious, and I think these two are among the best that I have ever done." He went on prophetically: "But even here I am considered by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting" (L, 363). 23 When we look upon these relationships and exchanges and realize that the readers and publishers of Eliot's allegedly anti-Semitic poems were Jews, and when we consider Eliot's state of mind during the months of composition, do we really want to believe that a dominant motive in the poetry was to exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism in the face of his Jewish friends? How might the poems be thought "intensely serious" rather than "merely disgusting"? 24
Eliot's brother Henry had his own sense of what Eliot was trying to do in these poems and later wanted to write an open letter to a periodical about the surrealism in them, but he eschewed the role of embarrassing brother. He wrote to his friend Harry Harvey: "It's there, sticking out like a barber pole, but no critic has touched it. . . . TSE's short earlier poems are certainly partly inspired by Picasso (et al). I think he is one of the earliest surrealist poets. Critics have floundered around in interpreting his Sweeney, etc. poems without discovering the surrealism which is the key to their understanding." 25 As I have discussed the Sweeney poems elsewhere as components of Eliot's personal myth of sexual betrayal, psychological retribution, and moral regeneration (EDA, 87-101), I want to turn to the surreal elements of the poem that has disturbed many readers, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar."
Why, at the end of the war, did Eliot choose to write a poem about Venice? We know that during his year at the Sorbonne in 1910-11 he broke away to become an avid tourist of Italy, probably with a Baedeker, and that Venice was a major stop on his tour. He filled his notebook with observations about the Grand Canal, the piazza, and St. Mark's cathedral, noting parenthetically that the quadriga above the portal was "(a particularly uninteresting set of horses"), the horses that would later enter his poetic imagination and "Beat up the dawn from Istria/ With even feet." 26 Later in the day, at the Ca d'Oro, he was struck by Mantegna's Saint Sebastian (ca. 1490) and wrote down the Latin script on the scroll attached to the candle at the base of the painting:"Nihil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus." So, when in 1919 he made his vicarious return to Venice in the poem, it was to portray his sharp sense of "Time's ruins" in relation to Dante's Italy and Shakespeare's Venice, to sketch the return to the post-war city of modern English and American tourists—gentiles and Jews—who have no sense of the history evoked in the poem's allusions, of the ethnic and religious exiles the once-great city had absorbed in the past, of the Italian victory over the Austrians in Venetia that led to the Austro-Hungarian surrender in November 1918 and the collapse of one of the most powerful empires in European history. To Eliot, Venetian Italy was symbolic of the post-Versailles diaspora, of the newly "contrived corridors" (CPP, 22) in which hotly contested lands and ethnic-religious dislocations and antagonisms would ensure the further disintegration of European unity. It is in the context of this diaspora that Gerontion, part Hebrew, part Hellene, sees in the window of his decayed European house a squatting Jewish landlord, a modern counterpart of Shylock, once again pushed with his people from nation to nation, ghetto to ghetto, "Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London," fleeing the horrific pogroms in Poland during the peace process. Eliot had followed daily reports in The Times of vicious attacks in central European cities on Jewish landlords, merchants, and citizens, whose only trustworthy avenues of egress were England and America and whose plight had made the Zionist movement for a national home in Palestine a pressing problem at the Versailles conference, which in May adopted a solemn protest against the massacre of Jews in Eastern Europe. In the exhausted and conflicted persona of Gerontion, Eliot had indeed attempted to reflect the duplicitous attitudes toward Jews in the fragmented mind of Europe. 27
Thus, the poet returns to Venice in a maddened, hallucinative state of mind, approaching the city through a surrealistic succession of fragments analogous to the end of The Waste Land, where the distracted quester can connect nothing with nothing, where similar broken images suggest the madness that sweeps over a mind on the brink of mental and spiritual exhaustion. Here the fragments from works by his literary predecessors in Venice over four centuries allude to random moments of lust, adultery, mortality, mutability, eternity: Gautier's carnival cry, "Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire," is immediately undercut by Mantegna's Latin subscript ("Nothing lasts excepting what is divine; the rest is smoke"), and in the surreal phantasmagoria we hear among others Othello's cry of "Goats and monkeys!" as he madly anticipates proof of Desdemona's infidelity (IV, i, 274). The Venetian mindscape that we are about to enter is unreal.
Eliot had found his way into the poem through three plays that he was then teaching in his third-year extension course on Elizabethan literature—Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, taught together as a unit, and Ben Jonson's Venetian play Volpone (EDA, 46, 48), all of which exhibited the savage humor, "the old English ferocity" that Baudelaire had perceived in English writing and that Eliot had begun to develop as a critic of moral life, moving ferociously beyond his earlier satires of Matthew and Waldo, Russell and Channing. 28 He conjoined Jonson's caricatures of Volpone and Paulina into his own Princess Volupine, of dubious imperial lineage from the city's Hapsburg conquerers, the sickly seductress of the lustful pushovers, Burbank, Bleistein, and Sir Ferdinand Klein. It is tempting to see Russell and Vivien in Burbank and Volupine—"They were together, and he fell"—not only in the casual banality of their illicit coupling but in the line-play from Tennyson"s "The Sisters," "he fell" for "she fell," the she a young woman also seduced by an Earl. After Volupine has exercised her wiles on Bleistein, a Chicago merchant far removed from his Jewish origin in Vienna and whose stereotypical mannerisms are captured in ferocious caricature—"A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out"—she entertains another touring Jew, Sir Ferdinand Klein. His British title and names betray more of his displaced and forgotten heritage than Bleistein's—from the Ashkinazim who had migrated to Venice from Germany, from the Sephardim expelled from Spain by Ferdinand. Eliot greatly admired Sephardic culture and traditions, and he was aware that their settlement in Venice led to the first gated ghetto, the insalubrious ghetto from which the re of Shylock would emerge. As the narrator follows Volupine's serial seductions of her Venetian tourists, his stream-of-consciousness associations surface like Bloom's—"On the Rialto once," "Money in furs"— alluding to the Merchants' Exchange where Shylock, staunchly defending his faith and tribe, determines to "feed fat the ancient grudge" he bears towards the Christian Antonio and his abusive anti-Semitism: "He hates our sacred nation, and he rails,/ Even there where merchants most do congregate,/ On me ... (I, iii, 48-51). Bleistein and Klein, Shylock's deracinated counterparts in Venice, cannot in collecting their pound of flesh from Volupine hold a candle to Shylock's tenacious defense of his religion, culture, race, humanity: "Hath not a Jew eyes?" he asks.  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that" (III, i, 61-66). The measure of the present against the past is thus taken with the savage techniques of Eliot's past masters. And when the ludicrous re of Burbank, who has like the Lion of St. Marks been clipped and flea'd and pared by Volupine, returns at the end of the poem to ponder the domestication of the leonine emblem of Venetian power and to meditate on "Time's ruins" and the "seven laws"—as though the cultural and architectural erosion of Venice and its stones could be explained by a Ruskin philosophy filtered through a Baedeker— the savage irony of this "intensely serious" poem is complete.
Well, almost complete. There remains that disconnected, surreal description in mid-poem. In the midst of the three illicit rendezvous, "A lustreless protrusive eye/ Stares from the protozoic slime/ At a perspective of Canaletto" (CPP, 24). This is not the eye of Bleistein, as some would argue, there to cruelly mock in synecdoche an exaggerted ethnic physical trait, but the blanched eye of a corpse that surfaces from the depths of the Grand Canal, from the depths of the narrator's consciousness, seen through the dying smoke of Mantegna's scripted candle. It is the haunting eye of "Phlébas, le Phénician," whose corpse had surfaced for the first time in Eliot's French poem "Dans Le Restaurant." The image of the ancient Semitic sailor, whose presence now becomes a dominant motif in Eliot's phantasmagoria, had its origins in the eyes of Joyce's drowned man in the Proteus chapter, where Stephen contemplates his drowning and surfacing: "His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death," says Stephen—the "saltwhite" corpse's brown eyes made "saltblue" by his terrible "seachange," which brings to Stephen's mind the "unearthly music" of Ariel's song, heard by Ferdinand in The Tempest, "Full fathom five thy father lies . . . Those are pearls that were his eyes" (I, ii, 397-99). 29 Ferdinand's musing on the king his father's drowning and Ariel's horrific description of the drowned corpse's eyes were to become for Eliot an irrepressible allusion in his surrealistic sequence of poems (his own father had died the previous January). In "Burbank," the water-sick, staring eye triggers images of corpse-chewing rats beneath the piles, prompted by Shylock's imagery of the rat-infested ghetto when he adamantly defends his pound-of-flesh interest before the Venetian court of justice: "What if my house be troubled with a rat" he asks the court, "And I be pleased/ To give ten thousand ducats/ To have it baned? What, are you answered yet?" (IV, i, 44-46) Shylock's ghetto rats and Maurice's trench rats are now loosed in Eliot's imagination, to appear repeatedly with the staring corpse in succeeding poems. "The jew"—Phlebas, the Phoenician Jew—"is underneath the lot"; yes, but not in the deprecatory sense of Jewish usury or mercantilism, a hostile charge repeatedly voiced in Europe and reported in the papers. Eliot knew the terrible irony that the new foundations of post-war Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews.
When Bleistein himself is recast as a drowned corpse in that macabre funeral lament, "Dirge," he too rests on his back at the very bottom of the sea, under the one-eyed flatfish, under the wharf rats, deep in the poetic consciousness, "with a stare of dull surprise." 30 "Full fathom five thy Bleistein lies," Eliot begins. And like Joyce he lets Ariel's song suffuse the gruesome scene, exclaiming in a draft, "Those are pearls that were his eyes. See!" (WLF, 123) before withdrawing and reserving the line in favor of a more graphic image of the swollen, discolored eyes in their watery grave—"Graves' disease in a dead jew's eyes," a terribly debilitating disease that swells the eyes as they hemorrhage and the capillaries bloom into bright red swirls and streaks, a condition made even more ghastly in a seachange. As Joyce's corpse "breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun" (U, 3.480-81), so Eliot's Bleistein exhibits the "lace that was his nose" as bones peep through his ragged toes, his lips unfold, and the lobsters work on the flesh, "scratch scratch scratch" (WLF, 119).