Nancy Duvall Hargrove

This was pure serendipity on two counts: back in early 1989 I wandered into an iconic Melbourne second hand bookshop. I was at the time building a collection on T.S. Eliot, thinking I might undertake masters or doctoral studies on a figure that had emerged, with his near-contemporary James Joyce, as the zenith of my undergraduate journeyings. In the end I felt that I was theologically too entwined with Eliot to maul him in a masters dissertation, so I mauled D.H. Lawrence instead; my small Eliot collection moved to the dustier corners of my shelves. Amongst them was the book I purchased that April (the cruellest month, though perhaps not so in Melbourne) day in 1989, Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot. It gathered dust, unopened, through many academic and geographical backwaters, for more than twenty years.

These days, though, I have more time to revisit the unopened doors of life past, and with little more than random abandon, drew Hargrove’s long neglected book from the shelves. My regard for Eliot has never abated, though he was never a part of my interim academic meandering: it was time to revisit him.

I doubt for me there could have been a better oeuvre - or re-oeuvre, perhaps? – to Eliot. Perhaps because landscape has been such a powerful motif in my own absorption of the world (though the landscapes of rural and outback Australia and of New Zealand are vastly different to the British and American landscapes that provide the bedrock of Eliot’s literary and inescapably theological vision), perhaps because I have slowly and perhaps even dissipatedly constructed a symboliste worldview by which to survive life, Hargrove’s volume was always going to be a useful entry-point to once neglected corridors. Of course I have by-passed the opportunity to be a connoisseur of Eliot criticism, and have no idea where Hargrove’s first published major work now rests in the canon of Eliot criticism, but it was for me a happy serendipity to have it perched upon my knees for several days.

Hargrove writes fluidly, unpretentiously, without the kind of rarefied abstruseness that is the modus operandi of so many academics (myself included, I fear). She first revisits the well attested territory of the influence of Tennyson and Baudelaire on Eliot’s use of land and cityscape, but then takes us further than previous critics by undertaking the simple but critically important task of describing the scenes to which Eliot alludes, and identifying the place they have both in Eliot’s own biography and in his interaction with the earlier poets - perhaps most magnificentally in her treatment of The Dry Salvages, near Rockport, Ma.

Hargrove was writing this in the mid to late ’70s, and the territory is perhaps de rigueur now, but it was not so then – despite Eliot’s own 1960 essay “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet” and Helen Gardner’s “The Landscapes of Eliot’s Poetry” (Critical Quarterly 10, 1968). The problem with much scholarship prior to Hargrove’s is that, while acknowledging (as Eliot does in any case) the significance of a Starnbergersee (see The Waste Land, II, 8-9), a Cape Ann or a Little Gidding – and many others – no direct description of the place is attempted, and therefore Eliot’s famous methodology of allusion is truncated.

Not that Hargrove’s is a mere “Eliot with a Baedeker” – or even “Hargrove with an Eliotan Lonely Planet” (the latter series not invented in 1978!). Having reached and described the place glimpsed or hinted at in Eliot’s lines Hargrove digs deeper into the substrata of its place either within Eliot’s life story (Cape Ann, Rogue Island, St Louis), within socio-religious history (Glencoe, Little Gidding), or, most wonderfully, in the intersections of and even interstices between the two. She does so within the framework of the chronology of Eliot’s poetry, so that as Eliot’s poetic and religious quest closes with the mystic union of fire and rose the entire symboliste milieu finds its own natural cadence, and Eliot’s life, and his readers’ lives, and Hargrove’s readers’ lives, can move on: landscape and Symbol in Eliot’s post-poetry prose may be a wholly different intellectual journey!

Hargrove was writing in the 1970s – the book was published in 1978 – at the beginning of what was to be a distinguished academic career, from which, at least in a pecuniary sense, she stepped down just three years ago. Language has changed since then – the generic ‘man’ grates, but I find that easy enough to translate in my mind’s ear as I read. Few of us these days are fluent enough in French to read Baudelaire untranslated: my failed school-boy French flounders after “symboliste milieu” and ennui and other terms stolen from philosophers - in these less rigorous academic climes Hargrove might have had to translate. The division of the bibliography into monographs and essays may have been a house style, but I found it a little clumsy. Short titles and identification only by author in endnotes is sometimes unhelpful, presupposing that the reader has read and retained every endnote – but these were days long before foot and endnote programmes, and an author’s patience can wear thin.

On the whole though, within the limitations established by the title (Hargrove was not setting out to explore the Bergsonian influence on Eliot’s understanding of time!) this was a magnificent monograph. I am deeply grateful to Hargrove for giving Eliot back to me, and to serendipity for sending me into a second hand book shop in Melbourne more years ago than I care to remember.… (mehr)