Donoghue

Words Alone

by Denis Donoghue

reviewed by Ann Garvey

Dear Dr. Donoghue:

I have read your book Words Alone, and now, in deference to the advice of Virginia Woolf, I will write, not a review of the book, but this personal note to the author. If I were an Eliot scholar, or even an academic in literature, I could pass judgment on your book. I have read the reviews of others and they are all positive. There is no mistaking that the book is written by a gifted scholar, and one who has steeped himself in the same waters of erudition and thought that Eliot did himself. Maybe even more, because there are all the backward looks of critics and admirers to contemplate. But I am no scholar. So instead I ask myself questions, like a child with her first toothache who struggles to tell the doctor where and how it hurts.

I ask myself, would I read the book again, and I say, yes, and again and again. For the truth is I have already read it several times, and still it feels like I am skipping stones off many of its surfaces. There are things in this book that will takes years to understand.

The problem is that so often I cannot hold onto what you are trying to say. You are talking to a select audience. One that can leapfrog with you through ideas about the destiny of a poem, and the power of the Inferno, the Aeneid, and the history of modern French literature and philosophy. All on the same page.

So why would I read it again? Because you said so cleverly that Eliot speaks as if from a burning bush. And because you show us Eliot’s poetic voices, not as three, but as legion and as flowing through the single river of language that unites us all. Because you did not like passages in the “Four Quartets” that have rocked me to sleep some bad nights in my life. And because you honored ones that woke me up when I wanted to sleep my life away.

Mainly because you led me to listen, in new ways, to the gloriously uncanny language of T. S. Eliot.

In explaining the shifting voices in “The Waste Land”, you wrote:

Words stand between reason and madness, touched by both adversaries.

For that sentence alone, I would read this book again.

I ask myself, would I recommend it to others. And I cannot answer truly. If words alone are enough for you, I would say, better spend your money on a volume of Eliot’s poems, and warm yourself amongst the hundreds of burning bushes you will find there. But if you want to walk into the world of the man that set the fires, then read this book, and read the books it points to, and listen to the ideas and moods that Eliot’s poetry inspired in the author. Enjoy the too rare glimpses into the author’s personal stumbles though his first reading of Eliot, his meeting with the poet, his view of Eliot’s life searches, and his “memoirs” of a less cerebral type. Then, if you work hard enough, you may find that some line in, for example, “The Hollow Men”, will shimmer with five shades of meaning instead of none, and you will slip into a veritable wonderland of thought, and the author begins to make sense, and you will begin to hear music that you did not hear before. Yes. Then, yes, read this book.

Sincerely yours,

A Reader