Books: Christmas with Mr. Eliot

THE CULTIVATION OF CHRISTMAS TREES —7″. S. Ellof—Farrar, Sfraus & Cudahy ($1.25).

This is less a book than a Christmas card. With the help of some singularly uninspiring illustrations, the publishers have contrived to stretch the American edition of T. S. Eliot’s first poem since Four Quartets—all of 34 lines long—into a book of ten pages. Eliot at Christmastime, as might be expected, is no Dickens. He opens magisterially: “There are several attitudes towards Christmas”—and proceeds to plead for the child’s attitude. He cannot, of course, help noticing the cosmic worm in the plum pudding (“The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure”). But on the whole he is pleasant, his rhymeless phrases are more precisely tooled than Christmas tree ornaments, and the total effect is that of a very small and shaded candle.

∙∙∙

It is not the first time that a poem of Eliot’s has been stretched a bit. It also happened with The Waste Land (433 lines) and its famed notes (217 lines). In the Sewanee Review, Eliot reveals: “When it came to print The Waste Land as a little book … it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter . . . They became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes; but … they have had almost greater popularity than the poem itself … I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.”