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 somesingularly uninspiring illustrations, the publishers have contrived tostretch the American edition of T. S. Eliot’s first poem since FourQuartets—all of 34 lines long—into a book of ten pages. Eliot atChristmastime, as might be expected, is no Dickens. He opensmagisterially: “There are several attitudes towards Christmas”—andproceeds to plead for the child’s attitude. He cannot, of course, helpnoticing the cosmic worm in the plum pudding (“The awareness of death,the consciousness of failure”). But on the whole he is pleasant, hisrhymeless phrases are more precisely tooled than Christmas treeornaments, and the total effect is that of a very small and shadedcandle.

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