T. S. Eliot: Multiple personality in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in Eliot’s real-life identity as “The Captain,” possibly an alternate personality

This post continues my poetry-post retrospective. I want to make it clear that multiple personality is not an isolated quirk of any particular poet.

June 14, 2017

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: In the first line—“Let us go then, you and I”—the “you and I” may refer to Prufrock’s alternate personalities.

“Eliot offered different identifications. At some time in the 1950s, he answered the enquirer that ‘anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that ‘you’ in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at the moment addressing…’ On the other hand, in a 1962 interview, Eliot said that Prufrock was in part a man of about forty and in part himself, and that he was employing the notion of the split personality…

“But the immediate source for ‘you and I’ is likely to have been Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), published in translation in 1910…In the Essai, Bergson develops the idea of a double self: one aspect being the everyday self, experiencing common reality; the other, a deeper self, attuned to profound truths, and normally in subjugation to the superficial self” (1, pp. 48-49).

“Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts…” (2). Laurence Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature” (2).

Comment

Why did Eliot, speaking about the poem in a 1950s interview, have to conjecture and presume what he had meant? Why didn’t he know for certain who “you” is in his poem? And why did he give a different explanation in the 1962 interview? Perhaps different personalities were answering the question in the two interviews.

1. B. C. Southam. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996.

2. Wikipedia. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock

June 18, 2017

T. S. Eliot: In a secret life, Eliot called himself “The Captain,” who may have been the alternate personality responsible for his pornographic poems.

“The flat Tom rented in early 1923 was to be the hub of his secret life…At Burleigh Mansions he underwent a metamorphosis: here he was no longer ‘Mr. Eliot,’ banker and dutiful husband, but ‘Captain Eliot,’ hero of the Colombo verses, captain of his crew…

“Osbert Sitwell noticed, when he visited Eliot in the ‘bizarre’ atmosphere of the Charing Cross Road flat, that ‘Visitors on arrival had to enquire at the porter’s lodge for ‘The Captain,’…

“ ‘Noticing how tired my host looked, I regarded him more closely, and was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder…I was all the more amazed at this discovery, because any deliberate dramatisation of his appearance was so plainly out of keeping with his character, and with his desire never to call attention to himself, that I was hardly willing, any more than if I had seen a ghost, to credit the evidence of my senses.’

“Osbert was almost ready to disbelieve what he had seen, but he went to tea with Virginia Woolf a few days later. ‘She asked me, rather pointedly, if I had seen Tom lately, and when I said ‘Yes’ asked me—because she too was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen—whether I had observed the green powder on his face—so there was corroboration!’ Osbert and Virginia were apparently equally astounded, and although they discussed Tom’s use of cosmetics at considerable length, could find no way of explaining his ‘extraordinary and fantastical pretence’…He remained mystified: Osbert never did discover why T. S. Eliot called himself ‘The Captain’ and wore make-up…(1, pp. 356-358).

“As a student at Harvard, he began circulating his Columbo and Bolo jingles between about 1908 and 1914. For men only, and degrading women, Jews and blacks, they offer the spectacle of a penis so mighty it can rip a “whore” “from cunt to navel”. This revel in violence is varied by the antics of the sex-mad King Bolo and his Big Black Kween, whose bum is as big as a soup tureen…

“At first, when I came upon the Bolovian Court and Columbo and his crew, I assumed that they were a juvenile aberration. The third volume of Letters (covering the period of Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican faith in June 1927) presents a challenge to this. For the obscene verse that Eliot continued to write and disseminate as late as the age of 44 is not, in his own post-conversion view, an aberration” (2).

Perhaps “The Captain” was an alternate personality responsible for Eliot’s Colombo poems.

1. Carole Seymour-Jones. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T. S. Eliot. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2001.

2. Lyndall Gordon. “T S Eliot and the sexual wasteland.” NewStatesman, 20 November 2015. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/11/t-s-eliot-and-sexual-wasteland