of the geometric nature of the early paintings, it was more than a style. It was a profound and complex manifestation of a view of modern man, living in a world where the old moral and social orders had broken down, where all relations and values were problematical, where there were no longer any simple locations, where reactions were complicated, many-sided and illogical, where life was chaotic and frustrating. To a certain extent, the Cubists' artistic endeavours were underpinned by current philosophical concepts and by mathematical and scientific speculation. It is possible, for example, that they may have absorbed some of the ideas of the new ‘soft-edged’ physics—the belief “that matter is less solid, more transparent as it were, than it [had] been thought to be; that motion cannot really be frozen into a timeless instant; that a real body cannot properly be seen from any one perspective point, but that there are many spatial frames that may apply to it, and that these are of equal validity”.⁴ Poincaré's geometry, Bergson's ideas of free association and Einstein's theories of relativity are also evident in their art.

The Cubists broke for good with the classical idea of three-dimensional space constructed from a fixed point of view. They created a flat surface with no apparent source of light on which they spread objects on “tilting, shifting planes”.⁵ These objects assume a rhythmic structure of their own, and represent various views of the object depicted simultaneously, thereby demonstrating the belief that things exist in multiple relationships to each other and change their appearance according to the point of view from which they are seen. The Cubists may be said to have introduced time as a dimension, seeing that various facets and perspectives other than those which travel to the eye of the spectator are introduced at the same time. “To intercalate realities”, writes Balthazar in Lawrence Durrell's novel of the same name, (itself a Cubist structure), “is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity.”⁶ In its simplest form, this “intercalation of reality” is evident in many of Picasso's paintings in the simultaneous presentation of a frontal and profile view. “Simultaneity” is the term used by Apollinaire, Delaunay and others to describe this method of showing objects from several different angles at the same time. No longer, as in traditional painting, did the artist abstract formal qualities of a subject. He now believed that by presenting various viewpoints of the same object simultaneously on a canvas he would have a more accurate method of representing the reality of that object. Cubist painting is therefore directed not so much towards sense perception as toward mental awareness, and the viewer has to reconstruct from the faceted, multi-planed surface an intellectual and imaginative concept of the object depicted.

Following Cézanne's observation that everything in nature is based on geometry, they constructed their art on the principle of splitting a three-dimensional figure into its geometric components such as the triangle, the square, the cube, and especially into the basic element, the facet, i.e., “a small area bordered by straight or curved lines, the tonal effect [suggesting] a … concave or convex surface … at a slight angle to the vertical surface of the canvas … overlapping and inconsistent, the edges [dissolving], allowing their contents to leak into each other”.⁷

The breaking of objects and the resolving of compounds into simple elements which can reconstitute the object analyzed into a new multi-dimensional form is like the analytic process of science and gave rise to the term Analytic Cubism.

The logical development of this multi-perspective (or possibly perspectiveless) structure is the dislocation and relocation in space and time found in the technique of Synthetic Cubism which evolved very slightly later. As the name implies, this took the form of synthesizing, ‘assembling’ or placing together objects in a collage to form multiple relationships with each other. Here again the artist is working with a different kind of logic from that of the traditional linear perspective. This new logic consists in juxtaposition, in which all the objects juxtaposed have a simultaneous existence and relationship with each other. “Cubism became the art of the close-up”, observed the critic, William Seitz. “The objects … depicted [by Picasso and Braque] no longer diminished in size or disappeared in light and atmosphere. Immediate and tangible, their subjects were pressed forward by the advancing real wall of the picture.”⁸ Some Cubist paintings were papiers collés—papers cut into shapes, assembled, and the picture completed with pencil or another medium. After 1911 the objects of collage became foreign materials such as wallpaper, old cigarette boxes, cane and newspaper (which in turn introduced a further dimension in images and words, and if the words were truncated, introducing further ironies, such as journal cut in half to spell jou, or coup de théatre as coup de thé).

These objects of collage provided in themselves, and through astonishing juxtapositions, a complex suggestion of different viewpoints, and a method of introducing into painting the dimension of paradox, ambiguity and wit. A parallel development in music is recorded by the French composer, Eric Satie, a contemporary of the Cubists. He wrote: “The noises of waves, revolvers, typewriters, sirens or airplanes are in music of the same character as the bits of newspaper, painted wood graining and other everyday objects that the Cubists frequently employed.”⁹

In Analytic Cubism the total effect is built up by fragmented and abstracted portions; in Synthetic Cubism extraneous elements retain their identity and are assembled in free association. This is the basic difference between the two. The Cubist style changed, developed offshoots, merged with other styles, but generally persisted until after the First World War.

III

When Eliot arrived in Paris, he brought with him the uncompleted manuscript of “Prufrock”. He had begun the poem in Boston, worked on it during the time he was in Paris and finally completed in Munich in 1911. It has generally been hailed as the first modernist poem. When Ezra Pound and Eliot met for the first time in London in 1914, Pound was amazed to find that Eliot had “actually trained and modernized himself on his own. … It is such a comfort”, Pound wrote, “to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date on the calendar.”¹⁰ He raved about “Prufrock”, calling it the best poem written by an American, and promptly published it in the magazine Poetry in 1915.

It is demonstrable that much of the modernity of “Prufrock” is to be found in those aspects in which it has affinities with the Cubist aesthetic, in those structural and stylistic aspects of the poem which are analogous to Cubist art, and which have only briefly been suggested but never systematically categorized.

“Prufrock” is the portrait of a man of indeterminate age, partly Eliot himself, would-be lover, would-be philosopher. (We note that Eliot returned to Harvard in July 1911 to take a postgraduate course in philosophy.) He appears as a kind of ‘existentialist’ evading a confrontation either with love or the meaning of life (both subsumed in the “overwhelming question”), concerned with growing old, suffering from boredom, hypersensitivity, sophistication, evasions, vacillations, hesitations, trepidations, indecisions, delusions, embarrassments; all of which are paraded against a background of a vision of himself wandering fitfully through deserted streets, going up and down stairs, taking tea, uncomfortable and inarticulate in sophisticated company. A sense of depression, of melancholy even, pervades the poem, which echoes the sombre vision of the Cubist painters.

On reading the poem one notices immediately that the senses are subdued. Sound is muffled — the women are talking of Michelangelo in another room, the sound of music is heard from a farther room, even the one character who speaks has something very negative to say — “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all’” (11.109-110). The mermaids have been singing, but it happened in the past and is not expected to be repeated. There is only one image of smell — “perfume from a dress”. There are few visual images, and of these the most striking are those of something or someone asleep or static. The patient is “etherised”, the fog (cat) falls asleep, the arms “lie across a table”,

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

(11. 75ff.)

Even the head is “brought in upon a platter”, and the lonely men are leaning disconsolately out of windows. Cubist painting is largely monochromatic, offering very little visual stimulation and hardly any sense of colour and plasticity. Picasso once said that “the senses distort, only the mind gives form”.¹¹

Just as in Cubist painting, what is announced by the title and what actually materializes is difficult to correlate and we have to look very carefully for clues as to the nature of the subject; so too the title of the poem hardly introduces us directly to the subject. In an article in English Studies in Africa, Brian Cheadle has noted this aspect. He comments: “… the use made of the persona is itself ironic. The name J. Alfred Prufrock is perched above the poem at the distance of caricature, and it seems congruous with the elegant relish of the absurd that is the keynote of ‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’; … By all these means the poem achieves a sly attrition of certainty.”¹² The comparison with Cubist painting need hardly be stressed. (It becomes even more obvious when Cubist portraits are compared with photographs of the same subject.) It is interesting to note how often in his early poetry Eliot uses a persona, and how often the subjects of Cubist paintings are portraits of people, as if they were all involved in an attempt to stress the fragmentation of the individual in a world where values are problematical and life is perceived more strongly than ever before as being in a state of turmoil and flux.

Eliot's verse is ‘obscure’ in the same way that a Cubist painting is obscure, for as the poem progresses we become aware of a striking lack of narrative notation. There is no succession of governing episodes, and the structure, far from being logical or intellectual, is emotional and imaginative. On examination we find that the poem consists of an assemblage of Imagist-type fragments presenting a series of themes related and contrasted, which move in and out of each other, fusing into an ironic whole.

Just as in Cubist painting, the fragments are contained within a totality afforded by the tone and mood which is predominantly that of resigned melancholy. Speaking in terms of colour, the over-all effect of “Prufrock” is that of grey, suggested by the images of evening, ether, fog, smoke and soot. The predominant colour is yellow, the colour of the fog which has a peculiar murky emotional effect similar to that of the yellow ochre which is one of the favourite colours of Cubist painting. Generally, the Cubist palette consists of secondary colours, neutral or transparent tones, especially subdued tones of earth colours and the suggestion of shadows. The only colours mentioned in this poem are earth colours, with a flash of red, white and black, which can be compared with the connecting passages of primary tones used in Cubist painting. In fact all the poems Eliot wrote or worked on at this time reveal the same tonality sustained, in part, by the same subdued palette.

If one considers the beginning of the poem, it becomes evident that the patient etherized upon a table, the description of the sleazy streets, the women coming and going, the fog passage, seem at first sight to be totally unconnected. Slowly we realize, however, as Gertrude Patterson so succinctly expressed it: “Prufrock himself is in all the fragments”.¹³ Just as a Cubist portrait presents many facets or points of view in one complex whole, so is the reality of Prufrock the sum total of the emotional charge of each fragment. This was stated in a different way by Hugh Kenner: “What ‘Prufrock’ is, is the name of a possible zone of consciousness where all the materials (i.e. the subjects of the fragments) can maintain a vague congruity; no more than that; certainly not a person.”¹⁴ The dislocation of aspects of Prufrock only partially glimpsed in the various passages can be compared with the Cubist practice of either breaking a form and scattering it, as it were, on the surface of the painting, or at other times repeating the same form in different places in the picture, thereby giving the appearance of spatial and temporal interpenetration. Eliot was conscious of this process of fragmentation. One thinks of the “wilderness of mirrors” and “fractured atoms” of “Gerontion”, the “thousand sordid images” of the third “Prelude”, the “crowd of twisted things” of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, the “heap of broken images” and “fragments … shored against my ruins” of “The Waste Land”. The whole of “The Hollow Men” is an evocation of the sense of fragmentation.

In 1911 Eliot attended seven of Bergson's lectures, and it is probable that he drew on Bergson's methodology for the poems he was writing at the time. Bergson suggested that truth could be grasped, not through analysis, but by “casting oneself on a current of immediate perception as it flows through time”.¹⁵ In Matter and Memory he defined an image “as a perception or as the perceived thing itself … The perceiver, by coming into contact with the material world, absorbs images into his consciousness, where they persist as memories. In the aggregate, memories thus form a durée, considered by Bergson to be creative, since, as he explains in Creative Evolution, they affect the perception of things in the perceiver's future.”¹⁶ Intuition is the only valid means of access to Eliot's reality, which is a flux of sensory experiences and of perceptions. Eliot's “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” which was written at this time, is constructed on what seems to be a principle of free association, obeying these laws of “instinctive consciousness” according to Bergson. There is a passage in this poem which could almost be a paraphrase of Bergsonian ideas:

Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions …
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things …

(11.2ff.)

The method of poetic composition which consists of the assembling of fragments, of changing from scene to scene, and of moving backwards and forwards in time through the use of allusion — the literary equivalent of a collage — was to be developed as one of the main technical devices of The Waste Land, but here we see that Eliot had arrived at this process through the inspiration of French poetry, Bergson and Cubist painting, and long before any influence was felt of Pound (whom he met only in 1914) or of the philosophy of Bradley (which he read for the first time in 1912).

The effect of the sudden transition in the poem from fragment to fragment is the verbal equivalent of the flickering movement of the eye in contact with a Cubist canvas. It can also be compared to the technique of cinematographic montage, where one scene is juxtaposed against another. And indeed, an awareness of the new art of film technique can be discerned in “Prufrock” where, at 11.104-105, it is stated: “It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”. In the third “Prelude” which was written at this time, there is another reference:

You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.

(11.3ff.)

Although, in “Prufrock”, Eliot does not use the highly allusive method of The Waste Land, the numerous references to other works or characters — the epigraph from Dante, the allusions to Michelangelo, to Hesiod's Works and Days, to Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress”, to the Old and New Testaments, to Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear and Twelfth Night—produce an effect of temporal dislocation or of different temporal points of view. This movement across times and cultures was later to be intensified by Eliot's study of Bradley and expressed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) as the “historical sense”, which involves “a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence”.¹⁷

The odd juxtapositions and the fusion of the sacred and profane, the sublime and the ridiculous (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet” (1.111) “… Do I dare to eat a peach?” (1.122)) are here analogous to the collage of Synthetic Cubism, whose evocative potentialities foreshadow the exploitation of the illogical, the irrational, the dream, and the shock element (“bouncing the spectator out of his accustomed logical habits”¹⁸) to be developed more fully in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. In “Prufrock” and “Preludes” other proto-Surrealist aspects can be noticed in Eliot's practice of isolating aspects of a body or of clothes—arms that are “braceleted and white and bare” (1.63), “Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl” (1.67), the pair of “ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (11.73-74), the head “brought in upon a platter” (1.82), the skirts that “trail along the floor” (1.102). Although this foreshadows Surrealism, a similar practice can be seen in the Cubists' use of motifs taken from primitive Negro or Iberian sculpture, the primitive suggesting a sense of the mysterious and irrational, of the submerged, anarchic self. These images are even more insistent in “Portrait of a Lady” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. Both poems refer to a drum or tomtom, and there are several references to automatic, subconscious actions.

In The Waste Land Eliot perfected the method of allusion and juxtaposition. It is very much an expression of those aspects of disjunction generally felt in the first part of this century and discussed earlier. It is interesting to note that as Eliot moved towards his own personal solution in the Anglican Church, his poetry became less allusive, and the phrases borrowed from other sources appeared, to use a metaphor from science, in solution in the poetry rather than as entities of their own.

In “Prufrock” the faceted, Cubist structure is further stylistically suggested by the complicated scheme of rhythm, rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration and the repetition of words and phrases, which produce the effect of a multitude of mirrors or which, by baffling the reader's expectations, suggest a series of “leaking” facets or “interpenetrating planes”.

In the first section of the poem we notice the repetition of the phrase “let us go” appearing three times as a motif at the beginning of a line. The rhyme scheme at the end of the lines consists of rhyming couplets followed at random by an unrhymed line which introduces a bathetic note—I, sky … table; streets, retreats, hotels, shells, argument, intent … question. In the second section a different pattern emerges. There is a repetition of words, particularly of verbs in the past tense, at the beginnings of lines, while the ends suggest a pattern of fractured couplets—panes (evening) drains, leap (night) asleep. The mock-heroic couplet, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (11.13-14) forms a refrain which is detached from the rest of the poem, constituting a fragment on its own which reappears, in Cubist fashion, in another place in the poem. In the section starting at 1.37 “And indeed there will be time” we have three and then four consecutive rhymes—dare, stair, hair; thin, chin, pin, thin. The word “time” echoes through the section, as well as “Do I dare?” In the section starting at 1.75 “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” we have a pattern set up whereby one couplet intersects another—peacefully (fingers, malingers) me. The space becomes even wider from 1.87 “And would it have been worth it, after all” where two couplets intersect a third—all (tea, me) (while, smile) ball. At the same time the ‘all’ sound is repeated throughout this section. In the section starting at 1.111 “No! I am not Prince Hamlet” we find a complicated repetition of the ‘oo’ sound and associated near echoes—do, too, tool, use, cautious, meticulous, obtuse, ridiculous, Fool. Of course, the words are bound together in terms of sense as well. Thus we have a different pattern in each section, all connected by a series of repetitions or words and phrases which Eliot learned from French verse, but which he greatly heightened to compose a faceted, Cubist structure.

The use of a highly original rhythm, subtle and unanalysable, which approaches the iambic pentameter but “swerves away from it” reinforces the sense of bewilderment, bafflement and disillusion. In 1917 Eliot said that “[the] most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.”¹⁹

The importance of rhythm in creating an ambience both in verse and in painting cannot be underestimated. Eliot called it “the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling”.²⁰ In 1961 Raymond Williams commented:

We are only beginning to investigate this on any scientific basis, but it seems clear from what we already know that rhythm is a way of transmitting a description of an experience, in such a way that the experience is recreated in the person receiving it, not merely as an ‘abstraction’ of an ‘emotion’ but as a physical effect on the organism—on the blood, on the breathing, on the physical patterns of the brain.²¹

And in relation to painting, we have a similar observation from Gustav Metzger:

It is [the] complex of timing, rhythm, tempo, sensation and emotion which is of central importance in the system's relation to art. It is the counterpoint, feedback, and accumulation of process, temperature, time and tension in the autonomic system, that is opposed to or contradicts or is off balance with time, rhythm, tempo, tension, relaxation and character of the observed work which leads to a heightening, a stretching of complexity, to new depths of sensation and experience and including aesthetic, intellectual and other factors that have, as it were, been forced through wavelike contractions.²²

Besides the faceted structure of Cubist painting, one is very aware of the rhythmic geometric lines which move one's eye up and down the picture. Eliot's verse echoes this movement. This is suggested in several ways. Firstly, we notice recurring images of movement (even if it is movement that leads nowhere), especially along a horizontal or vertical plane: “let us go”, “the evening is spread out”, the patient is “etherised upon a table”, streets “follow” and “lead” to an “overwhelming question”, “the women come and go”, soot falls on the back of a cat that “slips by a terrace”, smoke “slides along a street”, a question is “lifted and dropped”, Prufrock turns back and “descends the stair”, his collar “mount[s] to the chin”, he has gone “through narrow streets”, “arms lie across a table”, smoke “rises from the pipes”, “claws scuttl[e] across the floor”, a ball is “roll[ed]”, skirts “trail along the floor”, Prufrock “walk[s] upon the beach” and mermaids are “riding seaward”.

The sense of movement is also suggested by variations of pace, especially in the constant change of rhythm or locale. The restless movement of the streets “that follow like a tedious argument” and the women who “come and go” are contrasted with the lazy movements of the fog (cat) which falls asleep and is thus connected with the patient “etherised upon a table” and the later predominant images of indolence and sleep. This stop/start movement is crystallized in the lines:

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

(11.47-48)

The temporal disjunction is further enhanced by the constant change of tense which ranges from past to future and back again every few lines.²³ The discussion of time, the “visions and revisions” (1. 33) which are reversed and further punctuated by the suggestion of the passage of time being measured by the taking of tea and other social rituals, is the temporal equivalent of the maze of streets and the suggestion of wandering through them, up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, which permeates the poem.

Leavis considered that “Prufrock” constituted “an important event in the history of English poetry … [representing] a complete break with nineteenth-century tradition and a new start”.²⁴ Harold Nicolson stated that Eliot “tuned [his] ear to new rhythms”,²⁵ and Alvarez believed that Eliot “has improved the technical equipment of poetry out of all recognition”.²⁶ It would seem that the year Eliot spent in Paris made him a modernist poet, and that Cubist art played a larger part in this modernization than has previously been noticed. Although Eliot himself gave little encouragement for an interdisciplinary study of his poetry, he does stand on record as having insisted that “an educated man should be as familiar with the latest findings of natural science as with the most recent style of Picasso”.²⁷

Notes

1. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library. Quoted by L. Gordon in Eliot's Early Years (Oxford, 1977), p.33.

2. La France libre, 8, No. 44 (15 June 1944), pp. 94-99. Quoted in L. Gordon, op. cit., p.37.

3. To Criticize the Critic and other Writings (London, 1965), p. 58.

4. C. H. Waddington, Beyond Appearance (Edinburgh, 1970), pp.13f.

5. W. Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), quoted by N. Lynton in Cubism (Bletchley, 1976), p.18.

6. (London, 1958), p. 226. See M. Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Oxford, 1970), p.191.

7. J. M. Nash, Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism (London, 1974), p.19.

8. The Art of Assemblage (New York, 1961), p. 22. Quoted by G. Patterson in T. S. Eliot. Poems in the Making (Manchester, 1971), pp.98f.

9. Quoted by M. Praz, op. cit., p.192.

10. The Letters of Ezra Pound (ed. D. Paige) (London, 1951), p. 40. Quoted by M. K. Spears in Dionysus and the City (Oxford, 1970), p.138.

11. J. Dixon Hunt, “T. S. Eliot and Modern Painting” in A. D. Moody (ed.), The Waste Land in Different Voices (London, 1974), p.174.

12. “A Perspective in Modernism in English Poetry”, Vol. 19, No. 2, p.69.

13. Op. cit., p.116.

14. The Invisible Poet. T. S. Eliot (London, 1960), p. 35.

15. Quoted by L. Gordon, op. cit., p.41.

16. J. Grover Smith, “Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night & Bergson” in B.C. Southam (ed.), Prufrock, Gerontion, Ash Wednesday. A Casebook (London, 1978).

17. Selected Prose (Harmondsworth, 1935), p.23.

18. P. N. Furbank and A. Kettle (eds), Modernism and its Origins (Bletchley, 1975), p.43.

19. “Reflections on Vers Libre”, in Selected Prose, op. cit., pp.88f.

20. “The Use of Poetry”, ibid., p.94.

21. The Long Revolution (London), pp.88f.

22. Auto-Destructive Art (no date). Quoted by J. Benthall in “Technology and Art” in Studio International, a Magazine of Modern Art, April 1970, p.148.

23. I am grateful to Mr. D. McLoughlin for pointing this out.

24. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London, 1932), p.66.

25. H. Nicholson, “My Words Echo”, in N. Braybrooke (ed.), T. S. Eliot, A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday (London, 1958), p.34.

26. A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit (London, 1958), p.16.

27. V. Cronin, “T.S. Eliot as Translator” in N. Braybrooke, op. cit., p.134.