Meaning by Shakespeare by Hawkes Terence

Author:Hawkes, Terence.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

You came a long way from St Louis

Of course, the discursive terrains of that world continued to be shaped by other events. Two of the most significant of them also took place in the year 1917. First was the founding of the University of Cambridge Tripos (i.e. degree) in English, which effectively established in Britain the study of the subject as we know it to this day. The second event was also a literary one: the publication of T.S.Eliot's highly influential volume of verse Prufrock and Other Observations. In fact, the impact and influence, if not the content, of the latter could be said to be a direct result of the former, for the professional teachers of the new subject quickly found in Eliot a poetic stance to match their critical presuppositions.13 The fact that Eliot was not English was usually ignored. His voice somehow seemed to speak from the centre.

He had virtually danced his way there. In June 1913, the year before his appointment to the Sheldon Travelling Fellowship at Harvard which made his momentous trip to Oxford and London possible, we find Eliot paying a fee of seven dollars to one Emma Wright Gibbs for three hours’ dancing lessons.14 The investment paid off. In mid-Atlantic in July 1914, he reports that ‘we have great fun, especially when it comes to dancing to the sound of the captain's phonograph’.15 Yet his trip to Europe was also moving him away from the American fountainhead. At Oxford in November of that year, he confesses to being ‘as much au courant of Cambridge [Massachusetts] life as anyone can who has not yet learned the fox trot’, and resolves that, when he returns, he will put himself in the hands of a local dance teacher ‘for a month of the strictest training’. The new style of ballroom dancing, he jocularly but accurately calculates, is after all one of the spearheads of the American cultural penetration of Europe.

I was able to make use of the fox trot in a debate in the college common room a few evenings ago. The subject was ‘Resolved that this society abhors the threatened Americanisation of Oxford’. I supported the negative: I pointed out to them frankly how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance. And see, said I, what we the few Americans here are losing while we are bending our energies toward your uplift…we the outposts of progress are compelled to remain in ignorance of the fox trot. You will be interested to hear that my side won the debate by two votes.’16

Eliot soon learned to foxtrot. Better still, he soon learned that his transatlantic dancing style offered a highly successful means of access to the social as well as the intellectual life of London. It was his entrée to the city:

I have been mostly among poets and artists, but I have also met a few ladies, and have even danced. The large hotels have dances on Saturday nights, to which one can go by paying or by taking dinner there.

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