A stay against inner anarchy.

Words Alone
The Poet T.S. Eliot
Denis Donoghue
Yale University Press, $26.95, 326 pp.

In 1990, Denis Donoghue published Warrenpoint, a marvelous hybrid of a book--part memoir of his Irish childhood, part collection of literary, philosophical, and theological musings. It helped to cement Donoghue's reputation as a literary humanist in a profession that has been dominated of late by theorists and ideologues. Donoghue belongs in the select company of critics like Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks--scholars who have spent half a century crisscrossing the Atlantic, writing about literature with the unshakable conviction that words, for all their ambiguities and betrayals, are still capable of conveying meaning, and that we can still speak of authors as the creators of imaginative works that demand our respect and attention.

One of the many pleasures to be found in Warrenpoint is Donoghue's recollection of his Catholic upbringing, an extraordinary narrative of what was, by his account, a fairly ordinary childhood in the church. While his teachers at the Christian Brothers school were hardly paragons of scholarship or sanctity, neither did they traumatize young Donoghue. His faith survived intact, even after the buffeting and questioning of his university years, and has informed much of his mature criticism. For example, in Ferocious Alphabets, one of the most lucid books on postmodern literary theories, Donoghue brilliantly contrasts two types of reading: that which sees breath, voice, and personality behind the creation of literature and that which makes writing a play of language, without reference to an author. The former view, Donoghue argues, is underwritten by "the Christian tradition in which the primal creative principle is identified as the Word of God, God uttering Himself...." The essence of reading, he concludes, is "not to enlighten ourselves but to verify the axiom of presence: we read to meet the other."

But unless I'm mistaken, Donoghue's most recent books are addressing his faith more openly and extensively than ever before. Warrenpoint, which moved with ease from anecdotes about the Christian Brothers to reflections on Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of "the other," contains one of the few defenses of the doctrine of Original Sin to be found in contemporary literary criticism. In the preface to Words Alone, Donoghue claims that he is writing a sequel to Warrenpoint, which ended just as he set off for University College, Dublin. To continue the story, he realized, required a new tack: the tale of his formative university years had to contract into a single protracted experience--his attempt to read and comprehend the works of T.S. Eliot. For a young Catholic in love with modern literature, Eliot was the central figure of the era; Donoghue set about becoming an apprentice to this master. In writing Words Alone, Donoghue wanted to look back at that experience and come to terms with the question: "What is entailed in submitting oneself to a writer?"

It's an intriguing question, but Donoghue never answers it, at least not directly. Despite the promise that the narrative will be not just about Eliot's poetry but "my experience in trying to read him," there is little autobiography in Words Alone. Aside from a few scattered references to the ways his peers were interpreting Eliot, this book is essentially a work of literary, cultural, and theological analysis. That his analysis is charged with the passion and precision refined by his lifelong conversation with Eliot is beyond doubt. But those expecting a straightforward sequel to Warrenpoint will not find what they're looking for.

Nonetheless, Words Alone is a timely, accessible, and courageous revaluation of Eliot--courageous because Eliot's reputation, which seemed unassailable for much of the twentieth century, has suffered a steep decline after being subjected to sustained attack over the last two decades. One of the first salvos in this campaign came not in the form of a scholarly monograph, but in Michael Hastings's stage play, Tom and Viv (later made into a film starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson). Hastings reinforced the old caricature of Eliot as a cold fish--a bloodless intellectual who took refuge from emotional chaos in religious dogma. Another, more serious line of attack, culminated in the publication of Anthony Julius's T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995). In a way, the allegations of Eliot's anti-Semitism share the premise of Tom and Viv: Eliot, his critics allege, felt threatened by "free-thinking Jews" just as he felt threatened by his first wife's mental instability--so he sought refuge in an authoritarian Christianity as a stay against his own inner anarchy.

Donoghue agrees to a great extent with this analysis of Eliot's struggle to bind himself to an order that rescued him from solipsism, but he comes to vastly different conclusions about Eliot's religious and cultural positions. Without denying Eliot's tendency toward disgust at the body and its needs, Donoghue writes with conviction about the poet's "profound doubting belief...contiguous to Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, and Pascal." His defense of Eliot against the charges of anti-Semitism is restrained and thoughtful, though unlikely to convert the die-hard critic. Donoghue regrets that Eliot was tempted into "over-explicitness" in his social and cultural criticism, but he points out that in the years surrounding World War II, Eliot--and a host of other intellectuals--felt that the fate of civilization was at stake. Eliot's willingness to put aside his Sphinx-like mask may have led him to say too much, but it seems churlish to hold that against him.

It would be wrong to convey the impression that Donoghue's method in Words Alone is primarily apologetic or defensive. The book, which concentrates on Eliot's poetry, is really an extended reflection on Eliot's relationship to language. Undaunted by the mountains of commentary on Eliot's oeuvre, Donoghue provides fresh, unselfconscious readings of poems great and small. (Some of the most rewarding discussions are about "minor" poems like "Lune de Miel," "La Figlie che Piange," and "Marina.") The text is strewn with phrases that possess epigrammatic wisdom: the young Eliot is described as "a character in a novel by Dostoevsky"; the purpose of Eliot's poems is "to make our delusions uninhabitable"; the poetry of Four Quartets "does not depend upon a doctrine professed but upon a doctrine felt."

The title of the book comes from a line of Yeats--"words alone are certain good." Donoghue plays on the paradox of words that, despite their uncertainties, are "the only instruments we have." He demonstrates that, if anything, Eliot was ahead of his time in his awareness of the contingency of knowledge, the tendency of presence to flee from our words, leaving us with the paradox of meaningful absence. For Donoghue, as for all of us, Eliot remains very much our contemporary.

Gregory Wolfe is writer in residence at Seattle Pacific University and the editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.