1982, June. The University of Sydney back then had days when high school students in their final year, coming up to their Higher School Certificate examinations, would make their way into the city to see a handful of special lectures by university academics.1 The aim was to give us a taste of university-level work, also to supplement what we had been doing in preparation for our exams. I don’t know how many university departments did this and how many schools took part, but the English department put on some of these lectures, so my classmates and I trooped in from the suburbs one day and crowded the Wallace Lecture Theatre.

English literature was my main interest back then, and I’d read a lot, I imagined, about the works on the syllabus that year – Conrad, Shakespeare, Eliot. I’d dipped into academic journals and supposed I had a sense of how the business of responding to a text could go – a sense of the nature and scope of the enterprise, and what was more-or-less possible. Then a slender man with a particular energy, Bruce Gardiner, appeared at the podium and gave a lecture about “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

I didn’t think too much of the poem beforehand (was more of a Ted Hughes man, then and now). But the lecture gave me an instant jolt, and shifted, I think, my view of poems, books and critical projects.

Hauling 1982 up from the recollective well, my response back then was partly to the ideas and partly to the person. He had such an acrobatic mind, was uncovering paths and introducing possibilities that would never have occurred to me but were each immediately apt, and that would each be replaced before I had time to fully take them in, let alone scribble onto foolscap. The lecture felt like a ride in a very fast open-top car.

I turned up at university next summer in 1983, and took first-year English. Lecturers came and went from the Wallace Lecture Theatre to handle particular works: Penny Gay on Twelfth Night, Gerald Wilkes on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – it says a lot about the 1980s department and university that I remember individual lectures in this way – and Bruce on a kindred spirit, Oscar Wilde, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

When I approached Bruce in person, he was generous from the start. I began visiting him in his office, and kept doing so long after I’d abandoned English to concentrate on philosophy. For me, Bruce in those years came to be an ongoing point of contact with a more freewheeling, subversive intellectual style.

We both had an interest in Richard Rorty’s work, a writer positioned between Bruce’s world and the one I was making my way into. Rorty in print and Bruce in person represented a critique of the pretensions of system-building naturalistic philosophy – a gentler critique in Bruce’s case than Rorty’s. Rorty would mount explicit criticisms and offer pointed caricatures of the kind of systematic work that I was starting to do, exposing its history and sometimes asking, directly, what people in such a field could reasonably take themselves to be attempting.2 Bruce nudged in the same direction, but did so more by example, by treating philosophy as one more interesting body of writing, rather than any kind of putative intellectual overseer.

Rorty has an essay on Derrida, from around that period, that is called “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”.3

Philosophy was part of Bruce’s omnivorous interest, and I think he saw that tradition in something like the way seen here in Rorty – as a sequence of works that comment on each other (and on other writings), exercises that try out new directions, provide resources for further rounds of writing, but can’t sensibly offer final answers to the questions being addressed. And that is fine, not something to regret, because the tradition of commentary on commentary is a valuable thing in itself, and something that can serve good humanistic ends.

Derrida, the ostensible topic of that Rorty essay, was also of considerable interest to Bruce, and the early 1980s was the time when Derrida’s work well and truly arrived in Australia. He became a topic and a resource in many discussions, including the latest round of internal ructions and ruptures within – not the philosophy department, but – the two philosophy departments at the University of Sydney, departments that had split over an earlier round of disagreement about the nature and boundaries of the field. I shared the common analytic philosopher’s view of Derrida as a showman at best, a somewhat empty figure and one with a mostly malign influence. This was not Rorty’s or Bruce’s view, though Rorty in that essay did distinguish the better and worse sides of Derrida, where the better side transcended the misguided project of general philosophical theorising about language and the worse side fell into it.4

I resisted, and still resist, the “kind of writing” view of philosophy, even when shorn of pretension and made coherent in the way Rorty did sometimes succeed in making it. I’d not be doing philosophy unless I thought it could make progress on answering some of its unwieldy traditional questions, where “answering” I understand in a way that has a fair bit in common with scientific question-answering, as opposed to a project of endlessly offering new pictures and interpretations. But I have always taken the other view seriously as a challenge; that critique of philosophy’s ambitions has always sat there in my mental background, including the way that Bruce seemed to expect to get the same sort of fruits from good systematic philosophy as he would from a poem.

* * *

When I’m writing about Bruce, most of the material above is written from memory, looking back forty years. The 1982 Prufrock hour left its mark, but what was in it? What did Bruce say? I must admit that the content had faded, leaving just an imprint that I knew mattered. But Bruce’s meticulous filing practices meant that he was able to send me a copy of the typescript of the lecture (in Courier, with its dark stamped apostrophes and underlines), which I read in the sun last week.5 Bruce’s accompanying note said that he did not think it was one of his best lectures, but I can see why it had the effect on me that it had in ’82.

The lecture shows no deference whatsoever to Eliot – to the revolutionary, the modernist innovator, and to what was, and still is, one of the most famous poems in English (perhaps the most actually remembered poem) from that century. Much of the lecture has the feel of Bruce steadily calling Eliot’s bluff. He begins by reading an entire poem by Edward Lear. Lear wrote “nonsense poetry”, which has an effect despite its lack of ordinary sense. It succeeds, when it works, in establishing a sort of contact, presenting not ideas but a voice. Bruce then works through the voices presented in quick succession in Eliot’s poem, asking what sort of voice each seems to be and what effect it has, without needing to ask what that voice was determinately saying, and without worrying too much about why these voices, rather than others, are the ones we confront.

A good deal of what arrives in this stream of voices is nonsense, Bruce says, roughly as in Lear. Passages that invite a careful interpretation – much-discussed passages that might tell us something specific about Prufrock’s frame of mind, such as the women talking of Michelangelo, are presented by Bruce as things that have lodged in Prufrock’s mind for no apparent reason, or no reason other than their vague atmosphere and some echoing phonetics, like those fragments of graffiti glimpsed in the street that can settle and reverberate unexpectedly in consciousness.

Bruce handles the “I am not Prince Hamlet” passage at the end of the poem, fleshes out this particular voice, not primarily by describing it, but by addition – by interpolating extra lines of interior monologue that provide a rationale, of sorts, for the written lines. These additions offer a mixture of self-doubt, vague affirmation, and idle thought. The “trousers rolled” and “eat a peach” passages of this part of the poem are handled by presenting them as a bit of Learian rhyming nonsense in the former case, and as an attempt to distract by arbitrarily introducing something wholesome in the second.

This avoidance of questions of meaning was the opposite of what I was used to with literature. An internet search directed at the poem today still yields candidate meanings for all sorts of passages. The yellow fog – is it a symbol of love? A symbol of something else? Can we work out roughly what “overwhelming question” Prufrock contemplates asking? Is it a personal question that Prufrock might ask a woman, or something more general and philosophical? All this is the sort of thing that Bruce saw as a mistake, something he was trying to steer us away from. Familiar ways of trying to understand what is going on in the poem, the sort of thing I was doing with great intensity in my last year of high school, were pointless because they were being deliberately thwarted by Eliot. If we insisted on finding a meaning, it would be like being fooled by Lear. We would be missing the boat.

Decades on, what do I think of the poem, and Bruce’s interpretation, now? I think that his response to it is mostly right. And – or but – I mean this in a way that is perhaps at odds with what I take to be Bruce’s own meta-theory, his overall picture of the situation. I wonder if the rightness of his 1982 lecture is a bit realer or firmer than he might say.

I think this is in part because of some external facts, some external evidence. Prufrock, the poem, used to be a fair bit longer. It used to include a 40-line passage called “Prufrock’s Pervigilium” that was cut, except for two lines, and not included in the 1915 published version. This passage was eventually published in 1996 as part of a notebook of early works and scraps that Eliot had sold to John Quinn, a collector and patron, in 1922. Eliot said that a condition for the sale was that the works in the notebook were never to be printed, but they eventually were.6

If these extra lines are included, if the poem is read including them, they give the whole quite a different character. Ostensibly, they fill out the picture of Prufrock’s streets and his experience of them, in a way with a dark paranoid flavour.

It goes on like this, with good doses of sexual anxiety, alienation and insomnia. (The darkness itself “leapt to the floor and made a sudden hiss”.)

These lines do not give a new overall “meaning” to the poem, but they unify the voices, and give context to the unstable sequence charted in Bruce’s lecture. The whole becomes darker, more definite, less enigmatic – more definitively unhinged. (The phrase “my Madness” appears twice in the deleted passage.) When the poem includes this material, the lines that were published take on a more definite cast as neurotic fragments, as nonsensical, as echoes and misfirings. They are products of a mind that is presented more explicitly, that is drawn more sharply, in the Pervigilium, which was then cut. The unifying voice was deleted and we are left with a sort of shell.7 Once the Pervigilium is gone, a Learian carapace remains.

I am endorsing Bruce’s 1982 interpretation, but I am not sure if the form of my appeal to an external fact, the deleted material, is in accordance with his mindset at all. There are two ways (at least) of handling this sort of extra material. One way is to treat it as generating a new object, the longer version of the poem, which can be considered in the same sort of way that one treats the shorter one, with commentary layered on commentary. Another way is to see the material as, in a stronger sense, uncovering something about Prufrock, as showing something about the poem. But then some further details about this material also matter. Eliot himself said that the Pervigilium was written a bit after the rest – 1912 rather than 1910–11 – and that Conrad Aiken, another poet, suggested that the extra material was inferior and should be cut. (Aiken later said he had no recollection of this.)8 If the extra material was added later and then removed, can it really be important in the second, more revelatory way distinguished above? It can contribute to the ever-growing garden of commentary, but can it do more than that? I am not sure, but I note in reply that the chronology is not so straightforward in any case. According to Eliot’s biographer Lyndall Gordon, Eliot in his 1911 manuscript of the poem “deliberately left four pages in the middle of the poem blank which suggests he had a rough draft of the ‘Pervigilium’ which awaited completion”.9

All this might be a thoroughly non-Gardinerian, or contra-Gardinerian, defence of Bruce’s 1982 lecture. I want to end by expressing my gratitude to Bruce, whose audacity and intellectual omnivory, as well as generosity, were such wonderful things to encounter on those first forays into university life.

 

 

 

Bibliography