Eliot's "Ass-Wednesday" (by Mitch Sisskind)

As we move into Lent, Eliot's "Ass-Wednesday" is a work to which we naturally return. Is it surprising to discover the poet's inscription to Scott Fitzgerald "with the author's homage"? At first thought the two writers hardly seem like a match -- but there are actually several points of affinity. Both men were Midwesterners who went East to Harvard (Eliot) and Princeton (Fitzgerald.) Both men had "difficult" marriages to Vivienne (Eliot) and Zelda (Fitzgerald.) Both men liked to drink, though Tom seems to have been able to handle it better.

Those of us who admire both writers no doubt have favorite poems/stories/novels, and even favorite lines. I recall reading Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" as a high school student and being moved (almost) to tears. That story, said to be an early version of The Great Gatsby, still seems to me one of Fitzgerald's best. And rarely does a week go by in which I don't recite to myself my favorite line from "The Waste Land" (actually, from the notes): "I have associated it quite arbitrarily with the Fisher King himself." But my favorite Eliot is "Four Quartets."

Good day!

Comments

[DL]

I feel the same way about some of Fitzgerald's stories -- and about "Gatsby." Though I never particularly cared for "Ash Wednesday," the title adjustment may make all the difference. For some of his contemporaries every Wednesday was ass Wednesday but for gray-faced Tom it may have been a once a year event. My favorite line from the "WL" footnotes is, "A phenomenon which I have often noticed," about the "dead" sound of a church clock.

[Chicago Observer]

Okey doke and howdy doo! Maybe I've driven into the wrong century, but speaking of T.S. Eliot in a switching gears way, Isaac Rosenfeld, a Chicago-born "golden boy of the New York literary intelligentsia" during the rapidly receding 30s-40s (and, according to a Wikipedia entry, the inspiration for Saul Bellow's King Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King)...anyway, Isaac Rosenfeld, at one time in his life, wrote a little spoof of TS Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that went something like this: Ikh ver alt, un mayn pupik vert mir kalf. (I grow old and my belly button grows old.)