Squalid seducers and smelly whores: Eliot as satirist

S. Eliot’s poetry is famously learned, intellectual and allusive. But before he started to write religious poems, beginning with “Ash Wednesday” in 1930, his verse was often satiric, sexual and self-critical. In the ironically titled “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—a man more prude and frock than rock—the middle-class, celibate, frustrated antihero has no love or sex.  The poem eviscerates a vulnerable autobiographical target who’s “etherised”, like a patient about to be cut open.  Dressed in formal clothing and almost choked by his high collar, he wants to retreat from a party that fills him with anxiety, agonises over his premature hair loss and regrets his skeletal body. He asks a rhetorical question:

“Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his  arms and legs are thin!”)

At the party, he observes from a safe distance the attractive perfumed women and notices the alluring hair on their bare arms, which he imaginatively associates with the hair on their heads and on their pubes:

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light  brown hair!)

“Light” echoes “lamplight,” “brown” rhymes internally with “downed”.

Prufrock wants to be fierce instead of frightened, and longs for a bold persona that shuts out the women’s pretentious chatter about Michelangelo: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  (In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad describes “a pair of ragged straw slippers.”)  But it would be difficult for Prufrock to embrace a woman if he were a crustacean.

Wishing to escape from his real self, he continues to assume less aggressive and more feeble personas.  As the penitential and decapitated John the Baptist, he laments, “I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed , / Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter.”

A shy social misfit, fearful of women and of encroaching old age, he feels the  threat of death and confesses, “I was afraid.”  He next identifies with the biblical Lazarus, “come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all.”  But Prufrock has not been revived and doesn’t tell anyone anything.  He even misunderstands what a woman is trying to tell him, and is rudely dismissed when she says, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”

His final self-condemned incarnation is that of a serviceable and rather pompous attendant lord in Prince Hamlet’s court:

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

His discovers that his pants are too long because he’s prematurely bent over but, desperately trying to be stylish, he declares, “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”  A biographer once reported that the new fashion for turned-up trousers reduced the ultra-conservative Lord Wemyss (pronounced “Weemz”) to a “speechless rage”.

“Prufrock” ends with lyrical effusion and sad regret:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each . . . .

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black. . . .

I do not think that they will sing to me.

In condemning Prufrock, Eliot’s ironic self-portrait also condemns his own weak and repressed personality.

In “Whispers of Immortality”, Eliot’s satire on the female sex, Grishkin’s customer takes the opportunity to “seize and clutch and penetrate” her:

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

She uses heavy mascara and her inflated breasts, available to all comers, satisfy their wildest dreams.  The high-class whore has a fancy flat to accommodate wealthy clients who are attracted to rather than repelled by her miasmic effluence.  For even the Brazilian-jungle jaguar does not “Distil so rank a feline smell / As Grishkin in a drawing-room,” where she is distinctly out of place.  Grishkin confirms Leonardo da Vinci’s belief that sex is slightly palatable but essentially disgusting: “The act of coitus and the parts employed therein are so repulsive that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actions and the frantic state of mind, nature would lose the human species.”

Eliot is equally repelled by the male.  His feral antihero makes a brief appearance at the start of the myth-laden “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”, where the poet expresses his intense hatred and savage mockery of the crude, mindless, animal sensuality compressed in human form:

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees

Letting his arms hang down to laugh,

The zebra stripes along his jaw

Swelling to maculate giraffe.

Eliot compares Sweeney to three different animals in one quatrain.  The crouching simian trails his knuckles along the ground, the zebra’s stripes appear on his shadowy mandible and he sports the swollen spots of the long-limbed giraffe.

The title of “Sweeney Erect”, punning on homo erectus and phallus erectus, alludes to the fictional Sweeney Todd.  The Victorian demon barber of Fleet Street cut his victims’ throats while shaving them and had them baked into meat pies. Eliot’s tone is savage, his hatred of sex intense, his interpretation of history horrific.  The poem suddenly shifts from a lyrical description of ancient Greece to a portrayal of the squalid spectacle of Sweeney getting out of bed and displaying his raw sexual power:

Gesture of orang-outang

Rises from the sheets in steam.

The withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval O cropped out with teeth:

The sickle motion from the thighs

Jackknifes upward at the knees

Then straightens out from heel to hip

Pushing the framework of the bed

And clawing at the pillowslip.

Subhuman Sweeney has a skull slashed with gaping eye-sockets, brutish molars and a crouching strut.  His sudsy shaving and razor-testing sends a shrieking prostitute into an epileptic fit that resembles the sexual act.  Eliot observes:

The lengthened shadow of a man

Is history, said Emerson

Who had not seen the silhouette

Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.

Eliot first notes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s high-minded allusion, in his essay “Self-Reliance”, to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from ape to man.  He then explodes this optimistic theory with Sweeney’s bent-over Neanderthal posture.  The pessimistic Eliot found it hard to believe, after the devastation of the Great War, that modern civilisation has indeed progressed.

Unlike the sexually frustrated Prufrock, who longs for women, the lower-class characters in The Waste Land have sordid sex with sad results.  Amid the erudite footnotes and Hindu chants, Eliot’s masterpiece contains several dramatic sex scenes.  Eliot took the complaints of the neurotic woman verbatim from his mentally ill wife Vivien, with whom he had agonising sexual relations:

“My nerves are bad to-night.  Yes, bad.  Stay with me.

Speak to me.  Why do you never speak?  Speak.

What are you thinking of?  What thinking?  What?

I never know what you are thinking.  Think.”

The persistent repetitions—of body, speak, what and thinking—suggest her desperate efforts to communicate with him and to understand his silent thoughts.

The working-class women’s talk about sex and abortions takes place during the five repetitive announcements of imminent closure in a pub—HURRY UP NOW ITS TIME—which suggest the threat of death.  One woman rudely warns her friend, “You ought to be ashamed to look so antique”. She advises her friend to get a set of false teeth and “make yourself a bit smart” when her husband comes back from the war.  He naturally “wants a good time, / And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will.”  The friend, trapped by marriage, defensively replies that after she had five children and nearly died of young George, she took abortion pills and has never felt or looked the same since then.  Her unsympathetic and unhelpful advisor harshly concludes: “Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, / What you get married for if you don’t want children?”—though she’s already had many more than she wants.

Another woman, travelling from north London in search of pleasure on the river, needs considerable athletic skill to remain afloat during energetic sex on the Thames:

Highbury bore me.  Richmond and Kew

Undid me.  By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.

After her surrender, her seducer is contrite, even tearful and hopeful.  She remains silent, even when she suspects he might be lying, and doesn’t resent the awkward and unsatisfactory encounter.

In the longest loveless playlet, a poor lonely typist, living in a small shabby room, awaits her brash assiduous lover:

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare. . . .

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

After a fatiguing meal of tinned food, he suddenly makes his move.  She does not resist and he’s pleased to proceed without obstruction or response.  Both participants are emotionally uninvolved in the cold sexual act.   After a final, patronising kiss, he gropes his way down the dark staircase and disappears—perhaps forever:

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

The passive indifferent woman examines herself in the mirror to see if there’s a visible change in her appearance, and recalls the sexual act as if it were an abortion.  This, according to satiric Eliot, epitomises the affectless sex life of the low born.

Eliot also imitated the Victorian poet and painter Edward Lear, who’d portrayed himself in Nonsense Songs (1871):

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,

Who has written such volumes of stuff.

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few think him pleasant enough.

Eliot adopts the form and tone of this amusing verse with his improbably titled “Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg.”  The former name refers to an Australian possum and a Persian spice, the latter to the exotic Indian pseudonym of an English theosophist:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim

And his conversation, so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And If and Perhaps and But.

Unlike the “queer” Lear, the puritanical Eliot was unpleasant.  He was a bank clerk at Lloyd’s and had an ecclesiastical appearance.  He behaved rather like Hamlet’s prudent and sententious attendant lord.  His prim-grim careworn demeanour, troubled by marital problems and illness, prompted his friend Lady Ottoline Morrell to dub him “The Undertaker”.  Others claimed he was tightly constricted in a four-piece suit.  At tea he once cautiously explained, “I daren’t take cake, and jam’s too much trouble.”  His talk was precise but severely qualified, so no one ever knew exactly what he meant.  After Eliot’s venomous hatred of uptight rentiers, smelly whores, subhuman satyrs, hysterical wives, squalid seducers and their cheap prey, it’s a relief to find him gently mocking himself.

Jeffrey Meyers’ will publish Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway in November 2025 and The Biographer’s Quest in the spring of 2026.

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