INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE

With TSE's signature in blue ink, and the rest in black ink, the front free endpaper of the Notebook has:

COMPLETE POEMS OF T. S. Eliot

FOR JEAN VERDENAL 1889–1915, MORT AUX DARDANELLES

... TU SE' OMBRA ED OMBRA VEDI.

... PUOI, LA QUANTITATE COMPRENDER DEL AMOR CH' A TE MI SCALDA, QUANDO DISMENTO NOSTRA VANITATE TRATTANDO L'OMBRE COME COSA SALDA.

PURG. XXI.

The sardonic 'Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot' suggests an early date for this teasing title-page (prior to Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917, and a fortiori prior to 1919 since the Notebook contains no poems of 1919–20). Yet the wording of the dedication, and the supplying of the epigraph, pull the other way and suggest a later date.

For Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) has a dedication 'To Jean Verdenal 1889–1915', with no epigraph. Poems (1919), which includes no 1917 poems, has neither dedication nor epigraph. Ara Vos Prec (1920) has at the head of the book the epigraph from Dante (Purgatorio XXI 132–6, beginning 'Or puoi'), but with no dedication, either there or preceding the 1917 poems which constitute, following a half-title (a page with PRUFROCK on it), the second half of the book. Poems (1920), which likewise has first the 1920 poems and then the 1917 ones (these without an interleaf or half-title), has 'To Jean Verdenal 1889–1915', with no epigraph. So it isnot until Poems 1909–1925 (1925, dedicated 'To Henry Ware Eliot 1843–1919') that there appear, on the half-title for the pages constituting Prufrock and Other Observations 1917, the Verdenal dedication and the epigraph. (The epigraph in 1925 differs from that in the Notebook in beginning: 'la quantitate / Puote veder del amor che ...', and in lacking 'Purg. XXI'.) The dedication in 1925 is worded as in the Notebook, sharing with it 'For' instead of the earlier 'To', and the added 'Mort aux Dardanelles'.

So, unlike 'Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot', the history of the dedication and epigraph suggests that it was between 1920 and 1925 that TSE wrote out what constitutes this title-page of the Notebook, probably when he sold it to Quinn in 1922.

In his Dante (1929; SE, p. 255, misprinted veda, saldi), TSE wrote:

The meeting with Sordello a guisa di leon quando si posa, like a couchant lion, is no more affecting than that with the poet Statius, in CantoXXI. Statius, when he recognizes his master Virgil, stoops to clasp his feet, but Virgil answers — the lost soul speaking to the saved:

'Frate, non far, che tu se' ombra, ed ombra vedi.' Ed ei surgendo: 'Or puoi la quantitate comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda, quando dismento nostra vanitate, trattando Vombre come cosa salda.' 'Brother! refrain, for you are but a shadow, and a shadow is but what you see.' Then the other, rising: 'Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.'

In the Temple Classics translation (this, reprinted 1909, was TSE's edition when he was young, and his copy is in the Houghton Library): '"Brother, do not so, for thou art a shade and a shade thou seest." And he, rising: "Now canst thou comprehend the measure of the love which warms me toward thee, when I forget our nothingness, and treat shades as a solid thing."' TSE again quoted this passage in his Clark Lectures (1926), The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (ed. Ronald Schuchard, 1993, p. 88).

Inventions of the March Hare: this title, in capitals, in black ink, crossed through by TSE, is on the blank flyleaf at the front of the Notebook. Despite TSE's cancelling it, the title is retained in the present edition, as likely to be less inappropriate than any other, as memorable, and as figuring in TSE's correspondence. He wrote to Conrad Aiken, 30 Sept. 1914: 'Do you think it possible, if I brought out the "Inventions of the March Hare", and gave a few lectures, at 5 P.M. with wax candles, that I could become a sentimental Tommy' (Letters i 59; punning, as Valerie Eliot notes, on J. M. Barrie's novel of that name and on TSE's name).

Two months earlier, on 25 July 1914, he had written to Aiken: 'I enclose some stuff — the thing I showed you some time ago, and some of the themes for the "Descent from the Cross" or whatever I may call it' (Letters i 44). That title, which does not appear anywhere in the Notebook, would more pertain to certain of the poems, than to the collection.

There is many a notable Descent from the Cross, pre-eminently perhaps that by Rubens. One of TSE's poems here, The Little Passion (i) 7, speaks of 'one inevitable cross', and there is He said: this universe is very clever 9: 'He said: "this crucifixion was dramatic"'. But TSE, writing to Aiken from Germany, may have remembered too the chapter (v) entitled Berlin in Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams:

Even in art, one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent from the Cross. He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to get sober as he best could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without suspecting that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle ages and the sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the towns were dirty enough — unimproved, unrestored, untouristed — to retain the sense of reality. As a taste or a smell, it was education, especially because it lasted barely ten years longer; but it was education only sensual. He never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the Descent from the Cross. He was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross; he learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again, and going about his stupid business.

TSE wrote to his mother, 4 May 1919: 'I am writing now about a cousin of ours, who has written a very interesting book which you would like to read: The Education of Henry Adams' (Letters i 290). TSE reviewed it in the Athenaeum, 23 May 1919; it was first published in 1918, but had been privately issued in 1907 and was known at Harvard.

Inventions: OED II, 'invention': 'Mus. A short piece of music in which a single idea is worked out in a simple manner'. On TSE's musical titles, see the note to First Caprice in North Cambridge. TSE wrote to John Hayward, 3 Sept. 1942:

How great is the resistance to "quartets"? I am aware of general objections to these musical analogies: there was a period when people were writing long poems and calling them, with no excuse, "symphonies" (J. Gould Fletcher even did a "Symphony in Blue" I think, thus achieving a greater confusion des genres). But I should like to indicate that these poems are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word "quartet" does seem to me to start people on the right tack for understanding them. ("Sonata" in any case is too musical).

(Quoted by Valerie Eliot in a letter to the TLS, 16 July 1971; on the implications of TSE's title Rhapsody on a Windy Night, see Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem, 1996.)

Inventions of the March Hare may recall Kipling's title Many Inventions (1893). In that volume there is a story particularly admired by TSE, The Finest Story in the World (it includes: 'and I must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks'); this story is mentioned together with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in a footnote in TSE's introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941, On Poetry and Poets, 1957, p. 239). On other respects in which this Kipling story mattered to TSE, see Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (1987), pp. 132–6.

The March Hare is of ancient stock (The Two Noble Kinsmen, III V 73, has a woman 'as mad as a March hare'), but he owes his fame to Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, ch. VII, A Mad Tea-Party. The March Hare reappears as Haigha (as is clear from Tenniel's illustrations) in Through the Looking-Glass (again ch. VII, where he is accompanied by Hatta, an avatar of the Mad Hatter); the next chapter is called 'It's My Own Invention,' and it returns repeatedly to the White Knight's claim ('It's my own invention', 'It's an invention of my own', 'It's a plan of my own invention', 'and the tune's my own invention' —'"But the tune isn't his own invention", she said to herself'). So TSE may have intended by his title Inventions of the March Hare, a stress amounting to this: Inventions — not, as you might suppose, of the White Knight, but — of the March Hare.

TSE's While you were absent in the lavatory has a suggestion of Alice: 'a white rabbit hopped beneath the table'; the Yale manuscript of this poem has 'around the corner', which is closer to the White Rabbit ('as it turned a corner') and which suggests Burnt Norton I 22 ('Round the corner'), for TSE acknowledged in an interview (New York Times Book Review, 29 Nov. 1953) the influence of Alice — Alice seeking to follow the White Rabbit — upon Burnt Norton I 12–14.

Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

There is more than a touch of Alice in a reminiscence by TSE of his childhood:

There was at the front of our house a sort of picket fence which divided our front yard from the schoolyard. This picket fence merged a little later as it passed the wall of the house into a high brick wall which concealed our back garden from the schoolyard and also concealed the schoolyard from our back garden. There was a door in this wall and there was a key to this door. Now, when the young ladies had left the school in the afternoon and at the end of the week, I had access to and used it for my own purposes of play. [...] Well, you know, either in spite of or perhaps because of this propinquity it's interesting that I remained extremely shy with girls. And, of course, when they were in the schoolyard I was always on the other side of the wall; and on one occasion I remember, when I ventured into the schoolyard a little too early when there were still a few on the premises and I saw them staring at me through a window, I took flight at once. (Recalling in Nov. 1959 the Mary Institute; From Mary to You, Centennial Issue, Dec. 1959, pp. 134–5.)

There is something Alice- like about the door, the key, and the girls, and 'extremely shy with girls' has affinities with the Laforguean spirit of the poems in Inventions of the March Hare, where In the Department Store 4 has a striking conjunction of staring and taking flight:

But behind her sharpened eyes take flight The summer evenings in the park

Like many philosophers, TSE alludes to Carroll, for instance in his paper on T. H. Green:

In this light then, Green's theory is simply utilitarian jabberwocky, and indeed it is possible that by holding Green up to the looking glass, we may get a better utilitarianism than is found in any utilitarian treatises. (Houghton Library; bMS Am 1691.14 (31), p. 10)

The Notebook joins a title from Carroll to an epigraph from Dante, as does TSE's Dante (1929):

One ought, indeed, to study the development of the art of love from the Provençal poets onwards, paying just attention to both resemblances and differences in spirit; as well as the development of verse form and stanza form and vocabulary. But such study is vain unless we have first made the conscious attempt, as difficult and hard as re-birth, to pass through the looking-glass into a world which is just as reasonable as our own. (SE, p. 276.)

On Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot as Nonsense Poets, see Elizabeth Sewell, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday (1958), ed. Neville Braybrooke; she remarks 'the endless tea- party, interminable as the Hatter's', in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Apollinax, Hysteria, A Cooking Egg, The Waste Land 'where the typist comes home at tea-time, the first scene of The Family Reunion, Skimbleshanks in Old Possum, till only the tea-leaves are left in The Dry Salvages' (pp. 52–3).

TSE's title may owe something to a moment in Jerome K. Jerome's Fanny and the Servant Problem (1908), a play in which TSE played Lord Bantock in the Cambridge Social Dramatic Club's production during the 1912–13 season (Letters i 76). In Act III, Fanny exclaims: 'It's Judy's inspiration, this [...] She always was as mad as a March hare.'

Alice muses, in ch. VI of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: '"I've seen hatters before", she said to herself: "the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps, as this is May, it won't be raving mad — at least not so mad as it was in March".'

OED, 'as mad as a March hare'. 'During March (the breeding season) hares are

wilder than at other times'. This would comment ironically upon these love-poems fastidious and not, poems which (on the occasion recorded in Letters i when he used this Notebook title) TSE led into as follows, immediately following a ribald Columbo stanza and TSE's comments on it:

I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me — several, because that makes the practical side less evident. And I should be very sorry for them, too. Do you think it possible, if I brought out the "Inventions of the March Hare", and gave a few lectures, at 5 P.M. with wax candles, that I could become a sentimental Tommy. (To Aiken, 30 Sept. 1914; Letters i 59)

As to the hare in heat, TSE may have remembered an author who meant a great deal to him in these years, Remy de Gourmont, and his Physique de l'amour: essai sur l'instinct sexuel (1904, ch. xv).

Le lièvre, qui ne passe point pour brave, est un mâle ardent et convaincu; il se bat furieusement avec ses pareils pour la possession d'une femelle. Ce sont des animaux fort bien outillés pour l'amour, pénis très développé, clitoris presque aussi gros. Les mâles font de véritables voyages, courent des nuits entières, à la recherche des hases, qui sont sédentaires: de même que les lapines, elles ne se refusent jamais, mêmes déjà pleines.

On 28 July 1922, TSE enquired of Pound for a copy of his translation, The Natural Philosophy of Love (Letters i 553).

'Pénis très développé': compare TSE's bawdy verses on a leaf excised from the Notebook, There was a jolly tinker (Appendix A):

It was a sunny summer day the tinker was in heat With his eight and forty inches hanging to his feet —

Given how often Hamlet is suggested in or by these poems, compare the line in Rejected Addresses (1812), the very popular volume of parodies by James and Horace Smith: 'For what is Hamlet, but a hare in March?'

With madness in mind, there is poignancy in its later being Vivien Eliot who wrote to Mary Hutchinson, 29 Oct. 1919: 'I played the Dormouse to Pasha Schiff's and his concubine's March Hare and Mad Hatter' (Letters i 342).

Yet the hare, free from March, is associated too ('starting a hare') with the prompting of inventive thoughts; Henry James relished 'the speculative hare', 'This irrepressible animal' (The American Scene, 1907, p. 202).

For an argument as to the shape that TSE gave, or might have given, to the sequence as a whole, see John T. Mayer, T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices (1989), and his article The Waste Land and Eliot's Poetry Notebook (in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush, 1991).