Sitting by the Fire and Believing in God
I've been thinking (in between what seems like the start of an absolute eternity of marking, and the teaching term not even completely over yet!) of Eric Griffith's plenary lecture at the Poetry & Belief conference - right at the start of the day I did manage to attend, so my mind was reasonably retentive as to what was being said then. Griffiths was looking at T S Eliot, in particular, his beliefs at the time of and subsequent to writing The Wasteland. Eliot's conversion to the Anglican Church, and in particular its Anglo Catholic 'wing' is well documented. Griffiths quoted, entertainingly, from Virginia Woolf's 1928 letter to her sister, artist Vanessa Bell:
'I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,who may be called dead to us from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked...I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.'
An amusing snippet which clearly conveys Woolf's incomprehension and dis-ease in Eliot's decision. Griffiths offered much amusing comment about her choice of words and phrasing too - did she, for example, wish to express more disdain at the fact of Eliot's belief per se, or his stooping to the social conventions implied by his weekly church-going? And how inconvenient and socially embarrassing his religious convictions seem, as though they are a positional gaffe to be rectified if only he could see the necessity of realigning himself - as though 'sitting by the fire' and 'believing in God' could equally be abstained from, if only Tom Eliot shifted himself out of respect for the polite intellectual company he was in.
I thought the quote and Griffith's extrapolation of it quite funny too and laughed together with the rest of us delegates, perched on our benches in the lecture room, listening to early-morning research-based pleasantries. But I liked the phrase in itself, the oddness of its juxtaposed activities - sitting by the fire and believing in God. Repeating it to myself I wondered whether that fire was really nothing but the pleasant social flames of Woolf's Bloomsbury sitting room, its warmth illuminating the clever talk of the gathered literati. I started re-imagining it as some sort of considerably more frightening hell-fire, a gaping mouth ready to consume and incinerate our trivial human interactions. Not literally, or even 'religiously' but perhaps mentally, and Eliot certainly had his moments of mental anguish. Perhaps it's only really when you're sat right by that particular sort of inner hellish fire that you'd go down the crisis route of explicitly 'believing in God'.
On another level I was quite surpised to hear Woolf's disparaging assessment as to this turn in Eliot's spiritual life. After all, she was far from being an out-and-out atheist herself. She described her own position as one of 'agnosticism with mystery at the heart of it' which is another phrase I like, and can relate to. Woolf didn't class herself as spiritual but she had an intriguing link to Quaker spirituality and its resurgent affinity with contemplative prayer through her aunt, the celibate and admittedly eccentric Caroline Stephen, who was nevertheless a much respected Quaker writer. She went by the epithet of 'Nun' to her family, and Woolf would visit Stephen's Cambridge home as a girl. Stephen wrote several classics of Quaker spirituality (e.g. 'Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Radiance')and it's hard to dismiss her strong, writerly, female influence from Woolf's thought and work entirely.
But pehaps it's the writing which provides the link back to Woolf. She writes about the act of writing and finds her sense of vocation exactly there, without any explicit additional beliefs. In 'A room of one's own' she arguably, and unconsciously, reconstructs her aunt's conditions - financial independence and a literal space for creativity to find its language. And in The Waves there's a wonderful sentence about 'a woman at a table writing'; a further Woolfian phrase I frequently remember, as though it's one of my ideal situations too. The construction of the phrase - the woman, sitting at a table, writing - nicely echoes Woolf's denigration of Eliot: Eliot, sitting (by the fire), believing (in God). A reversal of expected gender roles of a sort, too - the woman is actively producing text, the man is sitting and contemplating. Perhaps, to use another echo of Woolf (of male and female combining in the artistic mind), one needs both situations in order to be complete, both creatively and spiritually.
Woolf had her own experience of inner anguish too of course; Eliot did not have a monopoly of 'sitting by the fire' on that count. Sitting at the table writing was her surest way of engaging with and releasing those distressing flames. At least for the time in which she was writing.So - here I am, sitting on the sofa, blogging, while the pressure of an eternity of marking crackles discreetly at my side.
'I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,who may be called dead to us from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked...I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.'
An amusing snippet which clearly conveys Woolf's incomprehension and dis-ease in Eliot's decision. Griffiths offered much amusing comment about her choice of words and phrasing too - did she, for example, wish to express more disdain at the fact of Eliot's belief per se, or his stooping to the social conventions implied by his weekly church-going? And how inconvenient and socially embarrassing his religious convictions seem, as though they are a positional gaffe to be rectified if only he could see the necessity of realigning himself - as though 'sitting by the fire' and 'believing in God' could equally be abstained from, if only Tom Eliot shifted himself out of respect for the polite intellectual company he was in.
I thought the quote and Griffith's extrapolation of it quite funny too and laughed together with the rest of us delegates, perched on our benches in the lecture room, listening to early-morning research-based pleasantries. But I liked the phrase in itself, the oddness of its juxtaposed activities - sitting by the fire and believing in God. Repeating it to myself I wondered whether that fire was really nothing but the pleasant social flames of Woolf's Bloomsbury sitting room, its warmth illuminating the clever talk of the gathered literati. I started re-imagining it as some sort of considerably more frightening hell-fire, a gaping mouth ready to consume and incinerate our trivial human interactions. Not literally, or even 'religiously' but perhaps mentally, and Eliot certainly had his moments of mental anguish. Perhaps it's only really when you're sat right by that particular sort of inner hellish fire that you'd go down the crisis route of explicitly 'believing in God'.
On another level I was quite surpised to hear Woolf's disparaging assessment as to this turn in Eliot's spiritual life. After all, she was far from being an out-and-out atheist herself. She described her own position as one of 'agnosticism with mystery at the heart of it' which is another phrase I like, and can relate to. Woolf didn't class herself as spiritual but she had an intriguing link to Quaker spirituality and its resurgent affinity with contemplative prayer through her aunt, the celibate and admittedly eccentric Caroline Stephen, who was nevertheless a much respected Quaker writer. She went by the epithet of 'Nun' to her family, and Woolf would visit Stephen's Cambridge home as a girl. Stephen wrote several classics of Quaker spirituality (e.g. 'Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Radiance')and it's hard to dismiss her strong, writerly, female influence from Woolf's thought and work entirely.
But pehaps it's the writing which provides the link back to Woolf. She writes about the act of writing and finds her sense of vocation exactly there, without any explicit additional beliefs. In 'A room of one's own' she arguably, and unconsciously, reconstructs her aunt's conditions - financial independence and a literal space for creativity to find its language. And in The Waves there's a wonderful sentence about 'a woman at a table writing'; a further Woolfian phrase I frequently remember, as though it's one of my ideal situations too. The construction of the phrase - the woman, sitting at a table, writing - nicely echoes Woolf's denigration of Eliot: Eliot, sitting (by the fire), believing (in God). A reversal of expected gender roles of a sort, too - the woman is actively producing text, the man is sitting and contemplating. Perhaps, to use another echo of Woolf (of male and female combining in the artistic mind), one needs both situations in order to be complete, both creatively and spiritually.
Woolf had her own experience of inner anguish too of course; Eliot did not have a monopoly of 'sitting by the fire' on that count. Sitting at the table writing was her surest way of engaging with and releasing those distressing flames. At least for the time in which she was writing.So - here I am, sitting on the sofa, blogging, while the pressure of an eternity of marking crackles discreetly at my side.
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