Dregs of the Empire: Watson, Prufrock, and Modernism's Deracinated Man
by Roman Sympos
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The full text of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is to be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
Despite extensive studies by Joseph McLaughlin (Writing the Urban Jungle, 2000), Robert F. Fleissner (Shakespearean and Other Investigations, 2003) and others linking Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to developments in early modernism, and particularly to T. S. Eliot's work, the significance of Watson as precursor to a character-type central both to Eliot's poetry and the writings of the Lost Generation of post-war authors that Samuel Hynes, in A War Imagined (1990), calls "anti-monumental" (295), has yet to be examined. For these writers, the debacle of the Great War was better forgotten than commemorated, and they were bitterly dismissive of any attempt to restore the luster of pro patria mori. This is not to say that Watson's anomie as a pensioned, wounded veteran of the Second Afghan War in the opening pages of A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doyle’s first Holmes tale, comes near to approaching the cynicism of Ford Maddox Ford's Edward Ashburton in The Good Soldier (1927) or Christopher Tietjens in Parade's End (1924-28). Watson retains his faith in the imperial adventure, despite his temporary feelings of ennui and uprootedness. He does, however, at least upon our first introduction to him, offer Doyle’s readers a moral, psychological, and political perspective far more culturally disoriented than what we find in the standard portraits of "good soldiers," active or retired, disseminated in the works of contemporary defenders of empire like Kipling. He is, in this respect, the very first of his literary kind.
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Holmesians have remarked Doyle's attention to the good doctor’s deracinated, bohemian tendencies in the early tales, along with those of his detective protagonist. Watson's bohemianism is partly a consequence of the leisure forced upon him by his combat disability (a bullet in his shoulder, according to A Study in Scarlet, or in his leg, according to Doyle’s second Holmes novella,The Sign of Four), and partly a function of his being a bachelor in fin de siecle London. The two together serve Doyle's narrative purpose by impeding Watson's resumption of his professional medical duties upon returning home and leaving him entirely free to attach himself to Holmes and record his adventures. Having, in addition, "neither kith nor kin in England," Watson has become, in his own words, one of the "loungers and idlers of the Empire" draining into the "great cesspool" of London gaping at its center.
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McLaughlin (2) has remarked the startling negativity of Doyle's "cesspool" image of London here, at the inception of the Holmes canon with its well-known evocation of what G. K. Chesterton later called the "poetry" of the metropole. Watson's fecklessness, argues McLaughlin, is meant to contrast with the vigor and intensity of Doyle’s heroic defender of nation and empire, Sherlock Holmes, who will soon restore the good doctor’s esprit de corps.
As first conceived, however, Watson casts more light on the early development of modernism than he does on Doyle's imperialistic rationalizations. He is in fact a forerunner of the more embittered, dazed, and demoralized anti-heroes of post-World War I fiction, including not only those of Ford and Graves, but also Harold Krebs in "Soldier’s Home," from Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), and, more famously, Jake Barnes of A Sun Also Rises (1926). Like these men, Watson leads a "comfortless, meaningless existence" after his honorable discharge from the army, spending his pension money at an "alarming" rate and drinking the day away at the Criterion Bar. So isolated is he in "the great wilderness of London" that even "young Stamford," a junior acquaintance from his medical school days who "had never been a particular crony," is hailed "with enthusiasm" (Study, 4)
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The search for connections between Doyle’s stories and Eliot’s poetry dates from as early as 1949, with Grover Smith’s brief entry in Notes and Queries (“T. S. Eliot and Sherlock Holmes,” Notes and Queries, Volume 193, Issue 20, 2 October 1948, pp. 431–432), followed little more than a decade later by Priscilla Preston in The Modern Language Review ( “A Note on T. S. Eliot and Sherlock Homes,” The Modern Language Review, Jul., 1959, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 397-399). Aware that Eliot was a rabid, self-confessed fan of Doyle from an early age, Fleissner has identified numerous Holmesian echoes in Eliot’s work, and the search for citations and allusions has continued, online and off, almost to the present day, leaving a great deal of redundancy in its wake. (See, for example Chris Redmond at https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2021/08/ts-eliots-love-song-to-sherlock-holmes.html [2021]).
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The critical line of sight in nearly all these cases has been largely refracted through the dominant personalities of Holmes and his Napoleonic nemesis, Professor Moriarity. (The Broadway musical Cats and its master villain, Macavity, are repeatedly cited by latecomers to the conversation.) While numerous echoes of Doyle’s prose have been heard resonating throughout “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), little of substance has been made of them. And yet, the trajectory of the isolato character-type introduced to British literature by Doyle's portrait of a Watson adrift in the metropolitan "cesspool" traverses the period, and the city, in which Eliot's poem is set. As modernism's first superfluous man, Watson's "meaningless existence" provides a deeper, and more somber, entry point to the indecipherable "streets" of Eliot's "argument/ Of insidious intent" than the personality of Doyle's more heroic protagonist, for whom every detail of what Holmes calls, in the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet, “The Book of Life," teems with hidden meanings, motives, and intentions that will, we can be certain, be revealed by the end of the tale. Such expectations are signally defeated in J. Alfred's love song, a poem about impotence, indecision, uncertainty, and emasculation.
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I’m not arguing that Prufrock is Watson, even though the line, “Like a patient etherized upon a table,” seems to have sprung from the mind of a physician. There is evidence, however, to suggest that, like Watson, Prufrock (whom Eliot conceived before the outbreak of the Great War) may be a shell-shocked veteran of Britain’s wars of colonial expansion. His “bald spot” and anxiety at “grow[ing] old” tell us he is at least of an age to have fought in the Boer War (1899-1901) as a younger man. Watson seems to have survived his service in the Second Afghan War (1887-1880) with minimal damage to his psyche. Prufrock may not have been so lucky.
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The reiterated detective plot of Holmes’s numerous “Cases” and “Adventures” provides the armature for J. Alfred’s Song of Love. There’s a mystery here that we, as readers, are being invited to solve by tagging along with the titular speaker. The very first line, “Let us go then, you and I,” sounds as though Prufrock is asking us to accompany him on his “visit” or, if we credit the long-standing assumption that Prufrock is suffering from a dissociative personality disorder (See, e.g., Fleissner, Ascending the Prufrockian Stair: Studies in a Dissociated Sensibility, Peter Lang, 1998), it may seem as though he is urging himself to do so. If he is suffering from such a disorder, combat-induced PTSD is certainly on the table, and the diagnosis is given some weight by Eliot’s epigraph, which comes from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 27, where the warlord, Guido da Montefeltro, informs the Pilgrim,
If I thought my reply were meant for one
who ever could return into the world,
this flame would stir no more.
And yet, since none, if what I hear is true,
ever returned alive from this abyss, then
without fear of facing infamy, I answer you.
Eliot’s poem is, then, a confession, but a confession never intended to be heard by a living soul. “You” and “I” are the same person, split in two, and the poem reads like an interior monologue.
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Trying to imagine what he wants to confess to those he expects to find at his destination, Prufrock compares himself to “Lazarus, come from the dead,” a moving evocation of the kind of trauma experienced by survivors of mass slaughter, and clearly linked to Montefeltro’s speech from the “abyss.” Eliot even hints that Prufrock may once, like Montefeltro, have faced a moment of truth on the field of battle: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” he says. If so, he did not rise to the occasion. “And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,” he continues, “And in short, I was afraid.”
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Prufrock’s destination is, apparently, a “room” where “the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” The streets of London that will lead him and his ambiguous companion (and his readers) there “follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent” along a trail of textual and contextual clues to an “overwhelming question” that J. Alfred must gather the courage to ask but, in the end, may not even understand. Even if he “squeezed the universe into a ball” and “roll[ed] it towards” this “overwhelming question,” chances are good he would miss entirely, leading “one” (or another) of these women, “settling a pillow by her head,” to say, “That is not what I meant at all;/That is not it, at all.”
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Clearly, the overwhelming question is not a request for information or reasons why (or how) catastrophes like war, or the wasteland of Prufrock’s meaningless life as a civilian, come about. Is it, then, a plea? And for what? Understanding? Love? Sex? If the question is indeed a confession, maybe forgiveness. Maybe all of the above. Montefeltro, a man of war, is now beyond forgiveness. Prufrock, freshly returned from Hell, is not. But where is forgiveness to be found? And who, among the living, is qualified to give it? Or even recognize the sin it’s supposed to absolve?
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There will be time to murder and create . . . /Before the taking of a toast and tea.
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“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which is certainly as apt an epigraph for this poem of delayed gratification as anything from Dante’s Inferno. In context, murdering his desire in its infancy is as appropriate an interpretation of Prufrock’s dilemma as his idea that “there will be time” to “create,” to “prepare a face to meet the faces that [he] meet[s]” and pretend he’s just fine. Nonetheless, the violent inappropriateness of a word like “murder” to describe a polite conversation before tea should make us wonder what else might be lurking in that deep, dark well of life experiences from which Prufrock drew it up.
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However we parse it, unlike every single mystery posed for us in Doyle’s stories, the central enigma of “Prufrock”—the question in question—is never revealed: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” cautions the speaker’s petulant companion. “Let us go and make our visit.”
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“Our visit” to whom? Where? In seeking answers to our own questions about the speaker’s “overwhelming question,” much depends on where we decide to locate this room full of women that Prufrock is bound for. Who are his intended auditors, and why does he seek them out?
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The “room where women come and go” is somewhere in London, presumably, but the only neighborhood Eliot describes as a possible destination is rather seedy:
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.
. . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
Is this the neighborhood to which J. Alfred is heading? Or is it the neighborhood where J. Alfred lives and from which he’s leaving for his “visit” when the poem begins?
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Or should we take the word “through” more literally? Perhaps it’s a neighborhood he will be traversing on his way to his destination, a neighborhood already familiar to him. “I have gone” suggests repetition, especially when echoed by the present perfect tense in phrases like “For I have known them all,” “And I have known the eyes,” “And I have known the arms.”
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That these “narrow streets” are not the neighborhood where Prufrock lives is indicated by the way he dresses: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,/ My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.” He is not the kind of man to be found leaning out of his window on a narrow London street at dusk, in his shirt-sleeves, smoking his pipe. Nor is he the kind of man who would choose to live among the “muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” If Prufrock is an army veteran, he most likely served as a commissioned officer, not an enlisted man.
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The room for which he is headed is a place where the lonely men who do frequent these places are never seen, men who know nothing about topics of discussion like Michelangelo. “Toast and tea,” “drop[ping] a question on your plate” (along with the toast, presumably), “coffee spoons,” “music from a farther room,” “tea and cakes and ices,” “the cups, the marmalade,” “the porcelain,” all suggest Prufrock is headed for a tea room.
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“Tea time” is traditionally four o’clock in England, but “high tea” is served between 5 and 7 pm and the “visit” takes place in London on “a soft October night,” which means Eliot’s etherized evening could easily be spreading out against the sky by the time Prufrock departs. (The sun sets in London as early as 4:30 pm on the last evening of October—All Hallow’s Eve, when ghosts walk the earth.) That said, the anticipated image of Prufrock’s female listener stalling for time by “settling a pillow by her head,” or “settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl” if ever asked the “overwhelming question,” suggests the speaker is headed, not for a public tea room, but for an evening’s high tea at the home of an acquaintance. I may be wrong, but I doubt that patrons of tea rooms sip and nibble while reclining on sofas or divans.
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If the neighborhood of narrow streets, muttering retreats, lonely men, cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants “through” which Prufock walks is neither his home nor his destination, what is it doing here? Must the speaker take this route to make his visit or does he choose to? And if he chooses to, why would he want to?
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By way of answer I cite a post by Joel De La Cruz, an undergraduate at the City University of New York at the time he wrote it (April 21, 2013) to fulfill a “Great Works” course requirement. (https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/greatworks540spring2013/2013/04/21/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock/). Of the repeated lines, “In the room the women come and go,/ Talking of Michangelo,” Joel writes, “It is hard for me not to envision the women in a brothel. [They] are seen walking in and out of [the] room speaking of this well-known artist, and [his] perfect sculpturing of the naked body, which these women must have admired.”
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That’s how it strikes me, too, Joel. I would only add, “the naked male body.” As you go on to argue, Prufrock is terribly anxious about his own physical appearance before the ladies, telling us how thin his arms and legs are and worrying about his bald spot and how to cover it up. But what nails your reading (and may have brought this image to mind) is that this is a room where “women come and go.” Where do women “come and go” often enough to make their doing so remarkable? Trains come and go in train stations. Boats come and go in harbors. Commodities come and go in Amazon warehouses. In short, things and people “come and go” in places that do business. Places like tea rooms. And brothels.
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I also think, by the way, that your teacher, Professor Savina, did you a disservice when she shot down your premise by suggesting that prostitutes don’t know anything about artists like Michelangelo. Do prostitutes talk about Michelangelo? Maybe they do. Women from all walks of life, high and low, have been known to sell their bodies, some to survive, others to survive well. But does it really matter? The important thing is that these women who talk about Michelangelo at high tea are linked, in the mind of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a very different group of women, the kind that “come and go” not to buy, but to sell.
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I’ve been suggesting that Prufrock’s “overwhelming question” has something to do with a profound trauma, the kind that veterans of combat often suffer. We call it, nowadays, post-traumatic-stress-syndrome or PTSD. In Doyle’s and Eliot’s day, it went by the name of “shell-shock” or “battle fatigue.” Two among the many symptoms of complex PTSD are “hyperarousal” and “challenged interpersonal relationships” (https://www.hanleycenter.org/mental-health-disorders/complex-ptsd/). In particular, hypersexuality has been linked to the trauma underlying many cases of PTSD (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33229025/). Considered in this light, Joel’s observation brings within earshot a chiming chorus of otherwise disharmonious details suggesting, “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen,” that Prufrock suffers from just such a version of PTSD manifesting just these symptoms: he is sexually “hyperaroused” to the point of distraction at the smell of a "perfumed dress," and clearly “challenged” by “interpersonal relationships" with the opposite sex.
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Take, to start with, those “restless nights in one night cheap hotels.” Who are the most frequent guests at such establishments? Prostitutes and their johns. No wonder the nights are “restless.” Why is there “muttering” in these “retreats”? The word connotes secrecy, speaking soto voce so as to elude detection. Pubs and restaurants that put “sawdust” on the floor are just the sort of places where prostitutes look for customers, “malinger[ing]” there like “the afternoon, the evening” as Prufrock sets out. (“Mal”-lingering--loitering with bad intent--is more like it. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” gives us a detailed view of how it’s done.) The “[s]treets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent” are precisely these “half-deserted streets” through which Prufrock must pass, like Ulysses sailing past the sirens on the rocks, resisting (or trying to resist) temptation on the way to posing his “overwhelming question” over marmalade and tea.
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Are we not being invited to ask, or wonder, how well and how often Prufrock’s resistance was successful? Is there any other way to explain his intimate familiarity with these environs and their interiors? Sawdust restaurants? Rooms where women come and go? What can he mean when he says, “And I have known them all already, known them all?” The “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,” the arms that “wrap around a shawl,” these seem to belong to women of his class, women in the room he’s on his way to visit. But voulez-vous couchet avec moi? is as formulated a phrase as "that is not what I meant." And as for those arms "that are braceleted and white and bare/ (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)” where is this lamp? On a side-table in a room where the topic of discussion is Michelangelo? Or hanging from a post on one of those “insidious” and “narrow” streets?
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The final lines of the poem gain rather than lose poignancy from these insalubrious hints. Prufrock grows old, he will wear his trousers rolled. He is shrinking, losing heroic stature with each passing year. A moment later, he imagines himself walking on the beach, where rolling your trousers keeps you from getting your cuffs wet. He’s put his toes in the water, but is afraid to jump in.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
From the beach to mermaids is an easy, unlabored transition in light of the speaker’s unspeakable longing and anxious gynophobia, but it pivots on the image of the room, or rooms, where women come and go, whether speaking artfully of the artist most famous for his rendering of the naked male body, or formulating their phrases more unambiguously and without being asked.
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The mermaids that Prufrock hears at high tea are not the sirens who sang to Ulysses. They are singing to each other, not to him. What he wants most urgently to say, or to ask, they are unwilling to hear or unable to understand. They are, like the women who speak of Michelangelo, ignoring him.
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.
Not until he imagines the mermaids riding seaward, combing the “white hair” of the spraying waves—strands as white, presumably, as his own—do they start paying attention to him. Another “visit” is taking place, another journey, this one of the imagination, from the beach where Prufrock anticipates being stranded in old age to someplace beneath the sea. Prufrock’s thoughts of the mermaids combing his white hair lead him, and us, to still another roomful of women, the last in the poem:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Where are these “chambers” in which “we have” (again, the present perfect makes us wonder how often and repeatedly) “lingered” to delight in the attention and caresses, and presumably the songs, of the sea-girls? “Chambers” suggests not one, but several or many “rooms,” like those to be found in hotels. And sea-girls like this, seductive and solicitous, are not likely to be found sipping tea.
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Not until the last, heart-wrenching line—“Till human voices wake us, and we drown”—do we understand that Prufrock has been dreaming. Or rather, day-dreaming. To “linger” in the chambered nautilus of this erotic fantasy is to “malinger,” to hang back, like “Prince Hamlet,” from doing what he most desires: asking his “overwhelming question.” Unlike Hamlet, he is restrained not by conscience, which makes cowards of us all, but by fear of rejection. This is mal-lingering, not with bad intent, but with a bad outcome. When real human voices—“That is not what I meant at all;/ That is not it, at all”—begin to intrude on the mermaids’ songs and drag “us” back to the waking world of teacups, cakes, marmalade, and coffee spoons, that’s when we find ourselves figuratively drowning, unable to breathe.
Let alone speak. Let alone say what we mean.
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Dr. Watson undergoes a similar befuddlement in the presence of Holmes’s attractive client in The Sign of Four, Doyle’s second Holmes adventure, despite, as he tells us, “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents.” Three continents! Many nations! Blimey. Quite the ladies’ man, Dr. John. Presumably these nations include Afghanistan, where, as an Army surgeon, Watson would have treated numerous cases of venereal disease among the enlisted men, although, knowing the risks, he’d be unlikely to have availed himself of the pleasures on offer in the local brothels or among the female camp followers that were a permanent fixture of regimental encampments.
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In any case, he’s been playing the field for quite a while by the time he meets Mary Morstan, who, by the end of the tale, will become his fiancée. Until then, however, the ex-Army physician proves a rather clumsy Othello to Mary’s Desdemona, “endeavor[ing] to cheer and amuse her,” he tells us, “by reminiscences of my adventures in Afghanistan”:
but, to tell the truth, I was myself so excited at our situation and so curious as to our destination that my stories were slightly involved. To this day she declares that I told her one moving anecdote as to how a musket looked into my tent at the dead of night, and how I fired a double-barreled tiger cub at it.
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What stands in the way of Watson’s asking his own “overwhelming question” is fear of coming off as self-interested. If Holmes unravels this mystery, Miss Morstan stands to inherit a king’s ransom, throwing shade on her suitor’s amatory intentions. He’d look as though he was in it only for the money. Fortunately for Watson, if not for his fiancée, the Morstan treasure will be lost in the heat of pursuing its unrightful owners, clearing the way to a happy ending unblemished by any hint of a pecuniary motive.
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No mystery clings to Watson’s overwhelming question by the time we reach the end of The Sign of Four, while at the very end of his “Love Song,” Prufrock’s finds himself drowning in the “human voices” of the waking world—voices talking, communicating, understanding each other. Connecting. “I know the voices dying with a dying fall/ Beneath the music from a farther room,” he tells us. The echo of Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino, in the opening lines of Twelfth Night, has often been noted:
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
Orsino hears music, “the food of love,” dying away, and longs for “excess of it.” But Prufrock hears “voices dying” beneath love’s song. Are these “voices dying” the voices of the dying? Are these, in the end, the “human voices” that wake Prufrock from his underwater fantasy only to find his own voice “drowned” and dying in his throat?
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Unanswered questions beget more questions. By the end of Shakespeare’s play the Duke, like Watson, will be a married man. Is the question Prufrock cannot bring himself to ask also a proposal, or a proposition?
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In his mind, the two seem inextricable. Those dying voices will not entirely die away.