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Eliot believes that there is only one way out of the waste land—and that is not the middle way. He believes that the Western nations must choose between a pagan society and a truly Christian society. By a Christian society he does not mean rule by the church, but a society that really lives by Christian principles, with what he calls the "Community of Christians" (a kind of spiritual elite) forming "the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation." In his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the murder of Archbishop Thomas å Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, Eliot reminded his audience that a faith can live only if the faithful are ready, in the extreme of need, to die for it. While lesser men feebly tried to bolt the door against evil, Thomas conquered evil by submitting to death and martyrdom. It is a meaningful lesson for a civilization anxiously trying to bolt the door against an evil whose champions are notably ready to give their lives for its triumph.
Eliot does not believe that the world can succeed in forming a nonChristian, "rational" civilization—though it is now trying to. Says he: "The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
The world came fairly close to suicide in World War II. During the London blitz, Eliot spent two nights a week as a fire-watcher on the roof of his office building. From his perch above what he has often called the "unreal city," Eliot observed, with terror and compassion, the relentless fires. Had London's people (and with them, Western civilization) gone down then, Eliot's verse would have served as a magnificent and tender epitaph:
. . . Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended ...
Polyphiloprogenitive. The war only slightly disrupted Eliot's ordered and somewhat lonely life. His wife, who had been in a nursing home since 1930, died three years ago. Since the war, Eliot has shared a flat in artistic Chelsea with his good friend, Writer-Critic John Hayward (brilliant, witty Hayward, almost completely paralyzed, manages to get about London in a wheelchair). Eliot has the simple but expensive habits of an English gentleman (although English gentlemen usually consider him a typically American gentleman). He dresses well, likes claret and good cheese. As a church warden at St. Stephen's in Kensington he performs his duties conscientiously.
Now a full partner in the firm of Faber & Faber, he takes his work as publisher as seriously as his work as poet ("writing poetry is not a career," he says). He is known as the firm's best and most prolific writer of book jacket blurbs. He has little sympathy for poets who starve in garrets ("It isn't necessary"), but he frequently helps out of his own pocket* an aspiring poet who submits work to him.