Love & Mr. Eliot

On opening night at the Edinburgh Festival last week, the author (who will be 70 this month) sat in the audience holding hands with his 31-year-old wife, his former secretary whom he married a year and a half ago. That scene offered a clue to the proceedings onstage. More than any of his previous plays, or most of his poems, T. S. Eliot's The Elder Statesman extols love. Compared to The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk--intellectual avocados spiky with Greek myths and Christian mysticism--Eliot's latest seems as simple as the peach that Prufrock was once afraid to eat.

The play's theme: dishonesty toward oneself is the worst policy. The play's hero: Lord Claverton, an aged, retired Cabinet minister who idly fingers the empty pages of his once-crowded engagement book. Two unwelcome visitors from the past destroy the sand castle of his memories--precarious memories of what was essentially bogus success. Visitor No. 1 is a moneyed spiv from Central America who shared in a disreputable episode of Claverton's youth. Visitor No. 2 is Maisie Mont joy (now respectably renamed Mrs. Carghill), a onetime chorus girl whom the young Claverton seduced; in true Victorian melodramatic fashion, Claverton's father had squelched her breach-of-promise suit with cash. Now she accuses her former lover of having posed as a man of the world during their affair, just as he has since posed as an elder statesman: "You'll still be playing a part in your obituary, whoever writes it."

Trying to salvage the one good thing left to him--his daughter Monica's love--Claverton tells her the truth about himself and finds that "if a man has one person to whom he is willing to confess everything, then he loves that person, and his love will save him." As a serene Claverton goes off to die under a beech tree--faintly echoing Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus--he wears his fate like a royal robe: "I feel at peace now. It is the peace that ensues upon contrition when contrition ensues upon knowledge of the truth."

In the past Eliot seems to have agreed with Sartre that hell is other people; now he introduces the novel idea (for him) that heaven may be other people too. For this beaming Mr. Eliot, British critics had mostly middle-drawer adjectives--"entertaining," "touching," "his most human"--while the London Observer's Kenneth Tynan crashed through with "banal." U.S. audiences may have a chance to judge for themselves before long. The play is scheduled to move to London later this month, but at week's end Producer Henry Sherek was mulling "most flattering offers" to transport The Elder Statesman direct from Edinburgh to Broadway.

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