The Elder Statesman
Opened at the Edinburgh Festival in 1958.
‘If a man has one person, just one in his life, / To whom he is willing to confess everything … Then he loves that person, and his love will save him’. So speaks Lord Claverton, in a moment of revelation at The Elder Statesman’s end. Eliot’s previous plays had toyed with the idea of love. The newfound gentleness of The Elder Statesman owed much to the poet’s recent marriage. Eliot and Valerie’s relationship led Time to the conclusion that ‘more than any of his previous plays or most of his poems, T. S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman extols love.’ They sat in the audience on opening night, hand in hand.
The newfound gentleness of The Elder Statesman owed much to the poet’s recent marriage.
A play about compassion, forgiveness, and the need to divest oneself of lies, The Elder Statesman portrays the late life of Lord Claverton, an ‘aged, retired Cabinet minister who idly fingers the empty pages of his once-crowded engagement book.’ Having concealed his past from his children – the gentle Monica and roguish Michael – Claverton’s life is interrupted by the arrival of two figures from his past. The first, Gomez, is a college-friend whom Claverton had corrupted, and who had witnessed Claverton’s failure to stop when he ran over a man in his youth. The second is Maisie Mountjoy, a chorus girl with whom Claverton had an affair and then promised to marry, and who Claverton’s father had subsequently paid off. Beset by these figures, Claverton finds himself forced to throw off the parts he has played in life, resorting instead to the mercy of his daughter: ‘How could I be sure that she would love the actor / If she saw him, off the stage, without his costume and makeup’. Finally assured of Monica’s love, Claverton retires to die under a tree in the manner of Oedipus at Colonus, no longer forced to play the part of the elder statesman: ‘It is the peace that ensues upon contrition / When contrition ensues upon knowledge of the truth.’
A play about compassion, forgiveness, and the need to divest oneself of lies …
Widely lauded, The Elder Statesman’s reviews noted the ‘kindness’ of the play. It was ‘entertaining’, ‘touching’, ‘his most human’. ‘Dullness’ was a criticism of only a few reviewers, though Eliot’s characters once more came under scrutiny, Stanford writing that they were ‘good ideas for characters rather than convincingly realized persons’, Weightman that the two most interesting characters – Gomez and Maisie – received the least attention. Nevertheless, Eliot’s play has a biographical, self-reflexive resonance: a man seeking out an implicitly Christian unburdening. As Kenner comments upon the play, and upon late Eliot: ‘As Lord Claverton was able to enter into reality only through others, through a daughter he had hitherto tried to keep to himself, a son he had constrained, and a former lover he had allowed to be bought off, so his poet is set free from the lyric flame by writing for other voices, not knowing whose voices they will be’:
… from the self that pretends to be someone;
And in becoming no one, I begin to live.
It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.
Kate Pfeffer, 2016
