First performed in March 1939 at the Westminster Theatre, The Family Reunion might be a Greek drama but for its ending. It remains instead a potential tragedy, uncertainly redeemed by religious salvation. Set in the stately home of Wishwood, The Family Reunion opens on the birthday of Lady Amy Monchensey. She awaits the arrival of her three sons on the evening of her celebration. Of her sons, the only one to arrive is Harry, eldest and heir. He returns after an eight-year absence pursued by the Eumenides, dogged by the guilt of his wife’s death – or murder. The play revolves upon Harry’s agony and his choice – to remain thereafter at Wishwood, or to leave in search of Christian relief for his woes.
… a potential tragedy, uncertainly redeemed by religious salvation.
The Family Reunion’s creation was, for Eliot, particularly concerned with ‘the problem of versification’, with his endeavour to find ‘a rhythm close to contemporary speech’. As a result, the play is written in lines ‘of varying length and varying number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses’. Despite Eliot’s ambitions, contemporary criticism of The Family Reunion focused on one issue in particular: what chimera had been built from the commixture of Greek tragedy and Christian redemption narrative? ‘The whole point of Mr Eliot’s play’, Desmond MacCarthy argued, ‘is that [The Eumenides] are really guiding angels … Why in that case introduce Greek mythology at all? It is maddening.’ Ransom disputed that ‘there is nothing particularly Christian in this play’ in the first place. Yet a reader may find that it is from the very pastiche of dramatic models that The Family Reunion draws its greatest depths. A modern Orestes, Harry’s return to his childhood home is not only haunted by the death of his hated wife. His tragic heritage may perhaps also consist in the desire to kill his mother, which he effects by leaving Wishwood at the play’s end. Allusions to Macbeth and Hamlet similarly question Harry’s sense of resolution – is he a vacillator or a doer – and to what end will he ‘do’? The play’s ending permits the suspicion that ‘in spite of the bright angels one might find Harry a year or two later somewhere in the South of France, a virtuoso in suffering, an armchair saint.’
‘… one might find Harry a year or two later somewhere in the South of France, a virtuoso in suffering, an armchair saint.’
It is to ‘character’, finally, that many reviewers turned in their criticism of the play, often to explain its original shortcomings. Described variously as ‘marble’ or ‘statues of an intellectual commentary’, the play’s ‘passing pictures’ excited some ideas of immortality, yet in many a simple assessment that ‘it does not seem especially dramatic, nor is it compact.’ Cleanth Brooks noted that ‘the play may be said to be a restatement of “Burnt Norton” in terms of drama’, a poem from which The Family Reunion takes a large part of its liturgy. Though Brooks wrote of Burnt Norton as ‘rather dry and not sufficiently appreciated’, the works have suffered a dramatic reversal, The Family Reunion now a poor shadow of its verse cousin.
Brooks’ final word on The Family Reunion is as apt now for the play’s legacy as it was at the time of writing: ‘Harry’s difficulty is Eliot’s difficulty. The audience … are not more likely to understand the treatment of the relation of time to eternity expressed in “Burnt Norton”; they are even less likely to be sympathetic with it. … the play will consequently be murky and dull – another instance of Eliot’s retreat into Anglo-Catholic mysticism.’
Kate Pfeffer, 2016