TS Eliot 1: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

episode

Secret Life of Books 1h 11m 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 3 months ago

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: chapters · speakers · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What embarrassing fruit incident does the host share?

Jonty Claypole 0:00

Sophie, have you ever had an embarrassing fruit incident?

Sophie Gee 0:05

Well, obviously, let me start by saying there's nothing I love more than an embarrassing fruit. But yes, I have. I don't know if embarrassing is the word. Let me tell you my fruit story, Jonty. One of my summer jobs when I was an impoverished student was actually cutting up fruit. And so I learned a great deal about the properties and qualities of tropical fruits because I was working in a cafe that had a juice bar. And my first job of the day was to don some kind of surgical gloves. so that the acid of the fruit wouldn't eat into my hands. And then there was a very strict protocol about how one had to dissect all these various fruits, which of course did include peaches. Also pineapples. I got some great pineapple slicing and dicing technique in that job.

Sophie Gee 0:47

It completely put me off all fruit and fruit-related products for life. In fact, I don't think I've told you this, but I've got a kind of fruit phobia.

Jonty Claypole 0:55

Oh, interesting.

Sophie Gee 0:57

Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I love a piece of fruit, but fruit that has been transformed into something else so that it has ceased to resemble a piece of fruit. I've got a kind of horror of it.

Jonty Claypole 1:07

Interesting. We'll have to dig into that.

Sophie Gee 1:09

Yeah, let's go in deep. Yeah, because we could get quite fruity today, I think. So judging from that great opening question, I'm going to guess that you you too have an embarrassing fruit moment.

Jonty Claypole 1:19

I'm not sure if this is an embarrassing fruit incident, Sophie, but if you remember last week, we were talking about scrapes with the law when I was a student in the 1990s in my Bertie Worcester-ish days.

Bruno Satin 1:31

Yes.

Jonty Claypole 1:31

And I do remember an incident on one of these nighttime sprees across London with my friend George, where we ran past a late night grocer and impulsively stole a watermelon. Oh my God. Well, it got about 20 feet down the street and then had a moment of remorse and turned around and carried the watermelon back and put it back in its spot. So it was a rather pathetic attempt to be naughty, which we then immediately felt remorse about. So we stole a watermelon for about 15 seconds, I think.

Sophie Gee 2:03

Well done taking it back. I'm proud of you. So you had a sort of mini Goblin Market moment, actually. I'm realising that fruit has become a bit of a sub-theme in this podcast, which brings us to the topic of today's recording.

Jonty Claypole 2:15

That's right, Sophie, because the narrator of today's poem famously asks, do I dare eat a peach? This is The Secret Life of Books. I am Jonty Claypole, middle-aged man torn between my desire to live a philosophical life contemplating the absolute, but also to cause a social stir, but I'm too shy ultimately.

Sophie Gee 2:41

Oh, that's so sad, John T. So I'm Sophie G. I'm one of those society women who stands around in rooms coming and going, talking of Michelangelo and measuring out my life in coffee spoons. This week, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.

Jonty Claypole 3:00

T.S. Eliot was a Midwest American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century who wrote Dickens-inspired poems about fog, wind, damp evenings, and the general gloom of English life. If you were a young, neurotic, overeducated American man, that is. I grew up in London and I did not find it gloomy. Eliot's remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary modernism. Golly, who'd want to be that?

Bruno Satin 3:27

Especially with Ezra Pound.

Jonty Claypole 3:29

But while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognise some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot's lugubrious output. April is the cruelest month. I've measured out my life in coffee spoons. Do I dare eat a peach? And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. And actually, Sophie, you've forgotten probably his most famous lines, which are Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity.

Sophie Gee 3:59

Yeah, but McCaveney's coming back later, so don't jump the gun, my friend.

Jonty Claypole 4:03

And actually, for the record, Pound coined the great battle cry of modernist aesthetics, make it new, among other great lines. But the thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets, including W.H.