I came across this French word in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 177: “Here is the heart of Eliot’s aboulie in the autumn of 1921: a horrified glimpse of human depravity and the fear that few have the stature to transcend it.” I should have realized that it is the French form of ‘abulia.’ Merriam-Webster: an abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions. Further:
The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix a-, meaning “without,” with the Greek word boulē, meaning “will.” Abulia can refer to the kind of generalized indecision that makes it impossible to choose what flavor ice cream you want, though it was created to name a severe medical disorder that can render a person nearly inert.
Cf. here:
Le terme « aboulie » provient du grec ancien a- (privatif) et boulê (volonté), signifiant littéralement « absence de volonté ». En psychiatrie, il désigne un trouble mental caractérisé par une diminution ou une privation de la volonté, rendant difficile l’initiation et la coordination des actions, même planifiées.
I thank Vito Caiati for recommending Gordon’s outstanding 721 page biography five summers ago. I am currently re-reading it. Biblioteca Vallicelliana accession date: 9 July 2021. The real Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome is described here. Been there, done that. I would be surprised if Dr. Caiati has never played the archivarius in its depths. I myself did not make it inside. Came at the wrong time, a pretty Italian woman informed me. Lunch time, siesta, la dolce vita, the Italian thing, their thing. La loro cosa.
T. S. Eliot is a man worth a 700 page plus biography. I am not so sure about Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth, literary artists of high relatively recent repute. The consummate literary biographer Blake Bailey has written stomping tomes about each. They are meticulously done and you will not find a bad sentence anywhere in those thousands of pages. I have read the first three.
But I wonder: is it a good use of a life to poke through the details of lives of men far from exemplary? Eliot was imperfect but he had a sense of what is at stake in this life. Yates didn’t. Cheever, the ‘Catholic cocksman,’ did, but refused to rein in his concupiscence which he freely indulged with both sexes. Poor Mary Maldisposta,* as he called his wife. He was ever eager to mount her, well into his old age, unsated by his extramural activities, but Mary, though no prude, was, well, maldisposta. Can you blame her?
At what point does literary pahthography negate the value of literary biography?
And what about me? How much am I a philosopher seeking to answer the question How should we live? and how much a literary voyeur?
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*Maldisposta is the feminine singular form of the Italian adjective maldisposto, which translates to ill-disposed, hostile, unfavorable, or prejudiced. It describes a person or attitude that is unwilling, averse, or openly antagonistic towards someone or something. (AI generated.)
Bill,
After Princeton University Library unsealed in 2020 the more than one thousand letters that Emily Hale had donated to that institution in 1956, with the stipulation that they were not to be opened for fifty years after Eliot’s (1965) or her (1969) death, Lyndall Gordon published The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (1922). This recent work focuses on the deep impact that Hale had on Eliot’s poetry, for she is the Hyacinth Girl in The Waste Land, the figure associated with “memory and desire,” and she inspired the precise “rose of memory,” symbolic phrase of “Ash Wednesday” and its suggestive echoes in The Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton” garden scene). She was, in other words, the inspiration, arising out of his deep personal feelings for her, for some of the most powerful imagery of Eliot’s modernist masterpieces.
The second volume of Robert Crawford’s exhaustive, less thematic biography of the great poet, Eliot After the Waste Land (2022) also draws on Hale’s letters, but places less emphasis on her influence. His earlier volume, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land (2015), explores in much greater depth than previous biographies the influences of Eliot’s early life on the themes and imagery of poetic works.
Vito,
Thanks for these further references which, knowing me, I’ll probably order. There’s always room for more books.
I didn’t know that you had dug this deep into Eliot. The best way into his work is via a solid bio like that of Lyndall Gordon. Her distaff perspective helps or at least does not hinder.
Five summers ago you recommended Yates, *Revolutionary Road.* I am re-reading it now. Blake Bailey helps put it in proper perspective. But I seriously wonder about someone who, with religious intensity and single mindedness, devotes himself to the literary depiction of the lives of mediocrities and worse. Yates and I overlapped temporally and spatially in Boston in the ’70s, but I didn’t know who he was back then.
Bill,
I have been caught up in Eliot’s poetry, as well as his life journey, for more than sixty years. I can’t remember precisely when I first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock,” but I could not been more than fifteen, and although I understood very much of it or of Eliot’s other poems at the time, I knew that they were the creations of a poetic genius who, as you say, “had a sense of what is at stake in this life.” I am fascinated by the lives of men, literary or not, who had precisely this “sense” and who sought to live, however imperfectly, according to it, from Eliot, to Auden, Wordsworth, and Hopkins, among the poets; to Plato, * Augustine, and Pascal, among the philosophers. As much I appreciate the craftsmanship of a writer such as Yates—economy of language; incisive, authentic dialogue; psychological realism; and outstanding sense of structure—he had nothing of this “sense,” and, I guess, this is why I dragged myself through Bailey’s biography of him.
*Recently, I read and enjoyed Robin Waterfield’s, Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (OUP, 2023).
Vito,
You had to drag yourself though Bailey’s bio of Yates? I found it fascinating. But then I find it fascinating how some people can destroy themselves and die relatively young (Yates was 66) with alcohol and tobacco (4-5 packs of cigs/day), poor diet, no exercise, and outrageous behavior of various sorts — and ESPECIALLY when these people are cocksure bodily death is utter annihilation. Is it their COCKS that make them so SURE?
But there are other things about the Bailey bio of Yates that interest me, for example, there is a lot of good lit-crit of Yate’s work.
I read part of a short story by Katherine Mansfield this morning, “Bliss.” As you know, Eliot had a lot of unkind things to say about her. Yates took a dim view of her as well, opining that her writing lacked ‘balls.’ Yates was advising a female poet that she should write with ‘balls.’ Bailey, 241: “Jane Austen had balls, Katherine Mansfield didn’t.”
Bill,
Well, you know I greatly appreciate Yate’s talent as a novelist and short story writer, and while the parts of the Bailey biography that focuses on this did interest me, I had a hard time with the excessive way in which he lived, especially the drinking. I suppose it is the repetitive self-destructive behavior that turns me off and, essentially , bores me.
What is your opinion about the novels of James Salter? I ask because I think two of them –A Sport and A Pastime and Light Years–contain some brilliant writing.
correction: “although I doubt that I understood”
Your meaning came through the first time, and I wasn’t fooled by the typo re: the publication year of The Hyacinth Girl. You may remember this:
https://maverickphilosopher.blog/index.php/2023/06/05/why-typos-dont-matter-much-and-the-musical-watershed-of-the-fifties/
Bill,
Yes, I remember it. Habit in a very old dog is hard to break.