Adapting T.S Eliot's Four Quartets
Professor Denis Donoghue introduces the poems and Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of Fisher Center at Bard, visits the locations in T.S Eliot's masterpiece that inspired the multi-disciplinary performance.
Published 75 years ago, T.S Eliot's Four Quartets is considered the crowning achievement of his career as a poet. Today, three visionaries respond to the cycle in a ravishing union of dance, music and art.
Celebrated New York-based choreographer Pam Tanowitz taps into Eliot’s four-part poem, a mysterious meditation on past and present, time and space, movement and stillness, replete with images of dance. Her ten-strong ensemble moves lavishly through glorious solos and duets to a beguiling score by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho played live, while actor Kathleen Chalfant narrates from the stage, capturing the dynamic and kinetic language of Four Quartets.
The evocative stage design centres on paintings by major American artist Brice Marden, their exquisite colours and strokes each making connections to the geographical locations of the masterpiece’s four individual parts. Containing piercing and unforgettable literary passages, this unprecedented collaborative performance of the work is the first to be authorised by the TS Eliot Estate.
We learn more about T.S Eliot's poems and how his words have inspired this multi-disciplinary production.
The four poems
that became one
Professor Denis Donoghue introduces the geographies of T.S Eliot's four poems:
The poems take their names from four places, each of some bearing on Eliot’s personal life, with some relation to the four seasons and the four elements — air, earth, water, and fire in that order. Burnt Norton was an uninhabited manor house of no particular distinction near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, which Eliot visited, walking through the grounds with his friend Emily Hale in the summer of 1934. East Coker is a village near Yeovil in Somerset from which Andrew Eliot, one of T.S Eliot’s ancestors, emigrated in 1667 to America to found the American branch of the Eliot family from which T.S Eliot was directly descended. The Dry Salvages are a line of black granite rocks north of Gloucester, MA, off the coast of Cape Ann. 'The river' is the Mississippi at St. Louis, MI, where Eliot was born on September 26, 1888. Little Gidding is a village in Huntingdonshire once celebrated for the Christian community established there in 1626 by Nicholas Ferrar, a friend of the poet George Herbert. The community was destroyed twenty-one years later by Cromwell’s troops. The chapel was restored for worship in the nineteenth century. Eliot visited it on May 25, 1936.
While you're reading
Listen to a selection of tracks inspired by poetry, curated by Kaija Saariaho, the production's composer...
In the steps of Four Quartets
‘Home is where one starts from’
Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, visits the locations that inspired T.S Eliot's Four Quartets:
The idea to create a dance based on Four Quartets came from T. S. Eliot’s poems themselves, which are rich in images of dancers and dancing. In the summer of 2015 we presented an evening by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz at the Fisher Center, a Frank Gehry performing arts centre on the campus of Bard College in the Hudson Valley north of New York City. One of the works on the programme had a particularly beautiful title – A broken story (wherein there is no ecstasy). Over breakfast the next day, I asked Pam about its origins. She told me that she had combined the title of J.D. Salinger’s The Heart of a Broken Story with a line from East Coker:
'In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.'
We immediately discovered our mutual love of Four Quartets, Eliot’s late cycle of poems on time and timelessness, memory and history, stillness and sense of place. On an impulse I asked Pam to consider creating a dance performance with Eliot’s poems as the score, in time for the 75th anniversary of the American publication in 2018, if we could obtain the rights. Pam, thinking the project would never happen, agreed – and so our three-year creative journey began.
Before Pam could begin developing a performance based on Four Quartets, we needed to obtain permission from T. S. Eliot’s estate. In 2016 I approached Clare Reihill, who runs the estate, and pitched the idea to her. She invited me to meet her at the estate’s offices, which are housed at the London flat where Eliot lived with Valerie from 1957 until his death in 1965.
The idea of home is central to Four Quartets. In East Coker, the second poem, Eliot meditates on home as a place of origin and departure, a bridge between the living and the dead:
'Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.'
Photo by Gideon Lester
Photo by Gideon Lester
Sitting in that flat in Kensington, where Eliot is and is not, where his life ended and the journey of our performance began, I understood these lines as if for the first time. The rooms are small and unexceptional, but I found it intensely moving to be there, for the first time sensing the Eliots as real people living their lives in ordinary rooms. Eliot was for many years a publisher at Faber and Faber and part of his library remains in the flat, including a copy of Ulysses that James Joyce gave him. Clare made tea and we sat at T. S. Eliot’s kitchen table as I outlined our idea for Four Quartets. Much to my relief, Clare responded positively. The estate granted us a license and has supported the development of the performance in countless ways, for which we owe Clare enormous thanks. Eliot named the Four Quartets after four places that held special significance for him. As Pam Tanowitz began conceiving her performance, we decided to visit the four sites as a kind of pilgrimage in search of a deeper understanding of the poems.
© Estate of T. S. Eliot
© Estate of T. S. Eliot
© Estate of T. S. Eliot
© Estate of T. S. Eliot
Burnt Norton
T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet, Burnt Norton, was published on 2 April 1936
Burnt Norton is a large estate in the Cotswolds, close to the town of Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire. For generations, the estate has been owned by the Earl of Harrowby, and the current Lord and Lady Harrowby showed us around the house and gardens during our visit. In 1934, Eliot and his girlfriend Emily Hale had been hiking nearby and trespassed through the Norton grounds. Eliot had a kind of mystical experience there, by the edge of a drained pool, which he recorded two years later in the first quartet, Burnt Norton. Eliot guides the reader through layers of memory and into a rose garden, which I had always assumed was a symbolic rather than actual place:
‘Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.’
As Lord and Lady Harrowby led us into the garden, though, we discovered it was in fact exactly as Eliot described it – a concrete representation of a very real place. We first came to the rose garden, which somehow reminded us of the garden of live flowers that Alice finds in Through the Looking-Glass – perhaps because of Eliot’s depiction of the self-conscious roses, which ‘had the look of flowers that are looked at.
Beyond the roses is a gateway – ‘through the first gate, / into our first world’ – which leads to the ‘empty alley’ of Eliot’s poem. The alley leads to a formal garden, with the ‘box circle’ that I had never been able to picture – and suddenly there it was, a ring of topiary. And then, next to the formal garden, was the ‘drained pool’ where Eliot had a mysterious vision of a lotus flower rising from a mirage of water. Lady Harrowby explained that the pools were intended to be filled with water, but they leaked, so had always remained dry.
As Pam and I thanked the Harrowbys and left, we noticed a large bell hanging in a nook on the side of the house. It reminded us of the bells that recur throughout Four Quartets. In Burnt Norton Eliot wrote:
‘Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.’
Was he thinking of this very bell that we were now looking at, set into the side of the house?
The garden was full of birdsong when we visited and a strong wind blew through the trees. It was easy to imagine that ‘the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter’; and also to imagine Eliot standing here, 83 years earlier, in this half-wild garden at the heart of the English countryside. For a moment, the past, present and future seemed to coincide and we understood the opening lines of the poem in a new and vivid way.
Photo by Gideon Lester
Photo by Gideon Lester
Set design notes
Opening with a downstage scrim
The performers can be in front of or behind the image with changing light
East Coker
T.S. Eliot’s second Quartet, East Coker, was published on March 21 1940
‘In my beginning is my end’
The core of East Coker is the cycle of birth and death and the place that inspired the poem is deeply connected to the beginning and end of Eliot’s own life. This tiny hamlet in Somerset was home to the poet’s ancestors, one of whom, Andrew Eliot, emigrated to the New World in 1669. It is also Eliot’s final resting place; he and Valerie are buried in the village church which dates from the late 12th century.
As we drove into the village we were again struck by the accuracy of Eliot’s description. Typically for this region of southwest England, the road is sunken, with high banks and hedges on either side. Eliot paints it evocatively:
‘And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.’
Indeed the village is built from grey stone and yes – there were dahlias blooming on the warm summer day. After lunch in the village pub we climbed the hill to the little medieval church of St Michael and All Angels. Inside, a simple plaque marks the resting place of Thomas and Valerie Eliot, quoting the opening and closing lines of the first section East Coker.
We walked out into the churchyard and looked across at the fields in which Eliot imagined the ghosts of his ancestors dancing:
‘In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire’
We then sat down on a bench in the churchyard, imagining the one time that Eliot visited the village while alive, to pay homage to his ancestors. That was in 1937, three years before he published East Coker. We were reading the poem aloud when we were suddenly startled by a long peal of church bells. It was three o’clock. Only in hindsight did we remember that other bell in the garden at Burnt Norton; on that summer’s afternoon the tolling bell in the country churchyard seemed to us merely an expression of this beautiful place where Eliot once walked and where he now rests.
Set design notes
The scrim is lifted to reveal a 3D version of this painting.
The three darker vertical spaces on the sides of the image are removed for entrances and exits to allow the dancers to move within the painted background.
The Dry Salvages
T.S. Eliot’s third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, was published on 27 February 1941
T. S. Eliot himself pointed out the close relationship between the Four Quartets and the four elements. Burnt Norton and its sudden shaft of sunlight is the poem of air; East Coker reminds us that life comes from and returns to earth; the dominant symbol of Little Gidding is fire. The element of The Dry Salvages is unquestionably water, in the form of river and sea.
The Dry Salvages are a group of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts, the only American location in this transatlantic sequence of poems. The rocks lie a couple of miles from Rockport, close to Gloucester, where the Eliot family had a holiday home. Though he grew up in Missouri, the young Tom Eliot spent every summer of his childhood in New England.
The Eliots’ house in Gloucester is now a writer’s retreat, owned and managed by the T. S. Eliot Foundation and it was there that Pam and I spent a night before visiting the Dry Salvages.
The house is spacious and welcoming. In Eliot’s day, its porch had an uninterrupted view of Gloucester Harbor, though trees have now grown up around it. It was an extraordinary feeling to stay there, in the rooms where T. S. Eliot slept and lived as a boy, in that landscape that he loved so much.
We had arranged for a local fisherman to take us out to the rocks on the afternoon we arrived in Gloucester, but the sea was too rough to get to the Salvages comfortably, so our journey was postponed till the next day. Instead we went for a walk out to Eastern Point. Here, next to the lighthouse, we came across a large bell. The sign on it read: ‘This bell was used as the fog signal at Eastern Point Light House from June 1933 to Dec 1969. Cast in Chelsea, MA. Gold dust was sprinkled on the mold in order to obtain the right tone.’
Eliot wrote about just such a bell in The Dry Salvages:
‘And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers..’
The bell is an essential sound of the sea for Eliot – and by now it had become eerily apparent that bells were also accompanying us throughout our Four Quartets pilgrimage: the bell on the house at Burnt Norton, in the churchyard at East Coker and now here, on the promontory where Eliot played as a boy. Would there be a bell at Little Gidding too?
The next morning dawned warm and bright and the sea was entirely calm as we drove to Rockport to meet Captain Bill Lee, who would take us out to the Salvages. Bill has fished the waters off Cape Ann all his life. We asked him whether many tourists asked to be taken round the rocks; no, he said, in all these years only one other person had made the trip with him – an Englishman. We later realized that this was the actor Jeremy Irons, a great devotee of Four Quartets.
Photo by Gideon Lester
Photo by Gideon Lester
It took about an hour to journey out to the Salvages. The rocks are low-slung – just a metre or two above sea level and the cluster is almost entirely covered at high tide, making it hazardous to shipping. Even on this calm day there was a significant swell and except for a large colony of seals, there was little sign of life in this barren, remote place.
As we steered around the Salvages and headed back for the domestic familiarity of Rockport we thought of Eliot’s description of the ‘ragged rock in the restless waters’:
‘Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.’
Set design notes
All the backgrounds are flown out to reveal the back wall.
They are printed scrims that can be lit so that performers and the narrator can be seen behind them.
Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot’s fourth Quartet, Little Gidding, was published on 15 October 1942
The final stop on our Four Quartets pilgrimage was Little Gidding, a tiny hamlet about 30 miles northwest of Cambridge. An Anglican religious community was founded there in 1626 by Nicholas Ferrar, a friend of the poet George Herbert. It came under attack during the English Civil War and briefly served as a refuge for King Charles I when he was fleeing Cromwell’s troops.
Eliot probably only visited Little Gidding once, in 1936, but it impressed him sufficiently that he named the final quartet after it. He wrote it during the Blitz, in 1941, while serving as a volunteer fire watcher. The poem is full of references to wartime and death (the ‘dark dove with the flickering tongue’ is a German fighter bomber) and it seems likely that Eliot was thinking of the remote village’s role as a place of sanctuary in a historical war when he chose it as the final location for Four Quartets.
As with Burnt Norton and East Coker, Eliot guides us towards Little Gidding with a detailed description of place:
‘If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.’
We made our journey in May and sure enough the hedges were white with spring blossom. As we drove towards Little Gidding, we marvelled at how specific Eliot’s directions were. The hamlet is in the middle of fields and there is really only one way to reach it. The final stretch of road is a dirt track and then, sure enough, it turns behind some farm buildings and an old brick pigsty.
Our guide was Judith Hodgson, who, together with her late husband Tony, had run a new religious community at Little Gidding from 1970 until 1998. Judith is now a docent at the visitor’s centre and couldn’t have been kinder or more welcoming. She gave us tea and cakes and then left us to walk on to the chapel with its ‘dull facade / And the tombstone.’
The Church of St Mary is tiny and entirely surrounded by fields. We were pleased and not at all surprised to discover our fourth bell, set in the door above the entrance door. Inside there is space for perhaps thirty congregants, all facing each other, while on a wall hangs a sampler embroidered with words from Eliot’s poem.
Once again we were walking in Eliot’s footsteps; once again we imagined him here in the still, prayerful place, both when he visited in person and when he journeyed back to Little Gidding in his imagination during the horror of the Blitz.
Outside, the trees were covered in blossom and the still spring air was broken only by birdsong and the distant bleating of sheep. We sat under a yew tree, close to a bed of yellow roses and the tombstone by the western door and read Eliot’s poem:
‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.’
Our physical journey was over. Now a new journey began, as Pam began to imagine how our visit to these four quiet, out-of-the-way places would find new embodiment in the dance that she would soon start creating for Four Quartets.
Photo by Gideon Lester
Photo by Gideon Lester
Set design notes
This image resonates with us because it is related to the East Coker image: like bones or the underlying structure of the earlier painting, it reveals a deeper and more complex reconsideration of the tri-divided space.
Watch the trailer for Four Quartets, taking place at the Barbican 22–25 May 2019:
About
Published 75 years ago, Four Quartets is considered the crowning achievement of TS Eliot’s career as a poet. Today three visionaries respond to the cycle in a ravishing union of dance, music and art.
Four Quartets takes place 22–25 May.
About Gideon Lester
Artistic Director, Theater & Dance, Fisher Center at Bard
About Denis Donogue
Denis Donoghue is University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at NYU. His books include Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, published by Yale University Press.
Photographs by Maria Baranova
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