T S Eliot
Screening online 25 - 27 September 2021 in collaboration with Small Wonder Short Story Festival.
One of the twentieth century’s most important literary figures, T S Eliot continues to inspire writers from all over the world today. This 2009 BBC Arena documentary takes an in-depth look at the Nobel Prize winner, a man who was a poet, playwright, children’s writer, critic and publisher — but who was also a husband, a friend, and an American settler in the UK. As well as looking at his work, for the first time Eliot’s widow Valerie, with whom he spent the final years of his life, opens her personal archive, including the private scrapbooks and albums in which he documented their life together. Small Wonder Short Story Festival, Charleston, screened Arena’s T S Eliot, alongside a thought-provoking film of contemporary responses from celebrated authors Kate Mosse, Roger Robinson and Imogen Lycett Green. Here, you can still enjoy exclusive new poems inspired by the film from British-Guyanese poet Maggie Harris and British-Sri Lankan writer Minoli Salgado, and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with help from seasoned author Colin Grant’s masterclass.
ARENA: T S ELIOT
Producer/Director: Tim May; Film Editor: Guy Crossman; Photography: Chris Seager; series director Anthony Wall
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table…
The opening lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot; this was my introduction, along with many others, to modern poetry, at school at the age of fifteen or sixteen. In 1915, when it was published, it was the world’s introduction to modern poetry. Once read, these lines can surely never be forgotten.
Eliot broke the mould and has been a determining influence ever since, not least on Arena itself. Eliot pioneered the juxtaposition of the aesthetic and the intellectual with the commonplace and the ordinary. He took poetry somewhere that had never been imagined.
Eliot’s work has been fiercely protected by his estate. The simplest request to quote a few lines would be met with the sternest scrutiny. So when they approached us, we were taken aback, to say the least, and of course thrilled and glad that they thought we would be the right people to make a film about him and his work.
The solid centre of any arts series is the portrait of the artist. The artists portrayed on Arena are nearly all from the era of film. Prufrock was published at the same time that film ceased to be a fairground attraction and became a new kind of art — and the world’s dominant entertainment. When it comes to making an art documentary, the profile is often the most conventional and predictable form — a good story of the life and work of a fascinating and significant person. Eliot offered more. His ambivalence, contrasts and contradictions enabled director Adam Low and film editor Joanna Crickmay to flash back and forwards to deepen the film and reveal the underlying shape of Eliot’s life.
He was from the American frontier – St Louis Missouri – yet affected the manners and reserve of an English gentleman. Among the most famous figures of his day, for years he didn’t even own his own home. The most intellectually achieved of writers, his greatest public success has been a stage musical based on his humorous verse about cats. Cats ran for twenty years in the West End and eighteen on Broadway. The ultimate poetry revolutionary, he was happy to be first a successful banker and then a senior editor at Faber & Faber publishers, occupying the same tiny office for decades.
In a vintage piece of archive, W. H. Auden observes that young poets want to emulate their heroes; he says his generation were spared that emotion, having no aspiration to Eliot’s rolled umbrella and bowler. Realising the pressure in such opposing forces can generate more tension in a film than straight narrative alone might.
Arena has never had a manifesto or a set agenda. I remember when Alan Yentob was the Series Editor in the early 1980s, a director asked him for advice on how to approach the film he was making. Alan said, ‘Just make it really interesting.’
Aiming at neat and tidy conclusions that purport to be definitive is not going to explain a life and work as complex as Eliot’s, analysis that in truth is speculation in disguise. This film aimed to be an evocation of the artist’s world and an invitation to the viewer to enter into it.
Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest essayists and critics of all time, a fearless commentator on the work of others, was signally disinclined to explain his own poetry. A hundred years after his work was published, I hope the film shows that his writing continues to enchant, fascinate and disturb and, above all, to maintain its unique mystery.
Anthony Wall
24 August 2020
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO T S Eliot
Watch acclaimed author Kate Mosse, poet Roger Robinson who recently won the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry and award-winning writer Imogen Lycett-Green’s take on the Arena film.
Responding to the film
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Kate Mosse is a number one international bestselling novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer. The author of six novels and short story collections – including the multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel) and Gothic fiction The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which she is adapting for the stage – her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and published in more than forty countries. She is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a regular interviewer for theatre and fiction events. Kate is a Visiting Professor of Contemporary Fiction & Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Patron of the Sussex Together Festival. Kate divides her time between Chichester in West Sussex and Carcassonne in south-west France. The second novel in The Burning Chambers series, The City of Tears – set in Paris, London and Amsterdam – will be published on 14 January 2021.
Twitter: @katemosse|Instagram: @katemossewriter|Facebook: KateMosseAuthor| Website: www.katemosse.co.uk
Roger Robinson is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the 2019 T S Eliot Prize and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. His latest collection, A Portable Paradise, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, has been commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Roger has received commissions from The National Trust, the BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, the V&A Museum and Theatre Royal Stratford East among others. His workshops have been shortlisted for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries and were also a part of the Webby Award-winning Barbican’s Can I Have A Word. He is co-founder of Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records.
Author and educator Imogen Lycett Green was director of the Betjeman Poetry Prize 2014-2020, where she worked with the Forward Arts Foundation and National Poetry Day to champion creativity for children and young people. She has taught English literature at secondary level, and she co-founded the Narrative Medicine Programme at Brighton Health & Wellbeing Centre, which brings poetry into patient care as well as medical training. As an arts journalist, she interviews authors and artists both in print and on stage at literary festivals, including Charleston. Her books include Grandmother’s Footsteps (1994) (Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award) and Robin Hood (1998).
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S T S Eliot:
Listen to and read specially commissioned poems from two acclaimed poets from the region, inspired by the T S Eliot film.
Maggie Harris
‘There by the Waters of Margate I sat down and Wept’
Commissioned Poets
Maggie Harris is a Guyanese writer living in Kent. Twice winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature, her short story ‘Sending for Chantal’ was the Caribbean Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She won the T S Eliot Student Prize at Kent University, and was awarded a Leverhulme Scholarship to study performance poetry in Barbados. Her poem, ‘On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea’, was a winner in the 2017 Welsh International Poetry Competition. Her poem for Kent, ‘Lit by Fire’, was a BBC commission for National Poetry Day. Her poem ‘Cwmpengraig, Place of Stones’ was included in the Windrush Exhibition at the British Library. Maggie has worked for Kent Arts and Libraries and Kent University; she was International Teaching Fellow at Southampton University and in 2020 was Visiting Poet in Mangalore, India. She has published three short story collections, six collections of poetry, a memoir, Kiskadee Girl, and recorded two CDs. Her latest poetry book is On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea. Her Selected Poems is free to download at www.thecaribbeanpress.org
Minoli Salgado is the author of A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), Broken Jaw (2019) and the critical study, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2007). She won the first SI Leeds Literary Prize and has been nominated for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature, the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. In 2012 she was selected as the Olympic Poet for Sri Lanka as part of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012. She has published widely in postcolonial studies and is currently working on a study of global testimony. She taught for many years at the University of Sussex where she was Professor of English, and has recently taken up an appointment as Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in Lewes.
WRITING YOUR MEMOIR: A Masterclass from Colin Grant
Taking Arena’s T S Eliot film as a starting point, explore how you can begin to craft your own memoir or life writing with expert non-fiction author Colin Grant, who is based in Brighton.
Colin Grant is an author, historian and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies. His books include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Ackerley Prize. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho and A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca. Grant also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, TLS and New York Review of Books. Grant’s latest book is Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation.
Interviews
An Interview with Anthony Wall
An Interview with Susannah Stevenson
