A Second-Rate Potter

A couple of his plays have some amazing bits in them. Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party both work well if you think of them as verse in play form. That is entirely different from being great plays, though. A couple of his plays are not good verse or play, containing rather a few scattered interesting lines here and there (The Family Reunion and The Elder Statesmen).

The Confidential Clerk is only one of his plays that I can imagine making a good, you know, play. Acted right, it could be good. There are also some interesting philosophical matters in it. The ideas and the verse aren’t as good as in his best two plays, but there is actually a plot that makes the thing a play. I’m not entirely convinced I would go out to see a production of it, though.

How to describe it? “Sort of like Twelfth Night, but if J. Alfred Prufrock was the main character.”¹ The Prufrock comparison is perfect as the discussion below will show. Twelfth Night stands in for one of those plays where everyone is mistaken for someone else and in the end everything gets sorted out. I am not sure that Twelfth Night is really the best comparison, though. The Confidential Clerk is more like one of those drawing room comedies where we are surprised by finding out who all the characters really are. But Eliot would like the Shakespeare comparison more, so let’s give it to him. (Plus, we might as well be charitable to Shakespeare when we have the chance—he really is as good as Eliot.)

The philosophical problem around which the play is centered is the question of identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who do others think you are? One might think that it would be a good idea if the answer to all three of those questions is the same. But as the wealthy financier notes, he really wanted to be a potter, but he had to give up that dream:

Because I came to see
That I should never have become a first-rate potter.
I didn’t have it in me. It’s strange, isn’t it.
That a man should have a consuming passion
To do something for which he lacks the capacity?
Could a man be said to have a vocation
To be a second-rate potter?

Is there something wrong with being second-rate potter?

If your dream is to be a first-rate potter, but you only have the choice of being a second-rate potter or a first-rate financier, which is the better option? There is no doubt that the entire educational apparatus these days tells you to be first-rate. Thoreau, meanwhile, screams at you to proudly be a potter.

But, the deeper question is more than the old debate of what you should do with your life. Is it possible that your vocation, your calling in life, is to be a second-rate potter? Is it possible that being a second-rate potter isn’t just settling into a life you prefer, but actually the very best use of your time on earth? Is it possible that you will do more good as a second-rate potter than as a first-rate financier? Why couldn’t you have a calling to be mediocre? And, if that is your calling, your vocation, your purpose in life, shouldn’t you proudly pursue it?

As the young protégé replies,

Indeed, I have felt, while you’ve been talking.
That it’s my own feelings you have expressed,
Although the medium is different. I know
I should never have become a great organist,
As I aspired to be. I’m not an executant;
I’m only a shadow of the great composers.
Always, when I play to myself,
I hear the music I should like to have written.
As the composer heard it when it came to him;
But when I played before other people
I was always conscious that what they heard
Was not what I hear when I play to myself.
What I hear is a great musician’s music.
What they hear is an inferior rendering.
So I’ve given up trying to play to other people:
I am only happy when I play to myself.

Is he right to give up his dream?

Moreover, when you abandon the vocation you thought you had when you realized you would always be second-rate, can you really build a new life on make-believe?

My father— your grandfather— built up this business
Starting from nothing. It was his passion.
He loved it with the same devotion
That I gave to clay, and what could be done with it—
What I hoped I could do with it. I thought I despised him
When I was young. And yet I was in awe of him.
I was wrong, in both. I loathed this occupation
Until I began to feel my power in it.
The life changed me, as it is changing you:
It begins as a kind of make-believe
And the make-believing makes it real.

The problem is obvious. You can be successful by outward measures in your make-believe world. You may even move from success to success to success. But, inside, you’ll always know:

If you have two lives
Which have nothing whatever to do with each other—
Well, they’re both unreal.

There is the Prufrock problem:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

How long can you keep this up? If the person you are is not the same as the person you want to be, and if neither of those is the person the world sees, how long can you keep going? Is this triple life you are leading really better than just being a second-rate potter and feeling satisfied and happy in being a second-rate potter and having the world knew you are a second-rate potter?

Eliot’s solution to this problem in the play is cheating. It is, in fact, so transparently a cheat that Eliot surely knew it was. It is almost like Eliot knew he was a second rate playwright, but he really wanted to write plays.

¹Izzy Baird, personal communication, April 7, 2020.
[Yeah, Izzy really wanted a footnote.]