Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Monday
As I read Stormy Daniels’s account of her sexual encounter with Donald Trump—how she just stared at the ceiling as he did his business—I couldn’t help but think of T.S. Eliot’s description of the secretary and the “small house agent’s clerk” in The Waste Land. Both are equally empty and desolate. Here’s the story Eliot tells:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Eliot has taken on the persona of Tiresias, the world-weary seer from Greek mythology who has seen it all. In this instance, he witnesses a loveless tryst, which is different from the Daniels-Trump episode mainly in that Daniels thought she had been invited to Trump’s penthouse apartment for dinner. As Daniels tells it, once she saw Trump undressed and blocking the door, she gave in and allowed him to have his way with her. After it was over, she left as quickly as she could.
In Eliot’s poem, by contrast, the affair occurs in the woman’s apartment. Also, she at least gets supper. It’s unclear how consensual the sex is because we don’t know if there has been pressure at the office (assuming she works for the man). Given that his caresses are “unreproved, if undesired,” it sounds like she too surrenders to the power dynamic. It’s certainly the case that the reactions of both women are the same: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
The “young man carbuncular” (pimply?) is a dead ringer for Trump in his narcissism. He doesn’t notice much about the woman because he’s so caught up in himself. “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once,” we are told and, “his vanity requires no response,/ And makes a welcome of indifference.” While Trump, unlike the clerk, actually is as rich as “a Bradford millionaire,” Eliot’s scathing put-down of the clerk’s sense of entitlement fits the former president to a tee.
The sordidness of the scene matches what we are learning from the New York trial. Recall that what set Trump’s hush money payments in motion was the need to save his campaign following the remarks caught on the Access Hollywood tape (“”I don’t even wait [to kiss a woman]. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”). Witnesses are informing us that many were convinced that, if Stormy Daniels’s account had gone public, the GOP would have replaced Trump on the ballot. Though we have become numbed to his outrageous behavior since the 2016 campaign, at the time his future hung in the balance. Therefore he paid for the story to be hushed up (along with his affair with Karen McDougall) and then falsified business records to hide the payments—which is to say, to hide his election interference.
In the poem, Eliot laments the decline of high heroic ideals, with Teiresias–who once witnessed the Oedipus tragedy and spoke to Odysseus in the underworld—now reduced to reporting on an illicit sex scene. In our own unheroic times, the Founders must be turning in their graves to see the kind of man their republic elected to the presidency once, with the possibility of doing it again.
It’s not only the young man carbuncular who is groping around in the dark trying to find an exit.
