T. S. Eliot
I got to thinking about the third
man. What
third man? you might ask, and that’s the whole point. There are so many of them. A small convention of third men joined in my
consciousness last week in a curious fashion.
At the time I first became
seriously interested in poetry, in the 1950s, T. S. Eliot still wielded great
prestige among academic intellectuals. I
didn’t like Eliot, and I certainly didn’t understand him; but I knew I was supposed
to, and I soldiered on. But he is not a
poet for a tutorless adolescent in a hick highschool, and it was only in my
fifties and sixties that I really “got” it.
These days any casual rereading is likely to yield a new surprise. Last week I was dipping into “The Wasteland,”
where in the final section (“What the
Thunder said”) you find this:
Who is the third who walks always
beside you?
When I count there are only you and
I together…
These lines, Eliot says, “were stimulated by the account of
one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of
Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of
their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”
Orson Welles
I’ll return
to this somewhat obscure third man in a moment, but he raised in my mind a more
obvious one, Orson Welles’s The Third Man,
the most famous British film ever made, and among the contenders for best made
anywhere. I first saw it, probably, in
1952. No one reading this essay will
need to be told about it, or its haunting musical theme. The plot involves the topos of the dead man
who is not actually dead. It
established important elements of the iconography of the Cold War for many of
us who lived through that period. In
1951 two British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean, who happened also to be two
Soviet spies, disappeared just before they could be arrested by British
intelligence agents. Obviously, they had
been tipped off. By whom? By a Third
Man, of course. This eventually
turned out to have been super-spy Kim Philby.
This affair was certainly the most famous episode in the lively history
of Cold War espionage, and the fact that there eventually turned out to be a
fourth man, a fifth man, and for all we know a fourteenth man did nothing to
dull the world’s definitive fascination with the concept of the Third Man. How else than by early and obsessive engagement
with the Cold War could a medievalist come to write a book about Cold War
literature?
"Road to Emmaus" by Duccio
The third
man of Orson Welles was mysterious and malign; Kim Philby was mysterious and
malign. What about Eliot’s? He is mysterious to be sure, perhaps even
spectral; but since he is Jesus, he is definitely benign. The allusion is not even all that
obscure. It is to the great but puzzling
story (Luke, cap 24) of the encounter of two disciples (Cleopas and possibly
Luke himself) with the risen Christ as, shortly after the Crucifixion, they were
walking along the road from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus. All this vaguely coalesced in my mind in this
most recent casual dip into Eliot; but why does the poet’s note talk about
Antarctic exploration rather than the gospel of Luke? For elucidation I turned to my son Richard,
the only Antarctic explorer of my immediate acquaintance. He didn’t know off the top of his head, but he
performed a twelve second google, which did the trick—a little embarrassing,
since I am the one who is supposed to
be the literary scholar in the family.
Rich sent me to an excellent brief essay by Sandra Lockwood, a Canadian graduate student at Simon Fraser
University, entitled “Third Man Phenomenon.” (https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/221/docs/Lockwood_GLS2012_USC.docx) The essay includes
bibliographical notes of an illuminating nature. Of Shackleton she writes thus: “Shackleton’s
story is one of the great epics of human survival and the best-known example of
Third Man phenomena. However, his experience is not unique. Mountaineers,
astronauts, athletes, sailors, and 9/11 ‘Twin Tower’ survivors have recorded
similar encounters with a life saving presence. This presence is often
described as that of a guardian angel, a helper ghost, a shadow being, a
heavenly guide, and a divine companion.”
Shackleton’s is perhaps the best known example of the phenomenon as it
applies to physical danger and
distress, but if we expand the field to include the spiritual, surely the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke, which has
attracted reams of exegetical commentary and a significant visual iconography,
would claim precedence. I presume Ms.
Lockwood invokes Eliot, though not the Emmaus story, because the poet himself
speaks of the Shackleton episode (rather inexactly) in his notes. But
the section called “What the Thunder said” begins with a medley of scriptural
allusions to the Passion narrative, which the poet assumes do not need
footnoting—the Agony in the Garden, the betrayal on the Mount of Olives, and
the hubbub at Pilate’s palace: “He who was living is now dead /We who were
living are now dying”. The narrative
counterpoint is the Third Man of the Emmaus road, and the man who was dead and
is now living.
A Day at the Beach, South Georgia Island
Whatever
the case, my third men were dragging me back over decades to the 1950s—when I
first read Eliot, when I first saw the Orson Welles film, and when I first
became immersed in the dubious battles of the Cold War. And if Sterne could write a whole shaggy dog
novel (Tristram Shandy) on the basis
of Locke’s whimsical theory of the “association of ideas,” surely I can get by
with a short blog post?
