Every man, be he great, small, or fictional, has an enemy, a nemesis who, like an hobgoblin, consumes his every thought and haunts his every dream. Each man endeavors in his own way to over-come his natural foe, to crush that deviant’s soul and ritually defile his family—it is the eternal struggle. Moses had his Pharaoh, Custer had his Crazy Horse, Captain Ahab had the Jews, and I have T.S. Eliot.From my debilitating impotence to my fear of Prussians to my Smelters Elbow, every problem in my life is attributable to that insidious and scandalous Mr. T.S. Eliot.
The trouble began when I discovered a copy of Mr. Eliot’s collected writings hidden amongst my personal effects. As my household staff is expressly forbidden from owning personal property, I assumed the book to be an inheritance from my father that had heretofore gone unnoticed.
Initially, I had quite the laugh! How an obvious illiterate published an entire body of works was beyond me. But as I read on, my elation gave-way to despair. Mr. Eliot’s façade began to crumble when cast under my God given perspicacity. He was no more a well-meaning imbecile than my Polish maids were actually people. This auteur was not the idiot I first suspected him of being.
Woven throughout these addled ravings of a frothing nincompoop lay a most sinister cipher, the details of Mr. Eliot’s most infamous exploits. I discovered that ach and every poem, play, and essay is an ode to deeds most felonious:
“Sweeney Among the Nightengales” is a dance macabre, laying out T.S. Eliot’s direct involvement in planning The Great War.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a cleverly disguised step-by-step manual on larceny, felony, and millinery that was intentionally dispersed amongst our most debacherous citizenry.
And “The Waste Land” is naught but a detailed blue print of my summer cottage in Highland Grove!
He drew too close!
I began to notice things—tiny, almost imperceptible changes to my daily routine. My laundry was folded backwards, my gilded truffles arrived days late, and from the period of March 4th to June 17th 1920, I could never find a pen when I needed one. And there was only one man capable of inflicting such misery on another human being.
The game was afoot: one of us must die.
On a daily basis, I scoured every publication—no matter the author or ‘content’—across the Eastern Seaboard for clues that would lead me to his whereabouts. I knew that his tentacles stretched far and wide and that his agents were numerous and inclined to slipping coded messages into Tea Cozy Quarterly. I slept completely in the nude, covered in Mr. Eliot’s writings, so that I might absorb their secrets through osmosis.
I lay fatal traps for him throughout my manor, my factories, and randomly about town. But whenever I was sure I had him, he would disappear, like some ethereal willow-the-wisp, leaving behind only over-curious maids, drunken Slavs, and a few rather surprised and dead school children snared in my contraptions.
Now, some of my more astute readers, those who most keenly follow the details of my adventures, may point out that I have never in fact met Mr. Eliot. These same fellows may also point out the dearth of evidence connecting T.S Eliot to any illicit activities.
“Isn’t he a greatly respected author of gentle temperament?” these men may ask.
“Isn’t he man wise, a man considerate, a true champion of education and civility?” these men may ask again, women of course being constitutionally barred from speaking in public.
But I query expertly in rejoinder: is anyone sure he is not a monster? Is not the lack of evidence enough to condemn him?!
Does anyone even know if he casts a shadow? Are we sure that he does not in fact spend his days sodomizing pigeons and defecating in pies that he then serves to the unsuspecting? Can anyone ever be sure enough that he is not in reality twelve feet tall, possessed of hooves, forked tongue, and ravenous claws? Or that he does not lure men into his deadly mandibles with a siren song of placidity, sapping away their very souls and condemning them to a nightmarish abyss of abolitionists, the un-baptized and the rest of society’s lowest wrung?
I demand that the executors of Mr. Eliot’s estate answer these questions in full. And, until they do, I will continue to clean and set my traps, to watch, and to wait.