Arnold Bennett and T. S. Eliot: What Happened to Sweeney Agonistes?

Abstract

On 20 September 1920 Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘He [Eliot] wants to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny [sic] act the parts’.¹ Four years later, on 9 September 1924, T. S. Eliot informed Arnold Bennett that he had given up verse and wanted to write ‘a drama of modern life (furnished flat sort of people) in a rhythmic prose “perhaps with certain things in it accentuated by drum-beats”’.² According to Grover Smith, Eliot drafted a version of the play, sent it to Bennett who returned it, and ‘on October 23 Eliot wrote to him again saying that he was reconstructing it in accordance with Bennett’s suggestion’.³ Apparently Grover Smith has had access to a correspondence between Eliot and Bennett, but he gives no sources. As is well-known there are certain allusions in Sweeney Agonistes to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hence the ‘Fragment of an Agon’ couldn’t have been ‘completed’ until near the end of 1925 when Eliot read the novel. This is more than a year after the conversation with Bennett. In 1926 ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ was published and the next year ‘Fragment of an Agon’. Carol Smith, like Grover Smith, thinks that the ‘sample fragments’ and ‘scenario’ ‘were probably completed two years earlier, for in October Eliot sent them both to Arnold Bennett with a request for criticism’.⁴