L’honorable home d’estat

T. S. Eliot

Critics have often stressed the intertextualities of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land with the poetic work of T. S. Eliot, especially his three major books: Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Moreover, some scholars such as Ronald Knowles have found the origins of the plot of Pinter’s play in Eliot’s last play The Elder Statesman, which opened in 1958, seven years before the death of the American-born naturalised British poet. An elder statesman withdraws from social life to take care of his fragile state of health. However, the visits by two old friends will disturb his rest and will reappear in his life like the ghosts of a feeling of guilt that he had hitherto managed to conceal to maintain his honour. The Elder Statesman denounces the impossibility of fleeing from responsibility for one’s own acts and, at the same time, expresses some of the main ideas of T. S. Eliot’s philosophy of life: the need to expiate the past by articulating it and the human capacity for redemption through others. You think that I suffer from a morbid conscience, From brooding over faults I might well have forgotten. You think I’m sickening, when I’m just recovering! It’s hard to make other people realize The magnitude of things that appear to them petty; It’s harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner. What has made the difference in the last five minutes Is not the heinousness of my misdeeds But the fact of my confession. (T. S. Eliot,The Elder Statesman)