The Cocktail Party

First produced for the 1949 Edinburgh Festival, The Cocktail Party is, like The Family Reunion, an
attempt to express modern concerns in the guise of ritualistic drama. In this case, however, Eliot
depends on Euripides’ Alkstis (438 b.c.e.; Alcestis, 1781) as his classical antecedent, wisely
eliminating the embodiment of the Furies that proved to be so dramatically disruptive. In one
view, he effectively reproduced the sophisticated patois of cocktail-party chatter to distract his
secular audience from what Grover Smith calls the play’s theological “underpattern.” Other
critics, among them Barber and Carol Smith, suggest that the comic approach was a deliberate
attempt at a reversal in which “surfaces” become “depths” and the comic resolution an
indication of divine order.

A number of this play’s themes are taken from Eliot’s earlier plays. There is a reunion, although
not in the sense of Harry Monchensey’s mythopoeic experience, for the Chamberlaynes literally
as well as figuratively re-create their marriage; again, there is the figure of the mystic, this time,
however, a more convincing one, in Celia; moreover, there is a guardian, Reilly, who achieves
expressed validity in his role as a psychologist. Finally, and perhaps most important, there is a
sense that spiritual illumination is not restricted, except in its intensity, to martyr figures.

Superficially, the plot is familiar drawing-room comedy, entailing a series of love affairs. Edward’s
wife, Lavinia, has inexplicably left him; Peter Quilpe, a filmmaker, is in love with Celia Coplestone,
Edward’s mistress, while Lavinia is in love with Peter. Comic relief is provided by the scatter-
brained Julia Shuttlethwaite, the peripatetic Alexander MacColgie Gibbs, and Sir Henry Harcourt-
Reilly, an enigmatic, gin-swilling psychologist. As in the well-made play, the plot revolves around
a secret: Julia and Alex have conspired with Reilly to reinvigorate the Chamberlaynes’ marriage,
in an association called variously “the Christian conspiracy” or, as Jones puts it, “the Community
of Christians.”

The marital difficulties would be familiar to the audience, but not Eliot’s interpretation of them.
Having confused desire with affection in his attachment to Celia, Edward must face the fact that
he is essentially unloving, whereas Lavinia is by nature unlovable: Thus, Eliot suggests, they are
perfectly matched. In addition, Edward, who is indecisive, must learn to face the consequences
of making a decision—in this case, the decision that Lavinia should return to him. What he
realizes is that her return is tantamount to inviting the angel of destruction into his life.

Possessed by the belief that he is suffering “the death of the spirit,” that he can live neither with
the role Lavinia imposes on him nor without it, Edward goes to Reilly for help. The language that
this counselor uses indicates his role of spiritual guardianship. He speaks of Edward’s “long
journey” but refuses to send him to his “sanatorium,” for to do so would be to abandon him to
the “devils” that feast on the “shadow of desires of desires.” Instead, he brings him face to face
with Lavinia to convince him that the unloving and the unlovable should make the best of a bad
job—or, in terms of the blessing he administers, must “work out [their] salvation with diligence.”
Carol Smith’s review of Christian mysticism as a background to the play makes clear that Reilly
encourages the Chamberlaynes to follow the “Affirmative Way,” in which “all created things are
to be accepted in love as images of the Divine,” rather than the “Negative Way,” which is
characterized by detachment from “the love of all things.”

Reilly’s interview with Celia is substantially different, for while she, like Edward, complains of an
awareness of solitude, she focuses less on herself than on a perception that loneliness is the
human condition and that communication is therefore illusory. She also complains, unlike
Edward, of a sense of sin, of a feeling that she must atone for having failed “someone, or
something, outside.” She attributes her failure to a self-willed fantasy: In Edward, she loved only
a figment of her imagination. Unlike Edward, she has had a vision of the Godhead, an ecstatic
exaltation “of loving in the spirit.” It is this vision that she chooses to follow, although Reilly
emphasizes that it is an unknown way, a blind journey, a way to being “transhumanized,” the
“way of illumination.” Her way, the “Negative Way” of mysticism, culminates in her crucifixion
“very near an ant-hill” in the jungles of Kinkanja.

What Eliot offers in The Cocktail Party is a series of gradations of spiritual understanding,
gradations that were not presented adequately in The Family Reunion. Celia’s way of illumination
is undoubtedly more believable because her developing perceptions are not expressed in
sibylline pronouncements; likewise, the guardians are given authenticity by the comic role their
very eccentricity engenders. The common way, represented by the Chamberlaynes, is not
appealing but understandable, and, as Reilly says, “In a world of lunacy,/ Violence, stupidity,
greed . . . it is a good life.” Finally, Peter Quilpe, shocked by the news of Celia’s death, comes to
understand that he had been loving only the image he had created of her. As Grover Smith
comments, “the kind of comedy Eliot devised has been compared generically by some critics to
Dante’s Commedia, for in it the characters either fulfill their greatest potentialities or else are set
firmly on the way toward doing so.”