The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 190

4- I Never-seen ribald lines of Ti S. Eliot Early influences on a genteel young man of the early 20th century are revealed. not taking his final examinations because he could not (or would not) return to the United States at the beginning of World War I. But there is also present the anti-Semite, right now more argued about than ever since the recent publication of Anthony Julius' T. S.

Eliot, Anti-Semitism From the book jacket The collection contains a deleted passage from Alfred Prufrock." At the undertakers' ball. And again, in the poem "Interlude in We hibernate among the bricks And live across the window panes With marmalade and tea at six Indifferent to what the wind does Indifferent to sudden rains Softening last year's garden plots. It is interesting that these two poems have titles related to music, for music was the characteristic note, a nostalgic Poesque echo of a passing beauty, derived from the French Symbolist poets who so influenced Eliot. That influence was pervasive not only in his very early poems. Then and later, there is always the similar tone, the rhythms that are immediately recognizable as Eliotic.

Even in such an early poem as "The Little Passion, From 'An Agony in the one hears the later Eliot: From those stifling August nights I know he used to walk the streets Now following the lines Or diving into dark retreats. There is also in these early poems Eliot's growing religious sympathies, still questioning and skeptical but always there. Present, too, is the philosopher that he had studied to become at Harvard, writing a doctoral thesis but Eliot's friend, Ezra Pound, that some of the poems are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry. I am longing to print them in Blast; but stick to my naif determination to avoid certain words." In this collection, you will find those although propriety forbids me to repeat them here. Yet there are many other words in the collection as well.

Editor Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University, has done a splendid job of locating sources and influences perhaps too fine. He at one point asks, "Did the one poet influence the other, or was all this in the air? Or are the coincidences too slight?" Questions like that just thicken the book unnecessarily. There is no question, however, that the major influence on Eliot's early poems was the French poet Jules Laforgue, with his indecisions and his satiric, languorous monotone. Another influence was Baudelaire, who, as Laforgue himself had written, was "the first to speak of Paris from the point of view of her daily damned (the lighted gas jets flickering with the wind of prostitution, the restaurants and their air vents Here is an instance of the Lafor-guean Eliot in his poem These emotional experiences Do not hold good at all, And I feel like the ghost of youth INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE Poems 1909-1917 By T. S.

Eliot Edited by Christopher Ricks Harcourt Brace. 428 pp. $30 Reviewed by Harriet Zinnes So, to you, dear reader, who remembers the major modernist poet T. S. Eliot as the aloof Englishman (even though he was born in St.

Louis in 1888 and didn't become an English subject until 1927), who remembers him as prim, elegant, sanctimonious and a bit lugubrious, let me suggest, hmm, a purgative: Go out and buy Inventions of the March Hare, a never-before published collection that not only includes a deleted passage from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-frock" but also a dozen pages of oh, yes obscene verse. The poems are a young man's poems, a genteel young man of the early 20th century. "After all," he writes at the age of 26 to his friend, the poet Conrad Aiken, "I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage." Still, that important novelist and painter, Wyndham Lewis, who edited the short-lived Vorti-cist magazine Blast, could write to Science Fiction Reviewed by John R. Alden and Literary Form.

Whether one agrees with the critic William Empson that Eliot's expression of anti-Semitism was merely a reflection of his times or with others who suggest it is a manifestation of some heretical, demonic character that is part of everyman, today one shudders at the poet's questionable morality. Can those scurrilous lines from "Burbank With a Baedeker: Blei-stein With a Cigar," "A Cooking Egg," "Sweeney among the Nightingales," and "Gerontion" lead to redemption? Nevertheless, what will be of interest in these poems will not be the poems of scabrous anti-Semitism or even of the poet's anxiety over divinity or of personal anxiety (and despite Eliot's insistence on the principle of "impersonality," the personal is egregiously present in his poems). What you, today's reader, no within the vessel during its long inter-system cruises. In homage to s-f history, Zettel names her first-born AI Hal Clarke. And because everything in her future, from spaceships and stations to interstellar colonies and system-spanning economic networks, depends on computers, the threat of an uncontrolled AI feels wrenchingly real.

It's scary how alien our own creations could become with nothing but self-interest and the survival instinct to direct their actions. EXCESSION By lain M. Banks. Bantam Spectra. $12.95 Zettel and Clarke imagine futures not all that distant from the world today.

Banks' Exces-sion, however, is set in an era so vastly removed from our own that anything is possible. Readers who know that Banks uses his middle initial only when he's writing space opera have probably guessed that Excession is another "Culture" novel. Fortunately, the galaxy-spanning Culture is so rich with human variants, artificial intelligences and alien societies that excursions into its realm are al longer a "modernist," will want to read are those poems that demonstrate either a young man's vaunting of a fearsome sexuality or what the editor describes as "an erotic morbidity" in such a poem as "The Love Song of St. Sebastian." Interestingly enough, Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow, wanted none of the poems, even the bawdy, scatalogical ones, to remain unpublished. Was she indifferent, too, to such a poem as "Ode," in which the following lines appear-When the bridegroom smoothed his hair There was blood upon the bed.

The British poet Michael Hof-mann's comment says it all: "I have never read anything as coldly powerful as this in its squea-mishness and sexual disgust." Harriet Zinnes is a poet who lives in New York. ways welcome. This book's plot is far too baroque to summarize, and its characters likewise resist easy capsulization. The story's AIs are so far beyond human ken that even their names "Serious Callers Only," "Attitude Adjuster," and "I Blame My Mother" raise more eyebrows than answers. The only way to convey the pleasures in this novel is to describe the author's writing.

Banks unveils technological marvels in a spray of elegant words and miraculous effects: "The moons glittered their stolen light across the fretful dance of waves This may not be the literature of serious ideas, but it sure is fun. In a burst of marketing fervor, Chronicle Books has published a three-volume Star Wars trilogy in the comicAext format of the pre-World War II Big Little books. (If you've never heard of them, ask someone born around 1925.) At $9.95 each, the fat Star Wars volumes are clearly aimed at obsessive Star Wars collectors but for obsessive collectors, that will be their greatest -LJ -Ml. l.i im in IUI I -s 1 1 1 FOOL'S WAR By Sarah Zettel. Warner Aspect.

$5.99 Unlike 3001, Sarah Zettel's thought-provoking tale offers an energetic plot and a cast full of appealing characters. Several of the main players, both foolish and wise, are self-aware AI's. Self-awareness, Zettel proposes, will arise unpredictably, when some weird set of conditions spurs a non-sentient AI to recognize its own existence and take action to preserve it. That's a tough way to enter the world, Newborn AIs will be terrified, and their flailing about will cause chaos in the networks they inhabit. Panicky programmers will turn their anti-virus weaponry onto the equally panicky AI, who will either die in a system crash or be killed by the engineer's deadly code.

Eventually, however, some AIs will survive. Fool's War is a story of how we might come to accommodate those aliens from within. Zettel's book is full of clever bits. A spaceship's communication officer is called "Houston," and the ideal ship's crew includes a Fool whose japes and pratfalls help keep harmony Science-fiction writers have talked about cloning for so many years that it doesn't seem odd to hear that it has actually been done. What seems surprising is that it took so long.

If science fiction is on target again, tomorrow's paper might announce the creation, or birth, of a self-aware artificial intelligence in the genre's jargon, an AI. Science fiction's most famous AI is surely Hal, the mutinous computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, after nearly 30 years and two subsequent Odyssey volumes, Clarke has written 3001: The Final Odyssey (Del Rey, $25). Yes, 3001 is full of Clarkian wonders.

Humans have built a vast metal ring in space around our planet so we will have room to live while nature recovers. There is peace on Earth, and no shortage of food or resources. The Brainbox can pump a college degree's worth of information into an open mind in an hour. But instead of weaving such details into a story, Clarke uses The Final Odyssey as a soapbox. He prattles on and on about From the book jacket how rational, sensible future folk will deal with issues such as religion, politics and sex that we benighted primitives mishandle today.

Yet there's not a single insight in the whole sermon. 3001 has as much plot and character development as a half-hour sitcom, and about as much excitement, too. THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Q3 Sunday, April 20, 1997.