Prufrock.

Midnight

Prufrock made a funny figure, weaving through the lamplight shadows, muttering the whole way under his breath. A careful passerby might have heard him saying “What is it? What is it?” and an even more careful passerby might have heard him replying “Oh do not ask. No, no.” To most though, his words were a low buzz, his hands fidgeting by his side, his feet making quick, short steps, as if dancing around the yellow, heavy fog that settled in the city at night.

There was no doorman at the hotel where he stopped, hiding from the night beneath a faded awning. Electric lights illuminated a sign reading “Rooms for rent: vacancy.” Prufrock pushed through the door into a poorly lit lobby, stretching long into gloom. At the far end, Prufrock could make out a desk and an attendant, either tired or three-days dead. He stood just outside the pool of light washed over the desk, waiting for the attendant to stir.

He did – and drawled a long “Whaddyawant” in Prufrock’s direction.

“A, a room,” came the stammering reply.

The attendant reached for a wall of keys, full enough to make Prufrock wonder whether anyone was, in fact, staying at this hotel.

With all said and done, the attendant shoed Prufrock towards the adjacent restaurant, an apparently requisite part of the stay. It smelled of sawdust, and grease, and hopelessness. He sat alone in the corner and nursed a bowl of watery soup, wary of the yellow fog that seemed to gather at the window, begging to be let inside.

Its acrid smell crept through the cracks and seeped up from the floorboards, intoxicating Prufrock, filling him with insurmountable dread, a suffocating, sickly sense that his life was wasting away, as thin and meaningless the soup he scraped at in his bowl.  

Six o’clock

Morning came too early, announced by far-off shriek signaling shift changes in some factory or another. Prufrock rose, still half-dressed. He grabbed his morning coat off the back of a chair and shrugged it on, wrapping it tight around his torso, hugging his chin close.

He looked in the mirror, cracked and warped at the edges, and tried to comb his hair. It seemed that his bald patch grew every day, his hair falling out in clumps. He imagined the conversation already occurring below, where he was expected for tea in the parlor.

“Dear Alfred’s writing is fine, sure, but he’s no artist like Michelangelo.”

“Michelangelo, dear, of course not. That’s absurd!”

“At least Michelangelo had hair on his head.”

“Indeed, how his hair is growing thin!”

“But how his arms and legs are thin.”

“Hardly a picture of health, I’ll say.” And they laughed. Oh, they laughed, while Prufrock hovered uncertain on the staircase, fingers clutching the banister. He pulled as his necktie, new and handsome and choking him. Down a step, up a step, down two, pause. It took Prufrock a lifetime to walk into the parlor, where the women met him with kind, cursory glances.

“Have a seat, have some tea,” they said, while Prufrock counted the distance between him and the table in coffeespoons.

He sat quietly and listened in on their conversation, not remotely concerned with him so much as greater, timeless art. Prufrock studied the women around him, watching their careful grip on the teacups, the slow lift of toast to lips. The pale arms bathed in lamplight. He lost himself in a sort of trance, and when he went to grab his tea he found he couldn’t.

He was pinned to the chair, his arms and legs wriggling by his sides. Now the women turned their attention towards him.

“What a fine specimen,” they remarked. “Such interesting colouring,” and Prufrock opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.

Noon

Prufrock was fine. His little scare in the parlor left him pale and shaky but no worse for the wear. He sat in his room asking whether the whole charade was worth it – the questions, the nerves, the twisted circus of life.

As he walked down the stairs once again, called by the midday sun to another bout of tea, Prufrock pulled his coat tight around him and stood tall, princely.

“No, no,” he muttered, “he said I was a fishmonger” and ruffled his hair, let his coat hang loose. Prufrock knew he didn’t have the most lines, nor the most interesting, but he had some faint role to play in the drama of afternoons and coffeespoons.

In the dim and smoky parlor, he sat once again among the circle of women, only half present. He went to grab his tea, but his hand seemed unwieldy and stiff. His hand was a claw, clacking against the fine porcelain, and his legs were eightfold, curled up neatly beneath him.

“Alfred, are you okay darling?” asked one of the women.

“Your color looks a little crustacean,” said another, and they giggled.

The parlor filled with water and the carpet was sand. Prufrock scurried left and right, panicked, saying “I am Lazarus, come from the dead. I shall tell you all,” and through the water he heard the women reply, “That is not what I meant at all,” and the room emptied of water and Prufrock sipped his tea gone cold, the world righted again.

The women spoke. “See I was just talking about Eliot the other day—”

“He’s working on some grand poem, no?”

“Calls it The Waste Land.”

“Awfully grim—”

“That’s what comes of writing in April.”

Absorbed in their conversation, the women hardly noticed Prufrock scurrying out of the room, his breathing quick and shallow.

The hotel lobby was gone, replaced by a vast sand beach. A beautiful song rang out over the white hair of the waves. Prufrock bit into a peach, juice dripping down his chin. He walked into the waves, feeling the water soak his rolled pant legs. He walked until the water lapped at his chest, then fell forward into the chambers of the sea, quiet at last, searching for the mermaids and their song.

The water was cold and now it was in his mouth and now his lungs and still he felt somehow at peace, drowning, until he heard a voice saying “Sir, sir!”

He opened his eyes expecting the sting of saltwater but all he saw was a yellowish sort of tint. Cold concrete pressed into his back. Prufrock took a deep breath and felt the bitter, yellow fog curl into his lungs and this time he really was drowning.

Reflection

I was fascinated by the character of Prufrock. Eliot makes him so real, so relatable in some ways, and I felt that he deserved more page space. I had recently pulled Paul Rogalus’ collection of microfiction, Animals, out, and thought that it would be a perfect medium. There is too much going on in Prufrock to write straightforward prose, but I thought I might capture some of him through a series of short vignettes. I had to ask what the story might be, what would happen, and I chose the first two concrete settings as a backdrop. Still, there was so much more that happens, and the poem is deviously non-linear.

Enter Mexican Gothic. I loved the way Moreno-Garcia managed to seamlessly transition from reality to dreams and nightmares. This troubled line between waking and dreaming was perfectly suited to Prufrock, who seems to live in a half daydream. I could incorporate so many more elements of the poem without leaving the setting that I had created.

I needed a narrative frame for the vignettes, which led me to the insistence on time in the poem. I’ve also been reading about Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, a book about basketball. It’s divided into quarters and minutes, mimicking the pacing of a basketball game. I wondered if I could structure my stories as unique times of day, and I had my frame.

Finally, I brought in a little bit of Hamlet, because why not, and the fishmonger scene makes me giggle every time.

I found it challenging to include as many details from the poem as possible. At once, I feel like I was able to bring Prufrock to life in a more three-dimensional fashion yet still miss so many nuances and contradictions necessary to his character. It reinforced how brilliantly Eliot manages to capture Prufrock throughout this poem. It was interesting, as well, that the women became such an important part of the piece. I feel like their presence, although slight in the original, introduces an inescapable tension, a backdrop for Prufrock’s nervous tendencies.

I was also aware of modernist poetry’s influence on contemporary writing. The ability to shift between reality and dreams or to abruptly change setting, the inventive use of language, even, I could argue, microfiction as a form, all draw from modernist poetry in some small way. By the end of my writing, I felt like this piece was only partly about Prufrock. It felt more like a thank you to Eliot, a tribute to the lasting and memorable character of our dear, darling Alfred. I enjoyed burying little easter eggs in my language, like Prufrock’s measurement of the distance in coffeespoons, or the white hair of the waves. This is another lasting effect of modernist poetry – the tendency to make allusions and reuse lines from other pieces of literature, hence the line from Hamlet and reference to The Waste Land.

There is value in any adaptation or rethinking of older texts, even if they tend to drift from the source material. Wide Sargasso Sea built on the world of Jane Eyre in new, novel ways, reinforcing some of the themes in the original novel and rejecting others. Mexican Gothic did the same, albeit with even more distance. Even a song I referenced in one discussion – “Afternoons and Coffeespoons,” by the Crash Test Dummies – finds a new way for readers to encounter J. Alfred Prufrock’s nerve-ridden world. Adaptation allows readers to approach an original text from a different angle, to maybe find some insight that they missed in the first place. The author is dead, after all, so why not find new ways to revisit old work?