Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question

The love song of plastic surgery was at once a Greek myth and a national anthem, a modernist statement about the value of tradition that used neoclassical principles to design the totally futuristic beauty of an up-and-coming America. And in this it embodied with uncanny precision the ethos behind T.S. Eliot's theory of poetry. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), Eliot wrote that the true poet writes not as a means of self-expression, but through "a continual surrender of himself . . . a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (40). Such a surrender allows the poet to allow tradition to speak through him: "We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously" (38). In "Hamlet" (1919), Eliot continued this line of thought, arguing that when the poet extinguishes himself through writing, the poem emerges as the "objective correlative" (48) of his inspiration. Later, in Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928), he glossed the concept of the objective correlative, noting that the poet's job is "to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal" (quoted in Kermode, 17). In achieving the objective correlative, the poet takes his place in a tradition he has just altered: "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them" ("Tradition," 38).

What Eliot could not see was that the transcendent idealism of his vision was as practicable for surgeons as it was impossible for poets. The surrender of self, the extinction of personality, the achievement of the objective correlative--all these were the metaphors of a critic grasping after words to describe or, more cynically, to create the poet as a marvelous transformer, an energetic reactor capable of invigorating tradition itself (Eliot took his metaphor for such kinesis from chemistry: "consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide" ["Tradition," 40]). But Eliot's strained images were the undescribed, unsung realities of plastic surgery, whose finest creations never left a scar let alone a signature and whose work in flesh transformed its material into the objective correlative of the physician's sincere desire to heal. The past asserted its immortality through the unsigned invisible work of the surgical sculptor, whose expressive power grew out of an extinction of personality that Eliot, with his growing fame and craving need to write, could only postulate. In 1933, he explained his desire to "write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry" (quoted in Kermode, 20). By 1933, plastic surgery had been operating according to such a standard for several decades, producing art that literally stood naked in its bare bones, art so transparent that it revealed only what was meant to be seen through it: lovely, healthy people. As sculpture that was state-of-the-art medicine, plastic surgery was art that saw itself as beyond art, art whose greatest accomplishment was its capacity to work not for artUs sake, but for the betterment of society.

Plastic surgery was thus the unlikely answer to Eliot's prescription for an art capable of recombining tradition and individual talent into vital, new aesthetic forms. It was in this sense a High Modernist experiment with strictly popular pretensions, a self-consciously radical reinvention of tradition that sought a place in everyday American life. "Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous," plastic surgery brought to life EliotUs aesthetic ideal--but only to play it for a fool. "Prufrock" is the poetry of a world without myth, the verse of a voice that wants to be earnest but has no beliefs. In its metrical hesitation ("Do I dare?" "And how should I begin?") and backpedaling rhythms ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas"), it makes uncertainty the stuff of formal innovation even as it cries out for an expressive mode that knows itself, that swaggers--or at least scuttles--with confidence. Plastic surgery answered that cry. The attraction of plastic surgery's aesthetic was indeed its capacity to realize its aesthetic: where the balding Prufrock contemplates a combover as a matter of spiritual consequence ("Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"), the plastics patient has practically infinite power to defer such "overwhelming question[s]" (by the 1930s, hair transplants, facelifts, and even tummy tucks were available to stave off aging). And so plastic surgery promoted itself as a uniquely effective art: "May this specialty be an exception to all others. May there be no reaction or retardation as the result of misguided, indiscreet or overzealous enthusiasm," exhorted Charles Miller; "Let discretion prevail. Let us remember that perfect results only are satisfactory in this field" (xxiv; 2). Poetry, painting, and sculpture could and did all make mistakes; none was without its formal disasters and public failures. But plastic surgery owed it to its subject matter to be at once more precise and more precisely meaningful. Taking shape as a peculiarly pragmatic branch of the plastic arts, a medical development that saw itself as a pretty antidote to the ugly exigencies of modern life, plastic surgery supplied an essential alternative to a modernism that misplaces its faith in the transformative power of paint, marble, metal, wood, and, most of all, words.

Here the manuscript breaks off.

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