One recurring premise in much criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is the dissoluteness of his dramatis personae. I say ‘dissoluteness’, because there is usually assumed to be some correlation between the imputed psychological state and a moral dereliction. Thus, Bernard Bergonzi’s recent study, speaking of the ‘deluded’ or ‘corrupt’ narrator of Portrait of a Lady, argues that ‘his consciousness is at all times on the verge of dissolution’. His drawing-room conversation is said to be disrupted by the ‘grotesque musical sounds going on inside his head. . . . He makes an effort literally to compose himself but his impressions remain as fragmentary and disjunctive as the items in a daily paper.’ Yet the lines Bergonzi cites to substantiate this suggest the opposite. In face of a multitude of other lives assembled, but also abstracted, reduced, made safe for him by the newspaper, the narrator maintains a casual equanimity, only mildly stirred by the sense of a problematic otherness: