When, on October 23, 1922, T.S. Eliot assembled and dispatched to the New York lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn a packet containing drafts of The Waste Land as well as a notebook of early poems tentatively entitled Inventions of the March Hare and a selection of loose-leaf manuscripts of individual poems, he included in the package (surely inadvertently) the receipts for the three weeks he’d spent in the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville, Margate, in October and November of the previous year. While there, he had composed sections of what became part 3 of The Waste Land, “The Fire Sermon,” in which an oblique reference is made to this seaside town: “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing.” Though a “First Class Family Hotel,” as the heading on its bills declares, the Albemarle charged extra for baths, which cost a shilling. Eliot scholars piecing together the creation of the most influential poem of the twentieth century in the reading room of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, which acquired this material in 1958, were therefore able to ascertain that Eliot took just two baths between October 22 and 28, four the following week, and seven the week after that, including two on November 5.
Like most of the symbols deployed in The Waste Land, water ends up accruing meanings that are quite different for its male and female characters: among the rituals that the husband in “A Game of Chess” thinks might soothe the “nerves” of his frantic wife is “The hot water at ten,” while the drafts for this section depict in Augustan couplets the socialite Fresca performing her morning toilette:
This ended, to the steaming bath she moves,
Her tresses fanned by little flutt’ring Loves;
Odours, confected by the cunning French,
Disguise the good old female stench./ hearty female stench.
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
And on the daughter
Of Mrs. Porter.
They wash their cunts in soda water
And so they oughter
To keep them clean.
The Albemarle receipts were not included by Valerie Eliot in her 1971 edition of the drafts of The Waste Land but have been added to this centenary edition, which seems aimed at the Eliot aficionado ready to pore over every scrap surviving in the archive and eager to discover new angles on a poem more exhaustively interpreted than any in the language—or rather languages, for it is the most polyglot of poems. This gala volume is the first to reproduce manuscripts and typescripts in color and boasts of various “additional materials,” namely those bills and the versos of three leaves: on one of these Eliot has jotted down a couple of cosmetic skin creams that he has been instructed to purchase for his first wife, Vivien, at a pharmacy on the Champs-Élysées, and on another a compressed account of the plot of The Duchess of Malfi. On the third, the verso of the ending of “A Game of Chess,” Vivien has written, “Make any of these alterations—or none if you prefer. Send me back this copy & let me have it.”
Eliot did in fact make the alterations that she suggested to the pub scene, replacing “No, ma’am, you needn’t look old-fashioned at me” with “If you don’t like it you can get on with it,” and “You want to keep him at home, I suppose” with “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” He also accepted her recommendation that he change “medicine” to “pills” (“It’s them pills I took, to bring it off”). “WONDERFUL,” “wonderful,” “& wonderful,” and “Yes” were her responses to his depiction of the agitated woman and the silently brooding man in the scene beginning, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad”—husband and wife here in amiable accord, as is so harrowingly not the case for the couple in the poem itself.
She seems to have been puzzled, however, by his elaborate pastiche of fin-de-siècle aestheticism in the opening passage describing a woman at her dressing table surrounded by jewels and “strange synthetic perfumes,” writing against this: “Don’t see what you had in mind here.” And, in light of her final years in a private asylum in Finsbury Park in North London, there is a certain irony lurking in her fulsome commendation of Eliot’s decision to end the conversation in the pub by quoting the close of Ophelia’s first mad scene. “Splendid last lines,” she writes beneath “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”
In her introduction to the first volume of Eliot’s letters, published in 1988, his second wife, Valerie, quoted from “a private paper, written in the 1960s,” in which Eliot reflected on the miseries of his life with Vivien as well as on the poetry that resulted: “To her, the marriage brought no happiness…to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land” (her ellipses). We now know that this quotation was taken from a statement that Eliot dated November 25, 1960; this statement was to be opened on the day that his correspondence with the woman whom he thought of as his first love, Emily Hale, was made available to the public. Hale’s cache of 1,131 letters from the poet, deposited in 1956 and under embargo until fifty years after the death of whoever lived longer, became available on January 2, 2020, as did Eliot’s attempt to get in his retaliation first.
The extract quoted by Valerie continues, “And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale. Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive.” The “nightmare agony,” Eliot goes on, of his seventeen years with Vivien still seems to him preferable to life as a “mediocre teacher of philosophy” back in America with Hale as his consort. There follow bitter denunciations of Hale’s “insensitiveness and bad taste” and of her lack of interest in poetry in general and in his poetry in particular, but what seem to have rankled most were her misguided views on religious matters:
“It may be too harsh, to think that what she liked was my reputation rather than my work. She may have loved me according to her capacity for love; yet I think that her uncle’s opinions (her uncle by marriage [John Perkins, a Unitarian minister], a dear old man, but wooly-minded) meant more to her than mine…. I could never make her understand that it was improper for her, a Unitarian, to communicate in an Anglican church: the fact that it shocked me that she should do so made no impression upon her. I cannot help thinking that if she had truly loved me she would have respected my feelings if not my theology.”
In the unlikely event that this display of religious right-mindedness might not prove enough to scotch all possible gossip, a single paragraph is accorded the statement “I might mention at this point that I never at any time had sexual relations with Emily Hale.”
Nevertheless, Eliot wrote her those 1,131 letters, to which she replied, although we’ll never know how, since he had a Faber colleague destroy her side of the correspondence sometime between 1960 and 1963. Eliot and Hale had met back in 1905, when he was sixteen and she was thirteen. Her father, like her uncle, was a Boston Unitarian minister, and indeed in many ways she incarnated precisely the social milieu and the religious outlook that the young Eliot was so desperate to escape, and that he habitually reviled in later life. Their flirtation began in 1912, while Eliot was at Harvard Graduate School, and was fanned by amateur theatricals and Wagnerian opera, in particular Tristan und Isolde, the source of the “Oed’ und leer das Meer” quote that concludes the hyacinth-girl episode in the first part of The Waste Land, and a performance of which he attended with Hale and her parents.
In a letter of November 3, 1930 (among the first dispatched in more than a quarter-century of regular correspondence), Eliot urged her to consider “the hyacinth lines” as a belated tribute to their nascent love and as a poetic version of his inability to declare himself convincingly on the eve of his departure for Europe in 1914. In the same letter he draws attention to the passage in “What the Thunder said” that seems to come closest to the confessional heart of the poem—or at least that is how it has been interpreted by generations of readers:
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Many of Eliot’s alter egos, from the dithering Prufrock to the oracular philosopher-prophet of Four Quartets, brood compulsively on missed opportunities or moments of visionary paralysis that the poems then attempt to reconfigure into some ineffable yet deeper and more significant pattern of meaning. To what extent Hale was slotted into the role of Beatrice to his Dante retrospectively, in accordance with his imaginative habits, is impossible to determine, but his figurations of her in his letters place her as firmly on a pedestal as the saintly “Lady of silences” of Ash-Wednesday. In his detailed and thoughtful assessment of Eliot’s correspondence with Hale published in the London Review of Books in October 2020, Paul Keegan aptly characterizes the tone that Eliot adopts toward her as “a blend of amour courtois and mariolatry.”
Eliot’s language frequently derives directly from the uplifting conventions of the troubadour tradition: his love, he declares, is “as pure and unsullying as any love can be,” while the letter that she sends in return is greeted as “a Gift of Divine Grace,” inducing in him “a kind of supernatural ecstasy.” Undoubtedly she came to represent to him the antithesis of the “nightmare agony” of living with Vivien, an agony vividly captured in two photographs taken by Leonard Woolf in the garden at Rodmell in Sussex in 1932, which are included in Robert Crawford’s Eliot After “The Waste Land.” In the first, a smiling Eliot and Virginia Woolf stand side by side, almost touching, while to their left and apart, Vivien stares at the ground like a chastised child (see illustration on page 37); in the second, it is Eliot who is being chastised, and his smile is painfully slipping as an enraged and glaring Vivien jabs at him an accusing finger.
The caustic statement that Eliot composed in November 1960 is a dispiriting coda to his relationship with Hale, which was enormously important to him, even though it was conducted almost entirely on paper. Employed by a series of American colleges as a drama teacher, she ended up drifting from Boston to Milwaukee to California and then back to the East Coast, never settling long. Although they met occasionally in London, the Cotswolds (where she spent a number of summers with her uncle and aunt), and America, it was their correspondence that seems to have been crucial to Eliot’s well-being, enabling him to express devotion to a woman without having to engage in the problematic business of living with her; the regular exchange of letters allowed him “to care and not to care,” as he phrased it in Ash-Wednesday.
Ever alert to a literary parallel, in his statement he somewhat unfairly invokes Henry James’s The Aspern Papers as an analogy to her decision to deposit her epistolary trove at Princeton; for, rather than “a publishing scoundrel,” Hale seems to have been remarkably scrupulous and long-suffering, even when, having waited seventeen years for Vivien to die, her supposedly infatuated transatlantic admirer then declined to marry her. Indeed, the James novella that their relationship most insistently calls to mind is The Beast in the Jungle, a masterly study of election and evasion; like John Marcher and May Bartram, Eliot and Hale conspired to share a complex secret that allowed their lives to proceed on parallel tracks, precluding fulfillment or union and generating all manner of paradoxical formulations. Here, for instance, is Eliot, two years after Vivien’s death in 1947, when all notions of marriage have been tacitly abandoned, at once keeping her at arm’s length and refusing to let her go:
The all-too-Jamesian limbo dramatized here, in which the “overwhelming question” loomed and shimmered like a mirage, lasted until late 1956, when Eliot handed his secretary Valerie Fletcher a sealed letter containing a marriage proposal to her. After her acceptance and their wedding in January of the following year, Hale’s unhappiness was all her own.
Her bequest to Princeton seems to have taken Eliot by surprise, although it had been previously agreed that these letters would end up in some library, and that an embargo would be placed on them until well into the twenty-first century. The unwelcome news of the deposit set him to pondering his life and his revulsion at the thought of writing his own autobiography—“There is much for which one cannot find words even in the confessional,” he dryly notes in a statement written for the opening of the Hale letters. While conceding that any attempt to explain his reckless decision to marry Vivien, whom he barely knew, would “probably remain unintelligible,” he mentions in mitigation the urgings of Pound, who was desperate to keep his protégé in London, and also his innocence, so reminiscent of that of an early James protagonist such as Christopher Newman of The American. “I was very immature for my age,” he reflects in his statement, “very timid, very inexperienced.”
And yet, within eight years of that fateful day in June 1915, the immature, timid, inexperienced newcomer was the highly respected editor of The Criterion (funded by Lady Rothermere), boomed everywhere by Pound as the future of modern poetry, and the honored recipient of The Dial’s $2,000 annual award. Eliot conquered literary London as swiftly and decisively as James had done forty years earlier, principally through his consistently surprising and unnervingly self-confident critical prose, while his poetry, although fulsomely hailed in his native country by leading critics such as Edmund Wilson, continued to baffle English reviewers and readers, who were confused about what to make of the American cuckoo in their midst.
Anyone looking to track Eliot’s evolution into the most potent critic of the twentieth century can now follow his career as a tyro literary journalist in volumes 1 and 2 of the magnificent eight-volume edition of his Complete Prose. His versatility is astonishing: the subjects of the twenty-seven reviews that he published in 1916, for instance, range from Charles Doughty to Émile Durkheim, from Euripides to Henri Bergson. It was Bertrand Russell, with whom Vivien conducted an affair not long after marrying Eliot, who introduced him to the editors of magazines such as The New Statesman, The Monist, and The International Journal of Ethics, where many of his early reviews appeared. His willingness to take on any commission can be gauged from his first piece for The New Statesman, an omnibus review of ten books on India, most of which were about agricultural economics. Given the part played by his own allusions to the Upanishads (“Shantih shantih shantih”) and the Bhagavad Gita (“I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant,” in “The Dry Salvages”) in inculcating in Western readers a taste for ancient Indian mystic texts, it is amusing to see him here reprimanding a British India hand, R.W. Frazer, for confining his discussion of Indian thought to the Vedas and the Upanishads and ignoring more recent philosophers and writers.
During the summer before The Waste Land was published, Eliot engaged in what appears to have been a brief and desultory liaison with the heiress and, later, writer and activist Nancy Cunard. While it may have delivered a measure of vengeance for Vivien’s adultery with Russell, it clearly afforded him little pleasure—eight years afterward he reported to Hale that it left only “a taste of ashes which I can never forget.” A fragmentary letter of 1926 indicates that at some point Vivien, too, was apprised of this affair, for in it she complains, “Why can’t I even have the freedom & respect which is accorded to Nancy the real tart?” It was Hale, however, the very opposite of a “tart,” a proper New Englander through and through, who Eliot decided would provide a genuinely meaningful counterbalance to the grind of coping with his wife’s multiple afflictions and demands. They met on several occasions in the course of a visit that Hale paid to London in 1923, and he later told her that his “active spiritual life” dated from these rendezvous.
And all shall be well
And all manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
“I am—I can say it without the slightest vanity—the most conspicuous layman in the Church to-day, and my defection would be all the more significant because I was not born into it. I should of course be excommunicate, I should no longer take any part in Church affairs, and if I ever raised my voice to speak for the faith or attack paganism I should meet only with ridicule and contempt.”
The irony can’t have been lost on either of them; if his reignited love for Hale was a major catalyst in the spiritual vita nuova that he embraced in the 1920s, it in turn led him to commit to a religious institution that effectively prevented them from ever marrying, at least while his first wife was alive. And Vivien’s death in fact made him realize that he no longer wished to wed the woman for so long imaginatively construed as the antidote to all his troubles. “Gradually,” as he put it in his statement, “I came to see that I had been in love only with a memory, with the memory of the experience of having been in love with her in my youth.” It was, he summed up, “the love of a ghost for a ghost.” Given his repeated epistolary protestations that she was the only woman in his life, he would surely, in a previous era, have been liable for a case of breach of promise.
It is only obliquely that Eliot’s relationship with Hale is registered in his poetry. The opening of “Burnt Norton” commemorates their visit to an abandoned country house near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire in the summer of 1935, and is a brilliant example of his ability to inhabit a world of “speculation,” to dwell in “the memory of the experience” as a means of evading experience itself:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
The passage describing this purposefully echoes the failed communication with the hyacinth girl in The Waste Land, a crisis that left the stricken narrator of that poem “looking into the heart of light, the silence”:
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…
Crawford’s Eliot After “The Waste Land” is the first biographical account of Eliot to appear since the release of Hale’s letters. It is as dense and detailed as its predecessor, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to “The Waste Land” (2015), and sensitively weaves together poetry, letters, and criticism to present Eliot in all his complexity—one is tempted to say in all his perversity. The tale of the agony that he endured, and of the manifold sufferings that he caused others, only genuinely lightens after his all-transforming marriage to Valerie—and even that came at a price for some, like John Hayward, who was brutally dropped by his former flatmate.
Hayward was prominent in the committee that offered advice on the drafts of Eliot’s poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, a process meticulously documented by Helen Gardner in The Composition of “Four Quartets” (1978). To give a single example of Hayward’s literary acumen, it was he who advised Eliot to alter the final line of “Little Gidding” from “And the fire and the rose are the same” to “And the fire and the rose are one,” which is obviously far better. After more than a decade of sharing quarters in Cheyne Walk, Hayward was handed a formal letter by Eliot terminating the arrangement and requesting that his friend and collaborator “avoid discussion” of this change of affairs. Known in his circle as the Tarantula on account of his poisonous wit, Hayward forthwith took to signing his letters “the Widow.”
Eliot’s actual widow, Valerie, died in 2012, and in the decade since there has been a veritable explosion of Eliot publications: we now have nine volumes of correspondence (and that takes us only to 1941); the comprehensively annotated editions of The Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue; the 6,500 pages or so in eight volumes of The Complete Prose. And sometime this autumn all 1,131 letters to Hale will be released on the T.S. Eliot website. The “deathbed” edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1963, runs to a mere 234 pages, from which there now radiates a staggering amount of ancillary material. There seems, indeed, no end to our fascination with all that pertains to the creation of the best of these poems, from the baths that he took during his stay in Margate while working on The Waste Land to the original of the pool “filled with water out of sunlight” hymned in “Burnt Norton,” to which I once made a pilgrimage.
Where significance slides into trivia is not always easy to determine. Is it important that there was a furniture company in St. Louis run by one Harry Prufrock, or that Hale performed in a play in 1917 with an amateur thespian named W. Graydon Stetson? “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout?” the narrator of The Waste Land inquires of the Stetson whom he encounters on King William Street. “Will it bloom this year?” When questioned on the identity of Stetson and the implications of his name, the poet responded that he was a “superior bank clerk: a person in a bowler hat, black jacket and striped trousers.” Eliot himself, while working for Lloyds in the City, often sported just such an outfit, and his own planted corpses undoubtedly keep sprouting, keep blooming.
Two books — by Matthew Hollis and Robert Crawford — mark the centenary of a landmark in literature, one of the most admired and imitated poems ever written
The most revolutionary and influential poem of the last 100 years was written by an American banker in the City of London. When TS Eliot published “The Waste Land”, his forbiddingly difficult work in five parts — full of parody, pastiche and allusion — in 1922, Time magazine wondered whether it was a hoax. One London reviewer said of its bewildering modernist techniques: “A grunt would serve equally well.” By contrast, New York’s Dial magazine declared: “The poem is — in spite of its lack of structural unity — simply one triumph after another.” It would be reviled by some but also become one of the most admired and imitated works of literature ever written.
Two books celebrating the centenary of “The Waste Land” bring new biographical research to interpretation of Eliot’s achievements and reveal how troubled relationships with women are woven into his enigmatic poetry. Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem revives the enduring fascination of Eliot’s masterpiece. The second volume of Robert Crawford’s biography, Eliot After The Waste Land, completes the story he began in Young Eliot (2016) and is the first book to draw extensively upon a dramatic cache of letters to Emily Hale that was unsealed in 2020.
Hollis’s starting-point is the 1918 armistice on the western front in a Europe haunted by the ghosts of millions of soldiers and civilians, the wreckage of minds and landscapes, and gripped by the influenza pandemic that ravaged an exhausted postwar world. The opening part of “The Waste Land” is titled “The Burial of the Dead” and carries unmoored speech from those displaced by war.
As Hollis shows, Eliot was neither fully in nor out of the war. From London, he tried to join the US military before the end of hostilities but laboured instead for six days a week in Lloyds Bank, a grind he regretted for the hours wasted from his real vocation — literature.
In “The Waste Land” the City of London is an uncanny “Unreal City” where office clerks trudge over London Bridge to the rhythm of Dante’s dead entering limbo: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” Among them were servicemen who returned to their peacetime work in the nexus of global finance capitalism numb with trauma.
Contemporary readers saw “The Waste Land” as emblematic of the despair of a civilisation but Eliot dismissed its wider significance: it was, he confessed “only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life”. His chilling recollections located the core of the poem in the “nightmare agony” of his awful marriage.
Eliot had been captivated by stylish vivacious Vivien Haigh-Wood. They married only months after meeting. Eliot’s family were incensed by his reckless decision to throw away an academic career at Harvard to settle in London. His father, boss of a St Louis brick manufacturing company, cut him out of his inheritance, placing the newlyweds in economic straits. Hollis conveys an acute “sense of abandonment” that throbs beneath the protective allusive armour of “The Waste Land” in which isolation, loneliness and betrayal are recurrent motifs.
Anxious Eliot — a virgin when he married — was unable to answer Vivien’s emotional needs or decipher signs of her mental instability. Hollis is a scrupulous, perceptive guide to the Eliots’ marital distress, detailing Vivien’s serial flirtations, including an affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the chronic ill health that afflicted them both, as well as the claustrophobia that friends discerned in their domestic circumstances. He deftly draws out the short-term relief Eliot enjoyed holidaying apart from Vivien. The poetry extracted from their shared misery was the bond that connected them. The intractable tangle of their marriage darkens the drafts of “The Waste Land” that Eliot showed to Vivien.
“In the Cage” was the draft of part two, a section that recreated their excruciating non-communication. Vivien wrote “WONDERFUL” next to the harrowing passage that announced “My nerves are bad tonight”. “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” was Vivien’s clanging addition to the poem, six fruitless years after their wedding, her fears of hereditary insanity outflanking what Eliot would bitterly recall as his strong desire for progeny. And she insisted on the removal of a cryptic line — “The ivory men make company between us” — which was restored to the poem after her death. Hollis suspects that Vivien found this reference “too painful a portrait of their troubled marriage” since it “hinted at the absence of generational company, of life without children”.
This study also illuminates the crucial role that Ezra Pound, Eliot’s flamboyantly avant-garde friend, played in shaping the final form of “The Waste Land”. Hollis detects “a tide washing from” Pound’s “Cantos”, an experimental poem voiced through dramatic personas, which dislocates metre and rhyme to liberate virtuoso music and a slipstream of striking images.
He overstates the degree to which Eliot learned from Pound’s poetry (Pound acknowledged Eliot had “modernized himself”) but provides a masterly account from surviving manuscripts — photographed in colour in a Faber centenary edition — of Pound’s revisions. It enhances our understanding of the inspired yet intricate process by which the miscellaneous drafts Eliot described as “a sprawling chaotic poem” were distilled by Pound’s modernist principles into what he called “the justification of the ‘movement’, of our modern experiment, since 1900”.
Hollis combines a poet’s sharp eye for details with a cultural historian’s grasp of atmosphere. He conjures Eliot recuperating beside Lake Geneva following treatment by a psychotherapist who had alleviated his depression, enabling him to complete the poem in a flush of creativity. The famous closing line “Shantih shantih shantih” gestures to the soothing meditative calm of Indic religious rituals. It reminds us that after all the distracting city noises, the postwar collapse of empires and a desperate collage of fragments “shored against my ruins”, the writing of “The Waste Land” brought Eliot temporary peace from suffering, as well as fame and money. The lucrative prize that he received from the Dial magazine matched his annual salary in the City.
The richness of Hollis’s analysis is evident on every page although he is little concerned with the polarised responses to the poem. Those controversies are taken up in Robert Crawford’s Eliot After The Waste Land. Crawford was undaunted by the task of digesting a huge amount of recently published material in his attempt to offer a fresh portrait of Eliot after a century of intensive, sometimes intrusive, scrutiny.
The terrain of this volume — Eliot’s rescue from the bank by the publishing company Faber and celebrity as a Tory Anglican moralist who championed the cultural unity of Christian Europe — is well-worn ground. Crawford is groundbreaking in three areas: the unravelling of Eliot’s marriage with Vivien, the discipline of Eliot’s religious life and, above all, the light shed by 1,131 letters to Emily Hale (a beloved American he left behind when he came to England) only freed from embargo in 2020. This correspondence charts key developments in Eliot’s tortuous spiritual biography.
Crawford argues that each step towards sanctity was a step away from Vivien. In 1927 Eliot’s baptism into the Church of England — abandoning his family’s Unitarianism — ushered in a new life of celibacy. Vivien became increasingly manic: her addiction to prescription drugs led to alarming bouts of paranoia. Eliot dedicated his conversion poem “Ash Wednesday” “To My Wife”, but Crawford claims it sublimated erotic desire for Hale after they rekindled a transatlantic relationship. “Their lovemaking was excitedly epistolary”, he comments archly.
Although he believed divorce was a sacrilege, Eliot departed for an academic year in Harvard in 1932 then failed to return home. A few years later, Vivien was found wandering the streets and committed to a private asylum where she died in 1947. Eliot never did marry Hale, one of several intimate friends blindsided, says Crawford, by Eliot’s “horror of face-to-face emotional confrontations” and deeply hurt by his unexpected marriage to his Faber secretary Valerie Fletcher, 38 years his junior.
Crawford is a fine interpreter of Eliot’s later poetry. “Marina” is the cry of the childless man. “Four Quartets” is a meditation on divine love, striving after a mystical communion with God and “the greatest English-language” poem of the second world war. Despite “hidden personal references”, Crawford thinks that Hale is peripheral to “Four Quartets”. “Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me”, declared Eliot in a statement posthumously released by his estate on the opening of the Hale archive, adding “Vivienne [sic] nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive.”
Crawford and Hollis probe Eliot’s complexities with tact and empathy without turning a blind eye to unpalatable aspects of this twisting character. Their meticulous biographical readings unpick Eliot’s own impersonal theory of poetry and offer intriguing insights into the man behind the mask. Hollis is disturbed by the misogyny and anti-Semitism excised by Pound from the drafts of The Waste Land. And there is an irony in Pound’s editorial altruism striking out from Eliot’s poem a shameful prejudice he shared.
Pound’s fascist and antisemitic wartime radio broadcasts from Rome engineered his imprisonment for treason, followed by years in a Washington institution for the insane, his life’s work, by his own admission, botched. Hollis tells the story of Pound, under fear of armed arrest, asking his wife to bury his copy of “The Waste Land” for safekeeping. It bore Eliot’s personal inscription “for E. P., miglior fabbro”, the better craftsman; the laurel wreath Dante had bestowed on the troubadour Arnaut Daniel.
In old age, Nobel Prize-winner Eliot cabled Pound to reassure his friend he had been “epoch making”. Now that their epoch is over, and their attitudes and prejudices are markedly out of step with many 21st-century readers, the question arises as to why their words matter, why should we care about Eliot or Pound today?
After Eliot’s death in 1965, Pound urged people to “READ HIM” having in mind the long poem he helped deliver into the world. So, too, do Hollis and Crawford who, in their different ways, demonstrate the poetic alchemy that transmutes ordinary suffering into scintillating art.
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis, Faber £20, 544 pages
Eliot After The Waste Land (Eliot Biographies, 2) by Robert Crawford, Jonathan Cape £25, 624 pages
Hollis brilliantly sifts through the tendrils of TS Eliot’s unhappiness and shows how, with help from friends, he broke through his tortured silence to create an era-defining poem.
Another 50 years on that rebirth shows no sign of flagging. This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet (Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl. This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s. Those letters cast some retrospective light on Eliot’s own sense of the creation of his era-defining poem. “I was never quite a whole man,” Eliot wrote to Hale. “The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed.”
The poem itself, Hollis details and dramatises, broke out of that tortured silence in 1921. At the beginning of that year, in which Eliot turned 33, he was still describing himself in a prospectus as “Banker, critic, poet”. By the year end, Hollis notes, “the priorities would be reversed”. The weather seemed a part of it. In his “London Letter”, written for the American review The Dial in July 1921, Eliot noted: “The vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot rainless spring.” And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”.
Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth
garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed…
Gordon, meanwhile, in her tracing of Hale’s life to its end – she never married and pursued a career as a teacher, actor and director – reminds us that she lived her own life, made her own choices and ‘would not want our pity’. She may have been Eliot’s Hyacinth girl but she was considerably more.
Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story.Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner.Faber, pp. 320, £20
Prospect Magazine, October 6, 2022.
May is the
merriest month, and there are few more cheering journeys than a train ride into
the green wilds of Sussex, in southern England. And no destination is more
peaceable than Charleston, the secluded house, wreathed with gardens, that
found fame as a rural HQ of the Bloomsbury Group. Now a place of pilgrimage, it
continues to summon writers and artists, with audiences to match. Here it was,
for a festival in May, that the culture-hungry came. Drifting in their dozens
past fruit trees and congregations of flowers, they entered a large tent, where
the trappings of Bloomsbury-scented comfort were on sale: straw hats, cushions,
padded Alice bands, and vials of Sussex Rose Aromatic Water for the soothing of
high or fevered brows. We took our seats for the arrival, on a raised dais, of
Benedict Cumberbatch. He it was whom the pilgrims had travelled to see, and
this is what he had to say:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs
out of the dead land, mixing
Memory
and desire, stirring
Dull
roots with spring rain.
There was
more, and worse. “White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in
a little low dry garret.” And this: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that
cannot spit.” And again: “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the
faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves.” What had we
done, in the sun-warmed paradise of Charleston, to deserve all these mountains,
bones, and teeth? So much death, on a day that promised such life!
Cumberbatch
was, needless to say, reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which will
shortly celebrate its hundredth birthday. The occasion was a rare one, because
the recitation was entwined with music: a score composed in the nineteen-seventies
by the novelist Anthony Burgess, no less, to accompany the poem. Cumberbatch,
keyed up by the piano and the other instruments arrayed behind him, took the
lines at quite a tilt, slipping between accents like a quick-change artist
donning pants and hats, and thus reminded us how funny this bitter poem can be.
Eliot’s sense of humor, whether savage, lugubrious, or droll, never lay far
below the surface, and, as we honor the centenary of his most celebrated work,
it’s worth bearing in mind his responses to a questionnaire that was sent out
to a batch of poets, in July, 1922. “Do you think that poetry is a necessity to
modern man?” Eliot: “No.” “What in modern life is the particular function of
poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature?” Eliot: “Takes up less
space.”
Cumberbatch’s
contribution was one of a host of events that are being held in 2022, to mark
the centenary and, one hopes, to probe the tenacity with which “The Waste
Land,” far from wilting, has taken root and spread. Though it covers vast
geographical tracts, from Munich to the Himalayas, it is considered, with
justice, to be one of the great poems about London, and, in April, various
readings, concerts, and conversations, bundled together under the title
“Fragments,” took place in churches across what Eliot calls the “unreal city.”
Against the blackened wall of All Hallows by the Tower, there was a performance
of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Elsewhere, as a nod to the
presence of the single word “Alexandria” in “The Waste Land,” the Palestinian
DJ Sotusura played “old Arabic funk.” Would that Eliot had been alive to lend
an ear.
The word
“fragments,” to any Eliot fan, leads instantly to the climax of “The Waste
Land,” as it proceeds through cacophony to a haggard hush: “These fragments I
have shored against my ruins.” (Eliot originally wrote, “These fragments I have
spelt into my ruins,” but the final version is stronger for its hint of
desperate and unavailing bodily effort.) In another of this year’s tributes,
“Re-Wilding the Waste Land,” shards of the poem were mingled with musical
offerings from a choral ensemble, I Fagiolini, including two settings of “Deus
Venerunt Gentes”—“O God, the heathen are come,” from Psalm 79. I liked the
range of the wilding, but, at the risk of being a heathen, I do wonder how far
you can stray from “The Waste Land” without losing the thread. All in all, it
will be a relief to show up at the 92nd Street Y, on December 5th, when Ralph
Fiennes will read the poem, the whole poem, and, with any luck, nothing but the
poem.
Publishers,
too, are paying heed to the centenary. Newly available is “Eliot After ‘The
Waste Land,’ ” the second volume of a capacious biography by Robert Crawford;
the first part, “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to ‘The Waste Land,’ ” came out in
2016. (Notice how the poem is named in both titles, as the unarguable hinge on
which Eliot’s existence turned.) From Lyndall Gordon, who has already written
copiously on Eliot’s life, comes “The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden
Muse,” due in November, which allots a central place in the poet’s imaginative
world to Emily Hale, “an actor and drama teacher for whom he concealed a
lasting love.” More than eleven hundred letters to Hale from Eliot, secreted
for fifty years in Princeton’s Firestone Library and unsealed in 2019, form the
basis of Gordon’s discoveries. Her contention is that when Eliot writes, “we
came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,” in “The Waste Land,” it is Hale,
and only Hale, whom he is addressing. Readers who like their literary criticism
on the lofty side—“his romantic attachment to her light across the sea bringing
back his purity of heart”—will be on velvet.
More
grounded in its ambition is Matthew Hollis’s “ ‘The Waste Land’: A Biography of
a Poem,” due in December. Hollis delves into the deep background from which
“The Waste Land” arose: Eliot’s childhood in Missouri, as the scion of an
uncomfortably distinguished Unitarian clan; summers on the coast of
Massachusetts; his Harvard education; his fleeing to Paris and London; his
marriage to a young Englishwoman whom he scarcely knew, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in
1915; the incurable horror of that union, rich in sickness on both sides; his
fruitful friendship with Ezra Pound, without whose reshaping “The Waste Land”
would not have flourished as it did; and the books on which Eliot fed. There is
genuine suspense in the air, as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and
rumors, in the poet’s letters of long ago. Something was approaching and Eliot
could sense it. He needed calm to make a storm:
“He had
been anxious to get on to new work, December, 1920; had wanted to get to work
on a poem he had in mind, October, 1920; sought a period of tranquillity to do
a poem that he had in mind, September, 1920.”
If you take
fright at the intensity of such studies, or if you simply lack the shelf space,
I recommend a new app devoted to “The Waste Land”—Candy Crush for those of us
who found fault with an earlier version, in 2011, and have pined for an update.
The app bristles with textual information and commentaries, and with readings
of the poem by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen, a duo of Eileen
Atkins and Jeremy Irons, and, twice, Eliot himself. There is also a
“performance” of “The Waste Land” by Fiona Shaw, though whether and how it
should be performed, despite being Pentecostally thronged with voices, is open
to debate.
The
revelation is Mortensen, who is quick and quiet, revering the text while not
allowing that awe to shade into stiffness or pomposity. What’s often neglected
is that Eliot, though married to an Englishwoman and based in London, was still
an American when “The Waste Land” came out, and would not become a British
citizen until 1927; the poem, too easily Anglicized, is refreshed and made new
in the American tongue. In addition, alone of all the readers on the app,
Mortensen pauses to weigh the full Dantescan impact of the repetition in these
famous lines:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had
not thought death had undone so many.
For a
comparable thrust, go to YouTube, and to a clip of Bob Dylan intoning the
opening of “The Waste Land” and hitting the present participles, at the ends of
the lines, until they resound like a growly chant—“April is the cruellest
month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.”
Trust Dylan, Eliot’s most intrepid legatee, to turn what others view as a
monument into an action poem. Dylan casually says that it was written “in
memory of the death of Abraham Lincoln.” Huh? Must be the lilacs, I guess.
All of
which, for some people, will be about as thrilling as a dead bouquet, left over
from last Tuesday. Why such a fuss over an old poem? Who cares who reads which
lines with greater grace? One answer is that the new, in every field, flowers
out of the old; the radical, by definition, has roots. What’s more, Eliot has
the knack of sounding newer than the new. Another answer is that there’s no
choice in the matter, because the poem has already entered the language. This
time last year, for instance, if you had opened the business section of the
London Sunday Times, you would have found an article with the headline “I never
like buying shares in September—its the cruellest month for stocks.” (Eliot,
who worked at Lloyds Bank from 1917 to 1925, might have frowned at this
financial counsel, though what would have vexed him sorely is the lack of an
apostrophe.) You may not know “The Waste Land,” and you may not like it if you
do. But it knows you.
There was
no fanfare when “The Waste Land” first arrived. It was printed in the inaugural
issue of The Criterion, a quarterly journal, in October, 1922. On the front
cover was a hefty list of contents, among them a review by Hermann Hesse of
recent German poetry; an article on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which had been
published as a book in February of the same year; and an essay by an aged
British critic titled—wait for it—“Dullness.”
Eliot was
the begetter of The Criterion. He would edit it throughout its existence, until
it closed, in January, 1939. In the years between the two World Wars, during
which he surveyed—and held sway over—whole shires of the cultural domain, The
Criterion would be his minster, with “A Commentary,” often signed “T.S.E.,” as
an august and regular feature. No such pronouncements were evident, however, in
this initial issue. Instead, Eliot’s only contribution was “The Waste Land.” It
came with no preface, no afterword, and no warning. It was four hundred and
thirty-three lines long. It appeared at first glance to be a poem, but of a
disconcerting kind, and further glancing didn’t really help. Parts of it didn’t
look, or sound, or feel, like poetry at all:
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on
her daughter
They
wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix
d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit
twit twit
Jug jug
jug jug jug jug
So
rudely forc’d.
Tereu
Imagine
that you were a bookish reader, back in 1922. What did you make of this? Well,
maybe you identified the words in French—meaning “And O these children’s voices,
singing in the dome!”—as a line from “Parsifal,” a sonnet by Paul Verlaine.
Pursuing a line of thought, you recalled Wagner’s opera of the same name, and
the scene in which a sorceress washes the feet of the hero; and you wondered
how that ceremonial purification was meant to hook up with the activities of
Mrs. Porter (whoever she was) and her offspring. At this point, you wrinkled
your nose, and sniffed. Something indelicate, hard to define but impossible to
miss, was going on here, and your suspicions hardened at the stuttering of
those “jugs,” with their flavor of smutty Elizabethan slang. As for “Tereu,”
you dimly recognized it as a Latin vocative, referring to Tereus, who,
according to legend, violated his sister-in-law, Philomela, and cut out her
tongue. For her pains, the gods transmuted her into a nightingale. Now she and
her attacker were the stuff of Mr. Eliot’s mutations.
A more
important question: If you are an ordinary reader now, in 2022, with no
classical education, no French, and no access to opera, what happens when, by
chance, you pick up a book and stumble upon this same passage? What is your
first response? A snort of laughter, I presume, along with a suspicion that
this guy Eliot (whoever he is) must be taking you for a ride. If pressed, you
might describe the lines as starting off like a nursery rhyme and then
collapsing into nonsense. Whatever. You shrug, leaf ahead a couple of pages,
and find this:
A
current under sea
Picked
his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed
the stages of his age and youth
Entering
the whirlpool.
And then
this:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And
fiddled whisper music on those strings
Closing the
book, you move on. The whisperings, however, together with the birdlike twitterings,
reverberate in your mind’s ear. This noisy and peculiar work, like the snatch
of an overheard song, or a nocturnal stab of shame at the thought of someone
you once wronged, will not leave you alone.
There is
little doubt that, of these two first-time readers, the erudite and the
uninformed, Eliot would lean toward the second. “Genuine poetry can communicate
before it is understood,” he wrote, in an essay on Dante. “It is better to be
spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose
that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.” What he
sought, as both a writer and a reader, was “some direct shock of poetic
intensity.” True to that quest, “The Waste Land” is a symphony of shocks, and,
like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down. (Go to moma
and let your gaze move across Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” from west to
east. If you don’t flinch when you reach the faces on the right, bladed and
scraped like shovels, consult your optician.) The shocks have triggered
aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:
DA
Datta:
what have we given?
My
friend, blood shaking my heart
The
awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an
age of prudence can never retract
By this,
and this only, we have existed
Which is
not to be found in our obituaries
Or in
memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under
seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our
empty rooms
I happen to
think, for what it’s worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of “The
Waste Land,” are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a
doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of
our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over
what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by
the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the
shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double “o” of “rooms.”
And the word “surrender” could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at
the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible
politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a
Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will
face that overwhelming question: “What have we given?” It is something that
each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.
Like the
Book of Psalms, “King Lear,” and Nadal vs. Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2018, “The
Waste Land” is divided into five parts. Each part has a title: “The Burial of
the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What
the Thunder said.” What of the title of the poem itself? “Immature poets
imitate; mature poets steal,” Eliot wrote, and, as with Macavity, the master
criminal in his “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (1937), you can’t always
tell where the poet’s been. It could be, in this case, that he stole from
Tennyson’s “The Passing of Arthur,” and its undulating mood—“as it were one
voice, an agony / Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills / All night in a
waste land, where no one comes, / Or hath come, since the making of the world.”
But
Tennyson unfolds a single story, whereas Eliot has many tales to tell, some of
them overlapping, or no sooner begun than snapped off, and, to anyone versed in
Tennysonian euphony, “The Waste Land” can seem like a baffling Babel. You might
as well be rummaging through international newspapers, or spinning the dial on
a radio. Listen to the scraps of languages other than English—Italian, French,
German, Latin, Sanskrit—that litter the poem, and the profusion of people who
speak. Somebody named Marie, of aristocratic descent, recalls an episode from her
girlhood; someone else chatters to friends in a pub. The pub’s landlord chimes
in, too—“HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” There is a clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris,
and another seer, the blind Tiresias, with whom Odysseus once conversed in the
underworld, and who now watches two loveless urban dwellers making love.
Elsewhere, another woman brushes her hair and complains of bad nerves, while a
third records, without anger or animation, a sexual act (“After the event / He
wept”), which occurred in Richmond, in southwest London. She asserts her modest
origins:
“My
people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To
Carthage then I came.
Hang on,
what? Within three lines, we have jumped not just from Britain to Carthage, and
from modern to ancient, but from a woman to a man: the last line is taken from
St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” Chase down the quotation and you will discover
that immediately before it comes the clause “I became to myself a barren land.”
Aha.
Trying to
sort out who is uttering what, at any juncture, in “The Waste Land” is far from
a fool’s errand, but it’s a tough task nonetheless. (Anyone attempting it
should arm themselves with “The Poems of T. S. Eliot,” edited in two
redoubtable volumes by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.) Augustine is not the
only source whose words Eliot, ever the ventriloquist, throws into the mix.
Others include Dante, Milton, Marvell, Spenser, Baudelaire, the explorer Ernest
Shackleton, and a gang of English dramatists: John Webster, Thomas Middleton,
Thomas Kyd, and the leader of the pack, Shakespeare, who never keeps quiet for
long. “The Tempest,” especially, rumbles through the poem:
A rat
crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging
its slimy belly on the bank
While I
was fishing in the dull canal
On a
winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing
upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on
the king my father’s death before him.
Catch the
echo here, in the final line, and you want to ask what the hell Shakespeare’s
Ferdinand is doing behind a gashouse. Isn’t he meant to be shipwrecked on
Prospero’s island? The whole passage, collapsing history in on itself, is
startling even now, so imagine how it flummoxed readers in 1922. Parody was not
far behind; in a tale of 1925, P. G. Wodehouse mocked “the jolly, wholesome
sort of poetry the boys are turning out nowadays”—specifically, “good, honest
stuff about sin and gasworks and decaying corpses.”
Meanwhile,
for readers who didn’t catch the echo, Eliot offered help. Appended to “The
Waste Land,” when it appeared as a book, in late 1922, was a section titled
“Notes on the Waste Land.” This gave references for the litany of quotations
that bestrew the poem: “The Tempest, I, ii,” “Ezekiel, II, i,” “Paradise Lost,
IV, 140.” There is no disguising an aroma of practical jesting; Eliot treats us
to nineteen lines of Ovid, untranslated, and solemnly informs us that, when
“The Waste Land” mentions a hermit-thrush, the bird in question is Turdus
aonalaschkae pallasii. Nice to have that sorted out. “It was discovered that
the poem was inconveniently short,” he later explained, “so I set to work to
expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with
the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that
is still on view today.” If the Notes were bogus, however, why did Eliot
include them in subsequent collections of his verse, where length was no longer
an issue? Forget hermit-thrushes; what’s the Latin name for a wild goose?
The gravest
charge to be levelled against the Notes is that they lure students into
approaching “The Waste Land” from the most disheartening direction—not yielding
to it as a spell by which to be struck and charmed, like Ariel’s song in “The
Tempest,” but confronting it as a code to be cracked. That was my experience,
in high school. Grim with bewilderment, I tried plowing through Jessie Weston’s
“From Ritual to Romance” and J. G. Frazer’s encyclopedic “The Golden Bough”
because Eliot deferred to them at the start of the Notes, and because Colonel
Kurtz, absurdly, keeps them on his bedside table, in “Apocalypse Now.” When
Marlon Brando groaned “The horror! The horror!,” he was quoting the same words,
from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” that Eliot had originally chosen as an
epigraph to “The Waste Land.” If Francis Ford Coppola could wander down a
rabbit hole, so could I.
There is
much that the Notes leave unsaid. Take the loneliest lines of the poem:
I have
heard the key
Turn in
the door once and turn once only
We think
of the key, each in his prison
Thinking
of the key
We are
ushered, by the Notes, toward two relevant passages: one from Dante’s Inferno,
and one from “Appearance and Reality,” a work of 1893 by the British
philosopher F. H. Bradley, on whom Eliot had written his doctoral thesis at
Harvard. But something else haunts Eliot’s vision of incarceration, and I would
wager a solid sum that he is summoning, consciously or otherwise, a sentence
from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” as told to Sherlock Holmes: “She
smiled back at me, closed my door, and a few moments later I heard her key turn
in the lock.” Eliot was a confirmed and ardent Sherlockian; the cry of “What!
are you here?,” in the deserted street of “Four Quartets,” recalls an urgent
question posed by Sir Henry Baskerville—“What, are you coming, Watson?”—in “The
Hound of the Baskervilles,” from which Eliot would pinch the murky word
“grimpen.”
Admirers of
Eliot should take care, though, not to dwindle into detectives. To hunt for
clues in “The Waste Land” is, however gratifying, to risk shutting ourselves
in, and there is a liberating pleasure to be had in looking outward from the
poem, and onward. The key to the key, that is, lies not just in Dante, Bradley,
and Conan Doyle but also in what the image opens up, for the purposes of later
creative endeavors. Francis Bacon, for example, was much obsessed by Eliot, and
his 1971 triptych, “In Memory of George Dyer,” shows a solitary figure, beside
a staircase, feeding a key into a lock. Likewise, in the plainly titled
“Painting” (1978), a violet-fleshed foot stretches toward a door, with a key
gripped tight between its toes. Temperamentally, Eliot, who dressed like a
banker because he was a banker, could scarcely be more distant from the
chaos-smeared Bacon, but there’s no accounting for influence. If Eliot steals
from Ophelia at the end of the pub sequence in “The Waste Land”—“Good night,
ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”—who can begrudge Lou
Reed his own theft, in “Goodnight Ladies,” the final track of “Transformer”?
The most
resourceful homage paid to “The Waste Land,” and the most biting, is a work of
1990 by Martin Rowson, prized as a cartoonist for the Guardian. He reconfigures
the poem, in the format of a graphic novel, as a riff on Raymond Chandler’s
“The Big Sleep” and on the ensuing Howard Hawks film: a notion so perfectly
attuned to my interests that Rowson should have invoiced me directly. The
conceit is sustained in beguiling style, with a Bogart-like hero, Chris
Marlowe, sleuthing his way through the arcana of the poem—“Then I saw the
Hyacinth Kid”—and straining, like every reader, to lend them some semblance of
a plot. The cinematic, literary, and art-historical allusions are fired off
like gunshots, and the result, despite finding no favor with the Eliot estate
(the British edition was sternly censored and altered), digs up something tense
and tenebrous in “The Waste Land” that had previously passed unobserved: here
is a poème noir.
Eliot’s
words are everywhere, in other words. The more closely you map “The Waste
Land,” the more it assumes the shape of an isthmus; so much of the past, both
public and personal, streamed into its making, and so much has flowed from it
ever since. When one of its most resonant quatrains is declaimed through a
megaphone by Anthony Blanche, the resident dandy of “Brideshead Revisited,” he
is obviously signalling the fashionable status of the poem, as its fame
increased through the nineteen-twenties and thirties, but there’s more to it
than that. He is restoring, as it were, the adamantine beauty of the rhyming
lines—pentameters in parenthesis, which embed the travails of the present day
inside the remoteness of myth:
(And I
Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted
on this same divan or bed;
I who
have sat by Thebes below the wall
And
walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Eliot died
in 1965. His wife Vivienne had passed away in 1947, having spent almost a
decade in a psychiatric hospital. In 1957, to the surprise of many friends,
Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and found with her a private
contentment that had hitherto eluded him. Another miracle, of sorts, arrived in
1968. A trove, long thought lost, was unearthed in the Berg Collection at the
New York Public Library: a sheaf of Eliot’s drafts of “The Waste Land,” some
handwritten, some typewritten, with wordless loops and slashes scrawled across
the text and brusque observations at the side. Edited by Valerie Eliot, the
keeper of the poet’s flame, the sheaf was published in 1971, under the
formidable title “The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original
Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.”
To
encounter the book, at college, was to feel like an Egyptologist, breaking into
a sealed tomb. As for the writing on the walls, there were three scribes in
all: Eliot himself; Pound, his fellow-poet and, on this occasion, his
indispensable midwife; and Vivienne. It was thus our privilege to see that,
next to a splintered piece of domestic repartee (“ ‘What is that noise?’ The
wind under the door”), Vivienne had pencilled the word “WONDERFUL.” Also, we
now realized, the fourth and leanest part of the poem, “Death by Water,” had
been much bulkier to begin with, filled out with a lengthy nautical
narrative—filled yet not improved, in Pound’s judgment, which is why he took a
scalpel to the entire passage. His decisiveness, in grasping what was essential
and what superfluous in Eliot’s conjurings, remains a scrupulous feat of
creative attention, outdone in generosity only by his praise for the finished
product. “Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies,” he
wrote to Eliot. “The Waste Land” was, he announced, “A damn good poem.”
For the
centenary, Valerie Eliot’s edition has been reissued, with extra material. If
you badly wish to know how much Eliot spent on breakfast at the Albemarle
Hotel, Margate, on the north coast of Kent, in October, 1921, your craving can
now be satisfied, because his hotel bills are shown in all their glory. I
feasted upon them, having long ago made the trek to Margate, in tribute to the
town’s cameo appearance in “The Waste Land”—“On Margate Sands. / I can connect
/ Nothing with nothing.” Some of the poem was composed there; the following
month, much of its finale was brought forth, with a fluency verging on the
trancelike, in Lausanne, on the shore of Lake Geneva. (It’s a natural spot,
beside the water, for beginnings and conclusions. Edward Gibbon completed “The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” there, and Dickens started “Dombey and
Son.”) To Switzerland, therefore, I made my sombre and illogical way, this
summer, and retraced the route that Eliot used to take from his hotel to his
appointments with Dr. Roger Vittoz, the author of “Treatment of Neurasthenia by
Teaching of Brain Control.” Downhill to one’s shrink, then an uphill struggle on
the walk back: a very Eliot-like odyssey.
Of such
madness there shall be no end. I have a memory of moving house and of thanking
the men who had spent a day boxing up the contents of my bookshelves. One guy
replied, in a tone of rueful defeat, “If I never see another book on T. S.
Eliot, it’ll be too soon.” That was thirty years ago. Since then, the secondary
and tertiary literature on the poet, and on “The Waste Land,” has swelled
beyond reckoning. We have had Eliot’s letters: nine volumes and counting, and
taking us only to 1941, with twenty-four years of his life to go. We have had
his collected prose, too: a mere eight volumes, but sufficient to test the
wrists of an elderly reader. All the matter within is available online, for a
subscription, but a lightweight Eliot means flirting with convenience, and
where’s the fun—the necessary pain—in that?
Meanwhile,
the critical and biographical stampede continues. Is it nostalgia alone that
makes me doubt the calibre of the current beasts? Back in 1972, “Eliot in His
Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘The Waste Land’ ”
sported contributions from figures as substantial, and as energetically
articulate, as Richard Ellmann, Hugh Kenner, and the poet Donald Davie. To skip
ahead forty years, to a volume such as “ ‘The Waste Land’ at 90,” is to bump
into a mass of inelegant formulations, doomed, or perhaps designed, to block
off the work more securely than ever against the incursions of an amateur
reader—the very last fate that “The Waste Land,” of all poems, either deserves
or needs. Without a tool kit of literary theory, none of us could unpick this,
with its telling typo:
“Instead of
using realism, with its epistemological intention to totalize and represent the
reality of a whole world and life, the poem favors textual anarchism (a kind of
rhizomatic and destablizing structure) in order to create a work which is
intrinsically and openly incomplete.”
“The Waste
Land” is already difficult enough; we should not make it more so. Less and
less, after forty years of living with the poem, am I tempted to regard it, or
shun it, as a cryptogram. Rather, in Eliot’s own words, from an earlier work,
“I am moved by fancies / That are curled around these images, and cling.” We
talk of a friend having had a difficult childhood, or enduring a difficult
marriage, and that is a more constructive model, I think, for drawing near to
the intractability of “The Waste Land.” It is a brave imagination that can keep
to order while exploring the terrain of its own torments; rarely has a
nightmare—not wholly comprehended by the dreamer—been dramatized with such
variety and wit. One of the first people to hear the poem was Virginia Woolf,
and her judicious response, as outlined in a journal entry of June, 1922, has
lost none of its honesty:
“Eliot
dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it &
rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; &
tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure.”
Woolf
added, “One was left, however, with some strong emotion.” Indeed.
As Benedict
Cumberbatch prepared to read at Charleston, in May, a festival assistant who
was working that day told me that—unlike the paying audience, most of whom
looked three times her age—she did not know “The Waste Land.” At last: the
ideal recipient, as unencumbered as Eliot would wish. After the reading, I
asked what had struck her most about the poem. “The landscapes,” she said,
without hesitation. “The rocks and the rivers. All that dryness.” Not for her
the unreal city, or the mob of languages, but a natural world under clear and
present threat. “The Waste Land,” in short, can speak to the ecological dread
of her generation as it spoke to the social and political anxieties of those
who had weathered the First World War. The poem, which is prefaced with the
words of a Sibyl, is fated to tell each of us, from one era to the next,
whatever it is that we most fear to hear.
Desiccation
was in the air, as Eliot toiled on the poem. A “London Letter” that he wrote
for the July, 1921, issue of The Dial begins in meteorological mode, with a
typical touch of the smilingly sinister. “The vacant term of wit set in early
this year with a fine hot rainless spring; the crop of murders and divorces has
been poor compared with that of last autumn,” he reported. “A new form of
influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste
in the mouth.” We are close to the stonescape of “The Waste Land,” hostile and
ungreen, “where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter.” Later,
amid “dry sterile thunder without rain,” we hear a plainsong of the unbearable:
If
there were water
And no
rock
If there
were rock
And also
water
And
water
A spring
A pool
among the rock
I remember
sitting in a classroom, next to a friend of mine (the only one with a serious
ear for music), who listened to those lines and said, “I feel so thirsty.” He
had got what Eliot planned for: the shock of the dry.
How far
back the parching goes is not easy to gauge. Can a want of water be traced to
its source, like a river? Lately, I have come across a path that has not, to
the best of my knowledge, been traced or trampled on before. Robert Crawford
glances briefly at it, then moves on. What took me there was a letter from
Eliot to his mother, in May, 1919, in which he asks that she send him “the
Rollo books,” adding, “I was anxious that they be preserved.” He then adds, “If
there is anyone else in the immediate family who would treasure them as much as
I (for I think highly of them), let them have them.” Pressing his claim while
denying it, Eliot is awkwardly eager to have what he calls “the beloved Rollo
books” in his clutches.
The Rollo
books, in fourteen volumes, were popular tales of moral instruction, playful
and severe, by a prolific children’s author, Jacob Abbott. Published in the
eighteen-thirties and forties, and frequently reprinted, they revolved around a
young boy, Rollo, and his adventures. We know that the stories were read and
reread by Eliot and his siblings, because three of the volumes—frail and almost
spineless, crudely colored in as cherished books often are, and cocooned in
protective boxes—sit in the London apartment where Eliot lived with Valerie,
and where he died. It is now the home of the T. S. Eliot Foundation.
The Rollo
books are a portal into the imaginative world of the poet, before he became a
poet; I believe them to be a part of that becoming. Picture the young Eliot
reading the admonitions that are handed down to Rollo by his father: “You
cannot at first control your imagination entirely; but if you steadily exert
yourself to keep your mind on other objects, you will soon learn to do so.” (A
portent of Dr. Vittoz.) Think of the doleful invocations from “Four
Quartets”—“This is the death of air,” “This is the death of water and fire”—and
you will be dumbfounded, as I was, to learn that the last four Rollo books, on
“Rollo’s Philosophy,” are subtitled “Water,” “Air,” “Fire,” and “Sky.” Most
pertinent of all is “Rollo at Play,” one of the three surviving volumes at the Eliot
Foundation. In one ominous chapter, “Who Knows Best, a Little Boy or His
Father?,” Rollo wants to “go a blueberrying” with his cousin Lucy. His uncle
puts the dampeners on the plan:
“I am in hopes we are going to have some
rain.”
“In hopes,” thought Rollo; “that is very
strange.”
Rollo grows
grouchy, refuses to join Lucy in alternative games, and earns a Biblical
broadside from his father:
“Your heart
is in a very wicked state. You are under the dominion of some of the worst of
feelings; you are self-conceited, ungrateful, undutiful, unjust, selfish, and,”
he added in a lower and more solemn tone, “even impious.”
Rollo tries
to defend himself:
“I did not know that there was need of rain
in the fields.”
“Did not you?” said his father. “Did not you
know that the ground was very dry, and that, unless we have rain soon, the
crops will suffer very much?”
“No, sir,” said Rollo.
“It is so,” said his father; “and this rain,
which you are so unwilling to have descend, is going down into the ground all
over the country, and into the roots of all the plants growing in the fields.”
At last, as
ever, the child is rebuked, and the lesson learned. Seeing the soil “drinking
in the rain with delight,” he ponders his own selfishness. “In a word Rollo was
now beginning to be really penitent. The tears came into his eyes; but they
were tears of real sorrow for sin, not of vexation and anger.” Here is Eliot in
waiting: the self-laceration, the guilty submission to chastisement, and, above
all, the belief in aridity as the natural—even preferable—state of affairs.
Dryness is what Rollo wants. Redemption and relief are so distant, and so
inconceivable, that it’s better not to pray for them at all.
The
extraordinary fact is that, at the other end of Eliot’s life, the drought was
eased. Having all but died in body and spirit in his time with Vivienne, he
found himself revived by unforeseeable love. It was in recognition of that new
life—his vita nuova, befitting a perennial reader of Dante—that he presented Valerie
with a book, on February 17, 1958. It was a first edition of “The Waste Land,”
from 1922, and it still exists in the couple’s home, in London. The words that
Eliot inscribed at the front of the poem have never been seen in public, until
now:
“This book belongs to Valerie, and so does
Thomas Stearns Eliot, her husband. He could not give her this book, for he had
no copy to give her. She had wanted the book for many years. She had possessed
the author for over a year, when the book came. She had made his land blossom
and birds to sing there. “
The Shock
and Aftershocks of “The Waste Land” By Anthony Lane. The New Yorker, September
26, 2022.
For much of
his life T.S. Eliot was surrounded by an aura of greatness: people accepted it,
and behaved accordingly. That kind of consensus is not helpful for a writer or
his works, as Eliot himself clearly saw, observing that nobody had ever written
anything significant after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature – true at the
time and mostly true since. His work is now in the position of Hamlet when he
wrote a famous essay on the play: that the universal agreement of its greatness
had hidden an understanding of its failures, its strangeness and what it
couldn’t do. We take the greatness of Eliot’s poetry pretty much for granted;
but in the centenary of The Waste Land, some cracks are beginning to appear in
a once unassailable reputation.
The story
that Robert Crawford tells has a willed aspect and one that can’t be
controlled: what posterity is going to think. Eliot allowed the dazzling
innovation and lyric force of The Waste Land to settle in. As a public
intellectual and founding editor of Faber and Faber, he became the greatest
impresario of poetry of the century, identifying the best poets of every
generation, from W.H. Auden to Ted Hughes. They were often poets very unlike
himself, and publishing them says a lot for his intelligent breadth of
curiosity.
There is
also his private life, which has attracted much attention, as if it told us
more about his culture than about him. His first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood,
was a disaster; they should never have gone near each other. Vivienne was a
talented writer who was profoundly unstable and we cannot draw any kind of
wisdom from what she said or did. When she told an embarrassed party that ‘I
loathe men – all men, just loathe them’, it was not out of any special insight
but because she was mad. As a character in Kingsley Amis says, madness ‘tells
us nothing about what [the mad] do in the rest of their lives, gives no insight
into the human condition and has no lesson for sane people except how sane they
are… they may make some very odd remarks but that’s because they’re mad’. It is
impossible not to feel extremely sorry for them both. Eliot worked hard to
protect and support Vivienne, and only when there was no alternative was she
removed to a place of safety.
People may
feel differently about his long apparent courtship by letter of his first love,
Emily Hale, the details of which have only recently emerged. She was a support
during the worst Vivienne period, and they appeared to have fallen in love. She
expected Eliot to propose eventually; but when Vivienne died, he saw quite
suddenly that he could not marry her. She was undoubtedly bitter, but his
mistake was only to share intimacies in the first place, and to protract the
situation for years.
There is,
finally, his second marriage to his much younger secretary, Valerie Fletcher,
which was unlikely, but immensely happy on both sides. Enchantingly, he
proposed in a handwritten letter which he handed her at her desk, as if it were
about royalties to be typed. Valerie devoted the rest of her long life to
guarding Tom’s estate with an exemplary sense of responsibility, putting a
magnificently authoritative edition of his letters in train.
The final
principal aspect of the narrative, which not many people saw coming, is Eliot’s
anti-Semitism. In his lifetime, challenges were made to some directly
anti-Semitic lines in the poetry (‘The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew
is underneath the lot’) and the essays: ‘Reasons of race and religion combine
to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable [in society].’
Private statements that have since emerged are worse still: ‘Why is there
something diabolic about so many Jews?’ ‘There are enough Jews in the English universities
as it is.’
Many
similar statements can be found in other writers, but what puts Eliot on
another level was his continuing to make them and, even in the face of the
Third Reich, commending an article talking of ‘so-called anti-Semitism’, or
expressing a concern about the arrival of refugees: ‘Jews in the mass are
antipathetic.’ When one refugee child was adopted by a friend, Eliot was happy
to note that ‘it’ was ‘not at all objectionably Jewish to look at’. His was the
worst kind of anti-Semitism, being elevated to an idiotic sort of principle. Of
the Holocaust he suavely observed: ‘To suggest that the Jewish problem may be
simplified because so many will have been killed off is trifling: a few
generations of security, and they will be as numerous as ever.’ His own view of
this was clear: his writing would only seem ‘anti-Semitic’ to ‘the Semite’.
I don’t see
how this horrible accumulation of evidence can do anything but close the long
debate. We can accept the mastery of the poetry and the immense good that it
and Eliot himself did in the world, but the ugly stain is not going to go away.
Wagner, who took care to exclude explicit anti-Semitic statements from his
artistic productions, has survived. Eliot, who did not, may in time be
downgraded.
This book
is a thorough, solid sequel to Crawford’s much-praised Young Eliot. It benefits
from the opening up of new material, the publication of letters and a proper
edition of both the prose and the full body of poetry. Crawford is more at home
in Eliot’s immediate milieu than in the wider world, and brings a rather flat
21st-century view to his subject. You cannot readily conflate
Anglo-Catholicism, which was so important to Eliot, with both Tory politics and
upper-class society. Many Anglo-Catholics, such as the crook in The Way of All
Flesh or the ones Charles Ryder’s cousin Jasper describes as ‘sodomites with
unpleasant accents’ in Brideshead Revisited, were neither Tories nor,
conspicuously, at all smart. Crawford makes more of Eliot’s encounter with Nancy
Cunard than do biographers do, who at most describe it as one-night stand,
which it probably was. On the other hand, he takes a justifiably brisk line
with those biographers of Vivienne who have pursued unlikely theories, such as
Tom being a secretly promiscuous homosexual.
I would
have welcomed more treatment of some of the ridiculous stories that accumulated
about Eliot in his lifetime, which tell a lot about the way his contemporaries
felt about him. You won’t find here Ivy Compton-Burnett’s vignette of sharing a
taxi with him and Valerie talking exclusively about ‘the Rent Act, cake shops,
fishmongers, greengrocers in the Gloucester Road and where to go for the best
fillet steak’. Nor the deathless story of Mrs Dylan Thomas at a party, sticking
her elbow into the bowl of ice cream that Eliot was eating, presenting it to
him and instructing him to ‘lick it off’. And was there really nothing to say
about Henry Reed’s ‘Chard Whitlow’, one of the greatest parodies in the
language? What did Eliot think of this dazzling take on Four Quartets? An
account of a writer that excludes serious dissent and trivial mockery will
inevitably give the impression of nervousness on his subject’s behalf.
Some
detailed and impertinent analysis of money would also have been of interest:
the individual Four Quartets were among those implausible ration-book
bestsellers. We hear that the 1948 Selected Poems had a print run of 50,000.
What did that mean in an era when taxation reached a level of near
confiscation? Is it accurate to talk of ‘substantial royalties and post-Nobel
wealth’?
One small
but irritating fault of the biography is Crawford’s occasional unwillingness to
cite proper sources. We are given only a reference in the collected letters to
Peter Quennell’s description of Eliot, apparently in the 1920s, as an
‘old-fashioned City gentleman’, rather than any indication of whether it was a
contemporary observation or (as I suspect) written much later in one of
Quennell’s autobiographies. It’s bad manners, too, to credit a Daily Mail news
report for the Queen Mother’s reminiscences of Eliot rather than A.N. Wilson,
who broke the omertà of a private party to report them in this magazine. It may
seem a petty point, but in a book that aims for authority it’s vital to let the
reader know where your evidence comes from.
This
biography, however, is going to play a large part in any future assessment of
Eliot, and has an overall solid authority. What will happen to that reputation?
Will it come down to the power and fresh ability to surprise of ‘Burnt Norton’
and the third part of The Waste Land? Or will the rest of Eliot’s work in time
follow the late verse dramas into a miasma, made up of the unrecoverable
acclaim of a past age, an unsympathetic fussiness about points of abstruse doctrine
and the undeniable bad smell of remarks made in passing? We won’t find out.
Is T.S.
Eliot’s great aura fading? By Philip Henscher. The Spectator, June 4, 2022.
