Young Eliot (76 page)

After just over a week of this psychotherapy Tom enthused about how ‘at moments I feel more calm than I have for many many years – since childhood – that may be illusory – we shall see'.
162
He listened to the sounds of the Swiss city, noisy when ‘children come downhill on scooters over the cobbles', pleasant when a local ‘Good orchestra plays “The Love Nest”', a hit from the 1920 Broadway show
Mary
, its tune simple and sentimental to the point of monotony, and its description poignantly remote from Tom's situation.
163
Asking her how she was, he mentioned it to his own close friend Mary Hutchinson in England.

Just a love nest

Cozy with charm,

Just a love nest

Down on a farm.

A veranda with some sort of clinging vine,

Then a kitchen where some rambler roses twine.

Then a small room,

Tea set of blue;

Best of all, room –

Dream room for two.

Better than a palace with a gilded dome,

Is a love nest

You can call home.
164

Tom listened as the Lausanne band played, and was very far away from all that.

In an odd way, there was a lot of American culture around him:
Tarzan
,
Les Nuits de New-York
and Charlie Chaplin at Lausanne's several cinemas; Broadway musical tunes in its streets; even in the local newspaper mention of ‘tourbillons' (tornados) near the Mississippi.
165
Thinking of his family, he sent a ‘Christmas letter'.
166
In lines written in Lausanne, but later dropped from his poem, he wrote of how ‘Aeneas' mother, with an altered face, / Appeared once in an unexpected place'. This allusion to a classical mother, Aphrodite, who is recognised by her son as ‘a goddess', is compared to the way ‘The sweating rabble in the cinema / Can recognise a goddess or a star'.
167
Such fusing of the ancient maternal with the erotic power of the screen ‘goddess' is telling. Like other aspects of the poem, it hints how much older mythological patterns underlie modern urban life; but it shows too a rather awkward attempt to reconcile the maternal with the erotic: a challenge for Tom in his life.

While he underwent psychological treatment, material from boyhood came into his head, mixing with his reading and recent sufferings. ‘By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept' was part of a passage he added to ‘The Fire Sermon', fusing the Old Testament psalmist's ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion' (Psalm 137:1) with his own situation here beside Lac Léman.
168
As his powers of concentration increased, he turned his attention not so much towards revising the poetry he had brought with him as to writing a fresh, concluding section. Matthew Gold has pointed out that the poet reached a stage where he was ‘speaking Vittoz' language' in his correspondence.
169
On 13 December he wrote to his brother Henry, ‘The great thing I am trying to learn is how to use all my energy without waste, to be
calm
when there is nothing to be gained by worry, and to concentrate without effort.' He hoped that if he could achieve this, ‘I shall place less strain upon Vivien, who has had to do so much
thinking
for me.'
170
A few days later he explained to Sydney Waterlow that he had become aware of ‘losing power of concentration and attention, as well as becoming a prey to habitual worry and dread of the future; consequently, wasting far more energy than I used, and wearing myself out continuously. And I
think
I am getting over that.' Tom was also ‘trying to finish a poem – about 800 or 1000 lines.
Je ne sais pas si ça tient.
[I do not know if it will work].'
171

The section that was to conclude his poem presented suffering and breakdown; also instruction involving ‘control'. Featuring a voice of authority emanating from a thunderstorm, it was sometimes clear and incantatory, but often a swirling vortex of fragments. The damp of wintry Lausanne and the physician who counselled ‘control' do not feature. Instead, presented through hypnotic repetition, the landscape is one of ‘sweat', ‘sand' and ‘dry sterile thunder and no rain'. There, like a hallucination, is heard the cry of a bird Tom remembered from boyhood:

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada, and

Dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip-drop drip-drop drop drop drop

But there is no water …
172

Pencilled in Lausanne on square-lined paper, these words formed part of what Tom regarded as his poem's finest section. The passage about searching for water in the desert and not finding it but hearing instead, like a vivid acoustic hallucination, the water-dripping song of the bird, communicates a sense of implacable desperation that can be detected equally by young children and by sophisticated older readers. Filled with longing, frustration, a restless search for spiritual meaning, and a fluid, incantatory beauty, it is one of the most haunting passages in poetry.

Tom seems to have written it relatively quickly, and made few changes in revision. ‘A moment comes', he wrote in 1922, ‘when the thing comes out almost automatically; I think that it is partly the anxiety and desire to express it exactly that form the obstacle; then a moment of self-forgetfulness arrives and releases the inspiration'.
173
That was how some of his finest poetry was written, not least in Margate and Lausanne.

He followed those lines containing the thrush's song with several other passages spliced together, including his pre-1914 one about the Dracula-like figure who ‘crawled head downward down a blackened wall'. Soon came another strange acoustic triumph: ‘Then spoke the thunder'. Readers hear a simple sound repeated three times

DA

…

DA

…

DA

…

Though articulated in the age of Dada, these monosyllables come from a very ancient fable. Each ‘DA' metamorphoses into a Sanskrit word, as happens in the original passage from the
Upanishads
that Tom had read at Harvard. Probably working from memory, he reordered the words. They remain untranslated, enhancing their aural weirdness and the poem's sense of resonating far into distances of time and space. In the original these sounds are uttered in response to urgent requests for guidance from the Lord of Creation, who speaks in the form of thunder. Each time the thunder-word ‘DA' is uttered, listeners interpret it differently, and each interpretation is pronounced correct: the first ‘DA' in the modern poem becomes ‘
Datta
' (which means ‘give'); the second becomes ‘
Dayadhvam
' (‘sympathise'); the third emerges as ‘
Damyata
' (‘control').
174

Yet in the poem each of these words of instruction is succeeded by an instance where the guidance has not been accepted, or, with painful consequences, seems to have been followed wrongly. The injunction to ‘give' brings mention of ‘The awful daring of a moment's surrender' which cannot be retracted and is kept secret; the counsel to ‘sympathise' brings an image of being locked solipsistically inside the prison of the self; the culminating advice to ‘control' sparks a memory of expertly sailing a boat, but this leads to an apparently vanished erotic opportunity: the mood of the verb in the phrase ‘your heart would have responded' suggests a heart that never did so.
175

Soon control seems lost. A short last verse paragraph brings further breakdown, whether heard in the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down' or in the swirl of fragments that ensues, bringing ‘ruins' and madness. ‘O Hieronimo!' Scofield Thayer had written in an unsigned ‘Comment' in the May 1921
Dial
, signalling disapproval of what seemed to him a crazy idea. Thayer was alluding to the figure of Hieronimo in Kyd's Elizabethan drama,
The Spanish Tragedy
, which carried the alternative title of
Hieronymo is Mad Agayne.
176
Tom's ‘Hieronymo's mad againe' glances towards the same play, sometimes regarded as an ancestor of
Hamlet
, and tilts his own poem towards insane breakdown, unless the repetition of the Sanskrit words of guidance and the final ‘Shantih shantih shantih' (meaning, Tom later explained, ‘The Peace which passeth understanding') can be heard as a closing note of calm.
177

Written in Lausanne, this latest section of the poem pivots between despair and saving guidance. Over a decade later, Tom told Virginia Woolf, ‘he wrote the last verses' of
The Waste Land
‘in a trance – unconsciously', and emphasised that ‘he did not like poetry that had no meaning for the ear'.
178
Veering among several languages, its lines usually strike readers more for their sound of chaos and longing, with a hint of final hush in the ‘Sh' of the three-times-repeated ‘Shantih', than for any sense of benign closure. In the manuscript there was a full stop after the last ‘Shantih', but Tom got rid of that punctuation mark when he typed up his draft. Even after he had completed this passage, he was uncertain how his poem should be arranged, and exactly how many sections would constitute the finished work. Writing to his brother on 13 December about how he liked being among people of ‘many nationalities', he stated, ‘I am certainly well enough to be working on a poem!'
179
The emphatic exclamation mark and the word ‘certainly' may signal that actually Tom was not quite sure how recovered or otherwise he was. Nor could he decide the exact length of his poem: ‘800 or 1000 lines'. He had still not been able to control it completely, to resolve it in its final order. Shortly before leaving Lausanne he told Henry he was about to rejoin Vivien in Paris, and looking forward to socialising there. Tom's phrasing suggests recovery, but not total well-being: ‘I am ever so much better, my concentration improves and I am beginning to feel full of energy. I am working at a poem too.'
180

People have long argued about whether or not the passages following the ‘DA' injunctions have biographical significance. In the section about giving, the poet wrote in his early manuscript draft, ‘My friend, my friend, beating in my heart, / The awful daring of a moment's surrender'.
181
Since the line above, in which the words ‘we brother' seem to have been crossed out, may indicate a male addressee, some detect the presence of Jean Verdenal. Yet the phrasing ‘My friend, my friend' echoes a speech in Act IV, scene i, of Dryden's
All for Love,
that play which Tom had so admired earlier in 1921. In it Dolabella, following an interchange about ‘constancy', laments how his friend Antony has lost his loving relationship with Cleopatra, whom he thinks unfaithful: ‘My friend, my friend, / What endless treasure thou hast thrown away'.
182
This echo of a ruined heterosexual relationship might more readily call to mind the Eliots' troubled marriage. The poem has roots in that relationship which contribute to its power, but it is written so that any autobiographical sources are endlessly refracted. In Tom's terminology, they are made ‘impersonal', given a wider, carrying resonance that came to voice the despair of a whole society rather than simply a damaged personal intimacy. That blend of the intimate and the overarching gives the poetry much of its remarkable power, its startling, aching acoustic.

Tom left Lausanne for Paris around New Year 1922, having written a poem like no other in the English language, but its final form remained unresolved. It was still a bundle of papers in his luggage. He was no longer happy with the title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices'. Apparently echoing the title of a poem by Madison Cawein (published in
Poetry
in January 1913), the new title he chose highlights despair, barrenness and his use of Jessie Weston's ideas about how ancient fertility ceremonies underpinned more modern religious and cultural designs. Tom drew on his memories of Weston's book at several points, and not least in the new lines written in Lausanne. These allude to the search for healing (provided, Weston explains, by ‘the Doctor'), to the revival of a ‘Waste Land', and to the Holy Grail quest with its ‘ruined Chapel' often linked to a cemetery.
183
Having read about the Grail quest since boyhood, Tom wrote of ‘tumbled graves, about the Chapel' in ‘What the Thunder Said'.
184
His poem would be called
The Waste Land.

 

16

The Waste Land

A
T
the start of 1922, when Tom reached Paris, his wife thought him ‘much better'.
1
Long-term residence in the French capital, she had decided, was not for her. Nevertheless, after he returned to London on 16 January, Vivien was going to stay on and spend time in Lyons without him.
2
Their relationship remained fraught. Pound, who had recently translated, for New York publisher Boni and Liveright Rémy De Gourmont's
Physique de l'amour
(a sexually explicit work advocating the right to ‘leave' monogamy, then ‘return at will'), considered having a serious conversation with his friend about sex.
3
Still, Tom seemed happier now ‘in the midst of Paris', so Pound decided not to broach the subject.
4
Tom went to see the charismatic, leggy ‘Paris Miss' Mistinguett ‘at the Casino de Paris'. A vibrant singer-actress, she made him think of music-hall stars he loved, including Marie Lloyd.
5
Explaining to John Quinn in February that Tom had come ‘back from his Lausanne specialist looking O.K.', Pound made it clear, however, that he was still ‘worried about' him. Might there be a way to release him from the bank, and, ideally, from Vivien? ‘Eliot has beautiful manners, wd. adorn any yacht club, etc.' Himself too wildly outspoken ever to adorn a yacht club, Pound was sure Tom ‘ought to be private secretary to some rich imbecile … failing that you might send over someone to elope, kidnap, or otherwise eliminate Mrs E.'
6