Young Eliot (77 page)

In Paris Tom (whose own imaginings turned more than once in his work to men who eliminate women) talked with his countryman Pound about books, including ancient Greek drama. The Eliots met Pound's publisher Horace Liveright, who was visiting. They dined with Joyce. Eager for the publishing coup of 1922, the ambitious Liveright was angling to publish
Ulysses
and further work by Pound as well as Tom's new poem. However, Liveright worried that this last seemed too short to make a book, and soon asked if the poet could ‘add' more material.
7
Tom spoke with Jacques Rivière and went looking for André Gide; both wanted him to contribute to the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. In the Pounds' small studio apartment at 70 bis, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens and less than a mile from Tom's old student lodgings, Pound pored over the bundle of papers containing his friend's most recent poetry. Astutely, he opined on 8 January that this new work was only ‘in semi-existence'.
8
It looked ‘damn good', but needed reshaping. A month or so later he wrote that Tom had arrived with a ‘poem (19 pages) in his suit case' and that it had been ‘finished up here'.
9
Pound was very much part of that final honing; the bundle had run to more than nineteen pages. Revising and editing continued after Tom returned to London. This process involved both himself and Pound, who scribbled vigorously in blue pencil over Tom's words. They went through the whole thing at least three times each, pretty much halving its length.

Pound's
Poems 1918–21
had just been published by Boni and Liveright. The volume contained the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh ‘Cantos', which Tom had read earlier with fascination. Criss-crossing history and geography, these poems fused Western and Eastern motifs; bookishly, they melded quotations from several languages, mixing lyric moments with passages of direct speech. In compositional technique, they were akin to parts of
The Waste Land.
Used to editing, Pound had been doing more than working on his ‘Cantos'. In 1921 he had been looking over and bringing into print another long poem, Jean Hugo's ‘The Cape of Good Hope', a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page typescript translation of Jean Cocteau's capacious 1918
Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance.
Pound had subjected it to a ‘brushing up' until, he felt, it read as if ‘written originally in English'; it had appeared in the Autumn 1921
Little Review
which Tom had read by November.
10

Immersed in the Parisian literary scene, Pound had a taste for Cocteau's work.
Le Cap
emanated from the Paris of Dada, Picasso and Stravinsky. With its ‘foaming Cumean / shaken Sybil', fragmented verse paragraphs, odd sounds (‘ue ue eo ea') and snatches of song, this poem too, while dealing with the modern world of war and air travel, ranged across history.
11
Hints of narrative in it remain only slivers.
12
In suggesting how Tom should revise
The Waste Land
, Pound cut swathes of conventional storytelling: out went the Popeian couplets about Fresca (Pope had done this sort of thing better) and the long depiction of sailing off America's north-east coast. As the drafts were scribbled on and sent back and forth, the poem became more cubist or kaleidoscopic. Pound also approved cutting the account of a Boston night on the town which had opened part one. Now, after that excision, the work began strikingly with ‘April is the cruellest month', and had at its start a focus on ‘breeding'. Turning convention on its head, Tom's arresting lines present the renewing fertility of spring as painful, not pleasurable: April brings back a torturing cycle of mingled ‘Memory and desire'.
13
The poem develops less through extended narrative than through juxtapositions of striking images. Not without elements of ‘story' – the lines about walking through the desert longing for water now stand out all the more – in its episodic structure it has moved closer to French avant-garde verse.

Accepting Pound's brilliant suggestions, Tom remained the author and final shaper of his work. Pound's editing was highly ethical: he cut material, leaving only Tom's best words to stand, but did not interpolate words of his own. He was sharpening, rather than inventing or adding. This editor of genius was vital to
The Waste Land
, as was Vivien who also furthered the poem's honing. Once again, Tom's creative endeavour and illness operated eerily in tandem. As soon as he returned, alone, to London, he was ‘in bed with influenza' for at least ten days; and on 20 January, he wrote to Thayer mentioning he would ‘shortly have ready a poem of about 450 lines, in four parts', and asking whether the
Dial
might publish it. If so, how much might they pay?
14
Tom seemed minded to cut all the ‘Death by Water' section, and wondered if each of his poem's ‘four parts' might appear in successive issues of the magazine. At the end of his manuscript he had placed what Pound saw as ‘superfluities', including ‘Song for the Opherion' and ‘Exequy' in which a buried lover's ‘suburban tomb' becomes a holy place for ritual sex and suicide.
15
Wisely, Pound advised cutting these. They added nothing, and without them the final ‘Shantih shantih shantih' might resonate far more impressively. Pound convinced Tom that from ‘April' to ‘shantih' had to be how the poem should run.

‘Complimenti, you bitch', Pound wrote from Paris on 24 January, protesting himself intensely jealous of what had emerged from Tom's manuscripts. From the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs came increasingly bawdy verses celebrating how ‘Ezra performed the caesarean Operation' of delivering the eventual poem.
16
Towards the end of the month Tom still wondered about using ‘Gerontion' as a preface. No, Pound advised. Should all mention of Phlebas be cut? Absolutely not, came the reply from Paris. So the poem became a five-part piece, its fourth section much shorter than the others. Proud of his sometimes bloody interventions, Tom's assertive poetic midwife (who had been reading the work aloud and thought it sounded great) suggested that the epigraph from
Heart of Darkness
about ‘horror' might lack
gravitas
. Reluctantly, while considering it ‘somewhat elucidative', Tom dropped this. Later, drawing on his undergraduate reading of Petronius and his own darkest fears, he substituted instead the epigraph in Latin and Greek in which the withered Sibyl of Cumae longs ‘to die'.
17
Ultimately, using a phrase from Dante, in later editions he would dedicate the poem to Pound, calling him gratefully ‘
il miglior fabbro
' – the greater craftsman.

Even as he completed
The Waste Land
, Tom was getting ideas for another extended work in verse. Unfinished, unpublished, it would lie for several years. Like
The Waste Land
, ‘Sweeney Agonistes' is patterned on anthropological interpretations of literature (in this case Aristophanic ancient Greek comedies) which detected fertility rites undergirding literary forms. In both works sexual fertility has gone wrong. Tom's fragmentary drama would fuse these ideas with jazz-age songs and rhythms. In the wake of their meetings in Paris, he and Pound had been comparing notes on Greek plays, while Tom reread Aristophanes. Pound had odd ideas about human sexuality: he had opined that the ‘brain' might well be ‘in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid'.
18
He liked to see himself as a phallic force to be reckoned with, and suggested to his friend: ‘Aristophanes probably depressing, and the native negro phoque melodies of Dixee more calculated to lift the ball-encumbered phallus of man to the proper 8.30, 9.30 or even ten thirty level now counted as the crowning and alarse too often katachrestical summit of human achievement.'
19
Benignly, he wrote to Tom, ‘May your erection never grow less', and explained that ‘I had intended to speak to you seriously on the subject' in Paris.
20
This suggests that Pound realised
The Waste Land
was bound up profoundly with Tom's sex life; a few days earlier Pound had implied that the poem represented an ‘exuding' of ‘deformative secretions'.
21
In ‘Sweeney Agonistes', however satirically treated, Tom's articulation of sexual torment would continue. The poet who in life had fine yacht-club manners created a drama featuring a man who wants to ‘do a girl in'.
22

Tom and Vivien were reunited in London when she returned to the flat around 25 January to find him still ill with flu. ‘V. sends you her love', Tom wrote to Pound just after she was back, adding that she ‘says that if she had realised how bloody England is she would not have returned'. He had been feeling ‘excessively depressed'.
23
Nevertheless, he donned his dinner jacket on 2 February to dine with Lady Rothermere and Richard Cobden-Sanderson who was to become the publisher of the new magazine he would edit. He also tried to catch up with correspondence. A letter arrived from Thayer, offering $150 for Tom's new poem, sight unseen. Possibly sensing continuing tensions between the Eliots, as St Valentine's Day approached Thayer sent ‘Valentinian love to Vivien and yourself!'
24
On 14 February Tom lunched not with Vivien but with Conrad Aiken, telling him he was seeking an American publisher for his new long poem. Aiken recommended the Dunster House Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but, though Tom pursued it, this idea came to nothing.

He had begun showing
The Waste Land
to friends, including Aldington. Instead of accepting Thayer's offer (worth about £35), Tom cabled asking for at least £50, but his cable was garbled in transmission. Meanwhile he was writing more prose: London letters for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
and the
Dial
as well as a short piece for Lewis's
Tyro
arguing that ‘literature is not primarily a matter of nationality, but of language'. He did not want productions that were only of ‘local importance' like most modern writing from England, America and Ireland. He sought work like Joyce's, that had ‘not only the tradition but the consciousness of it'.
25
That was what the completed
Waste Land
possessed to an astonishing degree. It sent deep taproots into English-language verse, then went even further, in strong, sustaining contact with other European and non-European traditions.

Yet still he despaired. His
Dial
‘London Letter' for May emphasised ‘the particular torpor or deadness which strikes a denizen of London after his return' from an absence of ‘three months'. English and American poetry seemed, for the most part, ‘conventional and timid'. This
Waste Land
poet who would go on to write ‘The Hollow Men' pondered the frightening idea of ‘the man who has no core', and detected a lack of true ‘moral integrity' in modern poetry. American work, including the ‘uninteresting' verse of Robert Frost, had its own ‘torpor'.
26
Tom could debate the finer points of Jacobean drama, but his domestic situation was as bleak as ever. His own wife terminally sick, Middleton Murry understood such strains. Spending a weekend in Murry's company during February, Tom was able to set aside their aesthetic differences, replacing them with a sense of shared difficulties. A doctor told Vivien she should go at once to a nursing home. She could not sleep and Tom found it hard to cope with her. She went. Arranging to sublet their flat, he moved back to 12 Wigmore Street, waiting for her to return.

He contacted Pound, who was soon in touch with Scofield Thayer, telling him, ‘Eliot has merely gone to pieces again. Abuleia, simply the physical impossibility of correlating his muscles sufficiently to write a letter or get up and move across a room.' This was, Pound opined, ‘a pathological state, due to condition of his endocrines'.
27
Reflecting on Tom in late February, Katherine Mansfield decided he was ‘attractive' yet ‘pathetic': ‘He suffers from his feelings of powerlessness. He knows it. He feels weak. It is all disguise. That slow manner, that hesitation, side long glances and so on are
painful.
And the pity is that he is too serious about himself, even a little bit absurd. But its natural; it's the fault of London that. He wants kindly laughing at and setting free.'
28
Mary Hutchinson felt similarly about this man she was so fond of, and ‘tried hard to “loosen him up”'.
29
Pound, too, perceived his good friend needed to be emancipated from at least some of his troubles, and strove to buy him time to write without anxiety. Judging the situation desperate, Pound urged Thayer to find a way of getting Tom money – perhaps through a prize offered by the
Dial
, or maybe via a loan or subscription. Around this time Tom substituted that new epigraph to
The Waste Land
ending with those Greek words meaning, ‘I want to die'.
30

He was angry at Thayer, whom he felt was exploiting him. Their history of rivalry complicated friendship: eager for the success of the
Dial
, Thayer had been less than rapturous about Tom's editing a new magazine that might become a competitor. Tired, sometimes thin-skinned, Tom asserted the value of his own poetry in demanding more cash for
The Waste Land
. Drawing on the businessman part of his character, he pulled himself together and wrote to Pound, setting out terms he had agreed for his new, London-based but internationally oriented journal. He solicited Pound (who had turned against England's literary culture) as a contributor, hoping his friend might also attract work from Continental writers including Cocteau. Tom wrote, too, to Valéry Larbaud, asking to publish a lecture on Joyce that Larbaud had delivered in Paris during December. It would form part of the first number of the new ‘critical review'.
31
He secured a contribution for the same issue from Hermann Hesse on ‘Recent German Poetry', and convinced Sydney Schiff to translate
Blick ins Chaos
.