Young Eliot (81 page)

A newly printed
Criterion
went to Lady Rothermere, now in Florence. She was unimpressed. Another early copy went to the
Dial
. Yet even before these were dispatched, Tom's published poem had met with one of its best informed readers. Vivien, who knew ‘So much depends on the
Criterion
', felt the poem ‘has become a part of me (or I of it) this last year'.
115
Though she had given high praise to the passage about nervous anxiety within a couple's relationship, she had asked Tom to remove the line ‘The ivory men make company between us' – perhaps because it was simply too painful.
116
Feeling utterly bonded to the work, it seemed to her ‘a terrible thing, somehow, when the time came at last for it to be published'.
117
If
The Waste Land
, with its images of adultery, sex gone wrong and edgy, nervous exchanges, can seem like a pained act of exposure, nonetheless its ‘impersonal' allusive technique, its almost infinitely expanding resonances and its arcane use of anthropologically inflected structures prevent it from being reduced to that – and designedly so.

Waiting to see what his poem's public impact might be, in private Tom chastened himself for some of Vivien's health problems, but was hardly to blame for them all. Each partner in the marriage seems to have continued to deploy illness and work to manipulate the other; certainly Vivien had used illness to try to coax Scofield Thayer when Tom first met her. Tom, immuring himself in his labours, could not help but note that Pound had a wife who enjoyed good health, a family who could help her and some prospect of wealth. Vivien, he confided to Pound that November:

has none of these things. Her father's property, such as it is, is practically all tied up in Irish real estate, which he has been trying to sell all his life, has never paid much, now pays less, and can't be got rid of; which will be an encumbrance to her and her brother for the rest of their lives. Finally, at the most optimistic view, she will
never
be strong enough to earn her own living. If I had only myself to consider, I should not bother about guarantees [of financial security] for a moment: I could always earn my own living. But I am responsible toward her in more than the ordinary way. I have made a great many mistakes, which are largely the cause of her present catastrophic state of health, and also it must be remembered that she kept me from returning to America where I should have become a professor and probably never written another line of poetry, so that in that respect she should be endowed.
118

Vivien's Irish links mean that she too (as well as the Emily Hale whom Tom had heard sing ‘Mavourneen') might be hidden behind that reference to the phrase ‘
Mein Irisch Kind
' (My Irish child) in those lines of
The Waste Land
which he quoted from
Tristan und Isolde
– words of love that lead only to a vision of an expanse both ‘
Oed' und leer
' (Desolate and empty).
119
Vivien, like Tom, was part of the poem's desolation.

No sooner was the
Criterion
published than its editor set off ‘for about a fortnight's rest' in Worthing, a small seaside town about ten miles from Brighton. ‘T. is running down again', Vivien worried in November.
120
He was bad tempered, and it showed, though his wife was unlikely to disagree with his splenetic outburst in a letter to Pound (who liked a misogynist rant) that Katherine Mansfield was ‘one of the most persistent and thickskinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women Lady R[othermere] has ever met and is also a sentimental crank'.
121
Vivien was worried that, while initial sales looked promising, Lady Rothermere, whom she disliked, wanted to abort the magazine. Determined to back Tom, Vivien wondered if he might finance the journal using Bel Esprit money and £500 that she could provide but which would ‘halve my income'.
122
Pound, wisely, advised the Eliots to save their cash. He would convince Lady Rothermere to hold firm. ‘Of course', he wrote to Tom, ‘if she says it looks like a corpse, she's right, mon POSSUM, do you expect her to see what is scarce discernible to the naked eye, that it is
supposed
to be PLAYIN' POSSUM
'.
Perusing the
Criterion
's drab, sober covers and sometimes worthy essays, Pound had his own reservations
.
He thought it reeked of ‘the Athenaeum Club', niffy with establishment respectability.
123
But about
The Waste Land
he had no doubts.

Nor did Tom. However, the prospect of getting the time he wanted to write more poetry seemed now more remote than ever. He still had thoughts of authoring a book on seventeenth-century literature, building on pieces including his
Times Literary Supplement
essay on Marvell. Yet this was not what he craved to do. ‘My dear Ezra, I dont want to write articles for the
Times
or for anything else, I dont want to write articles at all, I dont want to write, no sensible man does who wants to write verse.' Better to edit a magazine than to churn out journalism. Unlike Pound, Tom thought England tolerable. He just wanted to be ‘let alone'. He bitched, ‘There are only half a dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing.' His remedy would be to fill up the magazine with people of ‘other occupations', such as the donnish anthropologist J. G. Frazer.
124

Tom wanted to leave the bank. Spending the rest of his career there seemed ‘abominable'.
125
Annoyingly, he could not see how to escape in a way that would provide legally credible guarantees ‘for my life
or
for Vivien's life
'.
126
Bel Esprit had become a torment, tantalising yet unachievable. Then, on 18 November, things suddenly got worse. Tom let Aldington know he had been sent a cutting from the
Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury
; its ‘Books and Bookmen' column contained not just a report about Bel Esprit but a ‘false story' that two years earlier a collection had raised £800 for Tom who had simply pocketed the cash. ‘The joke was that he accepted the gift calmly, and replied: “Thank you all very much; I shall make good use of the money; but I like the bank!”'
127
Furious over this ‘libel', Tom, who had been expecting trouble, consulted his solicitor and a more senior barrister. Though he did not sue, he wrote to the newspaper pointing out the untruth of the ‘tale' and denying Bel Esprit existed ‘with my consent or approval'. If this last assertion was debatable, the poet's sense of injury was not. In a public letter to the
Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury
he stated that ‘The circulation of untrue stories of this kind causes me profound astonishment and annoyance and may also do me considerable harm.'
128
In private he felt menaced. An anonymous ‘Wellwisher' mailed him a donation of four postage stamps ‘to strengthen my poetry until I became poet laureate!'
129
He might have laughed. Instead he felt ‘utter exhaustion'.
130

Vivien's insomnia, his magazine work and other worries meant most nights he slept for ‘seldom more than five hours'.
131
He found himself getting back from the bank, then dozing off before dinner. For months in the later part of 1922 Vivien had ‘hardly seen anybody'. Impressed by her ‘infinite tenacity of purpose' as she stuck to her prescribed ‘spartan regimen', Tom saluted her ‘persistence and courage'. She ate her dinner in bed, not feeling strong enough to get up. ‘If I were not tied to the bank I could have gone abroad with her for a time; as it is she is not only under the strain of her own treatment but the strain of our very tense and always rushed and overworked mode of life.'
132

On edge when news reached him of the official announcement that he had won the
Dial
's $2,000 prize, he found his pleasure contaminated by tetchiness. Awkwardly, word of the award had ‘leaked out' in advance.
133
Rumours were circulating that the poet of
The Waste Land
was tubercular; that he suffered from epilepsy; that he had tried to kill himself.
134
He feared lest the
Liverpool Daily Post
story was picked up in America too. Life was consumed by ‘worry and fatigue'.
135
His brother congratulated him, but Henry was not sure he liked
The Waste Land.
Several reviewers, including Edmund Wilson, were enthusiastic; others simply bemused. Tom told Henry, ‘there is a good deal about it that I do not like myself'.
136

For Boni and Liveright's book-length version he had added notes written during the summer. His first intention was that such annotation would spike the guns of critics tempted to accuse him of plagiarism; showing himself well aware he had used pieces of earlier poems, he would signal clearly the sources his allusive method drew on. However, there was still too little material to fill even a small volume, so, ensuring that
The Waste Land
would be a book rather than a pamphlet, he extended his notes in a way that he later regretted. Readers have been divided as to the helpfulness of these authorial annotations, but for many they have provided useful clues about underlying structural elements. Several comments seem spoof-like: ‘I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.'
137
Their effect has been to fuel an academic industry, reinforcing the poem's rootedness in sometimes recondite literary tradition, sending readers off to the library and away from the poet's biography.

Few readers or hearers, however, fail to detect that the poem contains a pain and a horror by no means ‘academic'. If
The Waste Land
has come to be read as articulating Western civilisation's sense of crisis, it can be heard also as a lasting cry, giving voice to a darkness deep in the human psyche. The poem's universality is astonishingly powerful; its resonances seem to expand forever. Yet, while conscious that
The Waste Land
could be read as ‘social criticism', Tom remarked over a decade later, ‘To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.'
138
Shifting, spiky, flowing, weird, haunting, its rhythms are what convince its auditors. ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it', wrote Virginia Woolf when Tom first read it aloud to her on Sunday 18 June 1922. She and Leonard would publish it from their Hogarth Press in the following year – the first publication of the work in book form outside America – but her first, accurate impression was less of a text than of sound:

It has great beauty & force; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. But he read till he had to rush – letters to write about the London Magazine – & discussion thus was curtailed. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land it is called; & Mary Hutch, who has heard it more quietly, interprets it to be Tom's autobiography – a melancholy one.
139

‘Anguish' was the word Mary Hutchinson settled on to describe the emotional tenor of such numinous verse.
140
His mother recorded of the poem, ‘Tom wrote me before it was published that he had put so much of his own life into it.'
141
He had, and Vivien knew her life was in it too. All this helps give the verse its undertow of damage, its longing, its frustrated, ineradicable music.

It was 15 December when
The Waste Land
became an American book. One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the
Criterion
, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the
New York Tribune
, calling
The Waste Land
‘a thing of bitterness and beauty' and, ‘perhaps, the finest poem of this generation'. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri', then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers'. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T. S. Eliot' in plain black print on the title page.

It was as if he had never been young.

 

Acknowledgements

T
HIS
poet has been part of my life since at least
1974
when I bought his
Complete Poems and Plays.
In private the music of his poetry captivated me, but that book was practical in public too. It was a talisman I carried in my school bag to ward off mathematics. Eliot, who studied advanced mathematics as a graduate student, might not have approved. After reading his work further while a Glasgow University undergraduate, thanks to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Snell Exhibition, I went to Balliol College, Oxford, to write a doctoral thesis on Eliot. Only one supervisor was willing to take me on. To Richard Ellmann I owe debts that cannot be repaid; to Mary Ellmann as much. I made my first Eliot-related visit to the USA in
1983
, spending time in New York Public Library, at Columbia University, at Yale, and as a visiting scholar at Eliot House, Harvard, where I kipped on a sofa and played loud music in the sombre Matthiessen Room, whose curator George Abbott White was especially welcoming.