The Waste Land
Page 5
langwidge. Don’t try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages fur-
ther,” he wrote on 24 January ( LOTSE, 497).42
Eliot, meanwhile, continued to have doubts about the shape of the
poem and to fret over its publication. On 20 January he wrote to Scofield
Thayer, an old friend who was now co-owner and the guiding editor of
the American magazine the Dial, to o¤er him first publication of the poem
in periodical form. The poem, at this moment, was undergoing Pound’s
third editorial intervention, as Eliot carefully noted. (“It will have been
three times through the sieve by Pound as well as myself so should be in
a final form” [ LOTSE, 502].) Describing the work, Eliot briefly characterized it as “a poem of about four hundred and fifty lines, in four parts” ( LOTSE, 502; italics mine). Remarkable though it seems to us, Eliot was planning
to issue the poem without part IV. Six days later, however, when writing
again to Pound on 26 January, Eliot had second thoughts, asking: “Perhaps
better omit Phlebas also???” ( LOTSE, 504). Pound replied with characteris-
tic vigor: “I do advise keeping Phlebas. In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas
is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned
phoen. sailor, and he is needed absoloootly where he is. Must stay in”
( LOTSE, 505).
Even after he had acceded to Pound’s demand that the ten lines of
“Phlebas” or part IV be restored, Eliot faced the question that had inter-
mittently troubled him: the poem was too short to make up an indepen-
dent book. Adding notes, it now occurred to him, might resolve the prob-
lem, and even if they didn’t suªce to make it a book suitable for Liveright,
they might be enough to justify a small volume which could be published
as a deluxe or limited edition. On 16 February, having learned from his
friend Conrad Aiken about Maurice Firuski, a publisher of deluxe editions
2 6
i n t r o d u c t i o n
who was situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Eliot wrote to pursue this
prospect:
Your name has been given me by Conrad Aiken. . . . I under-
stand that you issue these books in limited editions, and that
for the volumes you take in this series you give a sum down
in advance royalty.
My poem is of 435 lines; with certain spacings essential to
the sense, 475 book lines; furthermore, it consists of five parts,
which would increase the space necessary; and with title pages,
some notes that I intend to add, etc., I guess that it would run
to from 28 to 32 pages.
But Firuski was slow to reply, and by 12 March Liveright had confirmed
his interest in publishing the poem as a book. For the moment, at least,
an American book publication seemed secure. More troubling was the
poem’s appearance in a periodical.
The source of the trouble, from Eliot’s viewpoint, was Scofield Thayer.
Thayer was enormously wealthy, the heir to a fortune in the woolen in-
dustry. His co-owner in the Dial, James Sibley Watson, Jr., was also wealthy, the heir of a fortune built up through early investments in Western Union,
the American telegraph company. Together the two men were subsidiz-
ing the Dial at the rate of $73,300 per year, a remarkable figure when one
recalls that a teacher in this period typically earned $1,100 per year. Thayer
had followed Eliot’s literary career with interest, and his sister was a friend
of Eliot’s wife, Vivien. Beginning in 1921 Thayer had contracted Eliot to
write an occasional feature on cultural news from London, a “London Let-
ter” that would inform American readers about topics of current discus-
sion. He had also asked Eliot to give him a first option of publication for
any new poetry he might produce.
Eliot, we have seen, had written Thayer about The Waste Land already
on 20 January 1922, only four days after he had returned from Paris.
Thayer promptly replied and o¤ered Eliot $150, or £30, for the poem. But
Eliot did not answer him until 8 March, when he telegraphed Thayer that
he could not accept less than £50 ($250). Four days later, on 12 March,
Thayer responded by renewing his o¤er of $150, advanced without his
having yet seen the manuscript. On 16 March, Eliot, in turn, withdrew
his o¤er of the poem entirely. He had heard “on good authority that you
i n t r o d u c t i o n
2 7
paid £100 to George Moore for a short story, and I must confess that this
influenced me in declining $150 for a poem which has taken me a year
to write and which is my biggest work . . . and certainly if I am to be o¤ered
only 30 to 35 pounds for such a publication it is out of the question” ( LOTSE,
515). Ezra Pound, he went to say, supported his decision.
Thayer was furious. And since Pound was also being paid by the Dial
to write a “Paris Letter,” and was more vulnerable because he had no in-
come outside his literary earnings, Thayer demanded that he explain him-
self on 10 April. Pound o¤ered a muddled account, but one that suªced
to assuage Thayer for the moment. The critical question of where The
Waste Land would be published, however, was left unresolved. On 6 May,
Pound himself intervened: he wrote to a friend and urged her to take up
the question with John Peale Bishop, then the managing editor of Vanity
Fair and an aspiring poet, one familiar with Eliot’s work and aware of the
potential importance of a long poem by him. As it so happened, Bishop was
sailing to Paris within a matter of weeks and would have the opportunity
to meet with Pound himself.
Pound and Eliot, meanwhile, arranged to meet in Verona, a town in
northern Italy that was on Pound’s itinerary in a tour that he was making
and conveniently close to Lugano, Switzerland, where Eliot himself was
taking a brief holiday. They met on 2 June and had further discussions
about the poem’s potential publishers. By now Eliot was planning to publish
the poem in the first issue of his own journal, the Criterion, in October,
thus securing serial publication in Britain. But who would publish a peri-
odical version of the poem in the United States? Three candidates were
still in play: the Dial, provided that Thayer could be persuaded to pay more; Vanity Fair, which possessed a much larger circulation than the Dial; and the Little Review, an avant-garde magazine associated with Pound—a journal that could pay little and had very small circulation but would at least
issue the poem without question.
Back in New York, however, Thayer’s co-owner had decided to intervene
on his own, hopeful that he could forestall Vanity Fair from triumphing
over the Dial. James Sibley Watson, Jr., sailed for Europe, determined to
meet Pound and, through him, gain access to Eliot. On 19 July, a Wednes-
day, he met with Pound over lunch in Paris. He “wants T’s poem for Dial,”
Pound explained to his wife, who was then away in London. The trajectory
of their conversation over lunch can be readily imagined. As Pound had
2 8
i n t r o d u c t i o n
already written to Thayer back in March, his view of Eliot’s poem was un-
compromising: “His poem is as good in its way as Uly
sses in its way, and
there is so damn little genius, so damn little work that one can take hold
of and say, ‘This at any rate stands, makes a definite part of literature.’”
Pound’s comparison of The Waste Land to Ulysses must have been especially telling to one such as Watson, a man keenly interested in new books who
had just traveled from New York to Paris. For Ulysses, at this time, was not just a set of words, a text that could be easily purchased at any local bookshop. It existed in only one form, in the deluxe and limited edition of one
thousand copies that Sylvia Beach had published in Paris some five months
earlier, and that edition had already become a precious commodity whose
value was soaring in the market for rare books and fine editions.43 When
Watson arrived in Paris, copies that had originally been priced at 150 francs
(£3 and 3s, or about $15) were fetching 500 francs (£10, or nearly $50) in
the Paris market. Watson was quite conversant with these figures; after
all, he himself had already gone to Sylvia Beach’s shop in Paris to pick up
his own copy of Ulysses (no. 33, signed by Joyce; originally priced at 350
francs, now worth 1,165 francs), one he had been prudent enough to order
in advance. Moreover, the price of the book was still rising, and by early
August, when Watson left Paris it was to double yet again both in Paris
and in London. In this atmosphere of feverish speculation, to compare
The Waste Land to Ulysses was to say a great deal indeed.
Pound probably proposed his own very practical solution to the impasse
between Eliot and Thayer. Back in March he had suggested to Thayer that
Eliot be given what he called “the December award,” his term for the an-
nual Dial Award which the magazine had first instituted a year earlier: a
prize of $2,000 (£400) for distinguished services in the cause of modern
letters. The prize would be the unoªcial price for the poem, while the oª-
cial one would remain the $150 which Thayer had first o¤ered. Watson was
taken with this idea. He promptly flew to Berlin, where Thayer was staying,
and secured his agreement, though as yet neither man had read a word
of the poem. Then he returned to Paris, once again to seek out Pound.
The two men met for a second time on Thursday, 27 July, and Pound
now agreed to write to Eliot and broach the new proposal. It was a propo-
sition that Eliot could not easily resist. After all, the Dial Award nearly
equaled his annual salary at Lloyds Bank, and it would be a curious man
who would not like to see his annual income suddenly doubled. “I will let
i n t r o d u c t i o n
2 9
you have a copy of the Waste Land for confidential use as soon as I can
make one,” he replied to Pound the next day. “I gather from your remarks
that Watson is at present in Paris. I have no objection to either his or
Thayer’s seeing the manuscript” ( LOTSE, 552). But in fact it took Eliot
more than two weeks to make a copy of the poem and send it to Watson
in Paris. When Watson finally received it, on 16 August, he informed his
colleague Thayer in Berlin:
In response to Pound’s letter Eliot has assumed a more con-
ciliatory attitude and has sent on a copy of Wasteland for our
perusal. I am forwarding it to you. . . . Anyway I wrote him
more plainly about the prize and await his answer. I found
the poem disappointing on first reading but after a third shot
I think it up to his usual—all the styles are there, somewhat
toned down in language [autograph addition:] adjectives! and
theatricalized in sentiment—at least I thought.
The protracted negotiations with the Dial were intersecting with three
other developments. One was the proposal first launched by Pound back
in May, that the poem be published in Vanity Fair. On 1 August, Edmund
Wilson, who had succeeded John Peale Bishop as the journal’s managing
editor, had written a letter to Eliot, o¤ering to publish anything new he
might have in hand. Meanwhile, on 3 August, Bishop himself had met
with Pound in Paris, an encounter which he promptly described to Wilson
in New York:
Pound I met the other afternoon. I found him extended on
a bright green couch, swathed in a hieratic bathrobe made of
a maiden aunt’s shit-brown blanket. . . . However, he was quite
gracious, and the twinkle of his eyes whenever he makes a
point is worth something. . . . Here’s the thing however—
Eliot is starting a quarterly review: he is to run “Waste Land,”
the new series of lyrics in his first number: he and Thayer have
split and the Dial will not publish it. Perhaps you might want
to arrange for the American publication. Pound says they are
as fine as anything written in English since 1900.
Wilson’s letter probably reached Eliot in London by 10 August, but it
was not till 14 August that he replied:
3 0
i n t r o d u c t i o n
Thank you for your letter of the 1st. inst., I should be very glad
to do for you such an article as you suggest. For the next two
months I shall be far too busy to attempt such a thing, but
I think that I should be able to provide one during October
or November if that is satisfactory to you. As for a poem, I am
afraid that is quite impossible at present as I have only one
for which I have already contracted.
Eliot, plainly, was not being straightforward. As yet he had made no
contractual arrangement for publishing The Waste Land in a periodical.
(Indeed, it was not till the next day, 15 August, that Eliot wrote to Watson
in Paris, accepting Watson’s plan to give him the Dial Award and making
some additional suggestions.) Eliot, in fact, rejected the o¤er from Vanity
Fair for two reasons. First, its rate of payment could never equal the sum
that came with the Dial Award. Vanity Fair was a commercial enterprise
that paid current market rates, not a publication subsidized by lavish pa-
tronage. Second, though Vanity Fair had ten times the circulation (96,500)
of the Dial (9,500), it represented a level of commercial success and popu-
lar acceptance that threatened to undermine the status that Eliot was try-
ing to establish for his work. He wanted his poem to be successful, but
not too successful.
The second development was the poem’s publication in book form,
which was slowly gathering momentum. Eliot had been pleased when
Liveright in mid-March had first confirmed his interest in publishing the
poem, but had grown alarmed when Liveright finally sent him a contract
in mid-June, worried by the vagueness of its terms. In response he had
turned to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and cultural patron who had
generously handled Eliot’s contract with his previous American publisher,
Knopf, without charging a fee. To Quinn he wrote on 25 June, describing
his new work: “I have written . . . a long poem of about 450 words [lines],
which, with notes that I am adding, will make a book of 30 to 40 pages”
( LOTSE, 530). Even now, more than five months after the poem had been
finished, Eliot had still not completed the notes. Indeed, his syntax leaves
&
nbsp; it unclear whether he had even begun: at best he was in the middle of the
process, with still some distance to go. Moreover, if the book was to be in-
cluded in the autumn list, the deadline for submission of a final manuscript
was fast approaching: “Liveright said he would print it for the autumn if
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3 1
he had the poem by the end of July” ( LOTSE, 531). When Liveright, around
9 July, sent Eliot a letter indicating that he had agreed to the revised contract
proposed by Quinn, Eliot hurriedly addressed the problem of a typescript
in another letter to John Quinn, dated 19 July: “As it is now so late I am
enclosing the typescript to hand to him when the contract is complete, or
to hold if he does not complete. I had wished to type it out fair, but I did
not wish to delay it any longer. This will do for him to get on with, and I
shall rush forward the notes to go at the end” ( LOTSE, 547). Eliot’s com-
ments make it clear that even as late as 19 July, six months after the poem
had been finished, he had not completed the notes. Plainly it was a task
which he approached with diªdence, not to say indi¤erence. Exactly when
Eliot completed them is unclear. “I suppose that the poem is now going
to press,” he told one correspondent on 15 August ( LOTSE, 560), a state-
ment which seems to imply that the notes had been completed by then.
Only now, some eighteen months after Eliot had first begun the poem in
February 1921, did it assume the shape that we know today.
Still waiting back in Paris, Watson finally received Eliot’s reply to his
proposal outlining receipt of the Dial Award as an unoªcial payment for
the poem: “Subject to Mr. Liveright’s consent, I would let the Dial publish the poem for $150, not before November 1st. In this event I would forego
the $150 advance from Mr. Liveright, and he would delay publication as a
book until the new year. Possibly he would be glad to do this, on the possi-
bility of the book’s getting the prize, which might increase the sales”
( LOTSE, 560). Armed with this letter, Watson set sail for New York on 18
August. “So the matter is still in the air,” he wrote a day later to his colleague
in Berlin, Scofield Thayer. But the final pieces in the jigsaw puzzle soon
fell into place.
On 21 August, Eliot wrote to John Quinn, outlining the Dial’s pro-