Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  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, so
me 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

  AT 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

  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 c
utting 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.