[Poem I 51 · Textual History II 357]
17–20 The silent man in mocha brown | Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; | The waiter brings in oranges | Bananas figs and hothouse grapes: “a negro · · · Bringing a dish with oranges and bananas | And another brought coffee and cigars · · · wide mouth”, To Helen 2–4, 6. To Eleanor Hinkley, 26 Apr 1911: “one looked through the windows, and the waiter brought in eggs and coffee”. (To John Betjeman, 25 Nov 1939: “looking at life through the window · · · the shy mulatto servant · · · laying the table”.) “window · · · fruit · · · figure drest in blue and green”, Ash-Wednesday III 13–15. mocha: with the American pronunciation moe-ka in TSE’s recordings of 1947, as recommended by Fowler.
18 Sprawls at the window-sill: “A bright kimono wraps her as she sprawls | In nerveless torpor on the window seat”, WLComposite 365–66. The Family Reunion I ii, stage direction: “The curtains part, revealing the Eumenides in the window embrasure.” Sprawls: Marlowe: “We saw Cassandra sprawling in the streets”, Dido, Queen of Carthage II i; quoted in Christopher Marlowe (1919) (Anne Stillman).
18–20 window-sill · · · oranges | Bananas figs and hothouse grapes: Alfred Kreymborg: “An answer comes through the open window · · · I got oranges, | I got pineapples · · · I got bananas”, Lima Beans (1918) (Anne Stillman).
21 vertebrate: pronounced vert-abrate in TSE’s recording of 13 May 1947, but vertabr’t in another (probably 1946). (OED 3. fig. a: “Of persons: having connective mental powers”, citing Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1879.) Alongside TSE’s first reading, the unindividuated “individual”, Pound wrote “economic unit”. Previously he had approvingly quoted Robert Bridges’s Flycatchers, with “A dry biped he was”, in Poetry Oct 1915 (which also contained TSE’s “Three Poems”).
21 variant animalcule: OED: “pl. animalcula is still frequent in scientific use. (By the ignorant the latter is sometimes made a sing. with pl. animalculæ.)” 1. (Obs.): “A small or tiny animal; formerly applied to small vertebrates, such as mice, and all invertebrates.”
21–22 silent vertebrate in brown · · · withdraws: Conrad: “The servant in brown appeared at the door silently · · · and stood aside”, The Secret Agent (1907) ch. 2.
22 Contracts and concentrates: Irving Babbitt: “a concentration that shall not at the same time seem a contraction”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 93.
23 Rabinovitch: marked “X” by TSE in Thayer’s AraVP with a note now illegibly erased, apparently a name, of which the middle element possibly ended “-dorf”. Rachel’s married surname is withheld (Ricks 31).
24 murderous paws: “Marlowe: Dido”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. “And after him, his band of Myrmidons, | With balls of wild fire in their murdering paws, | Which made the funeral flame that burnt fair Troy”, Dido, Queen of Carthage II i; quoted by TSE in Christopher Marlowe (1919). In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the dead girl’s throat shows “the mark of no human hand”, but that of the orang-outang.
27–37 heavy eyes · · · The nightingales are singing near | The Convent of the Sacred Heart, | | And sang within the bloody wood: “In Italy, from behind the nightingale’s thicket, | The eyes stared at me, and corrupted that song”, The Family Reunion I i (Grover Smith 203).
[Poem I 51–52 · Textual History II 357]
28 declines the gambit: OED “gambit” (chess): “A method of opening the game, in which by the sacrifice of a pawn or piece the player seeks to obtain some advantage over his opponent.” OED has figurative uses from 1855, including “The Widow’s gambit was played” (1860). Gilbert Frankau: “Where older rakes had never cared a damn bit, | He was too young to recognize the gambit”, One of Us (1912) 107. (The Waste Land II, title: A Game of Chess.)
29–31 Leaves · · · Outside the window, leaning in, | Branches: Ralph Hodgson: “And the leaves stared in at the window | Like the people at a play”, The House across the Way in Poems (1916).
32 golden grin: Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1908–15), had several gold teeth and was renowned for his smile. Vancouver Daily World 11 Mar 1909: “McLagan · · · doubled up like a jack-knife while Johnson displayed his golden grin in an apologetic way and obligingly backed off.” San Francisco Call 7 Apr 1912: “DAR’S NO MO’ WORK FOH PO’ OLE JACK! Champ Has No Tale of Woe, Picks up Fiddle an’ de Bow; den Gleams de Golden Grin.” See note to 17–20.
35 The nightingales are singing: “There’s a long, long trail a-winding | Into the land of my dreams, | Where the nightingales are singing | And a white moon beams”, American troops’ song of 1915 (Moody 64). nightingales: “I have less knowledge of nightingales, except for their literary associations, which are useful; but I am ready to affirm that a fine mocking-bird in his own pure song is at least the nightingale’s equal”, Mocking-Birds (1930).
[Poem I 52 · Textual History II 357–58]
35–39 The nightingales are singing · · · Sacred · · · the bloody wood | When Agamemnon cried aloud · · · liquid siftings: in a letter to the Sunday Times: “Ever since I published a poem called Sweeney Among the Nightingales—some forty years ago—I have been waiting for someone to question the presence of nightingales at the obsequies of Agamemnon. Mr Robert Graves, in his letter last week, has ended my suspense, by pointing out that Agamemnon was murdered in a bath-house in mid-January, where and when no nightingales could have been singing. I should like to explain that the wood I had in mind was the grove of the Furies at Colonus; I called it ‘bloody’ because of the blood of Agamemnon in Argos. As for the ‘liquid siftings,’ I suspect that they were suggested by the rain dripping on the coffin of Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd. It was a simple matter to bring the dead Agamemnon into the open air, and to transfer the nightingales from one place to another. So they might as well continue to sing in January, though I confess to ignorance of the date of Agamemnon’s death. But even had I known, it would have made no difference”, The Silver Bough (1958). Valerie Eliot in a copy of 1936 14th imp. (1951): “No nightingales present when A was killed, TSE took the nightingales in question from the Œdipus at Colonus of Sophocles.” In the opening lines of the play, blind Oedipus asks Antigone to let him sit “On common ground or by some sacred grove” and she replies: “where we stand is surely holy ground; | A wilderness of laurel, olive, vine; | Within a feathered flock of nightingales | Are warbling” (Loeb). In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1146–49), the Chorus sings of the “wild lyric” that grieves “the brown nightingale” and Cassandra replies, “Ah, fate of the tuneful nightingale! The gods clothed her in winged form and gave to her a sweet life without tears. But for me waiteth destruction by the two-edged sword” (Loeb). See note to Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 3 for “the sacred wood” and The Sacred Wood. The nightingales are singing · · · the bloody wood · · · liquid: Milton: “O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray | Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still · · · Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day”, Sonnet 1 (Southam).
36 The Convent of the Sacred Heart: to Hans Paeschke, 6 Feb 1947, on a misquotation by Hans Egon Holthusen (“In the convent of Our Dear Lady”): “The actual line · · · should place the convent in the contemporary world as was intended rather than in the Middle Ages when I do not think that the cult of the Sacred Heart was practised. I think that the religious order is comparatively modern.”
38 When Agamemnon cried aloud: “cf. Orestes”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. Aeschylus’ ORESTES: “You don’t see them, you don’t—but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on”, Choephoroi; used by TSE as an epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes.
39 siftings: OED vbl. n. 2: “That which is removed or separated by means of a sieve”; but more often the residue rather than the waste. Old French crappe, siftings, gives the later, excremental sense of “crap”.
39 variant droppings: Hamlet I v, GHOST: “Curd, like eager droppings into milk, | The thin and wholesome blood” (TSE: “bloody”, 37). Gordon 105:
&nb
sp; “I had ‘droppings’ at first,” Eliot said, “but Pound gave me ‘siftings’—his own word. He hadn’t then used it in Mauberley—it was typical of his generosity.” He [TSE] was talking in 1933 to Professor Theodore Spencer at Harvard, who copied the words into Poems 1909–1925 by Eliot (now in the Matthiessen Room, Eliot House, Harvard).
In the Introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems (1928), TSE described Mauberley as “much the finest poem, I believe, before the Cantos”. In 1947: “I think perhaps I was wrong about Mauberley; there is something rather scrappy about it. Since then, I’ve revised my opinion of it: I think Propertius and Cathay (those semi-translations of Pound’s) and the early Cantos are bigger stuff” (Mattingly).
40 stiff dishonoured shroud: Whittier: “Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, | Dishonoured brow”, Ichabod (Edmund Wilson, New Republic 13 Nov 1929).
[Poem I 552 · Textual History II 357–58]
The Waste Land: Headnote
1. Composition 2. From Completion to Publication: Boni & Liveright
3. The Dial and the Criterion 4. The Hogarth Press
5. Apropos of Publication 6. A Hoax? 7. The Author’s Notes
8. Anthologies, Translations, Adaptations
9. After Publication 10. Eliot, Pound and The Waste Land
11. The Fate of the Drafts
The present edition prints The Waste Land in two forms, that of the published editions beginning in 1922, in its usual position among the Collected Poems, and an editorial composite text given separately. Both are described and annotated in this Commentary.
The Waste Land was published without the author’s Notes in Criterion Oct 1922 and Dial Nov 1922. Then separately, with the Notes, by Boni & Liveright (New York), 15 Dec 1922 (1,000 numbered copies; see Gallup for state and issue variants). The second American impression of 1,000 numbered copies (mis-described in the colophon as “Second Edition”: see Gallup) was issued early in 1923, preceding the first separate English edition, which likewise included the Notes and was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in an edition of about 460 copies, published 12 Sept 1923. The poem, always followed immediately by the Notes, was collected in 1925+, Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems. On 10 Oct 1929, E. McKnight Kauffer proposed “a special edition” of The Waste Land, “not illustrated for that would be impossible—but perhaps annotated—perhaps suggestions arising from its sources”. The idea was not taken up (Letters 4 714). An edition of 300 signed copies, finely printed by Giovanni Mardersteig in Verona, was published by Faber in 1962.
Recorded in full 1933, Columbia U. (often misdated 1935). Second: 26 July 1946, NBC (NY) for the Library of Congress; released Feb 1949. Third: 23 May 1947, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Additionally: Part V only, May 1942 in Stockholm for the Swedish Broadcasting System. Part I only, 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading (“The two best parts of The Waste Land · · · for reading aloud are the first and the last, and I’m going to read you the first section, The Burial of the Dead”). Part V only, 23 May 1947, Washington. Part IV only, after the lecture From Poe to Valéry, 19 Nov 1948, at the Library of Congress. Parts IV and V only, 12 Nov 1950, for U. Chicago Round Table, broadcast by NBC.
1. COMPOSITION
Shortly after TSE’s death in 1965, a detailed reconstruction of the composition of The Waste Land was made possible by the recovery of the drafts, which TSE had given away in 1922 (see below, 11. THE FATE OF THE DRAFTS).
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
The drafts are not dated but other writings reveal the chronology, beginning with a letter of 5 Nov 1919, in which TSE thanks the American lawyer John Quinn for arranging publication of Poems (1920): “I am now at work on an article ordered by The Times [Ben Jonson, TLS 13 Nov], and when that is off I hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind.” He wrote similarly to his mother, 20 Sept 1920: “I have several things I want to do; and I want a period of tranquility to do a poem that I have in mind.” In the meantime he may have seen his friend Hope Mirrlees’s poem Paris (Hogarth Press, 1919), which has disjunctions and typographical experiments anticipating The Waste Land; in 1973, however, she was unable to confirm this (Bruce Bailey, T. S. Eliot Newsletter Fall 1974). For Paris, see notes to [V] 391–92, The Hollow Men I 5 and Ash-Wednesday I 36; for Mirrlees’s A Fly in Amber (Faber, 1962), see TSE’s letter to her, 7 July 1956 (quoted by Suzanne Henig in Virginia Woolf Quarterly Fall 1972).
Urged to contribute to the Dial by its editor, his friend Scofield Thayer, TSE wrote on 30 Jan 1921: “It will be several months before I have any verse ready for publication”, but on 7 Feb, Wyndham Lewis reported to Sydney Schiff: “Eliot I saw 2 nights ago · · · He also showed me a new long poem (in 4 parts) which I think will be not only very good, but a new departure for him.” When Schiff enquired about this, TSE replied on 3 Apr: “My poem has still so much revision to undergo that I do not want to let anyone see it yet, and also I want to get more of it done—it should be much the longest I have ever written. I hope that by June it will be in something like final form. I have not had the freedom of mind.” In the same month: “I see no reason why a considerable variety of verse forms may not be employed within the limits of a single poem; or why a prose writer should not vary his cadences almost indefinitely; that is a question for discretion, taste and genius to settle”, Prose and Verse (1921). By 9 May 1921, TSE was reporting to Quinn that he had “a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish”. The typescripts of Parts I and II were made before 20 Aug 1921 (when TSE’s brother Henry substituted his own typewriter for TSE’s dilapidated machine; Vivien Eliot to Henry, 23 Aug).
Aiken recalled the winter that followed: TSE “told me one day, and with visible concern, that although every evening he went home to his flat hoping that he could start writing again, and with every confidence that the material was there and waiting, night after night the hope proved illusory”, Tate ed. 195. Suffering from mental exhaustion, TSE was granted three months’ leave of absence by Lloyds Bank (TSE to Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 2 Oct), and he and Vivien retreated to Margate on 14 Oct 1921, moving into the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville, on 22 Oct. Vivien stayed until the end of the month, writing to Mary Hutchinson, 28 Oct: “I have started Tom well, and he shows great improvement already · · · Margate is rather queer, and we don’t dislike it.” And to Bertrand Russell, 1 Nov: “Tom is having a bad nervous—or so called—breakdown · · · In a short time I hope he will go to Switzerland, to see Dr. Vittoz” (a specialist in neuroses, recommended by Ottoline Morrell; see TSE to Julian Huxley, 26 Oct 1921).
TSE to Schiff, “Friday night” [4?] Nov 1921: “I have done a rough draft of part of part III, but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable. I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front—as I am out all day except when taking rest. But I have written only some 50 lines, and have read nothing, literally—I sketch the people, after a fashion, and practise scales on the mandoline.”
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
TSE presumably destroyed most of the manuscripts he wrote in that seafront shelter when he superseded them by typing up Part III (probably on his return to London from Margate on 12 Nov 1921). A few passages on a kind of paper that he used in Margate (Rainey 23–26) were spared because they bear pencilled passages which TSE did not incorporate into the typescript but which were still under consideration: ms1 (one leaf, WLFacs 36/37) and ms2 (two leaves, the second with manuscript on both recto and verso, WLFacs 48–53). In the first of these, ms1, TSE mentions a mandoline, having recently been bought one by Vivien, while in the second, ms2, he refers specifically to “Margate Sands”. The passage on the lower part of ms1, beginning “London, the swarming life you kill breed”, became the only section of Part III to survive in both manuscript and typescript, and although it is a very rough draft, TSE copied its final readings almost precisely when making the typescript.
TS
E was probably hurrying to type Part III before leaving London again, and did so before he was able to fit together the passages he had written. On 18 Nov 1921, he and Vivien left for Paris, where she stayed while he went for treatment with Dr. Vittoz. It is likely that at this stage Pound was lent copies of the typescripts of Parts I–III, to allow him a chance to absorb what TSE had done, before editorial discussions began on TSE’s return to Paris after his treatment. This would explain why both the ribbon copy of the typescript of Part III and its carbon are annotated by Pound. His comment “vide other copy” on the ribbon copy of Part III (WLFacs 32/33), indicates—as Grover Smith pointed out—that Pound had previously marked the carbon of this Part. His marks on the carbon of Part III were very extensive (WLFacs 38–47) and similar marks, presumably also made during his first acquaintance with the poem, can be seen on the ribbon copy of Part II (WLFacs 10–15). Only the ribbon copy of Part I is extant, and this is not correspondingly annotated, so presumably Pound marked the carbon of Part I.
TSE composed the final two parts of the poem at a sanatorium at Chardonne, near Lausanne on Lake Geneva (Lac Leman). Although he had “strained one hand in rowing in a single shell while he was in the Harvard Graduate School and used a typewriter in preference to handwriting thereafter” (TSE’s secretary to Daniel H. Woodward, 9 Sept 1963), he had no typewriter at Lausanne (to Alan Clodd, 15 Sept 1959). He probably also worked on Part III: the line “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …”, he wrote to J. M. Aguirre on 23 Nov 1956, “was probably written at Lausanne”.
Around 2 Jan 1922, he rejoined Vivien and Pound in Paris (“Tom has been here ten days”, Vivien to Mary Hutchinson, 12 Jan), and showed Pound the whole poem for the first time. TSE may already have decided to delete the opening scene of the poem, describing a night on the town, but he and Pound worked over TSE’s copy of the remaining two pages of Part I (WLFacs 6–9).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 64
