Virginia Woolf to Barbara Bagenal, 8 July [1923]: “I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliots poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles.”
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
TSE to Leonard Woolf [3? Sept 1923], on receiving finished copies: “I am delighted with The Waste Land which has just arrived. Spacing and paging are beautifully planned to make it the right length, far better than the American edition. I am afraid it gave you a great deal of trouble. You also had to contend against my abominable proofreading: I see one dreadful oversight for which I owe apologies: p. 7, I left under London Bridge instead of over!” 14 Sept: “There are 3 mistakes I left: ‘under’ for ‘over’ London Bridge; ‘Coloured’ for ‘carven’ dolphin; and Macmillan for Cambridge University Press for Miss Weston’s book. I hope you will forgive me.”
TSE acknowledged £7 5s. 7d. from the Hogarth Press in royalties for The Waste Land in a letter to Leonard Woolf, 1 May 1924. By 31 Mar, 330 copies had been sold. Total printing, binding, advertising and distribution costs were £25 6s. 3d. TSE received 25 per cent of gross profits.
Virginia Woolf to TSE, 3 Sept [1925], of J. & E. Bumpus the bookshop: “Bumpus says we must reprint Waste Land. People worry his life out for copies—so think sometimes, among all your glories and horrors, of that rapacious animal the Hogarth Press.” There was, however, to be no Hogarth Press reprint, and the Woolfs were disappointed to see The Waste Land becoming part of TSE’s Poems 1909–1925.
5. APROPOS OF PUBLICATION
Although Quinn had cabled as late as 29 July 1922 to suggest that TSE send Liveright a catalogue description of the poem, the $37 printing bill for Boni & Liveright’s Fall catalogue was entered into the accounts for the book on 31 July. The catalogue announced:
The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. Many poets who became prominent during the contemporary American poetic renascence have sunk quietly into forgetfulness. T. S. Eliot, however, is a name which has acquired a leading significance during the same period. The qualities of Mr. Eliot’s verse are enduring. They represent in many ways the keenest inquiry into our lives which American poetry can boast since Ezra Pound entered the lyric lists. Subtle, ironic, and molded to the peculiar form of Mr. Eliot’s mind, this poet’s work, highly individualistic, has run to caricature of genuine realities, set off by flashes of rhythm and color. He knows how to draw people—not always within the knowledge of a poet—and deals largely with the people he sees around him.
The Wasteland is the longest poem T. S. Eliot has ever written and is the first poetry that he has written in the last three years. Mr. Eliot writes from London that this volume represents a new phase in his development, being the ripe fruit of his experimentation in all of his previous work.
T. S. Eliot is a man to be reckoned with, now, and hereafter, among the few unique talents of the times.
The Wasteland will be one of the most beautifully printed and bound books that has ever borne our imprint.
(To be published October 1st … $2.00).
The title had been corrected by 15 Oct, when the New York Tribune listed it among the “Recommended Books on Fall Lists”. The New York Times Book Review, 26 Nov 1922, had the title right but made a different mistake when it announced:
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
The annual award of The Dial, amounting to $2,000, has been given this year to T. S. Eliot, the American poet living in England. This award, which is not presented as a prize, but in recognition of able work, was given last year to Sherwood Anderson, the novelist. Thomas Seymour Eliot, to give him his full name, is a Harvard graduate and a writer who may be regarded as the poetical leader of the Younger Generation. His volume, Poems, containing such unusual efforts as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the Portrait of a Lady, appeared several seasons ago. A new volume from his pen, The Waste Land, a single poem of some length, is shortly to be published by Boni & Liveright. Mr. Eliot’s work is marked by an intense cerebral quality and a compact music that has practically established a movement among the younger men.
The delay in book publication enabled Liveright to enhance the jacket. A panel on the front proclaimed: “Winner of The Dial’s 1922 Award. This prize of two thousand dollars is given annually to a young American writer in recognition of his service to letters.” The front flap read:
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (Winner of the Dial’s 1922 Award). Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, characterizes The Waste Land as, “A thing of bitterness and beauty, which is a crystallization or a synthesis of all the poems Mr. Eliot has hitherto written.” He goes still further, when he says, The Waste Land, “Is, perhaps, the finest poem of this generation; at all events it is the most significant in that it gives voice to the universal despair or resignation arising from the spiritual and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes of modern civilization, the cul-de-sac into which both science and philosophy seem to have got themselves and the break-down of all great directive purposes which give zest and joy to the business of living. It is an erudite despair; Mr. Eliot stems his poem from a recent anthropological study of primitive beliefs, as embodied in the Grail legend and other flaming quests which quickened men in other times; he quotes, or misquotes, lines from the ‘Satiricon of Petronius,’ ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ the sacred books of the Hindus, Dante, Baudelaire, Verlaine, nursery rhymes, the Old Testament and modern jazz songs. His method is highly elliptical, based on the curious formula of Tristan Corbière, wherein reverential and blasphemous ideas are juxtaposed in amazing antitheses, and there are mingled all the shining toys, impressions and catch lines of a poet who has read voraciously and who possesses an insatiable curiosity about life. It is analysis and realism, psychology and criticism, anguish, bitterness and disillusion, with passages of great lyrical beauty.”
The rear flap read:
T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri; he is a graduate of Harvard and studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, has been a lecturer, editor and banker. For the first few years in which his poems appeared he was known to only a small number of readers, but his first book of poems, and his long poem, The Waste Land, which has just been published, have established him, in the opinion of critics, as without question the most significant of the younger American writers. Abroad, and especially in France, he is held to be, in addition, the leader of the strictest and most intelligent school of literary criticism. Only one volume of his critical work has been published, under the title of The Sacred Wood.
6. A HOAX?
The first issue of Time, 3 Mar 1923, reported: “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that that is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results.”
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
TSE drafted a letter to the Literary Editor of the New York Globe, 4 Apr 1923: “I have received a cutting from your issue of the 6th March in which you quote from the Chicago News some statements about myself · · · made by Mr. Ben Hecht. According to this cutting, Mr. Hecht says that he met me in London, and knows that I thoroughly hate Americans and everything they write and read, and that he considers me wholly capable of hoaxing the Dial and all its friends. In case there may be anyone in America who believes this statement, I wish to inform you that if Mr. Hecht made the statements quoted he is a liar, and I should be glad if you would make this statement public. Mr. Hecht has never met me in London or anywhere else. He has not the slightest ground for the opinions which he attributes to me, and he must be perfectly aware of this fact. I can only presume that Mr. Hecht believes that my being 3000 miles away will protect him from any legal action, as it certainly protects him from any physical action on my part. I do not know whether Mr. Hecht is the author or merely the supporter of the libel which charges me with having perpetrated a hoax upon the Dial, but at least he has found it necessary to lie about me in order to give support to this rumour. If Mr. Hecht
has succeeded in hoaxing anybody with such a clumsy falsehood as that reported in the Chicago News, it would be hardly worth my while to spend two years’ labour upon a poem in order to hoax the Dial” (Criterion files, box 75. For the revised text of the letter, 6 Apr, see Letters 2. It was quoted at length in a mischievous column in the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, New York, 17 Apr 1923).
William Force Stead, of an occasion on 4 Feb 1928:
I remember once when I invited him to read a paper to our Literary Society at Worcester College in Oxford, he announced on arriving that he must have lost his notes on the train from London, perhaps a polite way of saying that he had not prepared any; however, he would read us The Waste Land. The poem was not widely appreciated at that time and called forth some very foolish remarks. A few remain in my memory; one youth arose at the end and said,
“Mr. Eliot, did you write all that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I thought some of those words about the barge she sat in came from something else.”
Eliot responded with a pleasant smile that he was glad the point had been raised, and that as the speaker had recognized the passage, so he was sure others would understand these and some other well known lines as quotations used for the purpose of association. The reply was framed with such tact that the young man’s vanity would not be wounded if he was merely an honest dunce, yet if he was trying to be facetious, he would be quietly silenced. A discussion dragged along for some time until a round-faced youth bounced up and said, “Mr. Eliot, may I ask a question?”
“Certainly.”
“Er—did you mean that poem seriously?”
Eliot looked non-plussed for a moment, and then said quietly, “Well, if you think I did not mean it seriously, I have failed utterly.”
Some Personal Impressions of T. S. Eliot in Alumnae
Journal of Trinity College [Washington], Winter 1965
TSE annotated Stead’s recollections in typescript, making no comment here.
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
Of the same occasion, Cherwell reported on 11 Feb 1928: “Mr Eliot compared his poem to a body stripped of its skin: the ‘anatomical’ interest is at first more puzzling, but is more unusual and more real. He said, further, when speaking of the self-explanatory nature of the poem, that it was not necessary for the reader to recognise the quotations introduced, although he would lose a little; the effect was independent of recognition. The much-discussed notes and references were included, he said, for the benefit of the curious, and to prevent others from pointing out to him that he had borrowed passages from the Elizabethans; it was not necessary for the reader to make himself acquainted with a large body of literature” (see David Bradshaw, Yeats Annual 2013; and for “a tissue of allusions intelligible only to · · · scholars”, see note to Ash-Wednesday V 10, 28, 36).
7. THE AUTHOR’S NOTES
There is no known manuscript or typescript of the Notes.
In Gotham Book Mart’s catalogue We Moderns (1940), Pound wrote: “The bearing of this poem was not over-estimated, nevertheless the immediate reception of it even by second rate reviewers was due to the purely fortuitous publication of the notes, and not to the text itself. Liveright wanted a longer volume and the notes were the only available unpublished matter.” In 1948, Clive Bell claimed that it was Roger Fry who “urged Eliot to elucidate the text of The Waste Land with explanatory notes. Eliot met him half way: he supplied notes, but whether they are explanatory is for others to decide”, How Pleasant to know Mr Eliot in March & Tambimuttu eds. 16. To Daniel H. Woodward, 26 June 1963: “It may be as Mr. Clive Bell says that it was Roger Fry who suggested that I should do notes to the poem. I remember reading the poem aloud to Leonard and Virginia Woolf before they ever read it and I know that the notes were added and were of such length as the poem by itself seemed hardly long enough for book form.”
Nicholas Joost claims that “Gilbert Seldes refused to print the notes to the poem, although they had arrived as a part of Eliot’s typed copy”, The Dial 1912–1920 (1967) 252. Quinn’s letter to TSE, 7 Sept 1922, contradicts this: “Seldes said that the prose notes would make a hit and were interesting and amusing, and he even said ‘wonderful’”, but it was written into the contract with Liveright that the Notes would not appear in the Dial. That the Notes were seen by Seldes suggests collaboration between the magazine and the book publisher, as does TSE’s remark to Seldes that “Liveright’s proof was on the whole very good indeed and I have no doubt that the appearance in The Dial will be equally good” (12 Nov 1922). The logistics of these two American printings are unclear—did the Dial set from a typescript, and if so which, or from the Liveright proofs?—but friendly relations are also suggested by Edmund Wilson’s having been able to send to John Peale Bishop both a gathering of the Dial with the poem and proof sheets of the Notes as set for Boni & Liveright.
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
Fascination with the Notes followed TSE for the rest of his life. Arnold Bennett, 10 Sept 1924: “I said to him: ‘I want to ask you a question. It isn’t an insult. Were the notes to Wastelands a lark or serious? I thought they were a skit.’ He said that they were serious, and not more of a skit than some things in the poem itself”, Journals III, 1921–1928 ed. Newman Flower (1933). In 1956, TSE related the Notes to the accusation of having “plagiarised, pinched, pilfered” (see headnote to Cousin Nancy): “I must admit that I am, on one conspicuous occasion, not guiltless of having led critics into temptation. The notes to The Waste Land! I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came to print The Waste Land as a little book—for the poem on its first appearance in The Dial and in The Criterion had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never be unstuck. They have had almost greater popularity than the poem itself—anyone who bought my book of poems, and found that the notes to The Waste Land were not in it, would demand his money back”, The Frontiers of Criticism (1956). To Bonamy Dobrée, 14 Nov 1957: “my own preference would be to abolish the notes to The Waste Land”. Finally: “author’s notes (as is illustrated by The Waste Land) are no prophylactic against interpretation and dissection: they merely provide the serious researcher with more material to interpret and dissect”, A Note of Introduction (1961) to a new ed. of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937).
Asked by Gorham Munson how he had influenced The Waste Land, Pound wrote in a “Communication” to 1924: A Magazine of the Arts [Sept/Nov] 1924:
I don’t care a damn where which influence crossed what other, etc. But I suggest that the reader of good will should read The Waste Land as I read it; i.e. without the notes; in which case he will find these terrible obscurities reduced to a few words of sanskrit (four words I think):
Datta—Give.
Dayadhvam—Sympathise.
Damyata—Control.
and Shantih—Peace.
and that of these four the first three are so implied in the surrounding text that one can pass them by—graeca non legitur [L. Graecum est; non legitur = it is Greek, so it cannot be read]—without losing the general tone or the main emotion of the passage. They are so obviously the words of some ritual or other, and the sense of the passage so repeats their general import.
Let it go that shantih means Peace; I think one does need to be told that. For the rest I saw the poem in typescript, and I did not see the notes till six or eight months afterward; and they have not increased my enjoyment of the poem one atom. The poem seems to me an emotional unit, since Mr. Munson asks for an unity. And perhaps intensity or poignancy of expression is as val
uable as any of the other more complicated structural functionatings which he finds lacking.
I have not read Miss Weston’s Ritual to Romance and do not at present intend to. As to the citations, I do not think it matters a damn which is from Day, which from Milton, Middleton, Webster or Augustine. I mean so far as the functioning of the poem is concerned. One’s incult pleasure in reading The Waste Land would be the same if Webster had written Women Before Woman and Marvell the Metamorphoses.
The poem is there for the reader. The notes are for some other species of fauna, perhaps the Times Lit. Sup. reader with whom we (toi et moi, mon ami) have no concern.
Sincerely yours,
Ezra Pound.
This demand for clarity in every particular of a work, whether essential or not, reminds me of the preraphaelite painter who was doing a twilight scene but rowed across the river in day time to see the shape of the leaves on the further bank, which he then drew in with full detail.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 68
