The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 73
Valerie Eliot, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971: “Pound left the decision to him, so he omitted the passage, a fact which he later regretted.” TSE: “horrified past horror”, WLComposite 544.
To Grover Smith, 21 Mar 1949: “The connection of Heart of Darkness with The Waste Land is simply that I had thought of using as the epigraph the dying words of Mr. Kurtz. Ezra Pound demurred at this as he thought that the quotation was not weighty enough for the occasion, and it was after that that the quotation from Petronius came into my mind as being what I wanted.” (Hugh Kenner pointed out that Pound’s comment on the Conrad epigraph was not made until his letter of [24 Jan], which “implies that he had not seen it before, one indication that this title-page [ts title], and incidentally this title [The Waste Land], was not part of what he saw in Paris”, Litz ed. 44.) See Commentary to The Hollow Men for the epigraph taken from Conrad as the epigraph for the section-page title, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.”
TSE: “the language which is more important to us is that which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects, as, for instance, the prose of Mr. James Joyce or the earlier Conrad”, Swinburne as Poet (1920), concluding words. To Alan M. Hollingsworth, 22 Mar 1955: “It is certainly true that I was very deeply impressed at an undergraduate stage by Joseph Conrad’s works, or those of his books which had then been published, and that I was particularly impressed by Heart of Darkness and the other two stories in the same volume. I am not, however, conscious of any evidences of this fact in the text of The Waste Land · · · Incidentally, you are mistaken in thinking that what Mr. Pound urged me to cut out was any reference to Conrad in my notes to The Waste Land. What he advised me to cut out was an epigraph from Heart of Darkness, which I replaced by one from Petronius. The tentative use of the epigraph in question is the only association between the poem and Conrad’s stories of which I am aware.” Conrad’s Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories appeared in 1902, the other stories being Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether. Alain-Fournier’s letter to TSE of 25 July 1911 (Letters 1) makes clear that TSE had recommended the volume, and Stravinsky recorded TSE’s later saying that Youth and The End of the Tether were “the finest stories of their kind I know” (Themes and Conclusions, 1972, 71). TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes both Youth and Conrad’s Chance (1913).
E. M. Forster recalled his first acquaintance with TSE’s work in 1917: “Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being feeble. For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except the slightest gestures of dissent? He who measured himself against the war · · · and said to Armadillo-Armageddon ‘Avaunt!’ collapsed at once into a pinch of dust”, Life and Letters June 1929 (repr. in Abinger Harvest). Forster then turned to The Waste Land: “It is just a personal comment on the universe, as individual and as isolated as Shelley’s Prometheus.” TSE to Forster, 10 Aug 1929: “On account of the flattery implied by being written about by you, my opinion is anything but reliable, but I liked the article very much. You are right about the ‘horror’; and may be interested to know that the first quotation I chose for the Waste Land, before I hit on the more suitable one from Trimalchio, was a sentence from the end of Heart of Darkness, which you may remember, ending with Kurtz’s words ‘the horror … the horror’. I only think that you exaggerate the importance of the War in this context. The War crippled me as it did everyone else; but me chiefly because it was something I was neither honestly in nor honestly out of, but the Waste Land might have been just the same without the War.” On tragedy: “to those who have experienced the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate”, Shakespearian Criticism I. From Dryden to Johnson (1934). Alan Ansen recorded an anecdote about TSE told by W. H. Auden, 15 Jan 1947: “A woman who was seated next to him at table said, ‘Isn’t the party wonderful?’ He said, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all’”, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1990). ‘The horror! The horror!’: Laforgue: “qu’on | Te nourrisse, horreur! horreur! horreur! à la sonde” [that they force-feed you, horror! horror! horror! with a tube], Complainte des Blackboulés [Complaint of the Blackballed].
[Poem I 53, 323 · Textual History II 372]
Epigraph “Nam Sibyllam · · · ἀποθανεῖν θέλω”: Petronius, Satyricon §48, the words of Trimalchio: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die’” (tr. Michael Heseltine, Loeb, 1913; WLFacs 126 has the misspelling “Sybil”). Kenner wrote that “Cage” is a mistranslation of ampulla, “bottle” (Litz ed. 38); see note to the unadopted title to Part II, “In the Cage”. TSE to E. M. Stephenson, 9 July 1944, about proofs of her book: “I think you should check, not only your quotations from other languages, but your translations of them: e.g. I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae, hanging in a bottle” (apart from “a celebrated Sibyl”, this is the translation given at Stephenson 19, and it is not clear whether TSE meant that “bottle” was wrong or that it was right).
TSE’s secretary to Stephenson, 18 June 1944: “Mr. Eliot · · · asks me to tell you that the quotation is from Petronius—Satyricon 48.8. The speaker, Trimalchio, is drunk. He does not know himself what the explanation is, and says that so far as his poem is concerned it does not matter.” From Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Notebook Fragments:
“I saw the Sibyl at Cumae”
(One said) “with my own eye.
She hung in a cage, and read her rune
To all the passers-by.
Said the boys, ‘What wouldst thou, Sibyl?’
She answered, ‘I would die’.”
This is preceded by a prose translation with “jar” for “cage” (Grover Smith 69). TSE to Giovanni Mardersteig, 15 June 1961, on the Officina Bodoni edition (1962): “Certainly, if you wish, put ‘Petronius, Satiricon’ after it. I think it is quoted somewhere by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but at the same time I must defend my use of the quotation by saying that I have read the Satiricon, or most of it.”
Lemprière “Sibyllæ”: “The most famous of the Sibyls is that of Cumæ in Italy · · · It is said that Apollo became enamoured of her, and that, to make her sensible of his passion, he offered to give her whatever she should ask. The Sibyl demanded to live as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand, but unfortunately forgot to ask for the enjoyment of the health, vigour, and bloom, of which she was then in possession.” (For the sufferings of the long-lived Tiresias, with his “wrinkled dugs”, see note to [III] 218.) TSE: “The aged sybil”, Goldfish IV 28. Sibylla, perhaps named after the character in Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book, recurs—sometimes as “Sybilla”—in the Criterion pieces by “F. M.” and Vivien Eliot’s notebooks of the 1920s (Bodleian); see McCue 2016.
In Virgil, the Sibyl prophesies the destruction of Rome: “bella, horrida bella | et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno” [Wars, grim wars I see, and Tiber foaming with streams of blood], Aeneid VI 86–87.
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 372]
At Harvard in 1908–09, TSE took Clifford H. Moore’s Latin Literature course “The Roman Novel: Petronius and Apuleius”. On 15 Oct 1963, TSE’s secretary replied to an enquiry from J. V. Healy: “Mr. Eliot · · · certainly read the Satyricon of Petronius with Professor E. K. Rand when he was at Harvard.” TSE’s copy of selections from Petronius’ Saturae et Liber Priapeorum Quartum, ed. Bücheler (1904), has a presentation to Hayward: “Wd you care to add to your library my Harvard (undergraduate) Apuleius and Petronius?” TSE wrote in it that Petronius is “awfully colloquial”. (The volume also contains Varronis Menippearvm Reliquiae, but TSE noted: “The only points of similarity between Petr. + Varro. | 1. General form of work. | 2. Insertion of pieces reproducing the manner of previous or contemporary poets. | 3. Parody of tragic style. | 4. Popular speech | Scepticism and irreverence.”) Grover Smith 1974 303–304: “The Satyricon enjoyed celebrity and notoriety in the Edwardian
and Georgian eras · · · Michael Heseltine’s cautious rendering [for Loeb] · · · presaged a spate of references including Compton Mackenzie’s suggestive comparisons, in Sinister Street (1913–14), of Petronius’s underworld to that of London.” In July 1922 a charge of obscenity was brought against Boni & Liveright after their publication of W. C. Firebaugh’s idiomatic translation of the Satyricon (Gareth L. Schmeling and David R. Rebmann, Comparative Literature Studies Dec 1975). TSE: “we think more highly of Petronius than our grandfathers did”, Euripides and Professor Murray (1920). In the same year, TSE used a quotation from Petronius as one of the two epigraphs to The Sacred Wood.
The incorporation of Greek speech within the Latin narrative was not unusual in the classics. When reading the Greek text of Aristotle’s De Anima in 1914–15, TSE annotated his copy in Latin, English and occasionally Greek. (His acquaintance with languages at various times and in different degrees included French, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, Pali, Sanskrit and perhaps some Portuguese.)
Dedication il miglior fabbro: Purg XXVI 115–19:
“O frate,” disse, “questi ch’ io ti scerno
col dito” (ed additò un spirto innanzi)
“fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.
Versi d’ amore e prose di romanzi
soperchiò tutti, e lascia dir gli stolti · · ·”
[“O brother,” said he, “this one whom I distinguish to thee with my finger” (and he pointed to a spirit in front) “was a better craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses of love, and prose tales of romance, all he surpassed, and let fools talk”.]
A note in the Temple edition reads: “Arnaut Daniel, a distinguished Provençal poet, flourished ca. 1180–1200. Among his patrons was Richard Cœur-de-Lion. He was a master of the so-called trobar clus, or obscure style of poetry, which revelled, besides, in difficult rhymes and other complicated devices. As such, he was very naturally ‘caviare to the general’.” Pound in 1915: “And the ‘best craftsman’ sings out his friend’s song, | Envies its vigour · · · and deplores the technique”, Near Perigord II (included by TSE in Pound’s Selected Poems, 1928). Pound: “Arnaut was the best artist among the Provençals, trying the speech in new fashions, and bringing new words into writing · · · and when Dante was older and had well thought the thing over he said simply, ‘il miglior fabbro’”, Arnaut Daniel in Art & Letters Spring 1920 (included by TSE in Pound’s Literary Essays). For Pound and Eliot on Arnaut, see note on volume title Ara Vos Prec (“Poems (1920)”). TSE, in A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry (1920):
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 372]
there is no more useful criticism and no more precious praise for a poet than that of another poet:
“Fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno · · ·
e lascia dir gli stolti · · ·”
Pound had previously added the article il when he used Dante’s tribute to Arnaut as the title of a paper at the Poets’ Club (letter to his father, 12 Jan 1910) which became ch. II of The Spirit of Romance (1910): “It was not in a fit of senseless enthusiasm, nor yet because of lost narrative poems of uncertain existence, that Dante praised ‘il miglior fabbro’ but for ‘maestria’.” In his next paragraph Pound translated the phrase as “‘the better craftsman’”. Pound’s copy of the American first edition of The Waste Land is inscribed “for E. P. | miglior fabbro | from T. S. E. | Jan. 1923” (Texas). The dedication was first printed in 1925 (by which time “fabbro” may have glanced at the name of TSE’s new publisher, employer and friend, Geoffrey Faber). Alexander: the addition of the article “changes the meaning of the phrase from ‘a better workman’ or ‘the better workman’ to ‘the best craftsman’.” TSE: “the phrase, not only as used by Dante, but as quoted by myself, had a precise meaning. I did not mean to imply that Pound was only that: but I wished at that moment to honour the technical mastery and critical ability manifest in his own work, which had also done so much to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem”, On a Recent Piece of Criticism (1938). On Pound: “the craftsman up to this moment has never failed”, Ezra Pound (1946). On the artist as craftsman: “No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his personality. He expresses his personality indirectly through concentrating upon a task which is a task in the same sense as the making of an efficient engine or the turning of a jug or a table-leg”, Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924).
WLComposite unadopted heading at head of Part I and again at head of Part II HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Valerie Eliot, WLFacs notes:
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, bk. I, ch. XVI, “Minders and Re-Minders”. Sloppy is a foundling adopted by old Betty Higden, a poor widow. “‘I do love a newspaper’ she says. ‘You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices’.” Eliot drew on the novel again for one of his Practical Cats. The Rum Tum Tugger who “will do | As he do do” is a deliberate echo of Podsnap in bk. I, ch. XI.
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 372–73]
(After publication of the heading in Gallup 1968, its source had been identified by Douglas Hewitt, TLS 1 Jan 1969.)
TSE to Anne Ridler, 30 Sept 1952: “If you want to hear a really ‘dramatic’ Waste Land, you should listen to the recent long-play recording of The Waste Land by Bobbie Speaight, who, like Sloppy, can ‘do the police in different woices’. (Hear him come the four cats in the wheelbarrow: pledge you my word, sir, four distinct cats. Damme sire, that’s genius. Who said that? About whom? to whom? where? General Knowledge Question).” (For the answers, see Pickwick Papers ch. XLIV.) To Enid Faber, 25 Feb 1939, after sending her a “Pickwick Paper” mock examination on Dickens: “At your stage of Pickwickian development, you may well be excused for confusing Lord Mutanhed with Lord Frederick Verisopht, and thinking that ‘taking a grinder’ had something to do with the Minders (and he do the Police in different voices) in Our Mutual Friend.” With the police again: “You may remember that Mrs. Cluppins, in the trial of the case of Bardell v. Pickwick, testified that ‘the voices was very loud, sir, and forced themselves upon my ear’. ‘Well, Mrs. Cluppins,’ said Sergeant Buzfuz, ‘you were not listening, but you heard the voices’”, The Three Voices of Poetry (1953). Dialogue with the police is heard within the poem’s cancelled opening part (WLComposite 35–43).
TSE’s Dickens was the New Century ed. (1899[–1916]), which apparently he began to collect in 1904 with Great Expectations (vol. 14, signed and dated by him); Our Mutual Friend (vol. 15) was published in 1908. Aurelia Hodgson’s notes on TSE’s library (probably 1932) record: “Thackeray set; Dickens in front and in use constantly” (Bryn Mawr). TSE gave Mary Trevelyan a copy of Pickwick Papers for Christmas 1955 (Texas; see Sackton F50 for inscription). A model for the writer: “the force of character by which Dickens, having exhausted his first inspiration, was able in middle age to proceed to such a masterpiece, so different from his early work, as Bleak House. It is difficult and unwise to generalize about ways of composition—so many men, so many ways—but it is my experience that towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working”, Yeats (1940).
Commentary, beginning with notes on WLComposite 1–54.
Valerie Eliot, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971, on the first part of He Do the Police in Different Voices:
a typescript on three leaves, revised in pencil and in ink. It opens with 54 unpublished lines, recounting a night on the town, which appears to be Boston, and is interspersed with snatches of music-hall songs. Gus Krutzsch, the pseudonym Eliot was to adopt on one occasion, is recorded as a member of the party. This passage, lightly cancelled by Eliot, has parallels with the brothel scene in Ulysses, for which, Eliot wrote to Joyce [21 May 1921], “I have nothing but admiration; in fact, I wish for my own sake that I had not read it.”
Anthony Cronin claimed that “some six or seven years before his death” TSE recalled meditating a long poem as far back as 1918, and said that the effect of reading episodes of Ulysses was, “for the time being, ruinous · · · He abandoned his poem. Eventually Pound told him that ‘even if the thing has been done in prose it is necessary to do it in poetry also’”, Irish Times 16 June 1972. (For comparisons with Joyce, see note to [I] 1–4 and William B. Worthen, Twentieth Century Literature Summer 1981.)
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 373]
On 18 Apr 1933, at Harvard, TSE and Theodore Spencer gave a class on Ulysses and Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), as part of their course “Contemporary English Literature (1890 to the Present Time)”. TSE: “The Synchronisation. (cf. Pound and myself). Several periods of time and several planes of reality at once. Strong historical sense, and of everything happening at once. Not in Woolf or Lawrence. Contrast historical novel. Gets away from straight narrative. (Mrs. Woolf to some extent). Intensity by association · · · intensity is gained at the expense of clarity. The real deeper emotional current of life is continuous, but ordinarily is not in full consciousness. Scenery is not described but is felt”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933). For “planes of reality”, see note to WLComposite 545, 548. (To Jack P. Dalton, 26 Sept 1963: “It is true that I was responsible for the publication of Finnegans Wake but I never felt any warm enthusiasm for the work. [Footnote: No one admires Joyce more than I do—but all one can say is that after Ulysses there was nothing else for him to do.]”)