WHEN I was a schoolboy in Manchester, England, I had contemporary literature forced on me not by a sponsor but by a detractor. This was James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, who said, I seem to remember, that he would rather slit his children’s throats than have them read The Well of Loneliness. One Sunday he devoted a two-page spread to an attack of the most slavering savagery on Aldous Huxley: the great banner headline was THE MAN WHO HATES GOD. The Daily Express into which Douglas’s Sabbatarian fury would sometimes spill over, though somewhat diluted, once organised a poetry competition for the young. Douglas was ready with good advice under an archetypal portrait of THE POET – an exophthalmic goitrous quill-chewer, evidently both syphilitic and phthisical. He told young aspirants to follow masters like Leigh Hunt and Longfellow, who knew how to rhyme, and to avoid charlatans like Pound and Eliot.
Pound, he said, could not rise above lines like ‘Sing goddam damn damn,’ while Eliot, who had written an illiterate gallimaufry called The Waste Land, went in for such doggerel as ‘O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and on her daughter.’ Naturally I was intrigued, and I borrowed The Waste Land from the public library.
I was only fifteen, and I understood very little of the poem, but I recognised that it was important. I seemed to hear a door, a long way down one of my mind’s corridors, trying to creak open but not quite making it. But I took in with relish the horns and motors and the throbbing taxi, the fishing by the dull canal, the carbuncular small house agent’s clerk. I knew this world, since I was the son of a Manchester shopkeeper, whereas I was vague on skylarks. I had even seen a Bradford millionaire, though not in a silk hat.
I copied the whole poem out, without the notes which I could see even then were a bit of a put-on. Then I got down to learning it by heart. This result was that, at fifteen, I could quote Dante and Baudelaire in the original, as well as a few objurgations from the Upanishads. The Waste Land was, and still is, quite apart from its poetic merits, a kind of big railway terminus, from which you can take a train to various literatures and theologies. In the refreshment room you see Mr Eliot himself, taking tea and refusing a slice of peach tart. He is not going anywhere; he has arrived.
By the time I got to Manchester University, I understood The Waste Land pretty well. Without boasting, I can say that I knew the poem better than any of my English lecturers: they did not have it by heart, and I did. In my first year I organised a sort of arty reading of it, with the lines split up among characters called the Hyacinth Girl, the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, Tiresias, Belladonna, and so on. The music was a mixture of ragtime, Wagner, and plain chant, and I myself composed a setting of the Thames Daughters’ song, made out of Wagner’s own weilala wailing in Das Rheingold. To accompany the opening ‘April is the cruellest month,’ I wanted that marvellous chill bassoon solo at the beginning of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, but I was howled down and we had to have a young music student playing Delius on the piano. Recently, I discovered that Eliot had had that very Stravinsky bassoon in his ears while composing his opening lines. I wish he’d announced that fact in some publication or other in 1937, the year of my production. I hate being right too late.
1937 was fifteen years after the first appearance of The Waste Land – a long time by the reckoning of a student. Still, the poem did not seem to belong to an ancient epoch, as the early Chaplin films did, as well as the old ragtime records we swing-followers despised. Eliot was still in early middle age and producing new things – the plays, the first of the Four Quartets. The Collected Poems had come out a mere year before. James Joyce, whose Ulysses had also first seen the light as a bound banned book in 1922, was working on his new unintelligible opus, which I remember my history lecturer, A.J.P. Taylor, sneering at in a lecture. Eliot and Joyce were very much now writers, and The Waste Land was avant-garde enough to set many of the older professors puffing – quite apart from philistines like James Douglas (who was that year, I think, howling away at obscenity in somebody as teashop-dainty as Mary Webb). And it seems to me now that The Waste Land is as fresh and surprising as it was in my youth.
Look at it as a film scenario, which in many ways it resembles, and you can see that it goes much farther – with its jump cuts and flashes backward and forward and montages and intense economy – than anything by Truffaut or Godard or Fellini or Antonioni. We open in April, with a poet in the middle of the road of life seeing, in a mixture of fear and regret and elation, the lilacs pushing out of the earth. How much better it was in winter, when the snow muffled everything, and there was no need to engage the forces of life. The poet is a man we have met before – in Eliot’s own ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – but he is less of the clown now and more of a Prince Hamlet. He is inhibited, scared of sex; the spring is an assault on his drab Bostonian security.
The scene changes from spring to summer – a remembered summer in Munich, on the Starnbergersee, when a sudden shower of rain sent the poet and his companion scurrying for shelter. April, sex, rain, water – all are to be feared. Water means fertility, revivification of what prefers to be waste and dry. And now the companion talks, evidently a woman: ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch.’ She is, she says, not a Russian; she comes from Lithuania, she is entirely German. She is one of the bastard products of a dry, cracked, decaying Europe. She too is frightened. She remembers a particular fear she felt while staying with the archduke, her cousin, when he took her out on a sled – the descent from the safe high sterility of the mountains, where ‘you feel free’, to those depths at water level where fecund dirty life is carried on. Her life? She reads much of the night, and goes south in the winter. She will appear again in the poem – a beautiful but sterile woman, waiting for death, the Lady of the Rocks.
And now the poet hears the voice of a preacher, echoing Ecclesiastes: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?’ Dried-up Europe, a world that has survived a great war but does not now wish to live, knows only ‘a heap of broken images, where the sun beats’. There is not water, but there is shadow. If the listener will step for a while into this shadow – not the shadow of a tree but of a red rock – he will see a whole procession of human life: ‘fear in a handful of dust.’
That image of drought is at once replaced by a memory of water – but water in pretence, make-believe. We are at the opera, and Tristan und Isolde is being performed. High on a ship’s mast a sailor sings: ‘The wind blows us briskly homeward. Where are you wandering, my Irish child?’ The story of a great sterile love affair is beginning, one that can end only in death. And yet such hopeless empty passions are magnificent, to be feared by Prufrock as much as the childish sexual encounter among the spring-wet flowers. Nothing is simple, everything is equivocal. The poet remembers a failure of early love, with a girl they called ‘the hyacinth girl’ – hyacinths are symbols of fertility – ‘when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not speak, and my eyes failed’. We have now rushed to the end of the opera, when love is to be fulfilled in death. ‘Od’ und leer das Meer’ – the sea is not life-giving but bitter and empty.
We now have to meet Madame Sostrosis, famous clairvoyante. An age that has rejected fertility has naturally rejected religion, which has its roots in ancient vegetation magic, and has to make do with such feeble substitutes as cartomancy. Madame Sosostris (her name seems to come from Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony) tells fortunes with the old tarot pack. This, with its strange pictures of the Hanged Man and the Day of Judgment and the Tower Struck by Lightning, is of very venerable origin, being tied up with the Grail legend and the myths of death and purification and rebirth that underlie it. Now the cards have been debased to serve a superstitious end, a forbidden prying into the future. Madame Sosostris is herself a debased seer – she has a bad cold and cannot speak very clearly – but she sees certain truths: the crowd of people walking around in a ring, making their own hell; the beautiful woman who is reduced to ruling over barren rocks and managing empty social situations. She does not find the Hanged Man among the cards she deals, for the Hanged Man is Christ or the sacrificed seer-king who will restore water to the parched land. She is very direct in telling her client to ‘fear death by water.’
Then we see another kind of hell – not people walking around in a ring, but a crowd flowing over London Bridge, ‘so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The words come from Dante, and describe the damned. This is the world that Eliot had just left in order to write The Waste Land, a decayed world, once magnificent, full of warehouses and money counting: Eliot had been an employee of Lloyd’s Bank. The Thames, once bright and thronged with life, is now so much dirty water; the bell of Saint Mary Woolnoth, a Wren church, speaks of a past magnificence but its final stroke ends with a ‘dead sound’.
The poet sees one he knew – as Dante so often does in his journey through hell – and hails him. His name is Stetson, a name that sounds dull and ordinary and seems to ask that things stay as they are (‘stet’), without hope, without redemption. The poet reminds him of the corpse Stetson planted in his garden and, almost hysterically, tells him to keep dogs away – symbols of busy animality, dream-token of sex – lest they dig it up. Resurrection is not wanted. Then the poet turns, in the words of Baudelaire, to the reader himself: ‘hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ The reader is Stetson, we are all guilty.
We are able, in the next part of the poem, to linger for a time in a fixed and static locale, with the camera slowly drinking in the details. We are with a new allomorph of the Lady of the Rocks, the beautiful woman dying slowly in magnificent aridity. Here she is surrounded by luxury sumptuously rendered, by all the glories of a past conspicuously not arid, and her very chair is described as if it were Cleopatra’s barge (yet does not that recall another passion that ended in death?). In her boudoir is a representation of the rape of Philomela, but the tragic song of her sister, changed into a nightingale, is reduced to a vulgar throating: ‘“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.’ Her cosmetics and perfumes are synthetic, rejecting the natural juices of life. She is conducting a love affair that has become as routine as ‘the hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four.’ Her nerves are shot to pieces; her lover reminds her that they are both ‘in rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones.’ They are awaiting the knock on the door that is death’s summons.
A door opens on to another scene – this time far from sumptuous. In a London pub, just before closing time, a woman is telling a friend about a more basic rejection of life – that of a third woman, not present, who refuses to have babies and has made a wreck of herself with abortive medicines. Her husband, Albert, is coming back from the war, a sort of phallic hero who ‘wants a good time’, but he will find a wife whose teeth are rotten and whose sexual urges have decayed. Here is the Lady of the Rocks again, but now no Belladonna. The landlord shouts HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME, and we are aware that life is running out for all of us. The customers say good night to each other, and then an alien voice intrudes: ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies’. It is Ophelia, and these are the last words she speaks before going off to a watery grave. She at least died by water.
The next section of the poem introduces us to the Fisher King, Amfortas, with the unhealable wound, wandering the shores of the Thames, the dirty water that was once pure poetic silver, hailed by Spenser – ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song’ – in a poem he wrote to celebrate a Christian marriage. The sodality of the pubs mocks the magnificent Wren churches. The suffering of the observer, who drinks the London squalor as a self-inflicted penance, is intensified by his changing into Tiresias, the seer who was both man and woman and who is now doomed to feel the agony proper to both the sexes, set as they are in a loveless sterile hell. Tiresias watches the mean seduction of a typist by a carbuncular clerk. The language is full of the rhythms of a more heroic age; the typist’s reflections on her ‘departed lover’ are followed by a parody of a song from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield:
When a lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
This ironic confrontation of graceless present with gracious past (though the dichotomy is never as simple as that) reaches its limit in the song of the three Thames Daughters, who, having watched Elizabeth and Leicester in a gilded barge, turn into true denizens of a degraded shore, tracing the river from Richmond and Kew, past Moorgate, to Margate Sands, recounting a table of debased and hopeless lives:
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble who expect
Nothing.
At the end of this section, which though set around water is called ‘The Fire Sermon’, we catch the very faint sounds of voices from another world. Saint Augustine turns London into Carthage – ‘where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears’ – and we remember that all cities fall. London has already been termed an ‘unreal city’. An echo of Buddha – ‘burning burning burning burning’ – suggests that our aridity must be made positive, must become an aspect of fire and not a mere absence of water. We are to see this hell as a sort of purgatory.
In a brief section called ‘Death by Water’, Eliot translates, from the French, one of his own earlier poems. Phlebas the Phoenician is drowned, having forgotten the ‘profit and loss’ of the commerce that carried him over the seas. Earlier, another Levantine – ‘Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant’ – appeared in London, ‘unshaven, with a pocket full of currants’, a debased representative of an Eastern wave that once brought more than mere goods to the West. Trade, we now see, is a substitute for free giving. Mr Eugenides pays a prostitute (acted by Tiresias) for ‘a weekend at the Metropole’: Madame Sosostris takes her fee; London is all buying and selling; even the Wren churches are monuments to trade. Phlebas, who may have sold currants – dried-up grapes, incapable of yielding wine – is now finding that ‘a current under sea picked his bones in whispers.’
The final section – ‘What the Thunder Said’ – is a nightmare that ends with a full statement of the hope prefigured at the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’. We seem to witness Christ’s crucifixion, then suffer, on a kind of road to Emmaus, the sense, unconfirmed by counting, that another person, ‘gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded’, is with us. We long desperately for water, for even the sound of water, for even the water-dripping song of the hermit thrush, but we are forced to trudge a cracked dry road in endless thirst. Cities, all unreal, collapse and re-form in the violet air; the bells of London clang from towers that are upside down. Then a cock crows. It is the noise of rebirth, but also the noise of betrayal. But Christ’s betrayer was a rock – now dry – on which a faith was built. It is not, however, to Christ or His Church that we turn, but farther east. We hear the thunder, harbinger of rain, and learn to interpret its ‘DA’. The Buddha shows us that the thunder is trying to say ‘Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata’ – ‘Give, sympathise, control’ – and the poet at once refers these injunctions to that personal ‘Bostonian’ level at which love cannot escape from its prison of reserve, where nerve fails and opportunities are lost forever.
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
The poem ends with a mass of quotations – Dante, Thomas Kyd, the Pervigilium Veneris, nursery rhyme – but does not attempt to sharpen a moral, turning a highly complex structure into a simple homily. ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ asks the Fisher King. Arnaut Daniel leaps into the ‘refining fire’. London Bridge is ‘falling down falling down falling down’, but is the prospect of ruin – against which ‘these fragments’ or scraps of knowledge are to be shored – to be taken seriously? The last word, thrice repeated is ‘Shantih’, the formal ending to an Upanishad, carrying the force of a dismissive blessing and best translated as ‘the peace which passeth understanding’. The Waste Land has didactic elements, like all Eliot’s work, especially the later, overtly Anglo-Catholic, writings, but it is not itself a sermon. It is a dramatic poem with many voices, and it would be as unwise to fasten any of its many moral statements on the author himself as it would be to identify Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth with William Shakespeare.
To summarise the poem – as I have briefly and, inevitably, inaccurately tried to do here – is to demonstrate that, like a play or a novel, it has a structure separable from language: there is a solidity that conveys the feeling of a three-dimensional artefact. But it is the language, of course, that finally counts. What first struck all the readers of my generation was the way in which avant-garde daring was combined with classic authority. It was something to be recognised also in Joyce’s Ulysses. The new seemed to be made out of the traditional and these two innovators disclosed a far profounder awareness of the importance of tradition than many of the old guard, its guardians. Eliot’s free verse was a very personal development of Jacobean blank verse – sauced a little with Laforgue – and its authority was such as to make Webster, Tourneur, and Middleton sound like very modern authors.
At the same time, Eliot did not shrink from filling his verse with most untraditional properties, at the risk of the accusation of ugliness or even the odd snicker in the wrong place. ‘While I was fishing in the dull canal on a winter evening round behind the gashouse’ – if this suggests the comic lugubrious, then Eliot’s complex seriousness is well able to accommodate it. It is, in fact, able to accommodate most things, from the pills that Lil took ‘to bring it off’ to ‘the agony in stony places’ and the ‘reverberation of thunder of spring over distant mountains’. English poetry had not known such a breadth of tone since Andrew Marvell. Robert Browning had tried to write poetry in which corns and bunions and tobacco went along with more traditional properties, but he failed in two ways: he never managed to absorb the contemporary speech rhythms in which trivialities are mentioned, and he never elevated trivialities to seriousness.
Eliot could take a ragtime song or a snatch of soldier’s obscenity and fit it into a context of tragedy. ‘O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag’ seems to sum up whole eras of decay when we hear it in the boudoir of that lady dying of boredom. ‘O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and on her daughter, they wash their feet in soda water’ (‘Not White Rock,’ Eliot said once); this is followed by a reference to the sacramental washing of the feet in the Parsifal legend, while the boy choristers sing: ‘Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!’ It is Eliot’s own juxtapository device for showing fragments of a decayed culture, but at the same time, Mrs Porter is somehow elevated to the level of a folk myth to be valued because it contains a sediment of ancient ritual.
The technique was to be exploited to the limit by Joyce in Finnegans Wake (the hero of which, by the way, seems to be named Mr Porter – a carrier of liquor and of sin). The whole history of man is presented through a technique in which childish, though polyglot, puns jostle with street songs and street slang. The very title derives from a New York Irish ballad, but it is made to bear the weight of ancient myth and perennial faith. Isolde’s death song has its opening words – Mild und leise – transformed into the nickname of a doubtful Dublin character, Mildew Lisa. The punning and the parody are funny but serious; the concentration of multiple, and sometimes opposed, meanings into a single word is in the service of a literary complexity carried very lightly. And it all, ultimately, comes from The Waste Land, complete with resurrection theme, images of a decayed civilisation, and a harkening to calls from the East.
If Finnegans Wake is the most massive example of the fertility of that brief crammed poem of Eliot, we can find very few poems and novels of less ambitious aim that, coming after The Waste Land, have been able to escape its influence. It was, I discovered myself when I first began to write seriously, hard to get the Eliotian voices out of my ears and my prose. It was so delightful to conjoin mock-pomposity with deliberate vulgarity, to throw in recondite literary allusions for ironic effects, to make statements conveying an authority somehow both professorial and parsonic, and yet, at the same time, tinged with self-mockery.
Apart from writers, the Eliotian phrase worked its way into the most unexpected contexts, so that television weathermen could comment on April being the cruellest month or say that, today, summer surprised us. When, at a cocktail party, a man was described as ‘one of the low,’ everybody added to himself: ‘on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ Whether or not the content of Eliot is acceptable, the quality of his phrase-making is so insidious that it cannot easily be rejected. Like Yeats, he is one of the great writers of single memorable lines. In creating these, the poet serves the language, modifying it in the direction of a greater subtlety, and his achievement affects the street and the market place as well as the academic common room.
I don’t think the young of today are capable of deriving the authentic poetic shiver from reading Eliot that my generation knew in the thirties. In those days it seemed unlikely that Eliot would ever become an academic text. He was untouched by the professors, a kind of literature of the counter establishment. Nowadays I am sometimes called upon to give a lesson on The Waste Land in one American university or another, and I find that the students have a heavily annotated text, obviating the possibility for their finding out anything for themselves. The epigraph from Petronius, in which the Sybil says she wants to die, is duly translated, and the battle of Mylae, at which Stetson fought, is rightly glossed as being an element in an ancient commercial struggle. I gain the impression that many students find Eliot a bit of a bore, with too much Latin in him, and that they regard his erudition as old-hat and reactionary.
The charge of fascism has even been brought against Eliot, as also against Yeats, Lawrence, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. Eliot didn’t, on the evidence of his poetry, care much for the Jews, and though there is no overt anti-Semitism in The Waste Land (as there is in ‘Gerontion’ and ‘Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar’), there is a suggestion that the mongrelising of Europe is the work of the wanderers – ‘hooded hordes swarming’ – and the exiles who have made a kind of culture out of their money. There is a sort of subdued desire for a pure Aryanism, best realised in the civilisation of India.
Eliot’s brand of Indianism, incidentally, makes no appeal to the young, who prefer the Buddhism of Eliot’s contemporary Hermann Hesse to the active philosophy of the Upanishads. Both Hesse, whom Eliot had read, and the poet who was eventually to find a satisfactory faith in Anglo-Catholicism, saw that Europe was collapsing and that the only hope lay in the East. But Hesse was all for the opting-out of a pacific neutrality, best realised in a Swiss canton, while Eliot proposes techniques of purgation and prayer and even, in The Rock, the Social Credit that Pound also espoused. Ultimately, of course, this sort of thing matters little. What remains is the powers of language, the purification of the dialect of the tribe, the big magic of words that we do not always understand.
The twentieth century has seen bigger and more ambitious poems than The Waste Land – such as the Cantos of Pound, the Anathemata of David Jones, the Anabase of St-John Perse – but no poem has been a more miraculous mediator between the hermetic and demotic. It is, curiously when one considers the weight of polyglot learning it carries, essentially a popular poem, outgoing rather than ingrown, closer to Shakespeare than to Donne. It was Pound who said that music decays when it moves too far away from the dance, and poetry decays when it neglects to sing. The Waste Land sticks in one’s mind like a diverse recital performed by a voice of immense variety but essentially a single organ: it sings and goes on singing.
Horizon, 16 August 1971