1922 It was done, he explained, ‘mostly when I was at Lausanne for treatment last winter’. Together ‘with the notes that I am adding’, he thought that it ‘should make a book of thirty or forty pages. I think it is the best I have ever done, and Pound thinks so too.’ Originally titled ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, it would come out later that year as The Waste Land.
So from its beginnings three strands were woven into this terrifying modernist poem about the decay of modern times: psychiatric distress (the reason for the ‘treatment’); footnotes to aid the reader in identifying the poem’s many literary allusions; and the support of that other great Anglo-American modernist, Ezra Pound.
In fact, Pound had been a midwife to The Waste Land, not only in introducing Eliot to Quinn in the first place, promoting his work from the beginning, and even trying to raise money to buy him out from his demanding job at Lloyd’s Bank in London, but also in his lively editing of the poem’s manuscript. This last service has been over-emphasised in the lore that has now accumulated around the famous production. Pound’s changes were mostly minor, though well-judged.
For one thing, he seems to have wanted to reduce the poem’s tone of provisionality. While Eliot’s typescript had ‘Mr Eugenides’, the gay Smyrna merchant, inviting the poet’s persona ‘To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel / And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole’, Pound scribbled in the margin, ‘dam per’apsey’ – and the ‘perhaps’ was duly dropped. And when the original had the blind prophet Tiresias surmising that ‘one half-formed thought may pass’ across the abandoned typist’s brain after being seduced by ‘the young man carbuncular’, Pound pulled Eliot up with: ‘You, Tiresias if you know[,] know damn well or else you don’t.’
As for those footnotes, we need them, Eliot thought, because we are part of that modern decline that no longer knows Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Webster’s The White Devil – or dozens of other texts including the Upanishads – as part of an integral culture.
Yet in the comparison between traditional and modern, the irony can be read both ways. Take courtship, for example.
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
This vignette is inset into a modern Thames, one that ‘sweats / Oil and tar … Down Greenwich reach / Past the Isle of Dogs’, and on which a less glamorous encounter took place:
‘Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’
But then, what were Elizabeth and Leicester up to, if not an adulterous dalliance of their own? Is their affair morally superior to the modern one in a boat rented by the hour, on a stagnant, colourless, polluted river – or just classier? Or is Eliot’s idea that the modern decline all started with the Tudors, who came to power through a violent interruption of the ‘natural’ succession, and made Protestantism the national faith?