Creators (29 page)

These three factors, then—the counterpoint of public and private misery, and the work in the bank—were crucial elements in the creation of Eliot’s first masterpiece. But there were two others. The first was alcohol. Even with the encouragement of powerful personalities like Pound, Eliot was always diffident about writing poetry. In prose, there is reason to believe, he was fluent and unhesitating. He also found no problems with dialogue; that is one reason why he turned increasingly, later in life, to drama (to our and poetry’s loss). But with verse he was always strongly inhibited, incapable without stimulation, of releasing the deeper feelings poetry requires. For him to begin a poem induced the fear that many people feel on entering a crowded room, in mingling with its occupants. Just as alcohol helps such people, it enabled Eliot to plunge into verse and into all that verse implied. Eliot always enjoyed drinking, especially gin. He
liked strong cocktails. (And called them that: hence the title of his play
The Cocktail Party
; a born Englishman of his class would have called it
The Drinks Party
.) In 1953 (I think) I first met Eliot standing just inside the entrance to the drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street, headquarters of the famous publishing firm of John Murray for over 200 years. In that room Byron’s letters from exile had been read to the London social literati, and in its grate the sole copy of Byron’s memoirs had been burned, before witnesses. The then head of the firm, “Jock” Murray, was celebrated for the strength of his dry martinis, and that was one reason why Eliot delighted to be present at the Murray parties, even though he worked for a rival firm, Faber and Faber. The sole remark he addressed to me, before we were interrupted, was: “There is nothing in this world quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.”

The word “stimulating” was, and is, instructive. Many years later, after Eliot’s death, I had a long talk with his second wife and widow. She gave an instance of the role alcohol played in his poetry: “Tom’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ was of great importance to me. He wrote it in 1927, and when I was fourteen, I heard a recording of him reading it. It made a huge impression on me, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and I remember saying to myself, ‘That is the man for me.’ In due course I succeeded in becoming his secretary, and eventually his wife. After we were married, I asked him about the composition of that poem, and he told me: ‘I wrote it one Sunday after matins. I had been thinking about it in church and when I got home, I opened a half-bottle of Booth’s Gin [a powerfully flavored drink with a faint yellow tinge], poured myself a drink, and began to write. By lunchtime, the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished.’”

The fifth factor in the creation of
The Waste Land
was Pound. Eliot began this medium-length work, which in its published form is 434 lines but was originally much longer, late in 1919. What it is about is not clear; indeed it is not necessarily about anything. It has often been subjected to detailed exegesis, which can illuminate particular sections. Eliot himself supplied notes, a kind of confidence trick, which he later regretted as dishonest and pretentious, and these help with references, though they no
more explain what the poem is about than the sideheads that Robert Browning reluctantly supplied for his incomprehensible poem
Sordello
.
The Waste Land
is not a narrative but a poem about moods, predominantly despair and desolation, reflecting the ruin and waste of Eliot’s private life and the defeat World War I had pointlessly inflicted on civilization. Eliot continued to work on it throughout 1920 and early 1921, but by the summer of 1921 he was so downcast that he was advised, by what was then still called a neurologist, to take three months’ sick leave from the bank. Lloyd’s agreed, and Eliot went in November to Lausanne to see a leading psychiatrist. While in Switzerland he finished the poem, which was thus essentially brought to completion under the stress of mental breakdown.

Though Eliot was a conservative by intellectual conviction and instinct, he had a passion for cultural innovation. He strongly approved of cubism, for instance; he said that when he first heard Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
he burst into cheers;
Ulysses
struck him as the best novel he had ever read. He wished to bring about the same kind of revolution in poetry as these phenomena had achieved in painting, music, and the novel. Eliot had much admired Conrad’s tale
Heart of Darkness,
and in particular Kurtz’s death cry “The horror, the horror!” which, to Eliot, summarized dismay at the utter meaninglessness of the world—to understand what the world is “about” is to comprehend emptiness. Siegfried Sassoon later claimed that Eliot, while working on
The Waste Land
, said that “all great art is based upon a condition of fundamental boredom: passionate boredom.” The original text of the poem contained large elements of parody, stylistic cleverness, and wit—witless wittiness perhaps—in the manner of Eliot’s early verse, illustrating the boredom induced by cultural satiation, and in so doing boring the reader. However, Eliot had the sense to submit the original, full text to Pound, or perhaps he agreed to Pound’s insistence on being appointed editor; he had the further good sense to accept Pound’s changes, which essentially consisted in cutting away the pretentious parodying and witty superstructure with which Eliot had decorated the poem’s hard despair. The extent of the work Pound performed on
The Waste Land
can be judged from the original manuscript, which came to
light in 1971, after Eliot’s death, and was published by his widow.
⁸

In effect, Pound dug out from the version Eliot gave him the fundamental bones of the poem of despair so that its music and rhythms can be heard and felt. The changes transformed the work into a masterpiece, and one which was perceived as such the moment it was made public.
The Waste Land
was beautifully timed to appeal to young men who had come to the universities shortly after the war ended. They, like Eliot, felt empty, bored, disgusted with the world, and with themselves; overeducated in the classics, especially in Greek and Latin and often in German and French, as well as familiar with the English classics; and unsure, now, what all their education had been for. The poem was allusive (and elusive), sophisticated, catchy, rhythmic, full of incoherence, and meaningless anecdotes. It ranged from the plebeian and demotic to the ultra-academic, and it contained snatches of jazz and popular songs. It was carefully loaded with sexual innuendo of a kind calculated to stimulate and tease male virgins or near-virgins, reflecting Eliot’s own appetites and frustrations. It was perverse, decadent, sly, outrageous, provocative, but also unquestionably poetic in its careful, musical choice of words, its strong beat in places, its skillful repetitions, and its rhymes, or pseudo rhymes. It is marvelous to recite and easy to memorize despite its obscurity. Most of all, it invites participation. The greatest strength and appeal of the poem is that it asks to be interpreted not so much as the poet insists but as the reader wishes. It makes the reader a cocreator.

This ability of an author to entice the reader into collaborating with him in expanding, interpreting, and transforming what he has written is a rare gift, and an extremely attractive one. Jane Austen notably possessed it. Many of the most strongly emotional episodes in her novels are merely suggestive or indicative. She supplies characters but sometimes only hints about how they behave in a given situation—we, the readers, are left to fill in the gaps in her narrative, and delight in doing so. The books are full of lacunae, and we are to supply them. As Virginia Woolf put it, “Jane Austen stimulates us to supply what is not there.” The reader is thus, as it were, drawn up by her graciously inviting
hand to her own creative level and becomes an honored collaborator in her work. Eliot does the same in
The Waste Land
. The poet gives the readers the mood, and certain episodes or elements are clearly presented, though others less markedly. The readers, having caught the mood, are then invited to exercise their imagination—they are told (in effect) to clarify, add, expand, prolong, correct, emphasize, and intensify. They are cocreators in a major exercise in brilliant deception.

It is hard to imagine, now, how intoxicating this must have been to clever young people in 1922–1923. The poem’s reception on both sides of the Atlantic was mixed, to put it gently. The professional critics were angered, puzzled, outraged, occasionally intrigued and fascinated, disapproving or dismissive. Some were slow to make up their minds and waited for others to speak first. But the young were dazzled. It is hard to think of any other occasion when a new writer has been taken so rapidly to the hearts of the student elite. Oxford was first to become enthusiastic; Cambridge was not far behind, followed rapidly by Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. Printed copies were initially hard to find, and the text was often copied out by hand or typewritten, then circulated and read aloud at undergraduate parties. Shortly after its appearance in the Hogarth Press edition of 1923, Cyril Connolly, who was then an undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to a contemporary at Cambridge: “Whatever happens, read
The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot—only read it twice. It’s quite short and has the most marvellous things in it—though the ‘message’ is almost unintelligible and is a very Alexandrian poem—sterility disguised by superb use of quotation and obscure symbolism—thoroughly decadent. It will ruin your style!” Connolly’s reaction was typical albeit heightened, since he was the sharpest, most knowing critic of his age group. As he later put it, nothing could convey “the veritable brainwashing, the total preoccupation, the drugged and haunted condition which this new poet induced in some of us.”
⁹
The young Harold Acton read it out loud, through a megaphone, from his Gothic rooms in Christ Church Meadow Buildings to the hearties trudging down to their eights boats on the river, provoking rage because “that poem” was already a symbol of antagonistic modernity. No poet has ever had a reception more
gratifying, especially among the audience that matters most—the opinion makers, the younger generation. The poem’s success more or less instantly placed Eliot at the head of the profession of poetry, a position he occupied until his death more than forty years later.

Eliot was in his mid-thirties when
The Waste Land
brought him fame. It occupies in his oeuvre the same position that
In Memoriam
held in Tennyson’s.
In Memoriam
was written in 1833–1850; was published in 1850, when Tennyson was forty-one; and was followed almost immediately by his appointment as poet laureate. Thereafter he never quite hit top form again except with his
Idylls of the King
, a fragment of which was written and published in 1842 and the rest spread out between 1859 and 1885. Yet Tennyson (who made a great deal of money from his poetry) was prolific. Eliot was not. He remained diffident and, despite constant and growing praise in the 1920s and 1930s, unsure of his genius. The celebrity he won with
The Waste Land
made it possible for him to cofound, with Lady Rothermere, the literary review
Criterion
(1922). This gave him additional influence. In 1925 he left the bank (which was very sorry to lose “a valuable employee”) and joined the publishing firm of Faber and Faber. He served there as chief editor of the firm’s volumes of poetry, in which it specialized. That confirmed his position as by far the most powerful poet and editor in the English-speaking world.

Some might argue that it was Eliot’s power which kept him to the fore as the greatest living poet. But that would be unjust to the sparse but intense gift he possessed. In 1925 he published “The Hollow Men,” a ninety-eight-line poem which reprised the emptiness, despair, and horror of
The Waste Land
, and proved extraordinarily memorable, from its opening line “We are the hollow men” to its shocking last couplet,

“The Hollow Men” was followed by two other successes: “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and “Ash-Wednesday” (1930). These punctuated his progression into the austere but glowing
form of Christianity then known as Anglo-Catholicism. Indeed in 1927 he was ritually confirmed and became a British subject (not “citizen,” as he liked to point out). However, it was with his grand poem or poems,
Four Quartets
, that he finally proved, beyond possibility of argument, that he was the world’s greatest poet. Their chronology is complex, since the first, “Burnt Norton,” dates from 1935 and the other three date from 1940–1942. Effectively, however, the
Quartets
are a mid-war publication, appearing as a whole in various editions toward its end. They led to the repeated assertion, which became almost a truism, that Eliot was dispersing the wartime darkness with his solitary gleam of civilization.
¹⁰

The
Quartets
were self-edited, without Pound’s assistance, for Eliot had learned the lessons Pound had taught. Together, these poems are longer and fuller than
The Waste Land
, more pictorial, full of luminous images and catchy themes, with more rhymes, and with a great deal more music. Whether they are more “accessible” (a term just coming into vogue in 1942–1943) is a matter of opinion. They echo all sorts of incidents, themes, and places in Eliot’s life, but they are not about anything. Like
The Waste Land
, they are poems of mood. But if we take these two major works together, we see how Eliot creates, sustains, or changes mood. He harps continually on certain abstracts and certain concretes or substances. Among the abstractions the most important is time. (Time is sometimes contrasted or linked with distance—a reminder that Einstein’s general theory of relativity of 1915 was demonstrated to be true, empirically, in 1919, while
The Waste Land
was being written, and that this theory was a key element in Eliot’s cosmology.) Time is a word that occurs frequently in the
Four Quartets
, notably in the opening of “Burnt Norton” (“Time present and time past,” itself a Proustian echo) and in the introduction to “East Coker” (“In my beginning is my end”). Another principal abstract theme is desiccation. The word “dry” is very often used, for instance in the title of the third of the
Quartets
, “The Dry Salvages” (though this was actually the name of a group of rocks near Eliot’s childhood vacation home in New England). Desiccation is not really abstract, since it is a quality Eliot associates with bones (he is fond of bones, especially dry ones), sand, earth, and rock. The world is a desert, a
lunar or Martian landscape, sometimes menacingly hot, sometimes piercingly cold. Its images, such as rocks, dry riverbeds, and cracks in the earth’s surface, reproach the human who strays there. Eliot also traffics in the undersea world, with its dim or impenetrable recesses, and its transformations over time (“Those are pearls which were his eyes”). Then there is fire, the subject of “The Fire Sermon,” one of the five parts of
The Waste Land
. Fire recurs repeatedly in
Four Quartets
. Eliot’s landscape is fiery when it is not desiccated or frozen, but though the fire scorches (“Burnt Norton”), it consumes not. It leaves ashes, though—and “ashes” is another favorite word. Then there is death; the word “death” occurs nearly as often as “time” in Eliot’s work. As Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding,” last of the
Quartets
: