Village Board announces concert series (see

A Heap Of Broken Images

JOSEPH SCOTCHIE

jscotchie@antonmediagroup.com “April is the cruelest month.” So begins “The Wasteland,” the T.S. Eliot poem that is also celebrating a centennial this year. Those opening lines stand right there with “Catch-22,” “You can’t go home again,” and “It was the best of the times. It was the worst of times,” as candidates for the most wornout lines in modern literature.

It almost wasn’t that way. The poem that Eliot originally composed while resting at a Swiss sanatorium was significantly longer—and with a different opening stanza.

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,

There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind, (Don’t you remember that time after a dance,

Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry,

And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz,

With old Jane, Tom’s wife; and we got Joe to sing

“I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me,

There’s not a man who can say a word agin me”).

The poem should have said: Written by T.S. Eliot, edited by Ezra Pound. The latter, a central figure in Eliot’s life, accepted the 100-page draft from his friend and promptly performed the Caesarian with the “April is the cruelest month,” opening all the way to the memorable “Shantih, shantih, shantih” ending. (To this day, Eliot remains popular in India.)

For decades, Pound wondered why his friend was so compliant. Why didn’t Eliot fight those changes? The man was entirely exhausted, before even setting down to write those intense lines. Pound could do as he pleased.

The story behind “The Wasteland” is as fascinating as the poem itself. Eliot first met Pound in 1914. The two were introduced by a mutual friend, Conrad Aiken, a prolific poet himself, who was a classmate of Eliot’s at Harvard. The meeting happened and 20th-century literature was set to achieve lift-off. Both men were classicists. Both were mad for poetry, mad for literature. Both were rebellious young men eager to overthrow not just the Romantic movement but also the Decadents of the 1890s.

The road to “The Wasteland,” Part I

In 1914, Eliot sailed to Europe with a draft of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in his suitcase. While a resident of Italy, Pound had a volume of his own verse self-published. With that book under his arm, the latter was set for the conquest of literary London.

The energetic Pound had his memorable take on literature, “news that stays news.” Not that easy. He managed to sell his vision to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine. He also had “Prufrock” published in that influential quarterly. Pound took over Eliot’s fledging career. He had his friend’s poetry published in a collection, Catholic Anthology, one that included contributions from not only Pound and Eliot, but from James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Ford Maddox Ford, and William Carlos Williams.

Eliot, the creator of “Prufrock,” was reticent and indecisive himself. His college career was now a decade old. When does he get a real job? By 1915, Eliot had reached a turning point. His Ph.D. dissertation on the English philosopher F.H. Bradley was completed. His professors at Oxford included Bertrand Russell, who was convinced of his young student’s genius. Eliot needed to go back to Harvard to defend his dissertation. His future was laid out before him: the Ph.D., the tenure track at Harvard, marriage to Emily Hale. Didn’t anyone tell him that a professorship would give him time to continue with his true love, poetry?

Poetry—along with England, Pound and Virginia Woolf—won out. Eliot stayed in the British Isles. Pound wrote a seven-page letter to Eliot’s father, a St. Louis brick manufacturer, telling the puzzled old man that his son had made the right choice. There was one major hitch. Eliot needed to become a British subject. And how. Enter now Vivien Haigh-Wood. A vivacious woman with an Irish heritage, Haigh-Wood was a product of middle-class England. Her father, to whom she was close, was an accomplished painter. After a four-month courtship, “Tom and Viv” married. A proper New Englander, Eliot had never met a woman as outgoing and sensual as Haigh-Wood. The latter, for her part, could make history. Friends told HaighWood that young Eliot was destined for great things. He just needed a wife to keep him in England legally.

To the chagrin of his parents, Eliot never defended his dissertation. The latter, in the middle of World War I, was ready to make the voyage home. HaighWood, convinced of a U-Boat attack, was firm in her refusal. Eliot held a teaching job before finding work as a translator for a London bank. Haig-Wood’s parents played a role in landing Eliot the job and the man’s father was happy that his dreamy son had a respectable middle-class job.

Poetry—and literature—beckoned. Russell was a chief London cultural czar. He gave Eliot books to review in numerous journals. Both Eliot and Pound had nighttime lecturing jobs. Eliot soon began publishing in The Times of London literary supplement. By then, he was an assistant editor at The Egotist, a prelude to obtaining a grant from a benefactor to edit his quarterly, The Criterion, one named for a restaurant that Eliot and Haigh-Wood frequented.

For Eliot, it was now off to 16-hour days: Writing in the morning, eight hours at the bank and evenings devoted to teaching and editing. Haigh-Wood continued to help, eventually writing stories that lampooned the Bloomsbury literary crowd. She also suffered from various illness, compounded badly by the death of her father. There were various medicines and various doctors. Haigh-Wood made her own mistakes. Russell had a reputation as an adulterer. Vivien was a flirt. When her husband found out, he had his own affair.

Bank job, The Egotist, poetry, essays, teaching, Haigh-Wood’s illness. It all added up to a late 1921 breakdown and a sanatorium in Switzerland. Rest? Try punching out the “poem of the century,” at least according to Lyndall Gordon, an otherwise unsympathetic Eliot biographer. One hundred pages, whipped into shape by Ezra Pound. The latter had to swallow hard. “Complimenti, you -----,” he wrote to his friend. “I am wracked by the seven jealousies.”

If Haigh-Wood was the muse and Pound the editor, then a New York attorney, John Quinn, was the financial angel. Quinn arranged for a New York firm, Liveright, to publish the poem in book form. He also saw to it that it won Poetry’s annual best poem prize, an award of $2,000 ($34,000 in today’s money).

The reviews came in. Was it a monumental work or a big put on? In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh wrote of young men singing the poem from their university dormitories. Eliot himself chanted the poem to a room full of admirers, including Virginia Woolf. Imitators and parodies swelled in numbers.

A generation of “wasteA generation of “wastelanders” was born. landers” was born. (Next week: Deciphering

T.S. Eliot

Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot