Where is it? What is it? It’s a state of mind. It continues to induce in the reader what Cyril Connolly described as ‘the almost drugged and haunted condition’ that it induced in undergraduates in 1922 as they gathered together to read it aloud. Peter Ackroyd notes its ‘echoic quality which requires the inflection of the voice of the reader to give it shape’. The writer Edmund Wilson called it ‘the great knockout up to date’. It still is.
The original title was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’. It’s Betty Higden’s phrase from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: ‘You might- n’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices.’ Eliot ‘do’ The Waste Land in different voices, many different voices – a multiplicity of sound. Soloists, as in a choir, break in and out of the song. The lines of gender are often blurred. They tell of strange visions interposed with fragments of memory, sometimes in different languages, incorporating lines from Dante, Sanskrit texts or the Bible, occasionally using jazz rhythms (Larkin once noted that jazz is the closest to the unconscious that we have). At other times they sing raucous popular songs, followed by a sudden switch of tone to the formality of Elizabethan language or the incantations of a prayer. ‘A Game of Chess’ (the second movement) opens slowly in the room, which is heavy with ‘her strange synthetic perfumes’. Then, suddenly, the jagged voice of the hysterical woman breaks in – ‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.’ – and then ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?’ The note is both frightening and sad – then it fades away into ‘O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—’ after which, unexpectedly, we’re transported to a cockney pub where the landlord recounts the tale of ‘poor Albert’ who has ‘been in the army four years, he wants a good time’, and ‘Lil’ who ‘ought to be ashamed’, ‘because she looks ‘so antique’. As closing time approaches he calls out, repeatedly, ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’ (the meaning of the line multi-layered) and he fades away with echo- ing, gentle salutation ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,/good night.’ The incomparable soaring genius of the piece, with Eliot the composer and the conductor of its five movements, makes reading The Waste Land one of the most thrilling experiences in literature. And life.
What was Eliot’s own state of mind when he wrote it and does it matter as one listens or reads the poems? The answer is no. But the question is interesting and has some bearing on the second section of The Waste Land, ‘A Game of Chess’. This is acknowledged to be, in part, a portrait of his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. In the margin of the dialogue of the nervous, harassed woman, Vivien wrote ‘won- derful, wonderful’. A letter from Eliot to British novelist Sydney Schiff, dated November 1921, concerning Part Three of The Waste Land, may come as a surprise to those who underestimate Vivien’s influence. ‘I have done a rough draft but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable.’ According to Ackroyd, Vivien once replied to a question concerning Eliot: ‘Tom’s mind? I am Tom’s mind.’ The reason for their estrangement, with its terrible consequence, did not lie in creative dissonance. This marriage, which he said later ‘brought to her no happiness’, brought to him ‘the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land’. And that, to many, is a shocking admission from the man to whom the theory of ‘impersonality’ in art was crucial.
Yet, as John Bayley points out, ‘The interior of Eliot’s poetry is deeply personal, full of secrets and intimacies.’ In his own notes to The Waste Land, Eliot quotes F. H. Bradley: ‘My experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside.’ How could it be otherwise? Within his own ‘circle of experience’ at that time lay long days at the bank and a home life that increasingly resembled that of a sanatorium. Vivien’s suffering was extreme: ‘Have you ever been in such incessant pain that you felt your sanity was going . . . that’s the way she is,’ he wrote in a letter in 1921. The ‘outside’ was post-war depression and exhaustion, as well as the slow grief of Europe and Britain having seen a generation wiped out. The summer of 1921 was a summer of drought and severe influenza. Eliot, Ackroyd points out, was ill and exhausted and found it enormously difficult to write. He quotes Siegfried Sassoon as having heard Eliot declare around that time, ‘All great art is based on a condition of fundamental boredom – passionate boredom.’ It was Vivien who encouraged him to go to a sanatorium in Lausanne and here The Waste Land was born.
It was to have as editor one of the great literary midwives in the history of poetry – the amazing Ezra Pound. When he read it for the first time he wrote to Eliot, ‘Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies.’ What poet wouldn’t be? However, in the British Library, Eliot’s original copy is marked through with so many red pencil lines that it resembles a piece of modern art. Ezra Pound, the ruthless surgeon and dedicated friend, cut to the music and carved away anything that dulled the note. The Waste Land is dedicated, as it should be, to Ezra Pound il migliore fabbro – the better craftsman.