This review of TS Eliot's Wasteland is the promised follow-up to my essay on the poet, "T.S. Eliot and Consciousness," that appeared in these pages in mid-September.
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I read a lot of T.S. Eliot's works in the 70s in my teenage years. In fact, I memorized most of his poems, and recited them aloud to myself often, getting myself all melancholy and clinically depressed. There was something about them that deeply affected me. The vision of his Preludes at times made me cry. Their musicality, They recalled Robert Schumann's Op. 12 Fanstasiestucke. "Warum?" Maybe not even that bright. But I never memorized his widely recognized 434-line master poem, The Waste Land. It doesn't readily lend itself to such incorporation. It's arhythmic at times or scatological and fractured in troubling ways. Nothing like the loss chord of Preludes:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Or an even worse vibe of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
These are hard sights to recover from, if you are sensitive to "the horror, the horror" of humankind after the Fall up to yesterday afternoon..
The Waste Land came at me differently. I was a toss-away foster child that Dickens threw the book at it, who'd just dropped out of an exclusive private school filled (and one guy who lit his farts on fire in the smoking room, my first glimpse at the coming danger of methane releases), and I was preparing to enter the Air Force out of desperation. I felt like the embodiment of that Dylan lyric about joining the Army if you fail. And my disposition led me to dark places that featured "Desolation Row." It was an emotional response I had to Eliot's poem. Initially, because I did not "get" the many and myriad allusions to literary drop-quotes and mystical figures and subjects above my class grade, I viewed the poem as a collage for snobs and the intellectually effete; no working class lad was ever likely to give it a go or give a sh*t what it was about. A printer's apprentice (as I was at The Grotonian lit mag) might have wiped his ass with the poem.
When The Waste Land appeared in Eliot's literary magazine The Criterion in 1922, it caused quite a stir. What did this stew produced by the prissy transplant Yank mean? Typewriters everywhere got workouts as critics and writers speedbagged the keys of their Underwoods. Then Hemingway got busy with the conscience of a generation lost in Paris with ex-pat Black jazz drifters looking for acceptance for a new sound, and elite folks started seeing The Waste Land the way I regarded (and still do) Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited -- superior to Eliot's work in so many ways. (... Between the windows of the sea / Where lovely mermaids flow / And nobody has to think too much / About Desolation Row".[that fuckin harp hurts, man]) Eventually, he got canonized for the poem and for great poems that followed, including the really, really good Four Quartets, which seemed to bring it all back home, so to peak, for Eliot -- "objective correlatives" out the yinyang, and I myself blubbered at its ontological achievement and high-minded beauty of expression. Look at me, I'm thinking, some poor tossed foster child out of William Blake having elegant thoughts.
Then, as more time passed, The Waste Land settled into that "major poem" concerned with the l'entre deux guerre to all the mom-semblance hypocrite lecturers out there. The Great Depression. Freud laughing from the grave at our civilizational discontents and future illusions. The Red Scare. The Black Sox Scare. The first Pearl Harbor to hit us between the running lights, with more deer in the road to follow. Turns out, WWI, "the War to End All Wars" (rolls his eyes) was followed not long after by WWII, the Rebound War, featuring buxom babes straddling bombs, which it's clear now was merely a placeholder lover war to get us to the war we really seem to want -- the voluptuous WWIII. Big Bang time as Gods of the Earth, who exclaim, Watch us light the firmament of the cunny cosmos with our urgent need. Chill Wills, indeed!
Technically, of course, though the poem was hailed as l'entre deux guerre angst with fractures and fissures of the Enlightenment gassing out on us (...a lonely cab horse steams and stamps...), it was actually meant to be a reflective-reactionary take on the fin de siecle period leading up to the publication of the poem. I'm told. New millennium. Spanish Fly pandemic. God is dead. The Espionage Act. Women wanting to vote. (rolls his eyes) HG Wells growing ever more pessimistic. You could almost hear Freud laughing about the "hysteria" from his consulting room coming down the Berggasse 19.
And the highly documented goss is that Eliot was all-too-familiar with hysteria. The short of it is: his first wife Vivienne was a drag on his vibe and the marriage was sexless and she starkers and she was seen as the tool of "moral insanity" and had to be imprisoned until she died in a mental asylum with Tom not visiting Viv once. (Whispers of mortality said that Tom may have lost after Bertrand Russell exploited her trystic needs and took revenge for the cuckolding that saw his sexual reputation slip into alleged homosexuality.) And Virginia Woolf, who had typed up Tom's Waste Land, was definitely on genius boy's side, saying famously of Viv:
Oh - Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began! - to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering trembling ... This bag of ferrets is what Tom [Eliot] wears round his neck.
Poor Tom! A bag of ferrets for an albatross? She was needy, clutchy, smelly, it was said and said. What's that? She may have been misdiagnosed by uncaring men and her prodigious periods seen as "women's problems" instead of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) or something reasonably similar that, with the right care, might have spared her such long term exposure to defilement? Hold me up. And word is, she longed for Tom to visit her at the loony bin, and took care, at one point, to wear a black shirt in anticipation of a visit to show her support for what the gosses were saying was his infatuation with Italy's loveable new tyrant Benito Mussolini. But Tom never visited her. Not once. No word if Bertrand ever snuck in to see her for some, in lieu of producing high-falutin concepts on aesthetics. Bertie, starring Nic Cage, was never made. Although the blind leading the blind seems to have featured.
Some say Ezra Pound, who helped edit The Waste Land, pushed Tom toward anti-semitism and fascist thinking, and Tom was unable to recover his spiritual quest (... the devil of the stairs who wears the deceitful face of hope and of despair...right?) until his wife was safely ensconced in Rubberroomville, and, by coincidence, Ezra Pound was locked away as a madman, too, shaking like a fascist geranium, at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the federal loony bin in D.C. that featured lobotomies and shredded patient files.
In any case, biographies abound that tell of the story of Tom and Viv, including a play by that name by Michael Hastings, with a film adaptation, starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson, that followed in 1994. But, for my money, Richard Poirier's take on Vivienne's role in the making of The Waste Land is blunt force enough. In his review of a biography of Vivienne Eliot, "In the Hyacinth Garden," Poirier tells us what Virginia Woolf has only implied:
She didn't live to discover that in addition her husband would later ascribe to her the credit, if it can be called that, for creating in him the state of mind that produced The Waste Land, a poem famous for its portrayal of the moral, culture and sexual decadence of modern life.
But Poirier does attempt to balance this out some by pointing to signs of his engagement with decadence in his earlier works, before Vivienne came along. Poirier writes that
A number of possible reasons for the failure of the [later] marriage can already be seen in these early poems, with their repeated emphasis on male inadequacy in the physical presence of women, on feelings of revulsion at the sight or odour of the female body. It seems as if there can be only physical horror and hazard, never physical pleasure as an expected consequence of sexual intercourse.
Suddenly, Joseph Conrad's line from Heart of Darkness -- "the horror, the horror" -- takes on new resonance. Eliot was deeply attracted to Conrad's strange introspection, as if he saw himself as Conrad's secret sharer, and when he needs to break out with a grim grin at the reader, he draws on Charles Baudelaire and his fleur de mal posturing.
We can't be entirely certain what Eliot thought of the uber-poem's value in the end. He was surprised by the acclaim and somewhat perturbed by the big fuss over his many footnotes, which was seen by some critics as a parallel composition with the poem. When critics summed up the work as "The Disillusionment of a Generation," the poet, sounding an awful lot like Bob Dylan decades later, dismissed the sentiment: "I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He goes to seemingly close off all attempts to raise the poem to Holy Grail stature by essentially farting in their blowback wind:
'Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.'
Wow. This seems so disingenuous. To think that I was so moved by such dancing belly grumbles! TS Eliot, you'll get yours! And then they gave him the Nobel prize. Go figure.
And there is also evidence that Eliot was playing with critics who had insinuated that he was a plagiarist. Thus, the overabundance of notes. He replied,
I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came to print The Waste Land as a little book-for the poem on its first appearance in The Dial and in The Criterion had no notes whatever -- it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so 1 set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day.
F*cker. Bogus scholarship! Douche'! Mr. Jones, 'cause something's happening here called intertextuality and you don't know what it is... do you?
The best way forward to understanding the poem is of course to read it again. I highly recommend that you read an online version of the poem that includes line notes built in URLs. But the best thing to do is listen to Eliot read The Waste Land. It's great, IMHO. Here it is embedded:
With the reading of the poem accomplished by the reader's eyes and ears, one is able to follow one's reader-response due diligence and figure out how you see/hear the poem. Rather than rashly running to the critics and their canon fodder ways. Here are a few of my cloudy thought-gatherings and occasional lightning strikes. No doubt you will enjoy similar weathering of the poem.
The Waste Land is 434 lines and divided into 5 parts: "The Burial of the Dead"; "A Game of Chess"; "The Fire Sermon"; "Death By Water"; and "What The Thunder Said". The titles vaguely suggest, with their reference to the four elements -- earth, fire, water and air -- the primacy of nature, while chess suggests the ascension of Man and intellect. Pagan ritual and an animistic worldview is suggested even before you've read a line. Thunder talks, omens exist. Death by water remembers the end of Prufrock when "human voices wake us and we drown." Drown in consciousness of our ontological condition, perhaps. There's an order, but it's tenuous. Logic and strategy. But it's a collage vision, a mash-up of lines and rhythms evocative of unconsciousness, lucid dreaming, interiority, and introspection. Cathedrals are built of such nervous energy and architectural tension. The Vision seems both sacred and profane. The shantih repetition that closes the poem is a mantra-like invocation to peace and order, a suture for the chaos. But still, just words.
The famous opening of the poem -- April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. -- brings to the fore the cycle of life and death, and the impermanence of either. Life comes out of death and life dies. And somehow the Son of Man seeks and sometimes finds meaning in it all. Memory and desire are not unique to human consciousness but all of nature. The poem proceeds in collage flashes of dreams and memories and allusions, in a fashion that suggests linkage such as in the Dylan's song "Series of Dreams." Or, similarly, evokes EA Poe's "Dream Within A Dream." I don't know if Eliot is to be my Virgil, or else he is lost in a Divine dream without one, making his way through the purgatorial fires toward a Feminine Ideal suffering from PMDD. Not that there's anything wrong with that. You don't need to commit Beatrice because she's got daily monthlies. A sense of privilege and erudition, arcane vocabulary and interests, and the leisure of thinking such thoughts pervade.
It's hard to know what the poem's "about" beyond the "grumblings" that Eliot confesses to on the rack of canon criticism. Is it about the War to End All Wars and its vast aftermath and rebuilding exercises in futility? Mustard gas and trench warfare and bayonets in the eyeball and the conclusion that the war was so vicious and low and, ultimately, pointless, that it had dragged the world to the brink of the annihilation of civilization? Spawning a League of Nations that would soon thereafter be ignored by powerful nation-states, on technical grounds, (rolls his eyes) which soon limited the world body's ambition to have the siblings knock it off. Or, are the opening lines about Vivienne and her periods? The recycling. The mess. The waste land. The critics (i.e., men) are still weighing in, some holding jugs of Clorox. Goddamn, reader-response can be hairy.
After some set-up lines presenting a couple in bed who can't find a way to communicate -- a female manic, a male mannikin all wood in response, which the film, Tom andViv, depicts as Eliot peering into the knowing eyes of Viv's mom as Viv reads from The Waste Land, next come lines 139-172 of "A Game of Chess" that tell a Downstairs story of unwanted birth, decrepitude, and war time scraping by; talk of Albert coming home from trench war to Lil seeking an abortion. An unwelcome cycle. In "The Fire Sermon" is a notational reference to Buddha's Fire Sermon to his priests and Siddharthas that is more compelling and of interest than Eliot's poetry, as he tells them,
And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted...
Memory and desire are overrated and must be avoided. But Tom is a sublimation boy, i.e. Catholic. He'll get through Purgatory. But always with the shedding of death for the promise of eternal life that never dies -- or, settle for escape from the reincarnation and the need for more karmic purgatorial fires, into Nirvana and nothingness. Aren't we just fucked, when you think about it?
I have to say I was quite moved by the image presented in these lines of "What The Thunder Said":
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
One gets the feeling that the sh*t is hitting the fan everywhere. The Tower Tarot card represents chaos and destruction, even in these places of culture and civilization. Add New York City to the deep import of Eliot's lines and I think we get the picture.
The lines that stuck in my craw for years come from "The Burial of the Dead," lines 60-63, where Eliot paints a picture of a procession of ghosts not yet "dead" in their thinking:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
This is intertextualized from Baudelaire, another one of Eliot's favorite haunts. Baudelaire's original lines, Eliot's notes tell us, go like this:
Unreal city, city full of dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.
This all connected up for me through my later discovery of the works of Charles Williams -- in particular, the opening to his novel, All Hallow's Eve, that features a bombed-out London, folks not quite realizing they're dead, wrestling with traumatized memories and desire. It's a novel of Christian mysticism that features Tarot journeys, Russia and China, and Jonathan, an Anti-Christ figure returned from the dead (get it?) for some trick or treating among the hoi polloi.
Eliot was a big fan of Williams's work and he wrote an introduction to All Hallow's Eve, which vaguely resembles The Waste Land in its strangeness, symbolism, and touching Christian mysticism. Very Anglican. I thought in reading the Intro that what Eliot said about Williams was a remarkably accurate description of his own spiritual journey by means of literature. Eliot writes,
He is concerned, not with the Evil of conventional morality and the ordinary manifestations by which we recognize it, but with the essence of Evil; it is therefore Evil which has no power to attract us, for we see it as the repulsive thing it is, and as the despair of the damned from which we recoil...His is a mysticism, not of curiosity, or of the lust for power, but of Love; and Love, in the meaning which it had for Williams...as readers of his study of Dante, called The Figure of Beatrice, will know...is a deity of whom most human beings seldom see more than the shadow. But in his novels he is as much concerned with quite ordinary human beings, with their struggle among the shadows, their weaknesses and self-deceptions, their occasional moments of understanding, as with the Vision of Love towards which creation strives.
Vision of Love. Sublimation of the passions, heading toward the triumphant moment that completes his Four Quartets:
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
But Everyman is unlikely to find such sweet succor in the lyricism derived from years steeped in the finest wines of thought -- at Harvard and Cambridge and the Sorbonne -- where Eliot studied philosophies -- Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, Bertrand "The Wolf" Russell, Henri Bergson -- and wrote a dissertation on F. H. Bradley. And plebs in Paris would have snickered had they seen him hobnobbing with Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. He fell under the spell of Ezra Pound's imagism and fascism, like Dylan fell under the spell of Mr. Tambourine Man and then Jokerman. f*cker. I love him. But in the end, again Eliot summing up the value of Williams, got around to selling to the ords that it's about hanging around for the punchline. He goes,
For the reader who can appreciate them, there are terrors in the pit of darkness into which he can make us look; but in the end, we are brought nearer to what another modern explorer of the darkness has called "the laughter at the heart of things."
This brings us full circle to the image in the Preludes where you "wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh" as worlds revolve like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots. Good one!
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For a more conventional round up of wisdom regarding The Waste Land, a documentary is available at YouTube. Eliot's works and other delights are available at the Internet Archive, the public library online for all, including the film, Tom and Viv. Upload something while you're there, won't you?
