This autumn the world will have been haunted by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land for 100 years. Discerning early readers realised they had seen—or rather, heard—an unquiet spirit of new poetry. John Peale Bishop, an American living in Paris, encountered it in the first issue of Eliot’s own magazine, The Criterion, in October 1922. “It is IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE”, he wrote in a letter to his friend Edmund Wilson, echoing the poem’s gothic use of single words and block capitals for dramatic effect. With its many places, ages and languages, The Waste Land disturbed the piped music of modernity, its strange noises spreading out into the world as though via the BBC radio masts that began emitting voices in November 1922.
In 1926, an Oxford undergraduate called Wystan Hugh Auden read the poem “with growing awe”. He immediately modernised his imagination, telling friends his favourite walk was along the canal to the local gasworks (at one point the elusive speaker of the poem goes “fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse”). In 1942, Tambimuttu, a young Tamil poet living in England, was discovered in a state of distress caused by marital discord, “reciting yards of The Waste Land”. (Eliot’s unhappy marriage is perhaps the poem’s deepest well of emotion). And at the end of Rose Macaulay’s 1950 novel of bombed London, The World My Wilderness, some famous lines are quoted verbatim: “‘I think,’ Richie murmured, ‘we are in rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones’”.
Testimonies of Waste Land fandom after 1950 could fill a book, from Seamus Heaney puzzling over the poem’s obscurities at university and realising “the breath of life was the body of sound”, to a young Barack Obama writing solemnly to a girlfriend about Eliot’s “fatalism” as a philosophy “born out of the relation between fertility and death.” Such responses mark the poem’s twin powers of fascination: not only does it appear to have a profound meaning; it sounds as though it has an even more profound meaning. Tellingly, Peale Bishop, who went over The Waste Land five times a day trying to “figure it all out”, reported that the line “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” made his “flesh creep”, before he was informed it is what bartenders say in British pubs.
Harriet Monroe, the editor who in 1915 had published Eliot’s first poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” at the urging of Ezra Pound, called The Waste Land “kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colours that fall somehow into place”. Five decades later, the possible meanings of the poem kaleidoscoped again when the original drafts were discovered. The earlier version was both longer and more rattly, and its many slashed passages revealed the hand of Pound as editor. Eliot’s ambitious work was originally called “He Do The Police in Different Voices”, and began with a boozy night out (“First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place”—TS stood for Thomas Stearns). As it became The Waste Land—always three words, for the archaic flavour—Eliot cut this prelude, and found his arrestingly ominous opening on the next page: “April is the cruellest month”.
To mark the poem’s centenary year Eliot’s publishers, Faber and Faber, have reissued their 1971 facsimile of The Waste Land drafts “in full colour”. A tinted edition of an ink-and-paper manuscript is a curious upgrade. It is not, after all, going to show exactly what shade of “brown fog” Eliot braved as he commuted to his job at Lloyd’s Bank through the “Unreal City” of London—although its browning pages reveal that the bohemian Pound used a violet typewriter ribbon.
The real interest of the drafts is the lines that got lost. It is generally agreed that Pound’s editorial ear was acute, chipping out dud bits as unerringly as if he were carving a woodblock print. He warned Eliot when he was in danger of sounding too much like James Joyce, whose Ulysses (1922) they both admired; or too “tum-pum” in his rhythms; or too vague (“make up yr mind”). And Eliot, like a star creative writing student, generally took the hint. To quote the critic Hugh Kenner, they worked on the poem “page by page… shaking out ashes from amid the glowing coals.” Some of those ashes nevertheless held a spark. It’s easy to imagine, for example, “A Different Darkness”—which begins in a beautiful iambic pentameter evoking dawn at sea (“A different darkness, flowed above the clouds”)—taking its place alongside A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh) and The Grass is Singing (Doris Lessing) as one of the many spooky novel titles coined from the poem.
Matthew Hollis makes a neat start to his new “biography” of The Waste Land by imagining the moment that Eliot himself restored one of these lost lines to his text. Wintering in Morocco in old age, the poet made a transcription which restored a chillingly fine line that his first wife, Vivien, had asked him to drop from the part of the poem describing their domestic miseries: “The ivory men make company between us”. (The section was called “A Game of Chess”.) Hollis then tells the story from the start, weaving Eliot, Pound and others into a page-turner about the sheer chanciness of what would later be called modernism. “What on earth is ‘modernist verse’?”, Eliot wondered in 1926.
But in 1921, there was nothing inevitable about the success of these two high-minded young American poets who met in London and formed an alliance against literary England. Pound hustled tirelessly for other writers he admired, while his own verse was often met with scepticism by reviewers. Eliot, meanwhile, exhausted by Vivien’s poor mental and physical health, and his own moonlighting as a literary critic, was aware that his reputation as a poet still largely rested on “Prufrock”, written in 1911.
Hollis’s previous book was an acclaimed account of the war years of the poet Edward Thomas. This may explain why near the start of The Waste Land: A Biography he includes a cinematic vignette about the last man to die in the trenches. The first half of the book intermittently zooms in and out like this, cutting at one point from a swastika in Weimar Germany to Virginia Woolf typesetting for her private press. Presumably inspired by Eliot’s evocation of postwar Europe through a montage of the panoramic and the intimate (“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal // A woman drew her long black hair out tight”) the effect is solemn but stilted, like stock footage cut into a TV drama.
The writing is more absorbing when Hollis washes historical colour into the human moments that made the poem, such as Pound and Eliot’s walking holiday in southwest France, where Eliot “shocked” his unreligious friend by saying that he feared life after death, or when Eliot and Vivien exchange the typescript of “A Game of Chess” by post. As well as requesting a deletion, she contributed an unforgettable line to the catty monologue of a Cockney gossip: “What you get married for if you don’t want children?”
Little of this will be new to anyone who has browsed the small library of criticism already written about The Waste Land, and some of it will be very familiar. But what Hollis knows about more than most is how poems get into print: although (curiously) he doesn’t mention it himself, he is poetry editor at Faber—where Eliot worked from 1925 until his death 40 years later. This insider expertise bursts out unpredictably in the first half with sudden typographical digressions (“America chose Caslon [type] for the Declaration of Independence in 1776; almost two hundred years later, Eliot’s Faber & Faber would launch the career of young Seamus Heaney with it”). In the more satisfyingly focused second half, it finds its natural relevance, as Hollis dramatises the process of actually writing the poem. Here, his feeling for period detail (“a hunter’s moon hung low over Margate”) brings romance to the scholarship of the late Lawrence Rainey, who forensically analysed the draft sheets to establish chronology (and also discovered the letter by John Peale Bishop). Sympathetically speculating about Eliot’s inkings in and strikings out, Hollis instinctively sees how these drafts were “stripped for parts”, and why Pound rightly advised his friend not “to bust all records” by making his distilled masterpiece any longer.
“The more we know of The Waste Land, the better”, Hollis writes of the “Additional Materials” —hotel bills, a couple of scribbled notes, a shopping list—included in the new facsimile edition. Eliot might have demurred. Faber’s other centenary year publication, Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story, a tender memoir by Eliot’s close friend Mary Trevelyan presented with a commentary by Erica Wagner, depicts him in later years when he was deliberately trying to put his most -interpreted work behind him as “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”.
When Trevelyan met “the Poet”, as she called him, he was writing the last of his Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” (1942), a patriotic meditation reflecting the Anglican faith he had professed since 1927. Trevelyan was the warden of the Student Christian Movement house in London, welcoming young people to England from around the world. As well-connected, widely travelled agents of late imperial soft power, she and Eliot had much in common—except an interest in his poetry. Endearingly, she misquotes The Waste Land and has little patience with the bloodless drawing-room plays he keeps trying to write, telling him frankly that his characters are “mere puppets”.
It was not an equal relationship. “Tom” emerges as a charming but childish old man: a fastidious bachelor (Vivien died in 1947) who likes nothing better than a few days in bed for a minor ailment, and who knows Trevelyan will take pity on what she calls his “distraught refugee” face. He wants a mother, but she wants a lover—and when she tells him so, he explains elaborately why life after Vivien must be a celibate purgatory, chastely awaiting death. The wrinkle in this story arrives in 1957 when, out of the blue, he marries his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and merrily ditches Mary and other friends.
When the brown fog of London finally got to his weak lungs in 1965, the poet once known as “Tears Eliot” died happy. But he left others unhappy, not least Emily Hale, his first love. After separating formally from Vivien in 1933, Eliot wrote hundreds of letters to Emily as well as a quartet, “Burnt Norton” (1935), but ultimately declined to marry her too. The unedifying story is told by Robert Crawford’s supremely well informed and organised Eliot After The Waste Land, the sequel to his Young Eliot from 2015.
Crawford’s fact-packed volumes almost certainly contain all the Eliot biography most people will ever want (and Eliot wanted none). Peter Ackroyd wrote the first in 1984, but was denied permission to quote from the poetry. Crawford, however, has had full access, including to the Hale letters, which were sealed until 2020. As a poet and professor who has taught Eliot’s “incantatory” work for decades, he writes briskly and judiciously, with a clear-eyed perceptiveness about his subject not unlike that of the hypochondriac poet’s doctor, who tells Mary Trevelyan: “he has very few enjoyments […] why would he not enjoy the dramas of ambulances etc.”
It is refreshing to see all three books openly acknowledge the racist sentiments that streak Eliot’s work, particularly his antisemitism—an interpretation once considered ungentlemanly, and which he disingenuously denied. Only Crawford, though—whose first book was on Eliot and anthropology—really understands the -self-contradictory maze of the poet’s intellectual life. Eliot’s fame, after all, was not only founded on his verse, but also his prolific prose, which spoke with authority on literature and culture.
In 1956, Eliot attracted almost 14,000 Minnesotans to a sports stadium for a lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism”, and throughout his career tried to reach readers via magazines and paperbacks, rather than through academic presses. Yet this aspect of his life’s work has been relatively neglected. The Complete Prose has now been gathered into eight edited volumes, but these are only affordable to university libraries, and there has been no Selected Prose since Frank Kermode’s standard edition in 1975. The Eliot who wrote sharply about Sherlock Holmes, cathedrals, Winston Churchill and the New English Bible remains unknown.
Speaking in Minnesota, Eliot warned against confusing biography with criticism: “in all great poetry, something... must remain unaccountable however complete might be our knowledge of the poet”. Hotel bills and typewriter ribbons won’t solve the mystery of how 433 bewildering lines of verse became the most enigmatically quotable book of the last century. When Elon Musk tweeted “Death by Water”, the fourth part of the poem, with the comment “Read Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land”, he was investing in a different kind of cryptocurrency—what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called, in her poem “Facsimile of a Waste Land”, a “silver anguish”.
The notes, as Eliot admitted, tell you very little. I suspect the poem’s ability to linger in the mind owes less to what it says about the collapse of modern civilisation (that eternal subject) and more to its spidery internal rhyming, which maps a paranoid world where even words seem to be shadowed by their own weird echoes: “echt deutsch / archduke’s”, “London / undone”, “Moorgate / Margate”. As Eliot muttered to Mary Trevelyan when the vicar at church skipped the middle of Revelation 7, with its listing of the tribes of Israel: “People are so afraid of repetition—they don’t seem to realise that it is the essence of poetry.”
