The Waste Land - Eliot #

Published in 1922, along with James Joyce’s Ullysses and Yeat’s The Second Coming, The Waste Land marks a distinct pivotal literary style.

Paradoxically while its innovative features are new, it harkens to the past for its derivative meanings through echoes, allusion, quotation (in several languages), a variety of verse forms, and a collage of poetic fragments.

Initially it appears an incomprehensible cacophonic melange of voices, pastiche of images, discordant threads or motifs like other works of art of his time. Full of multi-cultural allusions, the poem uses five different languages.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream, first exhibited in 1893, where the figure is trying to block out the ‘shriek’ that they hear around them, (the Norwegian title is actually ‘Skrik’), appears featureless and un-gendered, so it is de-individualised – and is perhaps one of the reasons why it has become a universal symbol of anxiety.

http://blog.artweekenders.com/2014/01/21/scream-versions/

Eliot thought that Stravinsky, in “The Rite of Spring,” ( written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company;) had transformed:

“the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP42C-4zL3w&t=619s

Eliot claims an attempt to replicate the mournful music of Beethoven.’s last requiems:

Eliot attempts disassociation from emotions but is defeated because language is sensual.

He attempts to display a fragmented world, but his art is unified by recurring motifs.

Picasso’s Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace.

https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/artwork-analysis-guernica-by-picasso/

Bob Dylan’s protest songs motivated many anti Vietnam war movements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2mabTnMHe8

At Eliot’s memorial W.H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky were upstaged. Groucho Marx turned up and read Gus, The Theatre Cat.

When “The Waste Land” was published in October, 1922 Eliot told everyone that he was finished with that sort of thing. He began speaking of the poem as a kind of psychic reflux, and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling. He was to tell the Paris Review that in the composition of the closing sections “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.”

He did not disown it, exactly, but he rarely discussed it again, except as the by-product of a bad marriage. He had been through a compositional experience that, whatever it was, he did not wish to go through again. Eliot himself wrote of his daily routine at Margate on 4th November, 1921.

I have done a rough draft of part III [of the`Waste Land’]but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable. ‘

Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a respectable and straight laced family. Like Scott Fitzgerald he felt some inferiority moving to the east.

During his studies in Philosophy at Harvard, in 1910 spent a year on his own in a Parisian boarding-house with a companion, Jean Verdenal, who died serving as a medical officer during the First World War in Gallipoli. Some suggest repressed homosexual feelings.

Eliot left to study in Germany until war broke out and he fled to England where in June, 1915, he published his first major poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an English governess who was passionate about the arts and, unbeknownst to Eliot, prone to mental illness.

They shared a flat with Bertrand Russell. Eliot had met Russell at Harvard, when Russell was lecturing there. Soon after Eliot arrived in England, they ran into each other on the street, went for tea, and began a friendship. Russell thought Eliot the brightest of the American philosophy students he had met, however, Russell also thought Eliot was,

“lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything.”

Vivienne, writing to a friend shortly after her marriage reveals,

“I am very popular with Tom’s friends, and who do you think in particular? No less a person than Bertrand Russell!! He is all over me, is Bertie, and I simply love him. I am dining with him next week.

Russell, separated, was having an affair with Ottoline Morrell, who enjoyed an “open marriage”.

In September,1915, he reported to Morell that Vivienne had

“a great deal of mental passion & no physical passion, a universal vanity, that makes her desire every man’s devotion, & a fastidiousness that makes any expression of their devotion disgusting to her”

—which suggests that something did happen, or failed to happen, between them.

In Eliot’s surviving letters to Russell, there is nothing indicating suspicion, only gratitude. How T. S. Eliot became T. S. Eliot, By Louis Menand

One account suggests, Eliot came home one night to find Vivienne and Bertrand in bed together. He then took leave at Margate Beach.

In a letter from Vivien to a friend on 13th October 1921, she states that,

“Tom has had a rather serious breakdown and has had to stop all work and go away for three months.’ The Letters of T S Eliot, Edited Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1988, 478).

A few days later on the 26th October, writing from the Albermarle Hotel, Cliftonville, near Margate she tells another friend that she has joined Eliot and that he is:

`getting on amazingly. It is not quite a fortnight yet but he looks already younger and fatter and nicer.’

On the 1st November, Vivienne wrote to Bertrand Russell that Eliot was:

‘at present in Margate, of all cheerful spots! But he seems to like it!’

Eliot himself wrote of his daily routine on 4th November.

I have done a rough draft of part III [of the`Waste Land’] but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable. ‘

On the recommendation of Morrell, Eliot sought treatment in Lausanne, from a doctor, named Roger Vittoz, who practiced a precursor of cognitive behavioral therapy, teaching his patients to redirect compulsive thoughts by writing. It worked for Eliot. He finished The Waste Land.

Within a few months of his return from Lausanne, Eliot had a relapse.

“Am very tired and depressed,” he wrote to Lewis in March, 1922. “Vivien has been in bed with fever, and life has been horrible generally.” The drip of complaints becomes a downpour. “I am feeling pretty well worn out at present and I am convinced that I cannot keep at this kind of life for very long” (February, 1923). “I have been hopelessly tired out and run down for a long time” (January, 1924). “I have gone through some terrible agony myself which I do not understand yet, and which has left me utterly bewildered and dazed” (April, 1924).

To Virginia Woolf:

“I have been boiled in a hell-broth” (August, 1924).

Woolf herself later wrote:

“I had a visit long, long ago from Tom Eliot, whom I love or would have loved had we been in the prime and not in the sere.”

Vivienne had nearly died, apparently because of some quack medical treatments. She also had periods of derangement, and tormented her husband. Eliot told Russell that “everything has turned out as you predicted ten years ago.”

Later Eliot wrote:

“To Vivienne the marrigae brought no happinesss. To me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land and it saved me from marrying Emily Hale who would have killed the poet in me.”

The Waste Land is a mystical desperate hope for “shantih” – the peace that passes understanding – and the fragmentation of personality and society.

JAMES PARKER, of The Atlantic writes:

Emily Hale claims that in 1922 Eliot wrote to her declaring:

“how very much he cared for me; at the time I could return no such feeling”.

She knew his marriage to be “a very unhappy affair”. But she resisted the entreaties of “this gifted, emotional, groping personality”,

writing that she was “dismayed when he confessed after seeing me again that his affection for me was stronger than ever”.

The friendship continued to 1935.

“We saw each other and knew about each other’s lives – though I had no feeling except of difficult and loyal friendship.”

However, Eliot’s commitment to his “mentally ill wife” restricted any further development until his spouse was institutionalized.

Then, from 1935 to 1939, Elliot and Hale began spending summers together in Campden, Gloucestershire. She continued in her account:

“He and I became so close to each other under conditions so abnormal, for I found by now I had in turn grown very fond of him. “We were congenial in so many of our interests, our reactions, and emotional response to each others’ needs – the happiness, the quiet deep bonds between us and our lives, very rich … And the more because we kept the relationship on an honourable, to be respected, plane.”

Hale wrote that:

“only a few – a very few – of his friends and family, and my circles of friends, knew of our care for each other; and marriage, if and when his wife died – couldn’t help but become a desired right of fulfillment”.

By November of 1930, Eliot – now typing – wrote he had been in a “state of torment” for a month.

“You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.”

“I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead; at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age.”

Describing himself to be in a “kind of emotional fever”, by December he confessed that:

“the pain is more acute, but it is a pain which in the circumstances I would not be without”.

In 1932, responding to a suggestion that they take a holiday together, he writes:

“two people in our position.” They must do nothing, which could raise the slightest suspicion in any mind however vulgar.”, but “age has not abated my passions.”‘

Following Eliot’s decision not to marry her in 1947, Emily’s handwritten draft, in blue pen, in her looped and ladylike hand is formal, gentle, baffled, and quietly devastating in effect.

What came between them after Vivienne’s death was, she writes,

“too personal, too obscurely emotional for me to understand.”

There is a note of quiet defiance:

“The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always.”

And at the end of it, she turns squarely toward us, in our libraries, shabbily poking through the story.

“I accepted conditions as they were offered under the unnatural code which surrounded us, so that perhaps more sophisticated persons than I will not be surprised to learn the truth about us.” By JAMES PARKER, a staff writer at The Atlantic

Emily endured her break down, but survived.

Dalya Alberge of The Guardian reprinted some of Eliot’s letters to Hale. In one he wrote:

“When I go to bed I shall imagine you kissing me; and when you take off your stocking you must imagine me kissing your dear dear feet and striving to approach your beautiful saintly soul.”

In others he told her that “you have all my love and devotion always”, that he was longing to stroke her “radiantly beautiful” forehead and that he would be “extremely jealous” of any other man who “cared for you as I have”.

Holding out no hope of divorce, Eliot remained married because of his religious faith, yet his letters reflect physical longing. He told Hale:

“I resent, and always shall, every occupation and engagement – except writing verse – that takes my mind from you; yet you are always with me when I wake and when I go to bed, and I stretch out my arms to where you ought to be.”

“There will be so much in existence to give a very false impression of me, and so few clues to the truth. Can I make clear to you my feeling, I wonder. I admit that it is egotistic and perhaps selfish; but is it not natural, when one has had to live in a mask all one’s life, to be able to hope that some day people can know the truth… I have again and again seen the impression I have made, and have longed to be able to cry ‘no you are all wrong about me, it isn’t like that at all’.”

Later, Eliot suggests that he was simply deluded:

“that the letters I had been writing to her were the letters of an hallucinated man.”

Eliot’s dissociation from his earlier self—from the man who wrote to Hale passionately, almost daily, for nearly two decades—epitomizes the strange swerves between intimacy and detachment that characterize his side of their long and fraught relationship.

As James Parker asks:

“The question is not does love exist / But when she leaves, where she goes.”

What’s that—something from Four Quartets? Actually it’s “Secrets,” by Van Halen. But how elegantly it expresses the problem. What happens to the love gone cold? All that madness, transport, froth, projection, communion—where does it go? With the source extinguished, do its beams still travel, like light from a snuffed-out star? Or does it dissipate entirely into unreality?

Inner and lower were the directions modernist writers took literature, toward what goes on inside the head and below the waist. That is certainly how readers experienced modernism, at least, and why the books attracted the censors.

Only through committed analysis and dedicated research of references, can sense be made of it - and then inconclusively.

Composed of five stanzas, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and sound, the poem begins with the burial of the dead - likely the carnage of WWI.