The Waste Land

by T. S. Eliot

  Vivien moved into some portion of a flat at 12, Wigmore Street, then taken

  by Lucy Thayer, sister of Scofield Thayer (editor of the Dial) and a friend

  of Vivien’s since 1915. Henry, meanwhile, was lodged in a separate room

  at 41, Gordon Square.35 But with Vivien still feeling poorly, as she had been

  since February, it was decided in early July that she would go out “to a

  place in the country on Chichester harbour” ( LOTSE, 459), while Henry

  left Gordon Square and joined Eliot in the flat at Wigmore Street.

  It was at this moment that Lady Rothermere, the wife of a wealthy

  newspaper magnate, first broached a plan for launching a new literary

  and cultural journal to be edited by Eliot, an idea that eventually led to the

  creation of the Criterion. In the short term, it threatened much correspon-

  dence to work out the terms of her support and Eliot’s participation, and

  by mid-July, Vivien was called back from the country to help. Now Vivien,

  Eliot, and his brother Henry were “encamped in an attic with a glass roof”

  ( LOTSE, 461) at Wigmore Street, as Vivien put it; or as Eliot put it, in “very confined and uncomfortable quarters for three people” ( LOTSE, 461).

  There they stayed for the next five weeks until the Eliot family departed.

  When they left, Henry took away Eliot’s old typewriter, the one he had

  used since early 1914 at Harvard, and left in its place his own much newer

  machine as a present. It was during this ten-week period that Eliot com-

  posed lines 185–258, or most of the first half of part III, which at this point

  were introduced not by lines 173–184 as we know them today but by a

  very di¤erent passage of seventy-two lines which recount the doings of a

  wealthy socialite named Fresca in couplets that attempt to imitate Pope.

  Eliot and Vivien spent yet another week at Wigmore Street after his

  family had departed, and moved back to Clarence Gate Gardens only on

  the weekend of 27–28 August. Both Eliot and Vivien were increasingly

  ill. To Mary Hutchinson he wrote on 1 September: “Also I am feeling com-

  pletely exhausted—the departure of my family laid us both out—and have

  had some splitting headaches” ( LOTSE, 467). And six days later he reported

  to Richard Aldington: “My wife has been very ill, we have had to have new

  consultations, and to make matters worse we have been moving from Wig-

  more Street back here” ( LOTSE, 468). There were also pressing commit-

  ments for journalism. In early September he wrote his regular “London

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  Letter: September, 1921,” for the Dial, his first essay typed on the new typewriter that Henry had left him. On 16 September he “finished an article,

  unsatisfactory to myself, on the metaphysical poets” ( LOTSE, 469–470)

  —his review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and

  Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler—which appeared the

  next month in the Times Literary Supplement (see 192–201 this volume).

  By the end of September, Eliot’s condition was so poor that Vivien arranged

  for him to see a “nerve specialist,” who promptly advised Eliot to “go straight

  away for three months complete rest and change and . . . live according

  to a strict regimen which he has prescribed” ( LOTSE, 471). Eliot requested

  a leave of absence from Lloyds Bank, which promptly granted it. But be-

  cause plans for the Criterion had now advanced and called for Eliot to pro-

  duce a first number in only three months’ time, or in January 1922, he

  took a further ten days to postpone the journal’s planned appearance and

  wrap up a¤airs in London. It was during this interval, on 10 October, that

  Ezra Pound came from Paris to London, where he stayed for eight days

  with his mother-in-law, Olivia Shakespeare, at 12, Brunswick Gardens in

  Kensington. Pound met Eliot on the evening of 12 October (Wednesday),

  and reported to his wife, Dorothy, on 14 October: “Eliot at last ordered

  away for 3 months—he seems rejuvinated [ sic] at prospect.”36

  Finally, on 15 October, Eliot left for Margate, a seaside resort town lo-

  cated some seventy miles east of London. He was accompanied by Vivien,

  who stayed with him at the Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville, an area just

  outside the main resort. Vivien remained for a little more than two weeks,

  until 31 October, then returned to London, leaving him alone. But already

  by 26 October she had reported that Eliot was “getting on amazingly, ”

  looking “younger, and fatter and nicer” ( LOTSE, 479). Eliot stayed for an-

  other twelve days in the solitude of a seaside resort grown quiet after its

  high season. While there he composed three drafts for his long poem, “O

  City, City” ( TWL:AF, 36–37), “The river sweats” ( TWL:AF, 48–49), and

  “Highbury bore me” ( TWL:AF, 50–51). These he conceived as forming a

  “part of Part III” when he described them to a friend and admirer in a let-

  ter which has been conjecturally dated to 11 November ( LOTSE, 484–485).37

  Together the three drafts make up lines 259–311 of the published poem

  and form the conclusion to part III. In addition, Eliot composed a brief

  fragment of thirteen lines beginning “London, the swarming life” ( TWL:AF,

  36–37) and two independent poems, “Elegy” and “Dirge” ( TWL:AF, 116–

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  119). The independent poems were the result of Eliot’s growing concern

  that his long poem might not be long enough to make an independent

  book, and from October 1921 to January 1922 he repeatedly considered

  the idea of having a small group of poems which would fill out the space.

  With these manuscripts in hand, Eliot returned to London late on 12

  November.

  He stayed less than a week, until 18 November. Knowing that he would

  soon be leaving for Lausanne, where he was to stay for six weeks and re-

  ceive treatment from the Swiss psychiatrist Roger Vittoz, Eliot attempted

  to assemble a working draft of part III of the poem as so far composed.

  He began to prepare a typescript ( TWL:AF, 22–35, carbon 38–47), the

  first part of the poem typed with the newer typewriter which his brother

  Henry had left him in August. The typescript incorporated the passage

  beginning “London, the swarming life,” which he had just composed while

  in Margate, now inserted before what is line 215 of the published poem.

  But his plan went awry: evidently he simply didn’t have time to finish typ-

  ing all of part III and got only about halfway through, as far as what is

  now line 258. In addition, he typed up a third independent poem titled

  “Exequy” ( TWL:AF, 100–103). It would go nicely with “Elegy” and “Dirge,”

  the two independent poems he had composed while in Margate. Mean-

  while, for the moment the introduction to part III remained the passage

  already mentioned, the seventy-two lines of Popean couplets depicting

  the wealthy socialite Fresca ( TWL:AF, 23–27, carbon 38–41).

  On 19 November, Eliot left for Paris, again accompanied by Vivien.

  In Paris they stayed at the Hotel Pas du Calais, 59, rue des Saints Pères,

  in the Sixth Arrondissement.
Eliot may not have stayed more than a day,

  and some evidence suggests that he had left the city already by 21 Novem-

  ber. Ezra and Dorothy Pound were in town, but having just moved into a

  new studio at 70 bis, rue Notre Dames des Champs, were busy painting

  the walls and constructing furniture. Pound and Eliot certainly met dur-

  ing the brief period when Eliot was in the city, but it is unlikely that Pound

  would have had enough time to go through The Waste Land. 38 “Eliot seemed

  fairly well when I saw him on his way through Paris last week,” he wrote

  to one correspondent on 5 December.39 Vivien, meanwhile, was left behind

  in Paris on her own, and in the weeks that followed received little compan-

  ionship from the Pounds, who were preoccupied with other matters. On

  13 December, Dorothy Pound was hospitalized for an abscess on her left

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  forefinger, which required surgery to cut o¤ the tip bone, and she remained

  in the hospital until 27 December.40

  In Lausanne, Eliot stayed at the Hotel St. Luce, a tranquil pension,

  from 22 November until 2 January. Lausanne, he wrote, was a “very quiet

  town, except when children come downhill on scooters over the cobbles.

  Mostly banks and chocolate shops” ( LOTSE, 490). It was amid these that

  Eliot finished his draft of The Waste Land. He wrote a draft of part IV which ran to ninety-two lines (compared with ten in the published version of

  the poem), and also a draft of part V, which was virtually identical with

  the final, published version ( TWL:AF, 54–61, 70–81). In addition, he be-

  came concerned by the lack of a vivid connection between the ending of

  part III, dominated by the taut series of three lyrics sung by the Thames-

  daughters (echos of the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Ring cycle), which

  he had drafted when alone in Margate in early November, and the begin-

  ning of part III ( TWL:AF, 22–23 and 26–27), with its caustic account of

  the doings of Fresca, a passage he had drafted earlier in the summer while

  his family was visiting. They seemed too disjunct, and Eliot responded by

  drafting an additional passage of seventeen lines designed to link them more

  firmly ( TWL:AF, 28–29). Since the evocation of the Thames-daughters

  entailed obvious reference to water, Eliot decided to expand another, quite

  minor reference to water in part III’s beginning ( TWL:AF, 26–27, ll. 56–

  57). On the partial typescript for part III which he had prepared in London

  in mid-November, he now placed a large asterisk and the command “in-

  sert” directly opposite a passage which recounted Fresca’s reading habits

  ( TWL:AF, 26–27), her daily immersion “in a soapy sea / of Symonds–

  Walter Pater–Vernon Lee.” Then he began a new draft which transformed

  Fresca into a version of Venus rising from the sea:

  From which, a Venus Anadyomene

  She stept ashore to a more varied scene,

  Propelled by Lady Katzegg’s guiding hand,

  She knew the wealth and fashion of the land.

  ( TWL:AF, 28–29)

  And so it went for another thirteen lines, all in what Pound would later

  call the “too loose” manner of Eliot’s pastiche of Pope ( TWL:AF, 38–39).

  Our concern, however, is not with the passage’s success or failure but with

  the kind of order that was dictating the poem’s composition: for that order

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  was fundamentally contingent and retrospective. It was not, in other words,

  an order being achieved as the realization of a plan or program, dictated

  by some predetermined notion of mythic structure or ritual pattern. What

  The Waste Land achieved were relative and incremental orders of coherence,

  orders fundamentally local and retrospective in nature. And because the

  orders of coherence which dictated the poem’s composition were so local,

  it meant that substantial parts of the poem could be eliminated without

  doing damage to the whole. Which is precisely what happened next.

  Eliot arrived in Paris on 2 January 1922, bringing with him the sheaf

  of typescripts, drafts, and autograph fair copies which he had assembled

  over the previous eleven months. Deeply uncertain about the worth of his

  entire project, he submitted these to Ezra Pound for advice and suggestions

  for improvement. What transpired is widely recognized as one of the great-

  est acts of editorial intervention on record. With uncanny insight, Pound

  urged Eliot to remove the large tracts of narrative which furnished the be-

  ginning to parts I, III, and IV of the poem. From part I he deleted the fifty-

  four-line sequence which depicted a rowdy night on the town in Boston;

  from part III he expunged the lengthy beginning which described the ac-

  tivities of Fresca, at that point a passage which ran to eighty-nine lines;

  and from part IV he slashed away the detailed exposition of the final voy-

  age of Phlebas, another eighty-three lines. In addition, he pruned twenty-

  seven lines from the central scene in part III, the tryst of the unnamed

  typist and “the young man carbuncular.” To top it o¤, he made another

  two hundred minor editorial changes, typically deleting or questioning

  isolated words and phrases.

  The process was only slightly more complicated than the above sum-

  mary suggests. At one point, on the autograph fair copy of what was then

  the beginning to part IV, Pound wrote in black ink, “Bad—cant attack

  until I get typescript” ( TWL:AF, 54–55). During his first reading of the

  poem, in other words, Pound had gone through parts I, II, and III, then

  had asked Eliot to furnish him with a typescript version of parts IV and

  V. Eliot promptly obliged while still in Paris ( TWL:AF, 62–69, 82–89),

  using Pound’s own typewriter to do so, which now became the third of

  the three typewriters which were used for the prepublication manuscripts.

  Pound then went on to finish his second editorial intervention with the

  poem, which chiefly consisted of removing the first eighty-four lines of

  part IV. What emerged was very close to the poem as we know it today,

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  with one significant exception. Pound’s deletion of the original beginning

  to part III, which he had made during his first editorial intervention, meant

  that it e¤ectively lacked an introduction, seeming to start much too abruptly.

  While still in Paris, therefore, Eliot drafted a ten-line passage which would

  serve as part III’s opening, a slightly abbreviated version of lines 173–184

  in the published poem, a plangent and deeply personal farewell to the

  nymphs, young men, and even the urban detritus which have populated

  the poem ( TWL:AF, 24–25).

  Writing and editing Eliot’s long poem was one thing; publishing it

  would be another. Eliot’s stay in Paris, by sheer chance, overlapped with

  that of Horace Liveright, a young American publisher who was director

  of the firm Boni and Liveright. Liveright was making an acquisition tour

  in Europe, trying to secure publishing contracts with younger writers of

  promise, and only months earlier he had published one of Pound’s best


  collections of recent verse, Poems, 1918–1921. During his five days in Paris, Liveright visited Pound daily, and on the evening of 3 January he had an

  extraordinary dinner with Eliot, Pound, and James Joyce to discuss a mile-

  stone publishing program. To Joyce, still seeking an American publisher

  for Ulysses, he o¤ered $1,000 against royalties, provided only that legal

  opinion deemed the work publishable. To Pound he o¤ered a contract guar-

  anteeing $500 annually for two years in addition to translator’s fees for

  any work from French agreed upon by both parties. To Eliot he o¤ered

  $150 advance against 15 percent royalties for The Waste Land and promised

  publication in the autumn list. As yet he had not read the poem, and his

  view of it was wholly mediated by Pound.41

  Eliot evidently made a fair copy of the poem for Liveright over the

  next few days and sent it to him at his hotel in London, the next stop on

  Liveright’s tour. On 11 January, in a brief note addressed to Pound, Liveright

  expressed some worry: “I’m disappointed that Eliot’s material is as short.

  Can’t he add anything?” he asked Pound. Eliot’s worst fear, that his long

  poem would be too short to stand as an independent volume, was now

  being realized. Ultimately, it was this fear which led him to create the

  notes for the poem. Anxious, yet also pleased with the results of Pound’s

  editing, Eliot proceeded to return to London on Sunday, 16 January, together

  with Vivien. The next day he resumed his work at Lloyds Bank.

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  p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h e p o e m , c o m p o s i t i o n o f t h e n o t e s Back in London, Eliot now made a complete but still provisional typescript

  of the poem, nineteen pages in length, which he sent to Pound in Paris.

  “much improved,” commented Pound. He had only two reservations. He

  disliked the epigraph which Eliot had added to the poem ( TWL:AF, 2–3),

  a passage taken from Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, and

  he opposed Eliot’s plan to include three additional poems at the end, the

  independent works which Eliot had hoped would assuage Liveright’s con-

  cerns about length. “The thing runs from April . . . to shantih without [a]

  break. That is 19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the English