The Waste Land
Page 6
posal and leaving open the door for Quinn to alter the contract. “A few
days ago I had an attractive proposal from Mr. Watson of the Dial who are
very anxious to publish the poem. . . . They suggested getting Liveright to
postpone the date of publication as a book” ( LOTSE, 564). Meanwhile,
the indefatigable Watson landed in New York on 29 August and promptly
set out to reach terms with Liveright. “Watson has just come back,” wrote
his assistant two days later to Scofield Thayer in Berlin, “and the Eliot
a¤air is taking up much of our time.” Watson soon convinced Liveright
that the publicity generated by the Dial Award would enhance rather than
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
detract from sales of the book. But Liveright demanded that the Dial pur-
chase 350 copies of the book at the same price charged to booksellers, and
Watson promptly agreed, e¤ectively guaranteeing that Liveright would at
least break even. A few days later, on 7 September, Watson’s assistant Gil-
bert Seldes met with Liveright in the oªce of John Quinn to sign letters
of agreement.
By that date, Liveright’s proofs of the poem were already en route to
Eliot in London. On 15 September, Eliot could tell Pound, in a brief post-
script to a letter about other matters: “Liveright’s proof is excellent” ( LOTSE, 570). Eliot was much less happy with the printer who produced the Criterion
version of the poem in London. To Richard Cobden-Sanderson, the Criteri-
on’ s publisher, he wrote on 27 September, “I am also sending you the
manuscript and the proof of the first part of my poem, so that you may
have a record of the undesired alterations made by the printers” ( LOTSE,
574). On 3 October, Eliot wrote him again: “You will see that I am enclos-
ing the corrected proof of the rest of The Waste Land. I shall ring you up
tomorrow morning at about eleven and will explain why I have done so”
( LOTSE, 576). But at last the long travails of the poem were drawing to a
close. Two weeks later the first number of the Criterion appeared, on 16
October, containing the first publication of The Waste Land, without notes.
Publication of the poem in the November number of the Dial, again with-
out notes, took place a few days later. When the December number of the
Dial came out four weeks later, around 20 November, it announced Eliot’s
receipt of the Dial Award, an event that received a substantial amount of
media coverage. A short time later, about 1 December, the poem appeared
for the first time as a book, complete with notes, issued by the American
firm of Boni and Liveright.
One small matter remained. On 23 October, Eliot sent all the extant
manuscripts of The Waste Land to John Quinn as a present, a token of his
gratitude to Quinn for having arranged his contracts with Knopf, Liveright,
and the Dial. Eliot thought the manuscript important for what it said not
about himself but about Pound: “In the manuscript of The Waste Land
which I am sending you, you will see the evidences of his work, and I
think that his manuscript is worth preserving in its present form solely
for the reason that it is the only evidence of the di¤erence which his criti-
cism has made to this poem” ( LOTSE, 572). Quinn received the manuscript
in January 1923. When he died the next year, it was inherited by his sister,
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3 3
Julia Anderson, who in turn bequeathed it to her daughter, Mary. For many
years it was simply left in storage among the many cases of Quinn’s papers.
The manuscript was rediscovered only in the early 1950s, and in 1958 was
sold to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, though the ac-
quisition was not publicly announced until 1968. Three years later, in 1971,
Valerie Eliot published photographic reproductions and transcriptions of
the manuscript.
r e a d i ng t h e w a s t e l a n d
John Peale Bishop, a young and aspiring American poet who had recently
resigned as managing editor of Vanity Fair, was living in Paris in November 1922. In August, we have seen, he had briefly met Ezra Pound to discuss
the possibility of Vanity Fair’ s publishing Eliot’s new poem; now he was
settling in to do some writing of his own. On 3 November, just over two
weeks after The Waste Land had been published, he wrote to his friend
Edmund Wilson and described his projected work:
I am trying to work out an elaborate form which will be partly
lyrical, partly descriptive, partly dramatic. . . . I need not say the
chief diªculty is to eradicate T. S. Eliot from all future work.
. . . I have read The Waste Land about five times a day since the
copy of the Criterion came into my hands. It is immense. mag-
nificent. terrible. I have not yet been able to figure it all out;
especially the fortune telling episode, the king my brother and
the king my father, and the strange words that look like Hindu
puzzle to me. I have not of course had the advantage of the
notes which you say the book version will contain. Perhaps you
can enlighten me on the following points: Mr. Eugenides (his
significance), Magnus Martyr, Phlebas the Phoenician. The red
rock is I take it the modern world both intellectual and me-
chanical. But the cock crowing, presaging the dawn and rain?
And what is the experience referred to in the last section with
all the DAs in it? Do you recognize Le Prince d’Aquitaine de
la tour abolie or shantih?
I don’t think he has ever used his stolen lines to such
terrible e¤ect as in this poem. And the hurry up please it’s
time makes my flesh creep.44
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
Bishop’s letter is important because, apart from Watson’s letter to Thayer
in mid-August 1921, it is the only evidence that we have of a contemporary
reader’s first experience of the poem. Bewilderment and admiration vie
with a keen sense of the poem’s terrifying power.
But Bishop was not alone in sensing the poem’s power. An anonymous
reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement urged:
Mr. Eliot’s poem is also a collection of flashes, but there is no
e¤ect of heterogeneity, since all these flashes are relevant to
the same thing and together give what seems to be a complete
expression of this poet’s vision of modern life. We have here
range, depth, and wonderful expression. What more is neces-
sary to a great poem? This vision is singularly complex and in
all its labyrinths utterly sincere. It is the mystery of life that it
shows two faces, and we know of no other poet who can more
adequately and movingly reveal to us the inextricable tangle of
the sordid and the beautiful that makes up life.45
On the other side of the Atlantic, Burton Rascoe promptly hailed it as “per-
haps the finest poem of this generation,” and went on:
At all events it is the most significant in that it gives voice to
the universal despair or resignation arising from the spiritual
and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes
of modern civilization, the cul-de-sac int
o which both science
and philosophy seem to have got themselves and the break-
down of all great directive purposes which give joy and zest to
the business of living. It is an erudite despair. . . . His method
is highly elliptical, based on the curious formula of Tristan
Corbière, wherein reverential and blasphemous ideas are juxta-
posed in amazing antitheses, and there are mingled all the
shining verbal toys, impressions and catch lines of a poet who
has read voraciously and who possesses an insatiable curiosity
about life. . . . The final intellectual impression I have of the
poem is that it is extremely clever (by which I do not mean to
disparage it; on the contrary): it is a rictus which masks a hurt
romantic with sentiments plagued by crass reality; and it is
faulty structurally for the reason that, even with the copious
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3 5
(mock and serious) notes he supplies in elucidation, it is so
idiosyncratic a statement of ideas that I, for one, cannot follow
the narrative with complete comprehension. The poem how-
ever, contains enough sheer verbal loveliness, enough ecstasy,
enough psychological verisimilitude, and enough even of
a readily understandable etching of modern life, to justify
Mr. Eliot in his idiosyncracies.46
Rascoe’s reference to “the copious . . . notes” shows that he had been read-
ing Liveright’s edition, not the November 1922 issue of the Dial that he
was ostensibly reviewing. But more important was the way he juxtaposed
“the copious . . . notes” with his charge that the poem was “faulty struc-
turally” and his confession that he could not “follow the narrative with
complete comprehension”—a juxtaposition that sketched the fault lines
of much subsequent debate about the poem, continuing to the present.
For to Rascoe, as to many later readers and critics, the notes hinted at lev-
els of narrative and structural coherence which jarred with his experience
of the poem. To read the poem was to plummet through a series of sketches,
scenes, glimpses, and gleams of lyrical intensity bereft of the spatiotemporal
and logical-causal connections typical of narrative—a dreamworld experi-
ence that startled and disturbed; to read the notes was to find reference
to “the plan,” an arcane but ultimately identifiable logic which was dictating
the poem’s entangled movements, perhaps even a narrative structure dis-
cernible behind its unruly opacity. The tension between these poles of in-
terpretation was replayed over and over in early reviews and critical discus-
sions of the poem. Conrad Aiken, for example, reached “the conclusion
that the poem succeeds—as it brilliantly does—by virtue of its incoherence,
not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations.” With
great prescience, Aiken foresaw the trajectory of critical discussion of the
poem: “It is perhaps important to note that Mr. Eliot, with his comment
on the ‘plan,’ and several critics, with their admiration of the poem’s woven
complexity, minister to the idea that The Waste Land is, precisely, a kind
of epic in a walnut shell: elaborate, ordered, unfolded with a logic at every
joint discernible; but it is also important to note that this idea is false.”47
Aiken and Rascoe, in taking up such questions with an air of serious
interest, were typical of American reviewers. In the period that immedi-
ately followed the poem’s publication in 1922 and 1923, there were at least
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forty-six reviews of The Waste Land in the United States, more or less
equally divided between positive and negative ones. In Britain, by contrast,
there were only twelve, and ten of them were hostile.48 A similar disparity
appears in the poem’s sales figures. Horace Liveright, writing in February
1923, noted that “The Waste Land has sold 1000 copies to date and who
knows, it may go up to 2000 or 3000.” In fact, it went up to 5,000.49 The
Hogarth Press edition in Britain fared much less well. Its 443 copies, pub-
lished on 12 September 1923, did not sell out until 11 February 1925, seven-
teen months later.50 The Dial Award had turned the poem into a subject
of debate in contemporary media coverage in the United States, lending
it an urgency that it did not possess in Britain. But the problem that had
preoccupied the American reviewers, a perceived tension between the ex-
perience of the text and the experience suggested by the notes, only became
more acute in the years ahead because of Eliot’s subsequent allegiances.
In 1928, only six years after he had published The Waste Land, Eliot
issued For Lancelot Andrewes, a collection of eight recent essays preceded
by a preface in which Eliot announced that he was now a “classicist in lit-
erature, a royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”51 It was a de-
liberately provocative statement, and since then it has often been quoted
as if it suªced to characterize the whole of Eliot’s work and life. It was an
impression that Eliot himself did much to foster in subsequent years. In
1932 he published his Selected Essays, 1917–1932, a selective compilation
of book reviews and essays which he had been writing since 1919. The
first essay in the book was “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a work
from 1919 in which Eliot had urged that the personality of the individual
artist be submerged in his work, or even expunged, in response to the
claims of a vague tradition. Perhaps innocently, Eliot even misdated the
essay, assigning it to 1917 and so making it stand as the gateway to all of
his subsequent work, including The Waste Land. 52 Of the ten essays that
Eliot wrote while composing The Waste Land, only three were included in
the Selected Essays, those which most reinforced the impression that Eliot
had always been a “classicist in literature.” Suppressed were the other
seven essays from the same period (all reprinted for the first time in this
volume), which had reveled in the vernacular pleasures of British music
hall and caricature, and had sketched an aesthetics that could be called
“classicist” only by a remarkable extension of the term. Similarly, the Selected Essays gave special prominence to a piece which Eliot had recently written
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3 7
in 1930 on Baudelaire, one in which he damned the French poet for “having
an imperfect, vague romantic conception of Good.”53 Silently erased was
the contrast between this theological estimate of the French poet and the
unstinting admiration for him shown in the suppressed essays of 1921.
Eliot’s conversion to Christianity and his growing allegiance to conservative
political and social views constituted a profound change in his thought,
but the extent of that change was concealed under the slowly mounting
edifice of neoclassicism.
In the new climate of taste, one that Eliot himself did much to usher
in, there was no longer a tension between the text of The Waste Land and
the claims to coherence implied by the notes’ reference to “the
plan.” The
problem that had preoccupied the poem’s early reviewers vanished from
sight. The most influential critic to erase that tension was Cleanth Brooks,
an American critic from the conservative South, who in 1939 published
an essay that profoundly shaped the course of criticism on the poem for
the next forty years. Brooks set out to show that the poem was “a unified
whole,” that every detail in it contributed to a work of extraordinary struc-
tural, thematic, and poetic integrity. Characteristically, Brooks’s starting
point was the first of the poem’s notes, the one which urged: “Not only
the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the
poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book . . . ” No less charac-
teristically, Brooks urged that the theme of the poem could best be recon-
structed from Eliot’s 1930 essay on Baudelaire, the one in which he had
repudiated the French poet’s “imperfect, vague romantic conception of
Good.” That a term such as “Good” nowhere appears in Eliot’s writings
from the period when he was composing The Waste Land deterred Brooks
not a moment. As for critics who had earlier described a poem far more
wild and unruly than the one delineated by Brooks, they were merely vic-
tims of “the myth” that had quickly grown up around the poem.54
Eliot himself, in his very late years, was relaxed enough that he could
be more candid about the notes and their status. Though his late memory
garbled a few points of chronology and omitted some details, its general
tenor was accurate, and it is worth citing in full. In 1956, when discussing
ways in which critics might be misled, Eliot said:
Here I must admit that I am, on one conspicuous occasion,
not guiltless of having led critics into temptation. The notes to
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
The Waste Land I had at first intended to put down all the refer-
ences 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 the Crite-
rion had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem
was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes,