The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  By mid-May, his mind, he confided to a friend, had “run down, so that at present I have to flog it for hours to produce the feeblest result,” the latest of which was his next letter for the Dial, as much Vivien’s work as his own, however. (“He was in a state of collapse,” Vivien wrote a friend, “so ill—he asked me what he should say … and he just wrote it down, anything, not caring … in despair.”) He and Vivien tried to live out of town, in Royal Tunbridge Wells, “for a needed change of air,” though even the relatively easy commute to London, the hotel “only one step from the station,” meant he had to get up every morning at six thirty, which, along with his constant anxiety about missing trains, meant, he wrote a friend, that “I get no benefit out of the country.” Richard Aldington, a writer and former assistant editor of the Egoist, whom Eliot had asked to help with planning the Criterion, thought the situation catastrophic. “T. S. Eliot is very ill, will die if he doesn’t get proper and complete rest for a long time,” he wrote to the American poet Amy Lowell in the first week of May. The “sunshine and happiness” that returned to London that week, and that had such a revivifying effect on Forster and Woolf, brought no relief to Tom Eliot.

  To get away for a long time was not possible, but his father-in-law offered a respite, what amounted to a second rest cure in Switzerland, a “4tnight’s holiday,” as quickly arranged with his indulgent superiors at Lloyds as his leave in the autumn had been, from May 20 to June 4, at the Hotel Bristol in Lugano, paid for completely by Mr. Haigh-Wood.

  It turned out to be the tonic he needed to rescue him from collapse. He had “never felt quite so lazy and languid,” he wrote, and spent his time “boating, bathing, eating, sleeping and making little trips about the lake,” which was very beautifully “smothered in roses and wisteria,” even if the town itself was overcrowded with hotels and “American trippers.” He met Hermann Hesse for the first time, having already successfully solicited an article on “Recent German Poetry” from him for the first issue of the Criterion. The trip also allowed him to spend two days with Ezra Pound in Verona. Despite his difficulties with the London Letter for the Dial, the only thing he had attempted writing in the previous two months, the trip freed him to put The Waste Land through the sieve with Pound, in person, one more time.

  Eliot had not seen Pound since January. The public announcement of the Bel Esprit plan had embarrassed Eliot, but as doubtful as Eliot was of how such a subsidy would work, or whether it would be generous enough, he did not ask Pound to stop his efforts. Nor did he actually express any willingness to leave the bank were a sufficient sum raised. Now the poet and his midwife were meeting on neutral ground, far away from the urban life that was overwhelming both of them for different reasons.

  Pound and his wife, Dorothy, were in Italy to be away from Paris, where Pound had begun to find it impossible to work, not incidentally because of his efforts on Eliot’s behalf. Through the early spring, Pound wrote privately to many potential supporters, including the poet William Carlos Williams and others, in what it became clear had been a rehearsal for the plan he soon announced publicly in the New Age. “I have been on the job, am dead tired with hammering this machine,” he wrote. One reason it might have been convenient for Pound to publish the Bel Esprit plan in the New Age—whatever the cost to Eliot’s pride and reputation—was simply that Pound would no longer have to write so many letters in search of individual subsidies. His personal pleas were reworded into the New Age manifesto, but then he left town, dramatically undercutting the likelihood that Bel Esprit would get off to a quick or lucrative start, his departure also suggesting he knew it was not feasible, a dream of a patronage that could not exist, even if it ought to.

  Pound had warned friends that he was about to disappear, writing to John Quinn, “I shall be dead to the world,” and to another friend, more definitively, “I am dead.” He was writing from the World of Spirits, he added, and “had it put about” that he had died on Good Friday, telling his father of his temporary suicide, “I shall rise again at a suitable time,” a resurrection—and return to Paris—that would come in three months rather than Christ’s three days.

  Just as Eliot had written geographical markers—King William Street, Margate Sands, Lac Leman—into his poem, Pound recounted his meeting with Eliot in the poem he was drafting during his trip, the “Malatesta Cantos,” named for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, who was a fifteenth-century counterpart to Pound himself, both poet and patron of the arts and artists. In the draft, Pound described himself and Eliot in conversation with other friends at a café near the Roman arena in Verona. Pound styled Tom as “Thomas amics,” a Provençal version of the French ami, friend or lover, and the scene outside the arena is more vital than the tired trappings of the show inside the arena—“the footlights, the clowns, dancers / performing dogs.” Tom and Pound and their friends are drinking, but Eliot drinking with him in Verona was not the only thing on Pound’s mind as he wrote. His several lines about Eliot were in effect the story of a quarrel over the fate of Eliot’s poem, the progeny he had been the midwife to, and what milestone it might have been—and perhaps would yet be—in the future of poetry. Pound began his canto where Eliot’s poem ended, his first line a “combative allusion” to one of Eliot’s penultimate lines, written in Lausanne, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” the very part of the poem that remained as Tom had written it and in which Pound had had the least hand. “These fragments you have shelved (shored),” Pound wrote, pointedly inserting “T. S. E.” after “you” on one draft, a reference not only to Eliot’s poem but also to the fact that Eliot had so far botched its publication. “Thomas amics” had shored his fragments at Lausanne, put them through the sieve with Pound, and then effectively shelved them—and their greatness—despite Pound’s efforts.

  Pound submitted the “Malatesta Cantos” to Eliot for the Criterion in 1923. Eliot requested one change. “I object strongly on tactical grounds to yr first line,” he wrote. “People are inclined to think that we write our verses in collaboration as it is, or else that you write mine [and] I write yours. With your permission we will begin with line 2.” Pound cut the line, which, once The Waste Land had been published, was no longer a private joke, but restored it when he published the poem in book form in 1925.

  * * *

  Leonard and Virginia returned to Richmond on Saturday, June 10, having spent ten days at Monk’s House. The weather had been so good, “perfection is such that it becomes like a normal state,” Virginia wrote in her diary. But it was not only the weather. The isolation of Rodmell had meant she could “slip easily from writing to reading with spaces between of walking,” the seamless simplicity with which she lived “in the brain” there leaving her with the feeling that happiness, too, was normal. Back in Richmond, they were busy entertaining, but she was not distracted from her work, was in fact “working too hard; talking too much,” and preparing Jacob’s Room for the typist, Miss Green. Her temperature still fluctuated, despite the extraction of her three teeth. She was regretful at their loss, but on the other hand, here was more evidence that her doctors’ prescriptions could profitably be ignored in the future. Even her “premonitory shivers” about the reception of Jacob’s Room, which Leonard had yet to read, did not seem to weigh heavily on her.

  Virginia had resolved to guard herself against what she called “my season of doubts & ups & downs” about Jacob’s Room, convinced after her success with “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” that the best answer to self-doubt was not to choose between her work on the story she wanted to write for Eliot, or continuing with her essay on reading, or accepting a review assignment that might be attractive. Doing one would not compromise the other or her vision. She saw herself, instead, moving easily among them, and had a “clever experiment” in mind. She would “vary the side of the pillow” as her mood suggested.

  * * *

  Morgan, in the wake of his “boom” in the Times, stayed at Hogarth on Thursday, June 15, after meeting Le
onard for a dinner in London with Cambridge friends. The change over the past three months had been remarkable. In part he was buoyed by fame, in part by the work he had done, however careful and uninspired he sometimes thought it. In part it was also the social life he had resumed. It was revivifying to be talked about so favorably and so publicly, after so many months and years during which the main question among his friends, and even in his own mind, had been what was wrong with him. Far from the inanition of March, he was now “very calm, serene, like a kettle boiling by some private fire, a fire at Weybridge,” Virginia wrote in her diary, her expansive mood fortified by the pleasure she was taking in her own work at the time. Morgan’s old, fussy, exacting mother was still at Weybridge, of course, but Poppy was kicking, and he was feeling less subject to Lily’s whims and prohibitions. He sat up late with Virginia and Leonard, talking about his book. It had been a long time since he had had a book to talk about, and now there was to be another one, as if he, too, saw some virtue in guarding himself against a season of doubts and ups and downs, as Virginia had decided to do. He agreed to collect some articles on Egypt for a book that the Hogarth Press would publish in 1923.

  On Friday the sixteenth, he replied to Edward Arnold, who after reading about his long-silent author in the Times had written him inquiring whether Forster might be writing another novel. Forster was vague, only promising, “If I ever finish a novel, you shall certainly hear of it. Financial considerations alone, are tempting, for it ought to have a good sale thanks to Lucas Malet’s timely tap. Public interest in me this morning has attained ¾ columns. It is all very queer.”

  A few days later, on Monday, June 19, he was back in London for a meeting of the Memoir Club. Both he and Lytton read contributions, another piece of work completed.

  * * *

  The night before the Memoir Club meeting, Eliot came to see Leonard and Virginia for the first time since his return from Switzerland and his visit in Verona with Pound. He came for dinner and, more significantly, had with him the poem that he had told them about in March. Then, too, he had come at almost the same time as Morgan. In March the contrast between the two of them had been very great, Tom confident of his best work, safe in his desk, and Morgan depressed to the point of inanition. Now, the two of them—and Virginia, too—were equally content and voluble.

  Tom’s time in Lugano had revived him even more than his visit to Lausanne had done, and by the time he saw the Woolves, on the evening of Sunday, June 18, he felt, he wrote a friend, “in very much better health than before I left, in fact in better physical health than I was when I came back from Switzerland in January.” It showed in his demeanor during dinner with the Woolves, and it showed in the performance he gave afterward.

  “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem,” Virginia wrote in her diary.

  “He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. But he read till he had to rush—letters to write about the London Magazine—& discussion was thus curtailed. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called.”

  It was fitting enough that Eliot had no time to discuss the poem. Distractions and obligations had shaped the writing of it, too, over many years. But his hasty departure may also simply have been a convenient excuse for him to avoid answering questions about his work, as he preferred to do whenever possible. After he had become a successful dramatist he remarked in an essay that in writing “other verse,” nondramatic verse, “one is writing, so to speak, in terms of one’s own voice: the way it sounds when you read it to yourself is the test. For it is yourself speaking.” For Eliot, this did not mean that he was speaking of himself but rather that the rhythm, the chant, was the poet speaking. What the poet expressed was sound; what the reader wanted, usually, was sense. But this was not the poet’s concern. “The question of communication, of what the reader will get from it, is not paramount.” If the poem “is right to you, you can only hope that the readers will eventually come to accept it. The poem can wait a little while.” Leaving the Woolves on Sunday, with or without letters to write, was a way of stating his case, and, conveniently, avoiding communication.

  Eliot was better that June, but Vivien’s condition was increasingly worse, her suffering as much the result of her doctors’ ministrations as from the symptoms and pains of her colitis and other illnesses that had driven her to undertake more and more extreme and desperate regimens. At the recommendation of Ottoline Morrell, she had seen a new specialist, whose fashionable diagnosis was “glands.” The “perfectly new and violent” experimental treatment the doctor proposed—doses of animal glands, together with a “very strong internal disinfection” requiring her to fast for two days a week—left her too weak, almost literally at wit’s end, to see the Woolves or anyone else. Vivien’s “constant illness” was once again left unspoken, the snippets of her pleas to her silent husband in the poem Tom sang and rhythmed and chanted a vivid enough reminder of her condition, and a revelation of his.

  The next night, after the meeting of the Memoir Club, Clive Bell hosted a dinner at his home in Gordon Square. Tom’s poem came up in conversation. It—and Eliot’s friends—had not waited a little while at all. And it seemed that, in fact, it was the poet speaking, but not in the way Eliot’s theory would have it. Mary Hutchinson had heard the poem, too, she said, and told the others she interpreted it to be “Tom’s autobiography—a melancholy one.”

  “Mary Hutch,” Virginia knew, was a confidante of the Eliots in a way she never truly had been. Occasionally jealous of Mary’s intimacy with Eliot, more frequently dismissive of her charms (and intelligence) despite Clive’s romantic attachment to her (she may have been occasionally jealous of that, too), Virginia on this evening was softened by Mary’s solicitous warmth to her. “Yes, Mary kissed me on the stairs,” she wrote in her diary. Mary had “crossed the room & purred in my ear.” Perhaps in consequence of this show of affection, Virginia let Mary’s interpretation of The Waste Land stand as her own at least tentative conclusion, and added nothing more.

  * * *

  Virginia’s description of Tom’s rhythming and chanting of The Waste Land caught an essential thing about Eliot, and his idea of the poet speaking. Tom’s sister Ada, thirteen years his senior, wrote in her last letter to him before her death, in 1943, at seventy-four, “When you were a tiny boy, learning to talk, you used to sound the rhythm of the sentences without shaping words—the ups and downs of the thing you were trying to say. I used to answer you in kind, saying nothing yet conversing with you as we sat side by side on the stairs at 2635 Locust Street. And now you think the rhythm before the words in a new poem!… Such a dear little boy!”

  His practice, in writing, was similar, sounding out the rhythm “to the accompaniment of a small drum,” which was actually advice he passed along to at least one younger poet, and a style he followed in his readings, not only as Virginia described it, but in his two recordings of The Waste Land, made much later. Virginia had written that after hearing the poem she was left with “some strong emotion,” but it was part of Eliot’s design of the poem, and of his performance, that whatever emotions of Eliot’s lay behind the poem were obscured. Eliot chanted, and did not emote, his voice absolutely flat, without inflection, what Leonard recalled, describing another of Tom’s recitations, as “that curious monotonous sing-song in which all poets from Homer downwards have recited their poetry,” all hints of implied meaning drained, the poet no more an authority on the meaning of the poem than the reader or listener: April|is|the|cruellest|month. Not April is the cruellest month, as if emphasizing there are other months more or less cruel, and that others, to whom the poet is responding, have said so. Not April is the cruellest month, as if to suggest there might be an argument, or any doubt, whether April is in fact the cruellest. Not April is the cruellest month, with any singularity to its cruelty. Nor that April is the cruellest month, as if to contradict the proposit
ion that it is the kindest month, or that April is the cruellest month, emphasizing the interminable duration of what might sometimes seem a quickly moving thirty-day span in spring. One reader might hear the line any one of these ways, at one time or another. But the poet did not favor one, or suggest that there might be a particular meaning in the line at all.

  When John Quinn once questioned Eliot about a passage in The Waste Land, Eliot replied not with the expected explanation but rather by laying out the method of his prosody. Perhaps Quinn didn’t hear the poem the way Eliot did, the poet wrote. Eliot told Quinn that “the line itself punctuates” and was a self-contained entity of sound. He himself always paused at the end of a line, whether the punctuation, or perhaps even what appeared to be the sense, suggested otherwise. The pause between lines was another of the drumbeats that, as Virginia had heard, imposed a symmetry of sound and rhythmed the poem into a chant.

  The sound of Tom’s poetry and the sound of his conversation were not very different from one another, his general manner of speaking the same when he was a boy on Locust Street in Saint Louis or a grown man in a London drawing room. Ottoline Morrell recalled the frustration that, during one conversation with Eliot at Garsington, had led her to a “desperate attempt to break through his veil of reserve” by speaking in French. She hoped to disarm him but found that in French, as in English, he spoke with the same controlled forethought, “slowly, precisely and flatly.” Another friend was to recall after Eliot’s death that she was beguiled by the way he spoke in a “slightly booming monotone, without emphasis.” His voice “lacked vanity,” she thought, and was akin to a “bow drawn gently over a ’cello string & because of this one missed the exact sense. He didn’t galvanize you with his words.”

  * * *

  In the week following his dinner and performance at Hogarth House, Tom focused with renewed vigor on doing what he could to get his poem published in America in the autumn if there were still any chance it could happen. He had finally written to Knopf in mid-April, inquiring about Knopf’s interest in his new poem for the autumn and adding rather mildly that he had met Liveright in Paris and he had made an offer. Knopf had replied on May 1 that though he wanted to publish more of Eliot’s poetry, it was already too late for him to add a book to his list this year; his catalog of autumn books was ready to print. He advised him to accept Liveright’s offer and said he would look forward to publishing Eliot’s next work of prose instead. But now it was nearly July, and Eliot had not yet accepted Liveright’s offer.