For different correspondents he adopted different voices. He hired ‘a very nice, intelligent, serious Scotch woman’, Miss Duff, as a ‘shorthand typist’. She came for a few hours ‘twice a week’ to help cope with the demands of magazine editing. Tom grew used to dictating formal, efficient-sounding letters.90 Typed up on Criterion notepaper, these gave the magazine’s address as 9 Clarence Gate Gardens; problematically, there was now little or no boundary between his home life and work. At least the first issue’s contents were shaping up, though not quite as the editor had anticipated: as well as The Waste Land (now likely to appear entire in the first issue), he now expected to publish pieces by George Saintsbury, May Sinclair, poet-critic T. Sturge Moore, Aldington and several foreign contributions, including the lecture on Joyce by Larbaud and Hesse’s article on recent German poetry. The journal’s objectives remained lofty. Tom summarised them in a letter to German intellectual E. R. Curtius, to whom he sent The Sacred Wood. The ‘great aim is to raise the standard of thought and writing in this country by both international and historical comparison. Among English writers I am combining those of the older generation who have any vitality and enterprise, with the more serious of the younger generation, no matter how advanced, for instance Mr Wyndham Lewis and Mr Ezra Pound.’91 Mr Pound, Mr Lewis and himself were to be the magazine’s ‘jailbirds’– the resident bad boys.92 Mostly Tom wanted contributors to represent the Criterion as unimpeachably impressive – ‘the best people of each generation and type’.93 His first issue, containing nothing by Pound or Lewis, would open with the irreproachable wisdom of seventy-seven-year-old George Saintsbury, retired Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Pound, who thought Saintsbury ‘a meritorious old dodo’, soon described Tom’s magazine as ‘very good’ and ‘octogenarian’.94
At last Tom had sent a typescript of The Waste Land to Pound in Paris, so that Pound could show it to his visitor James Sibley Watson, Jr, of the Dial. Tom seemed minded to accept a developing offer to have the Dial publish it. This deal would bring payment at roughly the usual rate, but there would be an understanding also that the magazine would award him its annual $2,000 prize ‘for services to the cause of letters’.95 Initially, the publisher, James Sibley Watson, found the poem ‘disappointing’, but after reading it three times he thought it might be ‘up to’ Tom’s ‘usual’.96 Pound had sounded out Vanity Fair about possible US publication of The Waste Land (a ‘series of lyrics’), as it was rumoured that Tom and Thayer had ‘split’, so that the Dial would not publish the work.97 Nevertheless, by mid-August, in a prickly and necessarily punctilious way, Tom was edging towards agreement with his old classmate’s magazine – provided Boni and Liveright did not object to his poem appearing in a journal at almost the same time as they brought it out as a book.98 The Dial and Boni and Liveright came to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Edmund Wilson, then managing editor of Vanity Fair, asked Tom for some prose instead. So it was that The Waste Land was lined up to be published in London in the October Criterion, then in New York in the November Dial, then as a slim volume by Boni and Liveright in December. It would be the following year before the poem became a British book.
As August 1922 drew to a close, Tom was rushing to pull together the material for the first issue of his magazine. Let down by a translator, he found himself having to translate Larbaud’s lecture, ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce’, and was working against the clock. His mother sent him addresses of possible subscribers at Harvard; she registered that Vivien was ill and in Bosham, and hoped she would ‘soon be better’.99 In London there were setbacks. Cobden-Sanderson’s father died on 7 September. Stressed, Tom fidgeted over the magazine’s contents. Having overestimated the amount of material he could fit into ninety-six pages, he reverted to his original idea of publishing just ‘The Waste Land I–II’ in the first issue, only to change his mind yet again.100 It seems that, like other people, he was torn between treating The Waste Land as a series of poems and as a single work. Overwhelmed with gratitude to Quinn, Tom sent him not only his poem’s manuscripts but also the notebook (‘Inventions of the March Hare’) which he had started in 1909. Quinn accepted the Waste Land material ‘as a mark of friendship’, but insisted on sending Tom $140 for the notebook.101
By mid-September Tom was correcting ‘excellent’ proofs from Boni and Liveright.102 Manifesting a lasting ability to get over fallings out, he enjoyed having dinner with Murry on the 13th. Neither man had changed his view of the other, but both were keen they should get on. Among other things, each knew ‘the worries’ of bringing out a literary magazine.103 Despite delays, it looked as if the Criterion would be ready for 15 October. Tom knew Bel Esprit was still under way, but, after a meeting with Virginia Woolf during the time Criterion proofs were being corrected, he gave her the distinct impression that he thought Bel Esprit ‘impracticable’.104 Woolf and her husband agreed. Yet the scheme ran on. Vivien believed if the Criterion succeeded and money from the Pound-inspired fundraising could be ‘guaranteed’, then ‘Tom would automatically leave the bank’.105
At this juncture Tom felt unable to go over all the ins and outs of his predicament. Vivien was ill again. Galley proofs needed correcting. Advertising for the Criterion had to be booked in newspapers and magazines. Further circulars must go to potential subscribers. Lady Rothermere had to be kept happy: details of financial arrangements, about which Tom was scrupulous, must be sent to her at ‘Claridges Hotel, Paris’. With these pressures as well as Lloyds Bank to contend with, he felt ‘assailed from all sides’. To get through, he ‘had to keep his mind off’ the whole complex tangle of Bel Esprit ‘and concentrate on what I must do from hour to hour’.106 The first page proofs of the magazine arrived on Saturday 30 September. Going through them on Sunday, Tom posted them back to the printer on Monday. By Tuesday night he had proofed the whole journal a second time – ‘extremely satisfactory’, though the setting of The Waste Land was proving fiddly.107 Tom would receive a ‘dummy’ copy of the magazine a few days later.108 In the midst of all this his old college room-mate Howard Morris, now ‘a very successful Bond Broker in New York’ dropped by. They talked finance. Howard expected ‘another slump’. Tom bore this in mind when discussing with Henry what to do about income he was now receiving from inherited stock in the St Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. Yet Howard, ‘a late Harvard friend of mine’, seemed almost from a buried life.109
At home Tom maintained a small shrine to that life, at least as far as it included his family. Ancestral pictures hung on the wall. Occasionally disconcerting visitors, these confirmed at once his sense of tradition and his foreignness. Having visited less than a year earlier, his brother Henry had been convinced that ‘The strain of going out among people who after all are foreigners to him, and, I believe, always must be to an American – even Henry James never became a complete Englishman – has, I think, been to him pretty heavy.’ His brother recalled Tom complaining in 1920 of ‘always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people’.110 If Henry (like Lady Rothermere) thought Tom needed simply to relax and rest, he may have been right, but Tom’s public and private life afforded less and less respite. His collection of family photographs was a reminder of earlier generations of hard-working, stern-faced Eliots who had simply buckled down and endured; it was also, to a poet who hoped his mother might visit him again, a consolation; and it was an ancestral challenge, a personal criterion against which he measured himself, even as he came to feel further and further removed from much modern United States life.
In the Criterion’s first issue Tom was the only American writer. He was also the sole contributor of new verse. Consciously or not, he assembled around The Waste Land prose that clearly set it off. Saintsbury’s opening essay on ‘Dullness’ counselled against ‘“passiveness”’ in reading; the elderly professor urged readers to ‘extend your knowledge and interests as far as possible’ and, if encountering ‘a reference or allusi
on’ that seemed difficult, not to condemn it ‘without making sure that the fault is not your own’.111 This was surely good advice for readers of The Waste Land. The second piece was a translation of Dostoevsky’s plan for an unfinished novel, a story involving ‘horror’, ‘passionate desire’, religion and ‘the abyss’; though in September 1922 Virginia Woolf and Tom agreed that Dostoevsky was ‘the ruin of English literature’, Tom once described his own life as a Dostoevsky novel authored by Middleton Murry.112 Then, on either side of The Waste Land came two items relating to doomed love affairs: the first part of T. Sturge Moore’s account of ‘The Legend of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry’, and May Sinclair’s tale ‘The Victim’, in which a man who suspects his partner of sexual betrayal commits a murder and has to live with the consequences of his knowledge. The first issue continued with Hesse’s piece on ‘Recent German Poetry’, which envisages ‘the ruin of the world’ and states that ‘“Dadaism” belongs thereto’; the final article was Larbaud’s discussion of ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce’ – the masterpiece Tom came to see as using that ‘mythical method’ so vital to his own long poem.113 Editorially, then, he set The Waste Land carefully among prose with which it resonated, deftly establishing a reading context that spurred and guided its initial public. He printed his poem without epigraph or dedication. After the concluding words of Sturge Moore’s ‘Tristram and Isolt’ (which Tom had edited so that its first part ended with mention of how ‘cut or wired flowers doomed to sterility’ compared poorly with ‘bloom on thriving plants’), readers turned the page and encountered The Waste Land with its opening lines about ‘Lilacs’ and ‘dead land’, ‘roots’ and ‘tubers’.114
A newly printed Criterion went to Lady Rothermere, now in Florence. She was unimpressed. Another early copy went to the Dial. Yet even before these were dispatched, Tom’s published poem had met with one of its best informed readers. Vivien, who knew ‘So much depends on the Criterion’, felt the poem ‘has become a part of me (or I of it) this last year’.115 Though she had given high praise to the passage about nervous anxiety within a couple’s relationship, she had asked Tom to remove the line ‘The ivory men make company between us’ – perhaps because it was simply too painful.116 Feeling utterly bonded to the work, it seemed to her ‘a terrible thing, somehow, when the time came at last for it to be published’.117 If The Waste Land, with its images of adultery, sex gone wrong and edgy, nervous exchanges, can seem like a pained act of exposure, nonetheless its ‘impersonal’ allusive technique, its almost infinitely expanding resonances and its arcane use of anthropologically inflected structures prevent it from being reduced to that – and designedly so.
Waiting to see what his poem’s public impact might be, in private Tom chastened himself for some of Vivien’s health problems, but was hardly to blame for them all. Each partner in the marriage seems to have continued to deploy illness and work to manipulate the other; certainly Vivien had used illness to try to coax Scofield Thayer when Tom first met her. Tom, immuring himself in his labours, could not help but note that Pound had a wife who enjoyed good health, a family who could help her and some prospect of wealth. Vivien, he confided to Pound that November:
has none of these things. Her father’s property, such as it is, is practically all tied up in Irish real estate, which he has been trying to sell all his life, has never paid much, now pays less, and can’t be got rid of; which will be an encumbrance to her and her brother for the rest of their lives. Finally, at the most optimistic view, she will never be strong enough to earn her own living. If I had only myself to consider, I should not bother about guarantees [of financial security] for a moment: I could always earn my own living. But I am responsible toward her in more than the ordinary way. I have made a great many mistakes, which are largely the cause of her present catastrophic state of health, and also it must be remembered that she kept me from returning to America where I should have become a professor and probably never written another line of poetry, so that in that respect she should be endowed.118
Vivien’s Irish links mean that she too (as well as the Emily Hale whom Tom had heard sing ‘Mavourneen’) might be hidden behind that reference to the phrase ‘Mein Irisch Kind’ (My Irish child) in those lines of The Waste Land which he quoted from Tristan und Isolde – words of love that lead only to a vision of an expanse both ‘Oed’ und leer’ (Desolate and empty).119 Vivien, like Tom, was part of the poem’s desolation.
No sooner was the Criterion published than its editor set off ‘for about a fortnight’s rest’ in Worthing, a small seaside town about ten miles from Brighton. ‘T. is running down again’, Vivien worried in November.120 He was bad tempered, and it showed, though his wife was unlikely to disagree with his splenetic outburst in a letter to Pound (who liked a misogynist rant) that Katherine Mansfield was ‘one of the most persistent and thickskinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women Lady R[othermere] has ever met and is also a sentimental crank’.121 Vivien was worried that, while initial sales looked promising, Lady Rothermere, whom she disliked, wanted to abort the magazine. Determined to back Tom, Vivien wondered if he might finance the journal using Bel Esprit money and £500 that she could provide but which would ‘halve my income’.122 Pound, wisely, advised the Eliots to save their cash. He would convince Lady Rothermere to hold firm. ‘Of course’, he wrote to Tom, ‘if she says it looks like a corpse, she’s right, mon POSSUM, do you expect her to see what is scarce discernible to the naked eye, that it is supposed to be PLAYIN’ POSSUM’. Perusing the Criterion’s drab, sober covers and sometimes worthy essays, Pound had his own reservations. He thought it reeked of ‘the Athenaeum Club’, niffy with establishment respectability.123 But about The Waste Land he had no doubts.
Nor did Tom. However, the prospect of getting the time he wanted to write more poetry seemed now more remote than ever. He still had thoughts of authoring a book on seventeenth-century literature, building on pieces including his Times Literary Supplement essay on Marvell. Yet this was not what he craved to do. ‘My dear Ezra, I dont want to write articles for the Times or for anything else, I dont want to write articles at all, I dont want to write, no sensible man does who wants to write verse.’ Better to edit a magazine than to churn out journalism. Unlike Pound, Tom thought England tolerable. He just wanted to be ‘let alone’. He bitched, ‘There are only half a dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing.’ His remedy would be to fill up the magazine with people of ‘other occupations’, such as the donnish anthropologist J. G. Frazer.124
Tom wanted to leave the bank. Spending the rest of his career there seemed ‘abominable’.125 Annoyingly, he could not see how to escape in a way that would provide legally credible guarantees ‘for my life or for Vivien’s life’.126 Bel Esprit had become a torment, tantalising yet unachievable. Then, on 18 November, things suddenly got worse. Tom let Aldington know he had been sent a cutting from the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury; its ‘Books and Bookmen’ column contained not just a report about Bel Esprit but a ‘false story’ that two years earlier a collection had raised £800 for Tom who had simply pocketed the cash. ‘The joke was that he accepted the gift calmly, and replied: “Thank you all very much; I shall make good use of the money; but I like the bank!”’127 Furious over this ‘libel’, Tom, who had been expecting trouble, consulted his solicitor and a more senior barrister. Though he did not sue, he wrote to the newspaper pointing out the untruth of the ‘tale’ and denying Bel Esprit existed ‘with my consent or approval’. If this last assertion was debatable, the poet’s sense of injury was not. In a public letter to the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury he stated that ‘The circulation of untrue stories of this kind causes me profound astonishment and annoyance and may also do me considerable harm.’128 In private he felt menaced. An anonymous ‘Wellwisher’ mailed him a donation of four postage stamps ‘to strengthen my poetry until I became poet laureate!’129 He might have laughed. Instead he felt ‘utter exhaustion’.130
Vivien’s insomni
a, his magazine work and other worries meant most nights he slept for ‘seldom more than five hours’.131 He found himself getting back from the bank, then dozing off before dinner. For months in the later part of 1922 Vivien had ‘hardly seen anybody’. Impressed by her ‘infinite tenacity of purpose’ as she stuck to her prescribed ‘spartan regimen’, Tom saluted her ‘persistence and courage’. She ate her dinner in bed, not feeling strong enough to get up. ‘If I were not tied to the bank I could have gone abroad with her for a time; as it is she is not only under the strain of her own treatment but the strain of our very tense and always rushed and overworked mode of life.’132
On edge when news reached him of the official announcement that he had won the Dial’s $2,000 prize, he found his pleasure contaminated by tetchiness. Awkwardly, word of the award had ‘leaked out’ in advance.133 Rumours were circulating that the poet of The Waste Land was tubercular; that he suffered from epilepsy; that he had tried to kill himself.134 He feared lest the Liverpool Daily Post story was picked up in America too. Life was consumed by ‘worry and fatigue’.135 His brother congratulated him, but Henry was not sure he liked The Waste Land. Several reviewers, including Edmund Wilson, were enthusiastic; others simply bemused. Tom told Henry, ‘there is a good deal about it that I do not like myself’.136
For Boni and Liveright’s book-length version he had added notes written during the summer. His first intention was that such annotation would spike the guns of critics tempted to accuse him of plagiarism; showing himself well aware he had used pieces of earlier poems, he would signal clearly the sources his allusive method drew on. However, there was still too little material to fill even a small volume, so, ensuring that The Waste Land would be a book rather than a pamphlet, he extended his notes in a way that he later regretted. Readers have been divided as to the helpfulness of these authorial annotations, but for many they have provided useful clues about underlying structural elements. Several comments seem spoof-like: ‘I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.’137 Their effect has been to fuel an academic industry, reinforcing the poem’s rootedness in sometimes recondite literary tradition, sending readers off to the library and away from the poet’s biography.
Young Eliot Page 59