“Prufrock” appeared in Poetry in June 1915, and the same month Eliot married Vivien Haigh Haigh-Wood, an English gentlewoman, slightly older, who aspired to write and paint. The marriage was, in one sense, a personal disaster; in another sense, it was a cultural spur to produce and a tone-setting event. It was contracted in haste and without the consent of Eliot’s parents; in fact they were not even informed until afterward. Whether it was ever consummated is doubtful. Vivien was not uncomely but of fragile health, both physical and mental. She was always about to be ill, actually ill, or recovering from an illness. Some of her complaints were real, others imaginary. Her impact on Eliot was considerable in one respect. He had never been robust, as we have already noted, and his truss was an impediment not only to sex but to any kind of normal life. Vivien sharply increased his awareness of his physical disabilities, and his proneness to minor ailments such as colds and migraines. From the early days of their marriage they engaged in competitive hypochondria. Both became valetudinarians and were always dosing themselves, complaining of drafts, and comparing symptoms. (It is a curious fact that Eliot’s only successful appearance on the amateur stage was as Mr. Woodhouse, the outstanding valetudinarian in English literature, in a production of Emma.) When Vivien recovered from a bout of neurasthenia, Eliot was sure to sicken, and a kind of medical ping-pong persisted throughout their marriage. Their bathroom medicine chest overflowed into the dining-room sideboard. All this first occurred during the war, but afterward, as travel became possible and the impact of Freudianism first powerfully asserted itself, both became addicts of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. All this can be studied in the first volume of Eliot’s Collected Letters, where his anxieties about his own mental state, and hers, were emphatically canvassed, and his efforts to find expert help described in detail.
There is no need to go into the marriage here, or for that matter to apportion blame for its unhappiness and eventual failure. It has been much commented upon: about as much as the tragic union of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and to equally little effect. As Tom Stoppard has truly noted, “No one, no matter how well informed, can possibly know what goes on inside a marriage except the two principals themselves.” What we do know is that Eliot was unhappy. But then he had not been notably happy before his marriage. (He later said he had never been happy in his life except as a child, embosomed by his mother and sisters; and in his second marriage, a similar experience.) However, the study of the creative process, especially in the arts, suggests that unhappiness is rarely if ever an obstacle to production and may, indeed, be a positive incentive. The case of Thackeray, whose wife went mad and left him lonely and desperately miserable, indicates that his plight was directly related to the writing of his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, one of the greatest of all novels.
In Eliot’s case, the transformation of a diffident versifier into a great creative artist was impelled by a ferocious counterpoint of personal and public misery. On the one hand there was the daily sadness of his marriage, punctuated by bitter disputes and medical crises; on the other there was the truly appalling destruction and agony of World War I, with its daily casualty lists of daunting length—a conflict that seemed to prolong itself indefinitely and to become more hopeless and seemingly interminable with every dreadful week that passed. It was a war without hope or heroic adventure—just a dull misery of loss and pain—which induced in the participants, serving in the trenches or suffering vicariously at home, an overwhelming sense of heartache. The times seemed to have no redeeming feature; mankind appeared to be undergoing the agony of the war with no compensating gain in virtue but merely the additional degradation that the infliction of death and cruelty brings. It was unmitigated waste. So, equally, was Eliot’s marriage, both parties to it enduring suffering without a mitigating sense of redemption, just two wasted lives joined in sorrow. This public and private mortification was the genesis of both the substance and the title of The Waste Land.
There was a third factor of some weight. Eliot had always worked hard. There was no element of idleness in his mind or his body. He was self-disciplined. But he lacked the external discipline of regular work. His father’s meanness in refusing to finance his son’s dilettante existence (as he saw it) in Europe obliged Eliot, now a married man, to earn a living. He tried being a schoolmaster, as did so many literary men in those days: first at High Wycombe Grammar School, then at Highgate Junior. Like some of his contemporaries, notably Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, he found the experience exhausting, numbing, and deleterious to his creative instincts.
Then, in March 1917, at the lowest point of the war, a happy chance pushed Eliot into a position in the City, in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank. He was there eight years, till November 1925, and his job became a position of some responsibility: from the end of the war onward he was put in sole charge of debts to and from the bank arising out of the war with Germany. This was a very complex matter, and Eliot later claimed that he never properly understood it. But that is belied by the confidence he evidently inspired in his superiors. In 1923 a member of the bank’s board asked a literary person at a reception: “You may know of one of our employees who is, I understand, a poet. Mr. Eliot.” “Indeed I do. He is a very remarkable poet.” “I am glad to hear it. He is also most proficient in banking. Indeed, I don’t mind telling you that, if he goes on in his present way, he will one day be a senior bank manager!” Eliot had never looked or dressed like a bohemian. On the contrary he had always looked and dressed like a banker, and he continued to do so for the rest of his life. In 1946 he was invited to Buckingham Palace to read poetry for the king, the queen, and the two princesses. Unlike many poets, he did not read his own verses well, and the occasion was not inspiring. Many years later, the queen mother recalled the event: “He did not seem like a poet to us. The girls laughed at him afterwards, and I said: ‘Well, he gives the impression that he is some kind of dignified official, rather buttoned up. Or that he works in a bank—of course, we didn’t know then that he did!’”
Eliot took to the initially difficult but increasingly satisfying routine of foreign-exchange banking, and worked at his poetry in the evenings. The contrast between his ledger work and his versification was sharp and salutary. There is an illuminating parallel here with Charles Lamb’s work in the accounts department of the East India House. The distaste that Lamb felt for his account books made his essay writing in his scant leisure hours doubly welcome and delightful. So, too, Eliot found an immense benefit in the relief from figures and double-entry bookkeeping which his evening poetry brought: for the first time in his life he discovered the power and depth of creative pleasure. This discovery in turn led him to think about, and plunge into, the business of writing poetry in a way he had never before experienced, so that his work broadened and deepened but also became more sharp and merciless, more ruthless in expression and effect.
These three factors, then—the counterpoint of public and private misery, and the work in the bank—were crucial elements in the creation of Eliot’s first masterpiece. But there were two others. The first was alcohol. Even with the encouragement of powerful personalities like Pound, Eliot was always diffident about writing poetry. In prose, there is reason to believe, he was fluent and unhesitating. He also found no problems with dialogue; that is one reason why he turned increasingly, later in life, to drama (to our and poetry’s loss). But with verse he was always strongly inhibited, incapable without stimulation, of releasing the deeper feelings poetry requires. For him to begin a poem induced the fear that many people feel on entering a crowded room, in mingling with its occupants. Just as alcohol helps such people, it enabled Eliot to plunge into verse and into all that verse implied. Eliot always enjoyed drinking, especially gin. He liked strong cocktails. (And called them that: hence the title of his play The Cocktail Party; a born Englishman of his class would have called it The Drinks Party.) In 1953 (I think) I first met Eliot standing just inside the entrance to the drawing
room at 50 Albemarle Street, headquarters of the famous publishing firm of John Murray for over 200 years. In that room Byron’s letters from exile had been read to the London social literati, and in its grate the sole copy of Byron’s memoirs had been burned, before witnesses. The then head of the firm, “Jock” Murray, was celebrated for the strength of his dry martinis, and that was one reason why Eliot delighted to be present at the Murray parties, even though he worked for a rival firm, Faber and Faber. The sole remark he addressed to me, before we were interrupted, was: “There is nothing in this world quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.”
The word “stimulating” was, and is, instructive. Many years later, after Eliot’s death, I had a long talk with his second wife and widow. She gave an instance of the role alcohol played in his poetry: “Tom’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ was of great importance to me. He wrote it in 1927, and when I was fourteen, I heard a recording of him reading it. It made a huge impression on me, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and I remember saying to myself, ‘That is the man for me.’ In due course I succeeded in becoming his secretary, and eventually his wife. After we were married, I asked him about the composition of that poem, and he told me: ‘I wrote it one Sunday after matins. I had been thinking about it in church and when I got home, I opened a half-bottle of Booth’s Gin [a powerfully flavored drink with a faint yellow tinge], poured myself a drink, and began to write. By lunchtime, the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished.’”
The fifth factor in the creation of The Waste Land was Pound. Eliot began this medium-length work, which in its published form is 434 lines but was originally much longer, late in 1919. What it is about is not clear; indeed it is not necessarily about anything. It has often been subjected to detailed exegesis, which can illuminate particular sections. Eliot himself supplied notes, a kind of confidence trick, which he later regretted as dishonest and pretentious, and these help with references, though they no more explain what the poem is about than the sideheads that Robert Browning reluctantly supplied for his incomprehensible poem Sordello. The Waste Land is not a narrative but a poem about moods, predominantly despair and desolation, reflecting the ruin and waste of Eliot’s private life and the defeat World War I had pointlessly inflicted on civilization. Eliot continued to work on it throughout 1920 and early 1921, but by the summer of 1921 he was so downcast that he was advised, by what was then still called a neurologist, to take three months’ sick leave from the bank. Lloyd’s agreed, and Eliot went in November to Lausanne to see a leading psychiatrist. While in Switzerland he finished the poem, which was thus essentially brought to completion under the stress of mental breakdown.
Though Eliot was a conservative by intellectual conviction and instinct, he had a passion for cultural innovation. He strongly approved of cubism, for instance; he said that when he first heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring he burst into cheers; Ulysses struck him as the best novel he had ever read. He wished to bring about the same kind of revolution in poetry as these phenomena had achieved in painting, music, and the novel. Eliot had much admired Conrad’s tale Heart of Darkness, and in particular Kurtz’s death cry “The horror, the horror!” which, to Eliot, summarized dismay at the utter meaninglessness of the world—to understand what the world is “about” is to comprehend emptiness. Siegfried Sassoon later claimed that Eliot, while working on The Waste Land, said that “all great art is based upon a condition of fundamental boredom: passionate boredom.” The original text of the poem contained large elements of parody, stylistic cleverness, and wit—witless wittiness perhaps—in the manner of Eliot’s early verse, illustrating the boredom induced by cultural satiation, and in so doing boring the reader. However, Eliot had the sense to submit the original, full text to Pound, or perhaps he agreed to Pound’s insistence on being appointed editor; he had the further good sense to accept Pound’s changes, which essentially consisted in cutting away the pretentious parodying and witty superstructure with which Eliot had decorated the poem’s hard despair. The extent of the work Pound performed on The Waste Land can be judged from the original manuscript, which came to light in 1971, after Eliot’s death, and was published by his widow.8
In effect, Pound dug out from the version Eliot gave him the fundamental bones of the poem of despair so that its music and rhythms can be heard and felt. The changes transformed the work into a masterpiece, and one which was perceived as such the moment it was made public. The Waste Land was beautifully timed to appeal to young men who had come to the universities shortly after the war ended. They, like Eliot, felt empty, bored, disgusted with the world, and with themselves; overeducated in the classics, especially in Greek and Latin and often in German and French, as well as familiar with the English classics; and unsure, now, what all their education had been for. The poem was allusive (and elusive), sophisticated, catchy, rhythmic, full of incoherence, and meaningless anecdotes. It ranged from the plebeian and demotic to the ultra-academic, and it contained snatches of jazz and popular songs. It was carefully loaded with sexual innuendo of a kind calculated to stimulate and tease male virgins or near-virgins, reflecting Eliot’s own appetites and frustrations. It was perverse, decadent, sly, outrageous, provocative, but also unquestionably poetic in its careful, musical choice of words, its strong beat in places, its skillful repetitions, and its rhymes, or pseudo rhymes. It is marvelous to recite and easy to memorize despite its obscurity. Most of all, it invites participation. The greatest strength and appeal of the poem is that it asks to be interpreted not so much as the poet insists but as the reader wishes. It makes the reader a cocreator.
This ability of an author to entice the reader into collaborating with him in expanding, interpreting, and transforming what he has written is a rare gift, and an extremely attractive one. Jane Austen notably possessed it. Many of the most strongly emotional episodes in her novels are merely suggestive or indicative. She supplies characters but sometimes only hints about how they behave in a given situation—we, the readers, are left to fill in the gaps in her narrative, and delight in doing so. The books are full of lacunae, and we are to supply them. As Virginia Woolf put it, “Jane Austen stimulates us to supply what is not there.” The reader is thus, as it were, drawn up by her graciously inviting hand to her own creative level and becomes an honored collaborator in her work. Eliot does the same in The Waste Land. The poet gives the readers the mood, and certain episodes or elements are clearly presented, though others less markedly. The readers, having caught the mood, are then invited to exercise their imagination—they are told (in effect) to clarify, add, expand, prolong, correct, emphasize, and intensify. They are cocreators in a major exercise in brilliant deception.
It is hard to imagine, now, how intoxicating this must have been to clever young people in 1922–1923. The poem’s reception on both sides of the Atlantic was mixed, to put it gently. The professional critics were angered, puzzled, outraged, occasionally intrigued and fascinated, disapproving or dismissive. Some were slow to make up their minds and waited for others to speak first. But the young were dazzled. It is hard to think of any other occasion when a new writer has been taken so rapidly to the hearts of the student elite. Oxford was first to become enthusiastic; Cambridge was not far behind, followed rapidly by Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. Printed copies were initially hard to find, and the text was often copied out by hand or typewritten, then circulated and read aloud at undergraduate parties. Shortly after its appearance in the Hogarth Press edition of 1923, Cyril Connolly, who was then an undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to a contemporary at Cambridge: “Whatever happens, read The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot—only read it twice. It’s quite short and has the most marvellous things in it—though the ‘message’ is almost unintelligible and is a very Alexandrian poem—sterility disguised by superb use of quotation and obscure symbolism—thoroughly decadent. It will ruin your style!” Connolly’s reaction was typical albeit heightened, since he was the sharpest, most knowing critic of hi
s age group. As he later put it, nothing could convey “the veritable brainwashing, the total preoccupation, the drugged and haunted condition which this new poet induced in some of us.”9 The young Harold Acton read it out loud, through a megaphone, from his Gothic rooms in Christ Church Meadow Buildings to the hearties trudging down to their eights boats on the river, provoking rage because “that poem” was already a symbol of antagonistic modernity. No poet has ever had a reception more gratifying, especially among the audience that matters most—the opinion makers, the younger generation. The poem’s success more or less instantly placed Eliot at the head of the profession of poetry, a position he occupied until his death more than forty years later.
Eliot was in his mid-thirties when The Waste Land brought him fame. It occupies in his oeuvre the same position that In Memoriam held in Tennyson’s. In Memoriam was written in 1833–1850; was published in 1850, when Tennyson was forty-one; and was followed almost immediately by his appointment as poet laureate. Thereafter he never quite hit top form again except with his Idylls of the King, a fragment of which was written and published in 1842 and the rest spread out between 1859 and 1885. Yet Tennyson (who made a great deal of money from his poetry) was prolific. Eliot was not. He remained diffident and, despite constant and growing praise in the 1920s and 1930s, unsure of his genius. The celebrity he won with The Waste Land made it possible for him to cofound, with Lady Rothermere, the literary review Criterion (1922). This gave him additional influence. In 1925 he left the bank (which was very sorry to lose “a valuable employee”) and joined the publishing firm of Faber and Faber. He served there as chief editor of the firm’s volumes of poetry, in which it specialized. That confirmed his position as by far the most powerful poet and editor in the English-speaking world.
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