[Poems I 119–21 · Textual History II 451]
6–11 I’ll be the cannibal · · · I’ll be the missionary · · · Into a stew. | A nice little, white little, missionary stew: Joyce: “Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty”, Ulysses episode VIII (Lestrygonians), with “—One stew” shortly before (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). TSE in 1948: “The man who, in order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has partaken of the practice of cannibalism, has probably gone too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again. [Footnote: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gives a hint of something similar]”, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 41. “I find it difficult to believe that I ever said I ‘enjoyed’ my friends. I may have said that I enjoyed the society of my friends or I enjoyed friendships, but I am not a cannibal”, memo to Peter du Sautoy about Louis Untermeyer’s biographical notes for Makers of the Modern World (Faber archive). I’ll convert you! | Into a stew: Cornford: “The Cook is a magician, a dealer in enchanted herbs, a medicine man. As such he is not, in origin, distinct from the Learned Doctor” (Smith 1963 68). On Cornford’s phrasing, see Commentary to The Waste Land [III] 218 TSE’s Note. A nice little, white little, missionary stew: Charles Dibdin:
Says Freedom, “Why that’s my own little island!”
Oh, it’s a snug little island!
A right little, tight little island,
Search the globe round, none can be found
So happy as this little island.
Dickens quotes this as “our right little, tight little, island” at the beginning of ch. VI of Little Dorrit.
[Poem I 121–22 · Textual History II 452]
18–31 no telephones · · · no gramophones · · · no motor cars · · · You’d be bored: “In an interesting essay in the volume of Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers adduced evidence which has led him to believe that the natives of that unfortunate archipelago are dying out principally for the reason that the ‘Civilization’ forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians”, Marie Lloyd (1922). (“the essential advantage for a poet is · · · to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 106.) Rivers: “in the Solomon Islands the rulers stopped the special kind of warfare known as head-hunting, without at all appreciating the vast place it took in the religious and ceremonial lives of the people, without realising the gap it would leave in their daily interests, a blank far more extensive than that due to the mere cessation of a mode of warfare · · · I have now to suggest that this loss of interest forms one of the reasons, if indeed it be not the most potent of all the reasons, to which the native decadence is due”, Rivers ed. 93–94. TSE, asked in 1945 about technology separating man from the artistic and creative crafts: “sooner or later · · · there will be a general rebellion against that · · · human beings will just become bored with the kind of life they have from it—and I think that boredom is a very powerful force in life and that people will do the most extraordinary things to escape from it · · · they are likely to be driven to wars of one kind or another, simply · · · to escape from boredom” (Hodin).
To J. H. Oldham, 14 Dec 1943: “I have lived to see many things working together, labouring and travailing to bring forth a degraded culture—the bioscope, the B.B.C., Bloomsbury, and now this monstrous regiment of Free Churchmen.” Poetic drama should “enter into overt competition with prose drama” with verse spoken by people “dressed like ourselves, living in houses and apartments like ours, and using telephones and motorcars and radio sets”, Poetry and Drama (1951) 26. “There’s a deterioration, it seems to me, in the quality of amusement as it becomes more mass entertainment and as the media for mass entertainment become more highly developed. The cinema first; now television. It’s profitable to appeal to the largest audience and therefore to the lowest common denominator. I think that the end of a purely materialistic civilization with all its technical achievements and its mass amusements is—if, of course, there’s no actual destruction by explosives—simply boredom. A people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for. I did touch on this problem a good many years ago in an essay I wrote on the death of a great music-hall artist, Marie Lloyd”, A Conversation, recorded in 1958, between T. S. Eliot and Leslie Paul ([1964]/1965). For “boring · · · automatism”, see note to 108–112.
22 Citroën: three full syllables in TSE’s recording.
34–35 Birth, and copulation, and death. | That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks: to Henry Eliot, 29 July 1926: “Unitarianism is a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth, copulation, death, hell, heaven and insanity: they all fall within the classification of Bad Form.”
37, 39 I’ve been born, and once is enough · · · Once is enough: John 3: 3: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” In The Superior Landlord Part II: “Mrs. Porter falls on the floor. She is carried out for dead into the next room · · · RESURRECTION of Mrs. Porter who returns as lively as ever.”
40 stage direction TAMBO · · · BONES: foils for the more educated master of ceremonies in minstrel shows in 19th-century America. “The two players, one on tambourine, the other on bones, who take seats opposite one another during the main part of the minstrel show. These ‘endmen’ were usually more heavily made-up than the other performers, used a more exaggerated dialect, and were called upon to perform more ludicrous and demeaning gyrations”, Michael Field in American Literary History Spring 1992. Huxley, Happy Families (stage direction): “CAIN WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON’S negro brother—for the TYRRELLS, I regret to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in them and CAIN is a Mendelian throwback to the pure Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his black face shines with grease.” TSE: “Here let a clownesque be sounded | on the sandboard and bones”, Suite Clownesque III 14 ^ 15 stage direction. On the blackface comedy duo Two Black Crows, see note to Ash-Wednesday I unadopted title (“All Aboard for Natchez Cairo and St. Louis”). Frank Morley’s Fable XIV in Noctes Binanianæ contains a duet for TSE and Hayward with “NIGGER MINSTRELS” and ending “See them roll and see them go | See | Them | Ro-holl | And see | Them | GO.”
40–48 Under the bamboo · · · Under the bamboo tree:
If you lak-a-me, lak I lak-a-you;
And we lak-a both the same,
I lak-a say, this very day,
I lak-a change your name;
’Cause I love-a-you and love-a-you true
And if you-a love-a-me,
One live as two, two live as one
Under the bamboo tree.
[Poem I 121–22 · Textual History II 452]
Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson, Under the Bamboo Tree (1902) performed by Marie Cahill (“the top song of the Cole and Johnson partnership”, The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs ed. Margaret Bradford Boni, 1952).
TSE to his Swedish translator, Erik Mesterton, 16 Nov 1948: “I had in mind the actual melody which went with it.” TSE is said to have sung Under the Bamboo Tree at the party to celebrate his Nobel Prize (Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times 10 Jan 1965). Longfellow: “Under a spreading chestnut-tree”, The Village Blacksmith 1.
40, 73 Under the bamboo · · · My little island girl: on adapting and imagining popular songs, see note to The Waste Land [II] 128–30.
43–45 Two live as one | One live as two | Two live as three: J. M. Barrie: “Are you and I one? Or are y
ou and Joanna one? Or are the three of us two?” Dear Brutus (1922) III (Grover Smith 1996 78). Ring Lardner: “they say two can live as cheap as one”, Big Town (1921).
55 Gauguin maids: Under the Bamboo Tree begins “Down in the jungle lived a maid | Of royal blood though dusky shade.” On TSE’s return to Harvard from Paris in 1911: “He would bring back from his travels a nude by Gauguin, and proudly display it in his new rooms in Ash Street”, Sencourt 37.
62–64 Do you want to flirt with me? | Under the · · · banyan · · · tree: John Fryer: “Under the Banyan Tree, an Altar with a Dildo in the middle being erected, they offer Rice and Cocoe-Nuts to the Devil”, A New Account of East-India and Persia (1698).
63–64 Under the · · · banyan · · · Or under the bamboo tree: “It is under the banyan tree that a village used to meet every evening to hear complaints from aggrieved parties. A sort of justice was done”, Back Under the Banyan Tree in Economic Weekly (India), 1 Sept 1956 (recalling an old apocryphal phrase). bamboo: OED v.1: “To beat or ‘cane’ with a bamboo.”
92 what life is: Arnold Bennett: The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) bk. 4, “What Life Is”.
102–103 I assure you, Sir, we are very interested · · · girl: Huxley, Happy Families, ASTON: “· · · this girl really interests me.” SIR JASPER: “Oh yes, I know, I know. She interests you too, Cain, doesn’t she?”
[Poem I 122–24 · Textual History II 452]
104 Any man might do a girl in: OED “do” 46c: “do in”: “do a great injury to · · · often, to murder, kill. slang”, from 1905. TSE to Dorothy Pound, 27 Oct [1923]: “I don’t think I will give you the name [of the doctor] unless you ask me again, or unless you want to do somebody in.” The night after the première of Sweeney Agonistes, TSE answered questions from Vassar students, one of whom asked “Mr. Eliot, did you ever do a girl in?” Flanagan 85: “Mr. Eliot looked apologetic and said, ‘I am not the type’.” Vivien Eliot wrote to Middleton Murry, [Sunday] 1926, of her fears: “Sometimes that he is mad or else that he is most frightfully subtly wicked and dangerous. That he is a terrible menace” (Letters 3 223). TSE had written to Middleton Murry of Vivien, probably in Apr 1925: “Must I kill her or kill myself?” (Letters 2 628) and “I know that the spring is Fear—a fear which I cannot account for. And I know that I have killed her. And this terrible sense of the most subtle form of guilt is itself paralysing and deadening” (Letters 2 632). To Frank Morley, 17 Feb 1938, on Harry’s guilt, in The Family Reunion, about his wife’s death at sea: “Don’t agree with you yet about PUSHED, because I wanted the comic associations. Besides, how else, without a good deal of machinery · · · can you get something on the borderline where it might have been murder, might have been an accident, or might have been imaginary? For all we know, he may have been standing several feet away thinking about this or that but with the lower level of day‑dream mind fancying himself pushing her over. When you want to kill somebody the imagination of doing it, in a particular way, can be very vivid; and everyone knows that a realistic dream can come back to the mind later and you can wonder indefinitely whether it was dream or actuality.”
104–106 Any man might do a girl in · · · Once in a lifetime: Hermann Hesse: “Each one of us must in one hour of his life stand on the threshold of the borderland where Myshkin stood”, Thoughts on the Idiot of Dostoevsky, tr. Stephen Hudson [Sydney Schiff], Dial Aug 1922. Tomlin 90, recalling a meeting with TSE on 25 May 1937: “He then gave me a slight shock by lapsing into a brief sort of reverie, and saying that if one had ever felt like ‘murdering someone’, one could never do anything about it. Something had been registered in the past and in one’s own being.” To Robert Waller, 19 Oct 1942: ‘Doesn’t everyone who has enough imagination · · · belong to the criminal classes as well as to other classes? No, one can have a great deal of imagination and yet be undeveloped on the criminal side.”
107–108 kept her there in a bath | With a gallon of lysol: in 1910, after murdering his wife, Dr. Crippen dissolved her organs in acid in a bathtub; see note on title Sweeney Erect. Grover Smith 1963 71: “lysol is a cleansing agent, albeit a violent one.” Huxley, Happy Families, ASTON: “I ought to have warned you in time of the chloroform flower.” BELLE: “But it’s such a lovely feeling now—like being in a very hot bath with lots of verbena bath-salts, and hardly able to move with limpness.”
108–112 lysol in a bath · · · Epsom · · · I seen that in the papers: “Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil · · · he was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, ‘life-giving’, cheery automatism of the modern world. For Baudelaire, sexual operation is at least something not analogous to Kruschen Salts · · · he was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and the newspaper editors of Paris”, Baudelaire (1930). OED quotes the newspaper slogan “That Kruschen feeling” for this laxative. Epsom salts, also a laxative, are primarily bath salts. (Baudelaire: “Les directeurs de Journaux · · · Liste de canailles” [The directors of newspapers · · · A list of guttersnipes], Mon Cœur mis à nu in Journaux Intimes.) For “Birth, and copulation, and death”, see 28 and note.
129–31 SWEENEY: I’d give him a drink and cheer him up. | DORIS: Cheer him up? DUSTY: Cheer him up? | SWEENEY: Well here again that don’t apply: TSE on Othello’s “Soft you; a word or two before you go” (V ii): “What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself”. (Othello has done her in.) Stoicism “is the permanent substratum of a number of versions of cheering oneself up. Nietzsche is the most conspicuous modern instance of cheering oneself up”, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927).
[Poem I 124–25 · Textual History II 452]
132 I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you: Fête Galante (1925) by “F. M.”: “when she tried to speak to him her words conveyed nothing”, following “under the apple-tree” (as here “Under the bamboo tree”).
134–35 He didn’t know if he was alive | and the girl was dead | He didn’t know if the girl was alive | and he was dead: Conrad: “Then he tried to imagine himself dead, and Carlier sitting in his chair watching him; and his attempt met with such unexpected success, that in a few moments he became not at all sure who was dead and who was alive”, An Outpost of Progress II (Unger 1956 233); for Conrad’s story see note to Journey of the Magi 8–10. TSE: “In Gopsum Street a man murders his mistress. The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead · · · something is done which can not be undone”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I; see also note to The Waste Land [V] 403, 405. “‘I feel | As if I’d been a long time dead’”, The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garrett” ms1 7–8. “I was neither | Living nor dead”, The Waste Land [I] 39–40 (see note for source in Dante). “‘Are you alive, or not?’”, The Waste Land [II] 126.
139, 140 joint: OED 14: “slang or colloq. (chiefly U.S.) · · · applied to illicit drinking-saloons”. For Prohibition, see note to WLComposite 2. TSE: “Marm Brown’s joint, and the girls and gin”, WLComposite 524.
145–46 Death or life or life or death | Death is life and life is death: Cornford 82 quotes the Euripidean question “Who knows if to be living be not death?” (Crawford 151).
156–61 When you’re alone in the middle of the night · · · waiting for you: Gilbert and Sullivan: “When you’re lying awake | With a dismal headache, | And repose is taboo’d by anxiety”, Lord Chancellor’s patter song, Iolanthe (Henry W. Wells, New Poets from Old, 1940, 75).
158 the hoo-ha’s: OED “hoo-ha”: “[Orig. unknown]. A commotion, a rumpus, a row”, from 1931 (Punch). OED comments on TSE’s plural usage that it “seems to be without parallel” (but compare heebie-jeebies). TSE to his Swedish translator, Erik Mesterton, 16 Nov 194
8: “As for ‘hoo-ha’s’, it is merely intended to be an inarticulate noise suggesting terror and impending doom. I seem to remember in Cockney speech some such phrase as ‘that gives me the “hoo-ha’s”’ meaning, in more modern and general terms, the jitters, otherwise shivers of nervousness and apprehension, but for my purpose you need take it only as a noise.”
160 you waked up: Fowler writes that the past tense is woke, and only rarely waked (and then usually in the transitive). See note to Marina 32, “the awakened”.
161 you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting: “waiting for a knock upon the door”, The Death of the Duchess [II] 49, becoming The Waste Land [II] 138. “‘You have the key · · · sleep, prepare for life.’ | | The last twist of the knife”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 73–77.
161–73 knock and the turning of a lock · · · hangman’s waiting · · · KNOCK | KNOCK | KNOCK: Macbeth II ii ends with the stage direction “Knock” three times, followed immediately by II iii:
Enter a Porter
Knocking within.
PORTER. Here’s a knocking indeed: if a man were Porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the Key. Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock.
[Poem I 125–27 · Textual History II 452–53
Then the Porter to Macduff: “much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery”. (See The Superior Landlord for “Scene · · · Murder of Mrs Porter” and, several times, the stage direction KNOCK.)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 113