Book Review: The Waste Land
By Matthew Hollis
A lit professor’s conundrum: teach T.S. Eliot as an American Modernist or a British Modernist? My own vote is for the latter. True, he was born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard, but true as well he moved to Britain in 1914 and renounced his American citizenship in 1927. Moreover, consider the cast of characters with whom he would share the American Modernist stage: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. If we’re playing “one of these things is not like the other,” straight-laced-to-the-point-of-corseted Eliot is certainly the odd man out. On the other hand, considering that the first draft of what would become The Waste Land was initially titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices” and began by charting a drunken night in the backwaters of Boston crawling from bar to bar to brothel and narrowly avoiding arrest for public urination, maybe old Tom could have held his own with those boys.
There is an off chance that I was taught this bit of literary history in my grad school days, but if so, years of intellectual sloth and wine-laced evenings purged this origin story from my brain—bottom line, whether it was something I once knew and had forgotten or whether it was something that I had never known, it felt baby-brand-new to me when I encountered it in Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. Hollis is an English poet and scholar whose previous works include Now All Roads Lead to France, a biography of Edward Thomas I read several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. One of the touchstones Hollis seized on in that book was the friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost. They met when Frost was living in England, and the two poets spent hours tromping together through the countryside talking of family and finance, writing and the war.
Another artistic friendship, albeit a more famous one, is at the heart of Hollis’s new work: the relationship between Eliot and fellow American ex-pat and poet Ezra Pound. Eliot may have been The Waste Land’s author, but he knew the poem would never have been what it became had it not been shaped—ruthlessly pruned and recast, more like—by Pound. Three years after its initial publication in October 2022, Eliot acknowledged the debt with a dedication in a new edition: “For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman). But in the years before Eliot banged out the first lines of the poem on his old Corona, Pound was more to him than an editor: Pound was his poetic peer, his travelling companion, his champion among the publishing houses and the small but influential magazines where Modernism flowered, and his friend.
Hollis’s biography flows along on the current of time, starting with the armistice of November 1918. Pound, by this point, was already a driving force behind Modernism, having played a founding role in the Imagist movement, published books and essays of criticism, and served as a foreign correspondent for Harriet Moore’s Poetry and literary editor of The Egoist. He had moved to London in 1908 and whirled about Europe, scouting literary talent and shepherding the publication of H.D., Richard Aldington, Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce. He and Eliot met in September 2014 when Eliot travelled from Merton College at Oxford to have Pound read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was love at first verse, and Pound persuaded Moore to publish the poem in Poetry the next year.
Using time as a structure for any work is mildly problematic in that the historical present of a previous time is tinged for the current reader not only by the past that led to that historically present moment but by a future that transpired after that moment passed. At times—particularly during the book’s “Armistice” section that spans November 2018 through December 1920—it’s difficult to know whether some incident or occurrence took place before the month and year which is ostensibly “current” in the book, during the specified interval or has traveled back in time from some month and year still in the future of the book’s present. Pound and Eliot drifted apart in the late 1920s—indeed, they were already drifting a bit in the last months before The Waste Land’s publication—but reading a criticism one leveled at the other from 1934 while we’re ostensibly in the happier days of 1919 is, for me at least, a bit jarring. In the “London 1960” chapter, Hollis provides a brief history of the poem’s publication and a very-much-briefer outline of Eliot’s and Pound’s histories afterward. Throughout the work Hollis does not hesitate to wade into the issues that problematize the pair as subjects of contemporary scholarship—Pound’s full-throated turn to fascism in the 1930s, and the current of anti-Semitism that flowed through Eliot’s life and taints his work—but as necessary as it is to address early signs of what was to come, the book would, I believe, flow better had the irruptions from the future been presented in a lengthier version of this final chapter.
Anecdotes from the pre-1918 histories of Pound and Eliot, by contrast, are essential to both their and the poem’s biographies, and Hollis draws from a multiplicity of original sources and previous scholarship to portray his protagonists’ social and psychological states during this period. Pound’s history is not sketched in as much detail as Eliot’s, but his personality comes clear through the amusing torture he inflicts on the English language in his letters, his boxing match with a young Hemingway, his dervish dancing as well as his care and concern for the writers he took under his wing (the story of Eliot meeting Joyce for the first time and presenting him with an elaborately wrapped parcel from Pound that turned out to be a pair of used shoes [pp. 199-201] is at once hilarious and heartbreaking considering how much Eliot admired Joyce and how cooly Joyce, likely humiliated at the present and his need for it, treated him after this). Hollis provides enough information about Pound’s seemingly happy upbringing and marriage to effectively contrast them with Eliot’s misery on both fronts. Eliot’s father did not approve of his son’s decisions to abandon academia, to move to Europe or to marry Vivien, and after the marriage, he essentially cut Tom out of the family’s estate. Eliot would never again feel close to either his father or mother, distance which was exacerbated by his father’s death in 1919. Indeed, Eliot is the poster boy for Larkin’s “This be the Verse,” and the imprint of his grief over his estrangement from his parents, his father’s death and his sense of failure in this man’s eyes appears throughout the poem, the drowned Phoenician with pearls for eyes an avatar for the elder Eliot.
Grief over his marriage is wound throughout the poem as well: Vivien’s ill health and mental instability took a toll on Eliot’s own health, both mental and physical, and they spiraled round each other in an agony readily apparent in these lines from “A Game of Chess” (Part 3 of The Waste Land):
‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Not the way I care to pass an evening with my own significant other. Reflecting on their marriage a few years after Vivien died in 1947, Eliot wrote, “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land." Sad, yet the masterpiece.
Hollis’s lens is tightly focused on the production of that masterpiece in the second part of the book. Picking up in in January 1921, the poem is soon underway, and Hollis’s structure for the remainder of the book is set: chapters titled after each of the poem’s sections, the presentation of draft typescript or manuscript for that section with Eliot’s revisions in pen and pencil, and discussion of that portion of the work both as a poem and as a literary artifact. However, not until the section related to “Death by Water” do we hear Pound weigh in on the work; he did not lay eyes or pen upon it until Eliot left copies of “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess” and “The Fire Sermon” with Pound when they met in Paris in November 1921. Eliot was on his way to Lausanne for a round of treatment from Roger VIttoz that he hoped would improve his nerves and overall health, while Pound was on his way to work editorial magic on the lines Eliot had entrusted to him. Hollis presents some of this magic to us, but we are not treated to photos of Pound’s reviewed copies the way were are to Eliot’s initial drafts. Considering how crucial these revisions are to the poem we know today, I dearly wish Hollis had included them as companion pieces to the originals. That said, these are available in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, a volume edited by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, and published in 1971. What stands out most to me is how different a poem The Waste Land would have been had Eliot not tapped his friend’s editorial prowess and, more to the point, trusted in that skill and humbly taken the hits to his lines in service to the poem as a whole. That these two could give and take and take and give and come out of it with mutual admiration and the knowledge that they had, between them, produced the canonical poem of Modernism is the happy ending neither man matched again.
Reading a play-by-play of a poem’s creation and crafting may sound about as exciting as an afternoon spent with Bob Ross painting happy clouds, but for those of us who are lovers of Modernism and/or poet wannabes, this tale of creation and collaboration is as tasty a concoction as a Long Island iced tea, and I was, to be truthful, a little sad when I reached the bottom of the glass. Hollis, however, had one last sweet sip in store for me: The Waste Land itself. I try to read it once a year, and I realized as I half-read/half-recited “April is the cruellest month” that I had let 2022—and maybe 2021 and 2020 before it—pass without a reading. Each time I reread a work, I feel an admixture of familiarity and surprise: parts of the piece stand steady as old friends, but other parts jump out at me as if I’d never seen them before, new and alien to my recollection. This half-remembered/half-forgotten work lives, of course, in my brain, while the work itself stands outside of time, the same self it was when the self I was first read it, the same self it is when the self I am reads it now, the same self it will be when/if some older self plucks it from the shelf and runs eyes over those words yet again. With this reading, couched as it was in context I had never previously brought to the poem—Hollis’s work most immediate, of course, but years filled with pandemic and political unrest and a general feeling that the world is burning down around us—I felt the poem more viscerally than ever before. “I had not thought death had undone so many.” “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience . . . .” “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.” 100 years later, Eliot and Pound—along, this time, with Hollis (“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”)— wander with me through a different waste land that is, in evocation if not in fact, the same waste land:
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are these hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
Learn more about Matthew Hollis and his work.