May is the merriest month, and there are few more cheering journeys than a train ride into the green wilds of Sussex, in southern England. And no destination is more peaceable than Charleston, the secluded house, wreathed with gardens, that found fame as a rural HQ of the Bloomsbury Group. Now a place of pilgrimage, it continues to summon writers and artists, with audiences to match. Here it was, for a festival in May, that the culture-hungry came. Drifting in their dozens past fruit trees and congregations of flowers, they entered a large tent, where the trappings of Bloomsbury-scented comfort were on sale: straw hats, cushions, padded Alice bands, and vials of Sussex Rose Aromatic Water for the soothing of high or fevered brows. We took our seats for the arrival, on a raised dais, of Benedict Cumberbatch. He it was whom the pilgrims had travelled to see, and this is what he had to say:
There was more, and worse. “White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret.” And this: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” And again: “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves.” What had we done, in the sun-warmed paradise of Charleston, to deserve all these mountains, bones, and teeth? So much death, on a day that promised such life!
Cumberbatch was, needless to say, reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which will shortly celebrate its hundredth birthday. The occasion was a rare one, because the recitation was entwined with music: a score composed in the nineteen-seventies by the novelist Anthony Burgess, no less, to accompany the poem. Cumberbatch, keyed up by the piano and the other instruments arrayed behind him, took the lines at quite a tilt, slipping between accents like a quick-change artist donning pants and hats, and thus reminded us how funny this bitter poem can be. Eliot’s sense of humor, whether savage, lugubrious, or droll, never lay far below the surface, and, as we honor the centenary of his most celebrated work, it’s worth bearing in mind his responses to a questionnaire that was sent out to a batch of poets, in July, 1922. “Do you think that poetry is a necessity to modern man?” Eliot: “No.” “What in modern life is the particular function of poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature?” Eliot: “Takes up less space.”
Cumberbatch’s contribution was one of a host of events that are being held in 2022, to mark the centenary and, one hopes, to probe the tenacity with which “The Waste Land,” far from wilting, has taken root and spread. Though it covers vast geographical tracts, from Munich to the Himalayas, it is considered, with justice, to be one of the great poems about London, and, in April, various readings, concerts, and conversations, bundled together under the title “Fragments,” took place in churches across what Eliot calls the “unreal city.” Against the blackened wall of All Hallows by the Tower, there was a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Elsewhere, as a nod to the presence of the single word “Alexandria” in “The Waste Land,” the Palestinian DJ Sotusura played “old Arabic funk.” Would that Eliot had been alive to lend an ear.
The word “fragments,” to any Eliot fan, leads instantly to the climax of “The Waste Land,” as it proceeds through cacophony to a haggard hush: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” (Eliot originally wrote, “These fragments I have spelt into my ruins,” but the final version is stronger for its hint of desperate and unavailing bodily effort.) In another of this year’s tributes, “Re-Wilding the Waste Land,” shards of the poem were mingled with musical offerings from a choral ensemble, I Fagiolini, including two settings of “Deus Venerunt Gentes”—“O God, the heathen are come,” from Psalm 79. I liked the range of the wilding, but, at the risk of being a heathen, I do wonder how far you can stray from “The Waste Land” without losing the thread. All in all, it will be a relief to show up at the 92nd Street Y, on December 5th, when Ralph Fiennes will read the poem, the whole poem, and, with any luck, nothing but the poem.
Publishers, too, are paying heed to the centenary. Newly available is “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’ ” the second volume of a capacious biography by Robert Crawford; the first part, “Young Eliot: From St. Louis to ‘The Waste Land,’ ” came out in 2016. (Notice how the poem is named in both titles, as the unarguable hinge on which Eliot’s existence turned.) From Lyndall Gordon, who has already written copiously on Eliot’s life, comes “The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse,” due in November, which allots a central place in the poet’s imaginative world to Emily Hale, “an actor and drama teacher for whom he concealed a lasting love.” More than eleven hundred letters to Hale from Eliot, secreted for fifty years in Princeton’s Firestone Library and unsealed in 2019, form the basis of Gordon’s discoveries. Her contention is that when Eliot writes, “we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,” in “The Waste Land,” it is Hale, and only Hale, whom he is addressing. Readers who like their literary criticism on the lofty side—“his romantic attachment to her light across the sea bringing back his purity of heart”—will be on velvet.
More grounded in its ambition is Matthew Hollis’s “ ‘The Waste Land’: A Biography of a Poem,” due in December. Hollis delves into the deep background from which “The Waste Land” arose: Eliot’s childhood in Missouri, as the scion of an uncomfortably distinguished Unitarian clan; summers on the coast of Massachusetts; his Harvard education; his fleeing to Paris and London; his marriage to a young Englishwoman whom he scarcely knew, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in 1915; the incurable horror of that union, rich in sickness on both sides; his fruitful friendship with Ezra Pound, without whose reshaping “The Waste Land” would not have flourished as it did; and the books on which Eliot fed. There is genuine suspense in the air, as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and rumors, in the poet’s letters of long ago. Something was approaching and Eliot could sense it. He needed calm to make a storm:
If you take fright at the intensity of such studies, or if you simply lack the shelf space, I recommend a new app devoted to “The Waste Land”—Candy Crush for those of us who found fault with an earlier version, in 2011, and have pined for an update. The app bristles with textual information and commentaries, and with readings of the poem by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen, a duo of Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Irons, and, twice, Eliot himself. There is also a “performance” of “The Waste Land” by Fiona Shaw, though whether and how it should be performed, despite being Pentecostally thronged with voices, is open to debate.
The revelation is Mortensen, who is quick and quiet, revering the text while not allowing that awe to shade into stiffness or pomposity. What’s often neglected is that Eliot, though married to an Englishwoman and based in London, was still an American when “The Waste Land” came out, and would not become a British citizen until 1927; the poem, too easily Anglicized, is refreshed and made new in the American tongue. In addition, alone of all the readers on the app, Mortensen pauses to weigh the full Dantescan impact of the repetition in these famous lines:
For a comparable thrust, go to YouTube, and to a clip of Bob Dylan intoning the opening of “The Waste Land” and hitting the present participles, at the ends of the lines, until they resound like a growly chant—“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.” Trust Dylan, Eliot’s most intrepid legatee, to turn what others view as a monument into an action poem. Dylan casually says that it was written “in memory of the death of Abraham Lincoln.” Huh? Must be the lilacs, I guess.
All of which, for some people, will be about as thrilling as a dead bouquet, left over from last Tuesday. Why such a fuss over an old poem? Who cares who reads which lines with greater grace? One answer is that the new, in every field, flowers out of the old; the radical, by definition, has roots. What’s more, Eliot has the knack of sounding newer than the new. Another answer is that there’s no choice in the matter, because the poem has already entered the language. This time last year, for instance, if you had opened the business section of the London Sunday Times, you would have found an article with the headline “I never like buying shares in September—its the cruellest month for stocks.” (Eliot, who worked at Lloyds Bank from 1917 to 1925, might have frowned at this financial counsel, though what would have vexed him sorely is the lack of an apostrophe.) You may not know “The Waste Land,” and you may not like it if you do. But it knows you.
There was no fanfare when “The Waste Land” first arrived. It was printed in the inaugural issue of The Criterion, a quarterly journal, in October, 1922. On the front cover was a hefty list of contents, among them a review by Hermann Hesse of recent German poetry; an article on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which had been published as a book in February of the same year; and an essay by an aged British critic titled—wait for it—“Dullness.”
Eliot was the begetter of The Criterion. He would edit it throughout its existence, until it closed, in January, 1939. In the years between the two World Wars, during which he surveyed—and held sway over—whole shires of the cultural domain, The Criterion would be his minster, with “A Commentary,” often signed “T.S.E.,” as an august and regular feature. No such pronouncements were evident, however, in this initial issue. Instead, Eliot’s only contribution was “The Waste Land.” It came with no preface, no afterword, and no warning. It was four hundred and thirty-three lines long. It appeared at first glance to be a poem, but of a disconcerting kind, and further glancing didn’t really help. Parts of it didn’t look, or sound, or feel, like poetry at all: