Old Possum Revisited

T.S. ELIOT: THE WASTE LAND edited by Valerie Eliot. 149 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $22.50.

It is no shock to be reminded that until someone suggested Mein Kampf as a title, Adolf Hitler wanted to call his book Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Everybody needs an editor. Besides, the FUehrer was that kind of fellow. But T.S. Eliot! Could that austere poet's most celebrated work actually have sprung from sweaty sessions with pencil stubs and mutual gropings after the mot juste! It has always been painful to imagine, even though for 50 or so years Ezra Pound has been acknowledged as much more than The Waste Land's literary godfather.

No one exactly thought that Eliot wrote "February is the cruellest month" the first time and had to be put right. But until 1968, all sorts of glum speculations were still possible. Then the only copy of the original manuscript turned up in New York. A brief critical glimpse--but no note taking--was permitted then, answering some questions, raising others. Now the poet's wife, Valerie Eliot, has brought out a facsimile edition of the original Waste Land. Complete with notes, a color key to distinguish Pound's editing from Eliot's, progressive handwritten and typed versions of the text, it clearly shows what Eliot, Pound, and even Eliot's unstable first wife Vivien contributed.

"Perhaps Be Damned." Eliot's famous burrowings and borrowings in Baudelaire, Buddha, Frazer's Golden Bough, the Fisher King legend, Shakespeare, the prophet Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Dante's Inferno, Rupert Brooke, Richard Wagner, Verlaine, Aeschylus, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Oliver Goldsmith originally helped make the poem the perennial undergraduate's hunt-and-peck guide to instant culture. But there appear to be no direct transplants from Pound. Except for an odd "an" or "who," he inserted only two words into The Waste Land: "demobbed" for "coming back out of the Transport Corps," and "demotic" to replace "abominable" when Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant of "The Fire Sermon," made an indecent proposition "in abominable French."

What Pound did do was cut, clipping off as many as 40 lines in a clump. His special target was a heavy-footed parody of Pope's Rape of the Lock. Though the couplets concern the ablutions of a fleshly lady named Fresca, they show Eliot at his most priggishly professional, and Pound briskly informed Eliot: "You cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope--and you can't."

Pound's marginalia, scribbled, indeed, with a stumpy pencil, mark the trail of an editor with a fine merciless eye for padding, preciosity or false prosody: "3 lines Too tum-pum at a stretch," one scribble reads. With the notation "1880," Pound skewered an anachronism in which Eliot called for "a closed carriage" in 1922; the carriage promptly became a "closed car at four." W.H. Auden once observed that Eliot was part church warden, part twelve-year-old boy. Pound was on the side of the boy. His objections to Eliot's frequent use of "may" and "perhaps" ("Perhaps be damned") rise to pique when Eliot's narrator of the moment, the blind seer Tiresias, who by definition knows the past and the future, suggests that a half-formed thought "may" pass through the mind of a young woman after adultery. "You Tiresias," snaps Pound, "if you know, know damned well or else you don't."

Genteel Dropout. Except for scholars, libraries and a few former English majors now adrift in commerce, these disclosures alone do not justify the coffee-table price fixed on the book by its publishers. Pound was a good editor, as well as the best and most generous teacher and preacher of modern poetic practice ever. Eliot had already started cutting radically, and Pound cut to the bone, giving The Waste Land pace and density. But except for a score of lines, part of a much longer description of a sea voyage that Pound cut from the "Death by Water" section, the excisions cannot have been difficult to decide on. They rarely leave even second-rate Eliot on the cutting-room floor.

Happily, Valerie Eliot has written a clear and humane introduction, which pieces together the poet's life during the period, roughly 1916 to 1922, when The Waste Land was in preparation. What emerges is a portrait of the artist as the most scrupulous, harried and genteel academic dropout of the half-century. After studies at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. Eliot gave up his Ph.D. degree (as Pound had before him) to write poetry. He married a neurotic woman who eventually went mad. To support them, he lectured, edited, wrote occasional literary pieces, taught at the High Wycombe Grammar School for "-L-140 per annum with dinner," eventually gravitating to a job at Lloyds Bank.

Eliot is reticent in his letters to his disapproving parents and to New York Lawyer John Quinn, who ran interference for the publication of Eliot's work in the U.S. Still, they are laced with references to Vivien's illnesses, constant moves and removes in search of better air or care. Eventually the strain proved too much. Eliot went off to a psychiatrist in Lausanne for three months in 1921, dropping Vivien in Paris and leaving their cat, "a very good mouser," with Poet Richard Aldington. He needed to learn, he explained, "to be calm when there is nothing to be gained by worry." When he came back, he brought much of The Waste Land with him.

Subjective Correlative. "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion," Eliot once wrote, "but an escape from emotion." He meant the refinement of the raw and the private into some sort of usefully generalized artistic ritual. Yet it is hard to read this annotated Waste Land in context without being acutely aware of Vivien and of how pervasive the poet's revulsion toward sex now seems. The physical description of Fresca's toilette, cut by Pound, adds to the impression. This is a moment of waning reputation for Eliot, and we are now probably due for a gloomy spectacle: the purifier of the dialect of the tribe flat on the couch like a patient etherized upon a table as a new generation of Freudian critics probe his private parts, and prove that the Objective Correlative was Subjective after all.

Current plaints against Eliot cite his "irrelevance," or attack his Christian quietism. The latter criticism is a fielder's choice. Eliot considered the world around him and decided that rapid improvement of human nature in the mass was unlikely. Though it is often hard to see where the pugnacious radicals of today find evidence to the contrary, their private need to believe that man and society can be swiftly and violently perfected is no doubt every bit as passionate as the need for religious faith that sears The Waste Land and softens Eliot's later works. As to "irrelevance," however, The Waste Land revisited holds up well, even deprived of the historic value it had as the great pioneering work in the tastes and techniques possible to modern poetry. It does not take a Tiresias to see that in the Age of Aquarius, Madame Sosostris with her tarot cards has gone public; love has declined further toward lustful practice, and "fear in a handful of dust" has been raised to the nth power by the fine drift of particles over Hiroshima and Eniwetok.

Because he is an extraordinary poet, there has always been more to Eliot than moral order and message. Shorn of his wan hope for the peace that passem understanding, deprived of his Sunday morning service, he still subliminally touches the ear and the heart in moments which, in another connection, Eliot has so well described:

. . . the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a

shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the

winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard

so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you

are the music While the music lasts.

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