The Waste Land Read online

  And as soon as he left, he began to write again.

  In early 1914 Eliot was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship in Philosophy,

  which meant that he could travel to Merton College, Oxford, for a year. He

  planned to spend the summer in Marburg, Germany, honing his German-

  language skills, then go on to England. He arrived in Germany in July,

  but the outbreak of World War I meant that, as a foreign national, he had

  to leave the country. He went to London, planning then to go on to Oxford.

  By chance his old friend from Harvard, Conrad Aiken, was residing in

  London. Still interested in Eliot’s early poems, Aiken had recently shown

  “Prufrock” and “La figlia che piange” to Harold Monro, proprietor of the

  Poetry Bookshop in London and editor of Poetry and Drama, then the prin-

  cipal journal for new poetry in England. Monro had dismissed them as

  “absolutely insane.”18 Undaunted, Aiken urged Eliot to visit someone else

  whom he had met over the summer, the American poet Ezra Pound. “You

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  go to Pound. Show him your poems,” Aiken reportedly said.19 On 22 Sep-

  tember, Eliot called on Pound and introduced himself. His life, though

  he did not know it, was about to be transformed.

  At Pound’s request, Eliot promptly sent him a selection of poems. By

  the end of the month Pound already had promised Eliot that he would

  get “Prufrock” published in Poetry, the Chicago magazine started in 1912

  by Harriet Monroe, already the most prominent journal for new poetry

  in English. “He wants me to bring out a Vol. after the War,” Eliot enthused

  to Aiken in late September 1914, adding ruefully: “The devil of it is that

  I have done nothing good since J. A[lfred] P[rufrock]. and writhe in im-

  potence” ( LOTSE, 58). Pound immediately grasped Eliot’s importance,

  and he was soon laboring to get all his early poems into print. More im-

  portant, his encouragement had rekindled Eliot’s ambitions; once again

  he entertained the idea of becoming a poet, not a philosopher. “Then in

  1914 . . . my meeting with Ezra Pound changed my life. He was enthusiastic

  about my poems, and gave me such praise and encouragement as I had

  long since ceased to hope for. Pound urged me to stay . . . and encouraged

  me to write verse again” ( LOTSE, xvii).

  Eliot moved to Merton College, Oxford, for the autumn term of 1914,

  but he was soon bored and returned to London in January 1915. He returned

  again to Oxford for the spring term, where he encountered his old friend

  Scofield Thayer. Sometime in the first week of March, Thayer introduced

  Eliot to Vivien Haigh-Wood, an intelligent, attractive young woman who

  dressed well and liked to dance. She was nervous and high-strung, and

  often su¤ered from headaches, cramps, and an irregular and overfrequent

  menstrual cycle. Eliot, who had confessed that he was still a virgin in De-

  cember 1914, later recalled that he was simply “too shy and unpractised”

  to engage in a “flirtation or mild a¤air” ( LOTSE, xvii). Instead, the two

  married. Their wedding, which transpired without their having informed

  their parents, took place on 26 June 1915. One contemporary observer,

  Aldous Huxley, thought their relationship was a matter of sexual attraction:

  “I met Mrs. E. for the first time and perceived that it is almost entirely a

  sexual nexus between Eliot and her: one sees it in the way he looks at her

  —she’s an incarnate provocation.”20 Eliot, in old age, gave a rueful assess-

  ment. “I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because

  I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And

  she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would

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  save the poet by keeping him in England.” He concluded grimly: “To her

  the marriage brought no happiness . . . to me, it brought the state of mind

  out of which came The Waste Land” ( LOTSE, xvii).

  Meanwhile, Eliot was beginning to acquire a reputation, as Ezra Pound

  hectored and cajoled editors into publishing his poems. In June 1915 Har-

  riet Monroe published “Prufrock” in Poetry. In July, Wyndham Lewis pub-

  lished four “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in the second

  issue of Blast. In September “Portrait of a Lady” was published by Alfred

  Kreymborg in the brief-lived New York review Others. Pound, meanwhile,

  had already sent Harriet Monroe another three poems which Eliot had

  composed earlier in the year while at Oxford, and in October “The Boston

  Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” and “Cousin Nancy” appeared in Poetry.

  In November, Pound brought out a collection of contemporary verse in

  which he reprinted four poems by Eliot (“Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,”

  “Aunt Helen,” and “The Boston Evening Transcript”) and included one new

  work, “Hysteria.” It was the first appearance of Eliot’s poetry in book form.

  Now married, Eliot set out to reorganize his life. In late July he returned

  to the United States, but he stayed for only three weeks. His parents wanted

  him to finish his graduate studies, and he evidently agreed to complete

  his thesis. When he returned to England in August, he found that Vivien

  was ill and, as he had already anticipated, that they were desperately short

  of money. Bertrand Russell stepped in to help, o¤ering them the use of

  a bedroom in his flat till they could a¤ord their own. Eliot began to teach

  at a grammar school in High Wycombe, a small town some forty miles

  outside London, which obliged him to rent a room there and return to

  London for long weekends. The pay was £140 a year and a daily meal.

  Russell had provided introductions to editors, and Eliot started to take up

  book reviewing in earnest, hoping to supplement his teaching salary; in

  the course of 1916 he published twenty-one reviews, chiefly on philosophi-

  cal books. Russell proved still more generous, giving Eliot £3,000 in engi-

  neering debentures; the income from these averaged £150 per year. At

  last, by Christmas 1915 the Eliots moved out of Russell’s flat. They spent

  three months at the home of Vivien’s parents in Hampstead, and finally,

  in March 1916, got a flat of their own at 18, Crawford Mansions. It was

  small and cramped, and Eliot complained about it repeatedly in the years

  ahead. Beginning in January 1916, he took a teaching position at Highgate

  Junior School; it was much closer to central London and paid £20 a year

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  more. Eliot kept the position for the rest of the year. But these temporary

  solutions to the problems of housing and domestic finances could not

  disguise the toll they were taking on his writing: in 1916 he published

  only four poems; two dating back to his time at Harvard (“Conversation

  Gallante” [1909] and “La figlia che piange” [1911]), and one to the brief inter-

  lude when he had been writing at Oxford in early 1915, just before he met

  Vivien (“Morning at the Window”). Only one, “Mr. Apollinax,” was a con-

  temporary composition.

  At the end
of 1916 Eliot resigned from his teaching position. For a

  few months he tried to survive as a freelance writer, but it proved impos-

  sible. In March 1917 he began to work for Lloyds Bank, where he would

  spend the next eight years of his life. Lloyds was already a huge corporation,

  the second largest of the “Big Six” British clearing banks which had emerged

  after decades of intensive merger and acquisition activity.21 The acquisition

  process was just drawing to an end during Eliot’s years at the bank, as

  Lloyds absorbed four banks during the period 1918–1923. The result was

  an immensely powerful concentration of capital, and the bank was now

  seeking to expand into the international arena. (In 1911 Lloyds had pur-

  chased Armstrong & Co., with branches in Paris and Le Havre, and in

  1917 it joined forces with National Provincial Bank to create the Lloyds

  and National Provincial Foreign Bank, a new firm that by 1938 had twelve

  branches on the Continent, serving British nationals and companies in

  Europe.) Indirectly, it was this expansion which led to Eliot’s employment.

  For it was a friend of Vivien’s family, L. E. Thomas, then the chief general

  manager of National Provincial Bank, who gave Eliot a letter of introduction

  to Lloyds Bank, and accordingly Eliot was duly assigned to the Colonial

  and Foreign Department. Its oªces were at 17 Cornhill Street (see Fig.

  8), in the heart of the City, one of several abutting buildings owned by

  Lloyds which faced Cornhill and Lombard Streets. (In 1926, just after

  Eliot’s departure, Lloyds tore down the older buildings and erected the

  head oªce it still occupies today.)

  The British banks concentrated in the City were the heart of global

  capital, and Eliot’s experience of their operations is perceptible throughout

  The Waste Land, which repeatedly conflates financial and sexual economies

  into an amorphous world of uncontrolled circulations. If The Waste Land

  is situated anywhere, it is in the City: King William Street (see Fig. 5),

  Moorgate, London Bridge (see Fig. 4), St. Mary Woolnoth (a church situated

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  just opposite the Lombard Street facade of Lloyds Bank; see Figs. 6, 7),

  St. Magnus Martyr (another church, this one adjacent to London Bridge;

  see Figs. 12–14), Lower Thames Street (see Figs. 12–13), the Cannon Street

  Hotel (see Fig. 10), Queen Victoria Street—all are City locations evoked

  in the poem. Every day, from 9:30 to 5:30, working one Saturday in four,

  Eliot labored in his oªce, a tiny cog in the great machine of capital.

  Eliot was one of 7,400 employees engaged by Lloyds Bank. During

  the First World War women clerks had first appeared at Lloyds. By late

  1918 they totaled 3,300, nearly 45 percent of the bank’s total labor force.

  With demobilization they were soon being dismissed, and after 1920 they

  were engaged only for typing or filing. By 1925 there were 1,500 left, all

  of them single (until 1949, women had to resign when they married). The

  Waste Land was unprecedented in placing an anonymous typist within

  the domain of serious poetry, as it does in part III; until then such subjects

  had been treated only in light or humorous verse.22

  Eliot worked in the Colonial and Foreign Department for three years;

  in 1919 he was transferred to the Information Department, and in 1923

  he returned to the Colonial and Foreign Department. There he tracked

  current movements in exchange rates against the background of economic

  and political developments. At the Information Department, as he told

  his mother, his work kept him busy:

  In the first place my work on German Debts has been very

  heavy. Next week I shall have an assistant and a typist to write

  my letters and do card indexing, but last week I have had to

  struggle through chaos myself, receiving hundreds of reports

  from Branches of the bank, classifying them, picking out the

  points that needed immediate attention, interviewing other

  banks and Government Departments, and trying to elucidate

  knotty points in that appalling document the Peace Treaty.

  ( LOTSE, 369)

  Eliot’s salary nearly doubled from the moment he entered Lloyds. In

  1917 he was earning £270 per year; by late 1918 his income had increased

  to £350 ( LOTSE, 259), and by 1922 to £455. Part of this increase was merely a function of the postwar inflation, but part indicated real esteem for his

  services. Employees at the bank recalled him as a stylish dresser. One remi-

  niscence, probably apocryphal, records that “he would often in the middle

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  of dictating a letter, break o¤ suddenly, grasp a sheet of paper, and start

  writing quickly when an idea came to him.”23

  The City in which Eliot worked di¤ered sharply from the area as we

  know it today. Many of its thoroughfares had quite recently been remodeled

  to conform to the grand manner of Edwardian commercial developments.

  Jerry White has neatly described this style, “eclectic in its borrowings from

  classical architecture, and from Wren and the French Baroque, as grandi-

  ose as the London County Council’s height restrictions would permit, with

  a buttoned-up pomposity of bearing which the odd flutter of decorative

  fancy did little to relieve, making oªces look like rich men’s mansions

  and calling them, with false modesty, ‘Houses.’”24 Between 1900 and 1914

  many areas in the northern part of the City were largely rebuilt in this

  “Grand Manner,” including Finsbury Square, Finsbury Pavement, Finsbury

  Circus, Moorgate (mentioned in The Waste Land), and London Wall. King

  William Street (also mentioned in The Waste Land) was remodeled around

  1912 to accommodate new oªces for insurance companies, while Grace-

  church Street was remodeled to house banks. One e¤ect of all this activity

  was to drive out residents; between 1901 and 1911 a quarter of the City’s

  population was lost. “The City,” one contemporary commented, “becomes

  more and more a collection of oªce buildings.”25 The sense of inhuman

  desolation which su¤uses The Waste Land, its depiction of the City as

  haunted terrain in which “a spectre stops the passerby in full daylight”

  (note to line 60), owes much to this perceptible dwindling of living inhabi-

  tants, their homes consumed by a voraciously expanding commercial life.

  Although the City was an extreme case, it epitomized a process taking

  place throughout the whole of inner London. In the Edwardian period all

  but two of the twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs showed a net decline

  in population, as residents increasingly moved to new suburbs. The little

  warren of small shops and warehouses that clung to Lower Thames Street,

  at the foot of London Bridge (see Figs. 12, 13), was virtually a prehistoric

  relic by the time that Eliot wrote the plangent verses which commemorate

  them in The Waste Land (see lines 259–263).

  Not that a loss of residents meant a decline in crowds in the City. Quite

  the contrary. Between 1891 and 1911 the number of employees in the City

  increased from 301,000 to 364,000, while “visitors” to the C
ity meant

  that over a million people per day entered and left the square mile. What

  enabled the movement of such large numbers of people was a revolution

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  i n t r o d u c t i o n

  in urban transportation which took place between 1900 and 1914. Electri-

  fication of the railways, especially the Tube or underground system, was

  rapid. Inaugurated in June 1900, it was already complete by 1906. In 1903

  the London County Council, which held a monopoly of tramways in inner

  London, began its electrification program for trams, and by 1914 electric

  trams were seen on most main roads throughout north, south, and east

  London. The era of the London motor bus got under way at about the same

  time, in 1907, when the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) intro-

  duced its first electric trams. In 1911 the last horse-drawn service for the

  LGOC was closed. By that date, too, the motor taxi had also more or less

  completely displaced the horse-drawn hansom cab. Hansoms still existed,

  but increasingly they were rarities to be pointed out and gawked at. In The

  Waste Land “the sound of horns and motors” is omnipresent, while “the

  human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting,” and “trams and dusty

  trees” cast inert gloom.

  The year 1917 marked not only Eliot’s entry into Lloyds, but also his

  first book publication. Prufrock and Other Observations was issued in June

  by the Egoist Press, the book publishing wing of the Egoist, a journal which combined feminist and individualist strains of thought. The press run was

  only five hundred copies, and reviews were not numerous. One reviewer

  dismissed Eliot as “one of those clever young men who find it amusing

  to pull the leg of a sober reviewer. . . . The subjects of the poems, the im-

  agery, the rhythms have the wilful outlandishness of the young revolution-

  ary idea.”26 But May Sinclair (1870–1946), an established English novelist,

  urged that “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” were “masterpieces.” “Eliot’s

  genius,” she wrote, was “disturbing”: “It is elusive; it is diªcult; it demands

  a distinct e¤ort of attention.” Yet she concluded that “if there is anything

  more astounding and more assured than his performance it is his prom-

  ise.”27 Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), an American novelist who resided in