Eliot’s Life

 
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Harvard and
did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled
in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for
the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the
seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal
Criterion.
 
26th September 1888: Eliot born
1906 – 1910: Undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Harvard
October 1910: Eliot goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne where he meets Verdenal
Summer 1911: Eliot travels to Munich where he writes much of ‘Prufrock and Other
September 1911: Observations’
1914: Eliot returns to America
April 1915: Eliot awarded a scholarship to Oxford University
May 1915: Eliot meets Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a ballet dancer, his first wife
June 1915: Verdenal dies at Gallipoli
1917: Eliot marries Vivienne Haigh-Wood
1921: ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’ is published, dedicated to Verdenal
1922: Recovering from a physical and mental in Lausanne Eliot finishes ‘The Waste
1927: Land’
1930: ‘The Waste Land’ is published and Eliot begins editing ‘The Criterion’
1933: magazine
1939: Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church
1947: Vivienne Haigh-Wood is committed to a mental institution
1948: Eliot divorces his wife while on a lecturing tour of America
1957: Eliot closes ‘The Criterion’ at the outbreak of World War 2
1965: Vivienne Haigh-Wood dies
Eliot awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Eliot marries his secretary Valerie Fletcher (she is 38 years his junior)
Eliot dies
 

Jean Verdenal
 
Jean Jules Verdenal was born on the 11th May 1890 and died in World War One on the 2 nd May 1915.
He was a French medical officer who met Eliot at the Sorbonne in Paris when Eliot was studying there
after transferring from Harvard.
 
Verdenal was killed while attempting to treat a wounded man on the battlefield at Gallipoli, one of the
most wretched campaigns of World War One, where a badly planned French, British and ANZAC
(Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) attempt to capture Istanbul and destroy the Ottoman
Empire (now modern day Turkey) was defeated. The troops were trapped on a small peninsula of land
facing stiff opposition and terrible weather where torrential rain occasionally drowned men in their
trenches.
 
Ultimately, the Allies were forced to evacuate after 9 months of fighting and 150,000 deaths and
casualties. This campaign, beginning before the ill-fated Battle of the Somme, was one of the first
major engagements of World War One and it is from this point on that it started to become clear
exactly how horrific the conditions of trench warfare were and how high the casualty rates of this war
were likely to be. Indeed in the early months of battle sometimes there were so many casualties that it
is thought that dead bodies were disposed of being thrown off of the cliffs into the sea. A fate that it is
believed to have befallen Jean Verdenal.
 
We know that Verdenal influenced Eliot’s poetry because his first collection of poems, Prufrock and
Other Observations, published in 1917, was dedicated to him. As in the Wasteland, Eliot
quotes lines  from Dante which translate as ‘Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms
me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.’
 
In The Waste Land echoes of Verdenal can be seen in the Hyacinth Girl from ‘Burial of the Dead’.
Evidence for this can be found in an editorial that Eliot wrote in ‘The Criterion’ in 1934. Recounting a
time when he was browsing through a book about Paris, Eliot suddenly breaks off in almost a reverie
and says “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory
of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens (a park in Paris) in the late afternoon, waving a
branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”
This has obvious parallels with the flowers that the Hyacinth Girl greets the persona with in the poem.
A reading perhaps strengthened by the fact that the Hyacinth can be interpreted as a male or
homosexual symbol: in the original Greek myth, Hyacinth was the (male) lover of the god Apollo
whose blood was turned into the hyacinth flower when he was killed in an accident.
 
Some commentators have taken this further and read the whole poem as an elegy for the
dead Verdenal. For example in 1952 the critic John Peter wrote in his "A New Interpretation of The
Waste Land" that: “What the poem seems to require is some preliminary statement to explain what
has gone before … At some previous time the speaker has fallen completely (perhaps the right word is
'irretrievably') in love and the object of this love was a young man who soon afterwards met his death,
it would seem by drowning. Enough time has now elapsed since his death for the speaker to have
realized that the focus for affection that he once provided is irreplaceable. The monologue which, in
effect, the poem presents is a meditation upon this deprivation, upon the speaker's stunned and
horrified reactions to it, and on the picture which, as seen through its all but insupportable bleakness,
the world presents. Such an introduction is obviously inadequate and may, I fear, even seem brutally
insensitive; but if we take it simply as a rather clumsy stage-direction, to be inserted at the beginning
of the monologue, it may go some way to justify itself on the grounds of usefulness, if not subtlety.”
Eliot reacted angrily to this interpretation of his poem and took out a court injunction to prevent the
publication of this essay.
 
Other biographers believe that this is probably taking things too far and Eliot’s biographer, T.S.
Matthews, asks: “What are we to make of these facts? Not much, beyond inferring that a friendship
between young men can be warm and may stir the blood without firing it; and that there may well have
been some exaggeration in Eliot's melancholy remembrance of this foreign friend.”
 
Ultimately it seems that there is probably some role for Verdenal when we try to come to an
understanding of The Waste Land, if only in that his death may have made World War One more
tragically real for Eliot and it is undoubtedly the case that the death, destruction and desolation of this
war is one of the principal influences on Eliot when he was writing the poem.

The Publication of The Waste Land

 
The Waste Land was composed during a period of enormous personal difficulty for Eliot. His ill-fated
marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood was already foundering, and both he and Vivien suffered from
precarious health. After a physical and mental breakdown in 1921, Eliot went
to Lausanne in Switzerland for treatment. There he completed The Waste Land (1922), a poetic
exploration of a soul's, or civilization's, struggle for regeneration.
 
The Waste Land offered a bleak portrait of post-World War I Europe: sometimes laced with disgust,
but also hesitantly gesturing towards the possibility of (a perhaps religious) redemption, the poem
caught the mood of confusion and feelings of nostalgia for a "paradise lost" after World War. On
publication the poem was not unanimously hailed as a masterpiece but this is perhaps due to its
complexity; its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt and unannounced changes of
speaker, location and time; its elegaic but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of
cultures and literatures. However, Conrad Aiken, a critic at the time, noted that the poem succeeds “by
virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations.” and many
reviewers felt that Eliot had captured the disillusionment of a generation. Perhaps as a result the poem
has become one of the most famous works of modern literature.
 
Ezra Pound contributed greatly to the poem with his editorial advice. The original version of the
manuscript with Pound's queries and corrections, published in 1971, is essential reading for admirers
of the poem. Following Pound's suggestion, Eliot reduced The Waste Land to about half its original
length and in acknowledgement Eliot later dedicated the poem to him: "For Ezra Pound,
'Il miglior fabbro'".

The Path to the Wasteland

 
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And if and Perhaps and But.
 
T.S. Eliot, Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mizra Murad Ali Beg

The Waste Land was published when Eliot was thirty-four. Behind it lay a strenuous history of
intellectual, emotional and spiritual experiment, but only three years later he was to ask that no
biography of him be written. The private derails were not to be made public
 
Throughout his life, Eliot stressed the ‘impersonal’ element in his writing, the idea that true poetry is an
escape from personality rather than an expression of it. It follows that we must learn to see his work
not as the outpourings of an overcharged soul, a revelation of the private experiences he was so
careful to protect, but as a series of artefacts, well-made verses that communicate matured experience
through a range of traditional knowledge. At first sight this may seem passionless. It is not. Under the
prim exterior, the beautifully urbane manners, was a fermenting, deeply subjective man fully aware of:
 
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
 
But precisely because such experiences are for all of us so very personal, their significance perhaps
not clear until many years later, Eliot would have said that in themselves they are little capable of
being directly analysed or used as the immediate subject of mature poetry. As we shall see, this in its
turn had a profound effect on Eliot’s idea of what a poet does, what a poem is and what both reader
and writer derive from verse at all.
 
Thus, though the details of Eliot’s life remain interesting - the details of a poet’s life always do
- it would be naive to assume that they explain the poetry. That poetry is, to repeat, a reinvestigation
of the traditions of intellectual, emotional and spiritual life activated not by the scholar’s desire to
pin the past down but by the poet’s need to find himself and belong to what he has inherited.
 
Repeated reading of The Waste Land will make this feeling clear. On a first acquaintance, it is a most
baffling poem - disconnected arbitrary full of references and quotations not only in English but in a
wide range of lndo-European tongues stretching back to Sanskrit. It is even supplemented by a set of
notes. But in places it is instantly vivid and moving. The last section of ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ much
of ‘A Game at Chess’ and the central episode of ‘The Fire Sermon’ have an immediate impact.
And it is just this power to raise feeling that urges as on. We come slowly to feel our way towards an
appreciation of at least some of the powerful juxtapositions in the work and wish to understand more.
We begin to want to deepen our experience of the poem by exploring its more difficult aspects. We
shall find that if we do so by recognising the emotion and drama of the supporting ideas - the sense of
longing, fear and final triumph behind the vegetation rites, or the ceremonious dignity of Spenser
- then we shall not be hoarding intellectual lumbar but acquiring things permanently valuable which
confirm and enrich our first impression of the poem. It is for this reason that a lengthy account of Eliot’s
intellectual sources has been included here. These, as we have seen, are more important to the
poetry than the details of his life. It is vital that they eventually be known and experienced. And it is oar
our imaginative experience that is important - a response which Eliot’s poem can deepen. Dante,
Baudelaire, Shakespeare and the rest are not neutral clues in a donnish word-game but an essential
part of oar intellectual selves, the coinage of intelligent exchange. They are the foundations of
the order and tradition within which Eliot worked, and they are a common inheritance. They are
ours. The Waste Land presents many of them as something once infinitely valuable but now
increasingly remote. If we bring our own experience of them to Eliot’s work, however, we shall
begin to meet him on common ground. In the end, Eliot’s conscious reworking of traditional knowledge
should lead as to read the Collected  Works not as a diary or a crossword puzzle but as a series of
meditations. To adopt a title from his favourite, Donne, they are a record of the ‘progresse of the soule’
 
Having said this, it is clear that the aspect of Eliot’s life which we mast trace is the intellectual one:
what ideas was Eliot nurtured among, what did he reject, modify or discover? This is also a means at
approaching Shakespeare, about whose private life we know even less. A knowledge of the people
to whom he wrote the Sonnets might be interesting – it would certainly have the thrill of good gossip –
but it would add not long to the stature of the poems, whose value lies precisely in their brilliant
recasting of age-old themes into a timeless beauty. This is equally true of The  Waste Land.
 
The tradition into which Eliot was born - in 1888 - was that of the high-minded Puritanism of nineteenth
Century America: bland, useful and, at its worst, rather smug. His mother wrote religious verse; his
grandfather had been a leading force in the Unitarian Church. Poetry and duty surrounded his early
years. So did other forms of culture. As a schoolboy, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where he studied
Latin, Greek, English, History, French and German. He then went on to Harvard, a society ‘quite
uncivilised’, as he was to call it, ‘but refined beyond the point of civilisation’. He took part in its genteel
existence ‘measured out with coffee spoons’ and, like his early creation Prufrock, wandered the slums
as an antidote. He continued his studies in literature and added Dante to his repertoire, along with
ancient art and philosophy. He also became interested in primitive religion and ritual.
 
We have seen that Eliot had begun to write, and it is clear from these early poems that, under the
urbane surface, Eliot’s spiritual instincts were deeply troubled. After a year in Paris he returned to
Harvard with the drafts of his first great poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred  Prufrock (1917). Here, in
this powerful and remarkably mature poem, the precious, precarious social world explored by Henry
James is threatened by intimations of chaos and extreme states. The balding narrator’s cowardice
holds him back in his bourgeois existence, but the tension is there, an intimation of the opening lines
of ‘A Game of Chess’
 
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock belongs to the over-cultured world of Eliot’s Harvard days, though
its location could be any English speaking upper class suburb and urban backstreet. This is a poem
about vision and moral turpitude, the fine web of social graces that binds itself round the narrator until
the invitation to a rawer experience at the opening is lost oil in genteel tittle-tattle. The narrator cannot
follow           Emerson’s injunction to ‘affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid
contentment of the times.’ Instead, the mild-mannered, balding Prufrock accepts his reluctant
impotence. He can forge no link between the salon, the slums and the sea. He is no prophet, no hero.
Caught in a polite, delicate world of tea and subordinate clauses, his vision of submarine
delights is  purely private, the fantasy of a fading gentleman. What visions he does hare are of a
guessed-at, but unlived life. He is the American cousin of the French Symbolists’ sad daddy,
particularly that of Jules Laforgue, whom Eliot had briefly sketched before:
 
… Life, a little bald and grey,
Languid, fastidious and bland,
Waits, hat and glove, in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the absolute.
 
The French Symbolist poets were of great importance to Eliot’s development. By the time he
came to write The Waste Land, he had absorbed a wider range of influences, but in 1908, when he
first came across Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Modern Literature, he encountered an
argument which suggested a way of putting spiritual vision before mere realism. The world may
become –as Baudelaire had sometimes seen it – a ‘forest of symbols’. All the things of the material
world can, in this theory, be made into images of the inner world of the poet. We see this in such
works as Rhapsody on a Windy Night where the universe is an outward, visible sign of the poet’s
spiritual condition. Through it he can penetrate the mysterious world of emotional experience, explore
it not always with hysterical extravagance, but often, like Laforgue, with a wry defeatism that
is sometimes flippant, sometimes scathing, as Prufrock himself is.
 
Eliot had gone to Pans to became a poet He returned to Harvard to study philosophy, His thesis work
was closely concerned with the problem that was to preoccupy him throughout his life: the relation of
chaotic subjective experience to a higher and absolute coherence. From this period stems the idea
that the limited, individual consciousness is not reality. The matter is a complex one,
and Eliot’s use of Bradley (the philosopher on whom he wrote has doctoral
thesis) eventually becomes that of a poet applying philosophy as a tone or colour to his
thought rather than that of the rigorous professional logician. Nonetheless, it is here that we can begin
to see Eliot moving away from purely subjective poetry and towards the communal, universal truth
enshrined in tradition. Some of the poems of this late Harvard period again show the religious tension
that Eliot was experiencing.
 
Eliot taught for two years in the Harvard philosophy school, but, as we have seen, he came to object to
its divorcing philosophy from religion. The latter was increasingly occupying him. He was now reading
Dante again and committing long sections to heart He had worked on Indian philosophy, in particular
the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gua: he was also reading widely in European mysticism and the lives
of the saints. His Harvard poems reflect this These later works are not as fine as Prufrock. Maturing is
not the same as regular bettering. They are riddled with images at martyrdom and glimpses at divine
reality, but they are not convincing. They discuss fleeing a world that has not yet been fully or
agonisingly lived in. The great human strength of The Waste Land is the known awfulness of the real
world. Its varieties of brutal deadliness have been felt along every nerve. In the Harvard poems there
is only an intellectual position: sincere no doubt, but thin and rather pretentious. Circumstances were
soon to change this, and Eliot kept his early drafts. Several years and a welter of experience later, he
was able to rework lines like these from The Death of Saint Narcissus more effectively:
 
 
Come under the shadow of this gray rock -
Come in under the shadow of this gray rork.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:
I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs
And the gray shadow on his lips.
 
In 1914 Eliot returned to Europe. The idea was that he should complete his philosophical
education at Oxford. In reality, his strictly academic years were behind him. The young don with his
intensely private religious life now met two critical influences on the formation of The Waste Land the
American poet Ezra Pound and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the English woman who was to be
Eliot’s first wife.
 
Pound was a brilliant sponsor of young literary talent, and Eliot was one of his
finest disciples among the London literary figures. Pound set about grooming Eliot, concerning
himself generously in the material details of his life and borrowing money for the
publication of Prufrock and Other Observations  (1917) Above all, he encouraged Eliot at this period to
move away from purely religious verse and back to a satirical mode in which the influence of Pound’s
ideas is clear Some of these, such as his anti-Semitism, are unpleasant in the extreme. The
discussion of sexuality is also troubling and prefigures much of the analysis in The Waste Land.
 
Sexual inhibition - which is not the same as a lack of sexual drive - is clear in many of Eliot’s early
works. Something of this can be seen in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but other and earlier
poems show a fear of women, such as his rather Swinburnian stanza from Circe’s Palace:
 
Around her fountain which flows
With the voice of men in pain.
Are flowers that no man knows
Their petals are fanged and red
With hideout streak and stain.
They sprang from the limbs of the deed -
We shall not come here again.

In other works, such as La Figlia Che Piange, Eliot takes an alternative stance: the safe and
melancholy delcicacy of a moment, which for all its beauty of epithet, is again rather Victorian. The girl
in this poem is less a real woman than a pose from a late-nineteenth-century painting. Thirdly, and
perhaps mare deadly, Eliot’s women are charming but pretentious. It is these
vacuous ladies of Prufrock’s world, talking of Michelangelo, or the cloying artistic hostess in
the Portrait of a Lady,  who under stress, lead to the neurotic, febrile woman of the first part of ‘A Game
of Chess’.
 
The fourth type of Eliot’s early woman is the common good-time girl: the clerk’s victim in The
Waste  Land, and, in such Sweeney poems as Sweeney Erect and Sweeney Among the Nightingales,
someone more brashly vulgar and, to the poet, offensively sexual. Such, are the girls in Mrs. Porter’s
‘rooming house’, where Sweeney is a regular visitor, as he is shown to be again in The  Waste  Land.
 
If the women of many of the early poems are demonic or, more often, trivial, the women in Sweeney
Agonistes say much about revulsion from physical love. They are degrading and the degraded man is
Sweeney, the barely articulate sensualist who says.
 
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts, when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
 
Sweeney is modern, sensual man whose sexual instincts though strong, cannot lead to a vision of
an improved world. His interest in women is bestial, and the women he is interested in are low, tawdry
creatures. Sweeney is  no more than hair, eyes and mouth as he takes his vicarious pleasure:
 
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs
 
Jack-knifes upwards at the knees,
Then straightens out from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.
 
This is sex at its most empty, the degrading fear and passion that underlies the neurosis shown in
such sections of The Waste Land as lines 95-106 or 196-206.
 
The satirical poems which describe the collapse of European culture have great elegance but are
riddled with disturbing anti-Semitism, a crude and rather sensationalist presentation of the idea that a
Jewish economic conspiracy was undermining traditional values. This idea, as we have seen, may
have been derived from Ezra Pound. A poem such us Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with a
Cigar juxtaposes the cultured ex-patriot American, touring Venice with his guidebook and memories of
Ruskin, with Bleistein -  ‘Chicago, Semite Viennese’ - and Sir Ferdinand Klein, a womanizing financier.
The confection of quotations at the start suggests the rich cultural past of Venice. The poem shows its
collapse and Burbank’s puzzled musing on this. This theme of bewilderment is suggested again in ‘A
Cooking Egg’ while the impotence of the Church and its refusal to take a sufficiently radical stand on
spiritual matters are hinted at in Lune de Miel and attacked in a more lively way
in The  Hippopotamus and Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service. Again, the women in these poems fail
to provide the prosperous, creative energy, the secure sexuality, which the poet needs. As early as
1909, in Conversation Galante, he had suggested that woman was ‘the eternal enemy of the absolute’,
and this, of coarse, was to be taken much further in The Waste Land.
 
The most powerful of these early poems is Gerontion, which Eliot at one time considered as a section
of The Waste Land. Here a desiccated arid empty little old man ruminates not simply on the unlived
life and the decayed house in which he is living, but an the failure of spiritual experience, the triviality
of those around him and his sense of being cheated oat of meaning. There is a feeling of great age
about Gerontion, of disillusioned passion and long patience, that characterises some of the portraits of
Rembrandt. Gerontion is more noble than Prufrock, more inured to suffering and disappointment. He is
not at home in a salon world. One does not sense his wearing formal clothes. He lives among the
detritus of time, in a world where ‘Christ the tiger’ is longed for by some, reduced to nothing by others.
In the rhetorical fourth section - which shows Eliot’s debt to Jacobean playwrights - time and history
are seen cheats. The great things of life are illusions which came too late or at the wrong time. Our
motives are misunderstood. Love, despite being welt meant, has been a cruel deception, and now ‘I
have lost my passion’. The aged Gerontion looks with saddened helplessness at the futile wreck of
human life. He is a little apart from it in his sleepy corner. Such disillusion, the feeling that both private
and public history had been a deception, that life is sad and unredeemable, prefigures The Waste
Land even in its imagery. His moods are, as Gerontion declares:

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season

 
These varieties of anguish may be partly a reflection of the fact that Eliot’s first marriage was a
cruel disaster. To the shy and somewhat tortured don, Vivienne Haigh-Wood’s vitality and lack
of inhibit ion were perhaps challenging and exciting; but if we read the earlier poems to find ‘the
pattern … of the personal emotion,’ then we come away with the clear impression that women’s
sexuality and his own response to it troubled Eliot deeply. He had been brought up in a
puritanical home, he had lived an intense intellectual and spiritual life, and he was only twenty-
six. A year after his marriage he wrote:
 
For the boy whose childhood has been empty of beauty, who  has never known the detached curiosity
for beauty, who has been brought up to see goodness  as  practical and to take the line of self interest
in a code of rewards and punishments, then the sexual instinct  when it is aroused may mean the only
possible escape from  a prosaic world.
 
But sex was not an escape. Vivienne’s mental arid physical well-being were extremely precarious, and
Lyndall Gordon comments well that Eliot’s marriage - and with it the very poor stale of his finances -
was ‘to be the grim underside of has life, the secret inferno to be traversed before he might be worthy
of the genuine awakening only Christianity could supply’. A line of Eliot’s own from this time is most
poignant: ‘It is terrible.’ he wrote, ‘to be alone with another person.’ Terror and neurosis, are the
powerful subjects of the first section of ‘A Game of Chess’.
 
The First World War kept Eliot in England. He was now living in a foreign country with
an unsympathetic wife. He no longer belonged to the world of the universities. He had committed
himself to literature and was still fervently searching for some form of religious truth. His conviction of
man’s corrupt nature had not left hitn, and now more than ever any form of tolerant liberalism was
unacceptable to him. Poverty and overwork, first as a schoolmaster and then as a bank clerk, ground
him down. And all the time he was reviewing and involving himself in criticism and lecturing.
The pressure became intolerable and his energy gave way. He began to discover that suffering in
unredeemed mediocrity was far mere dreadful than the imagined martyrdoms of his early
verse. Eventually he was given leave of absence by his bank and went first to rest by the English
coast and then for professional help in Switzerland. He returned from Lausanne to Paris, where he
presented Ezra Pound the first drafts of what was to become The  Waste  Land.