16 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
LIFEANDLETTERS
ON THE ROCKS
A hundred years of “The Waste Land.”
BYANTHONYLANE
M
ay is the merriest month, and
there are few more cheering jour-
neys 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 contin-
ues 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 trap-
pings of Bloomsbury-scented comfort
were on sale: straw hats, cushions, pad-
ded 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:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
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 Charles-
ton, 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 hun-
dredth birthday. The occasion was a
rare one, because the recitation was en-
twined with music: a score composed
in the nineteen-seventies by the nov-
elist Anthony Burgess, no less, to ac-
company the poem. Cumberbatch,
keyed up by the piano and the other
instruments arrayed behind him, took
the lines at quite a tilt, slipping be-
tween accents like a quick-change art-
ist 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,
- “Do you think that poetry is a ne-
cessity 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 consid-
ered, with justice, to be one of the great
poems about London, and, in April,
various readings, concerts, and conver-
sations, bundled together under the
title “Fragments,” took place in churches
across what Eliot calls the “unreal city.”
Against the blackened wall of All Hal-
lows by the Tower, there was a perfor-
mance 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
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” T. S. Eliot wrote. been alive to lend an ear. HENRY WARE ELIOT, JR. / COURTESY T. S. ELIOT ESTATE
