THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 17
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 trib-
utes, “Re-Wilding the Waste Land,”
shards of the poem were mingled with
musical offerings from a choral ensem-
ble, 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 won-
der 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 Gor-
don, 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 last-
ing love.” More than eleven hundred
letters to Hale from Eliot, secreted for
fifty years in Princeton’s Firestone Li-
brary and unsealed in 2019, form the
basis of Gordon’s discoveries. Her con-
tention is that when Eliot writes, “we
came back, late, from the hyacinth gar-
den,” in “The Waste Land,” it is Hale,
and only Hale, whom he is addressing.
Readers who like their literary criti-
cism 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 De-
cember. Hollis delves into the deep
background from which “The Waste
Land” arose: Eliot’s childhood in Mis-
souri, as the scion of an uncomfortably
distinguished Unitarian clan; summers
on the coast of Massachusetts; his Har-
vard education; his fleeing to Paris and
London; his marriage to a young En-
glishwoman 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 Hol-
lis 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:He had been anxious to get on to new work,
December, 1920; had wanted to get to work on
a poem he had in mind, October, 1920; sought
a period of tranquillity to do a poem that he had
in mind, September, 1920.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 Amer-
ican when “The Waste Land” came
out, and would not become a British
citizen until 1927; the poem, too eas-
ily Anglicized, is refreshed and made
new in the American tongue. In ad-
dition, alone of all the readers on theapp, Mortensen pauses to weigh the
full Dantescan impact of the repeti-
tion in these famous lines:A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many
I had not thought death had undone so
many.For a comparable thrust, go to You-
Tube, and to a clip of Bob Dylan in-
toning the opening of “The Waste
Land” and hitting the present partici-
ples, 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 busi-
ness section of the London Sunday
Times, you would have found an arti-
cle with the headline “I never like buy-
ing shares in September—its the cru-
ellest month for stocks.” (Eliot, who
worked at Lloyds Bank from 1917 to
1925, might have frowned at this finan-
cial counsel, though what would have
vexed him sorely is the lack of an apos-
trophe.) You may not know “The Waste
Land,” and you may not like it if you
do. But it knows you.T
here was no fanfare when “The
Waste Land” first arrived. It was
printed in the inaugural issue of The
Criterion, a quarterly journal, in Octo-
ber, 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 “Ul-
ysses,” which had been published as a