18 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
book in February of the same year; and
an essay by an aged British critic ti-
tled—wait for it—“Dullness.”
Eliot was the begetter of The Cri-
terion. He would edit it throughout its
existence, until it closed, in January,
- In the years between the two
World Wars, during which he sur-
veyed—and held sway over—whole
shires of the cultural domain, The Cri-
terion would be his minster, with “A
Commentary,” often signed “T.S.E.,”
as an august and regular feature. No
such pronouncements were evident,
however, in this initial issue. Instead,
Eliot’s only contribution was “The
Waste Land.” It came with no preface,
no afterword, and no warning. It was
four hundred and thirty-three lines
long. It appeared at first glance to be
a poem, but of a disconcerting kind,
and further glancing didn’t really help.
Parts of it didn’t look, or sound, or feel,
like poetry at all:
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
TereuImagine that you were a bookish
reader, back in 1922. What did you make
of this? Well, maybe you identified the
words in French—meaning “And O
these children’s voices, singing in the
dome!”—as a line from “Parsifal,” a
sonnet by Paul Verlaine. Pursuing a
line of thought, you recalled Wagner’s
opera of the same name, and the scene
in which a sorceress washes the feet of
the hero; and you wondered how that
ceremonial purification was meant to
hook up with the activities of Mrs.
Porter (whoever she was) and her off-
spring. At this point, you wrinkled your
nose, and sniffed. Something indeli-
cate, hard to define but impossible to
miss, was going on here, and your sus-
picions hardened at the stuttering of
those “jugs,” with their flavor of smutty
Elizabethan slang. As for “Tereu,” you
dimly recognized it as a Latin voca-
tive, referring to Tereus, who, accord-
ing to legend, violated his sister-in-
law, Philomela, and cut out her tongue.
For her pains, the gods transmuted her
into a nightingale. Now she and her
attacker were the stuff of Mr. Eliot’s
mutations.
A more important question: If you
are an ordinary reader now, in 2022, with
no classical education, no French, and
no access to opera, what happens when,
by chance, you pick up a book and stum-
ble upon this same passage? What is
your first response? A snort of laugh-
ter, I presume, along with a suspicion
that this guy Eliot (whoever he is) must
be taking you for a ride. If pressed,
you might describe the lines as start-
ing off like a nursery rhyme and then
collapsing into nonsense. Whatever.
You shrug, leaf ahead a couple of pages,
and find this:A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose
and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.And then this:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those stringsClosing the book, you move on. The
whisperings, however, together with
the birdlike twitterings, reverberate in
your mind’s ear. This noisy and pecu-
liar work, like the snatch of an over-
heard song, or a nocturnal stab of shame
at the thought of someone you once
wronged, will not leave you alone.
There is little doubt that, of these
two first-time readers, the erudite and
the uninformed, Eliot would lean to-
ward the second. “Genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood,”
he wrote, in an essay on Dante. “It is
better to be spurred to acquire schol-
arship because you enjoy the poetry,
than to suppose that you enjoy the
poetry because you have acquired the
scholarship.” What he sought, as both
a writer and a reader, was “some di-
rect shock of poetic intensity.” True
to that quest, “The Waste Land” is a
symphony of shocks, and, like other
masterworks of early modernism, it
refuses to die down. (Go to MOMA
and let your gaze move across Picas-
so’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” from
west to east. If you don’t flinch when
you reach the faces on the right, bladed
and scraped like shovels, consult your
optician.) The shocks have triggeredaftershocks, and readers of Eliot are
trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never
retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent
spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty roomsI happen to think, for what it’s worth,
that these lines, which come toward the
end of “The Waste Land,” are the great-
est that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a
shadow of a doubt over everything that
we believe about ourselves, at different
stages of our lives; over the stories of
ourselves that we tell to other people;
and over what they tell of us in turn.
As always with Eliot, abstraction is off-
set by the taut particularity of physical
things: the spider, the wax seals, and the
shuddering blood, concluding in the
long and mournful double “o” of “rooms.”
And the word “surrender” could be ap-
plied to so many daring souls: a lover
at the instant of ecstasy, a religious dev-
otee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible
politician, a wooer who hastens, like
Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a
Dostoyevskian gambler, with the fam-
ily jewels in his pocket. All of them will
face that overwhelming question: “What
have we given?” It is something that
each of us must ask, on our deathbeds,
though nobody wants to die in shame.L
ike the Book of Psalms, “King Lear,”
and Nadal vs. Djokovic at Wim-
bledon in 2018, “The Waste Land” is
divided into five parts. Each part has a
title: “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game
of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death
by Water,” and “What the Thunder
said.” What of the title of the poem it-
self? “Immature poets imitate; mature
poets steal,” Eliot wrote, and, as with
Macavity, the master criminal in his
“Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”
(1937), you can’t always tell where the
poet’s been. It could be, in this case, that
he stole from Tennyson’s “The Passing
of Arthur,” and its undulating mood—
“as it were one voice, an agony/Of lam-
entation, like a wind that shrills/All
night in a waste land, where no one